Jezebel (14 page)

Sometimes, when by some miracle she saw a young face, a young body among the painted mummies in the nightclub, Marie-Thérèse’s face would rise up in her mind. As she danced in the arms of a man, her lover who held her close, she’d think of Marie-Thérèse with tenderness and despair. But Marie-Thérèse was dead. ‘She’s happier than I am,’ she thought. She had blocked out the circumstances of that death the way that women can: by forgetting, innocently and completely. When she pictured Marie-Thérèse in her mind, she saw her as a child, as the child who had loved her. She sighed and looked sadly around her, but the people dancing, the smoke, the empty bottles were the setting of her normal life, and it didn’t seem any more inappropriate to think of Marie-Thérèse in such a place as she did when in her bedroom. Yet she pushed away the thought. What was the point, what was the use in regretting the past? She had so little time left to live. She had to push away such black thoughts. She looked up at the man who held her in his arms.

Her obsession had become fierce and desperate: her lovers lasted only a day now, sometimes only an hour. She had to be sure of her power, sure she could drive a man wild, as in the past, sure she could make him suffer. When
she could see them suffering her heart would feel appeased, but not for long. It wasn’t easy. Since the war, it was rare to find a man who was prepared to suffer over a woman. And she was no longer the most sought-after woman, the one who is noticed first among the herd of other women, the one whose brilliance overshadows all her rivals. She was no longer the woman men looked at immediately. Of course, she still easily aroused love and desire, but men grew tired of her. With each passing year they got bored with her more quickly. She gave in to them easily, for she knew very well that men were now eager for love, but she was too used to being adored to yield to such silent, brutal desire. She needed reassurance that she was loved, needed to hear tender words, needed time and the knowledge that a man was jealous, but every now and again a kind of desperate tempestuousness would evoke a secret distrust of her in the young man with whom she was in love.

‘I’m not getting tied down,’ they all thought. ‘She’s beautiful, desirable, but there are so many other women …’

Sometimes she would find a man who was young, more naïve than the others, who loved her the way she wanted to be loved, but she would immediately get tired of him. ‘No,’ she would think, ‘he’s too easy. But that other man, his friend, who hasn’t even given me a second look … Oh, my God! Let me have that once more. Once, just once, to be attractive, as I used to be, incredibly and utterly attractive, and then that will be the end; I’ll be an old woman, my heart will be dead.’

But she loved the fierce, capricious excitement, the
passion that burned through her body and the wild, bitter, tragic existence of the years that followed the war.

‘Ah,’ she mused, ‘now is the time to be young …’

The memory of her youth filled her with envious suffering. She grabbed the hand of the man sitting beside her; she looked into his eyes; she leaned her anxious, trembling face towards him. How men had changed. Richard, Mark, George Canning, Beauchamp … and now these bored faces, cold eyes, weary voices and such brief, brutal desire …

She went home at dawn. Outside her car the city was coming to life; it was covered in a bluish light; a breeze blew across the Seine; her heart ached; she remembered moments from her youth, the open carriage, her long white gloves, courtly love …

‘Men have changed? You poor fool. I’m the one who’s changed, me … Everything disappears? No, but we, we disappear.’

She sighed with ironic sadness. Then she looked into the little dusty mirror and saw a miraculous picture of youth.

‘I must be dreaming,’ she thought. ‘I’m still beautiful and as young as before! Who would ever believe I’m past thirty?’

Of course, in 1925 a woman’s age scarcely mattered. Forty was still young.

‘How could I have been afraid to turn forty? Ah, I wish I were forty again. At forty, you’re at your best, in your prime, still young. Yes, but … fifty … fifty. That’s harder!’

She allowed the man beside her to touch her breasts, but secretly despaired.

‘Yes, go on, you can look for more beautiful ones, but you won’t find them!’

Of course … But if he knew … If he realised ‘Gladys Eysenach is fifty’, what would he think then? What would he say if they quarrelled? If any man ever said ‘At your age’, she was sure she would die of shame.

‘If he loved me,’ she thought, ‘it would be different. But there’s not a soul in the world who loves me.’

She so wished she might hear words of love as in the past. Was that gone for ever? Or rather (and this is what made her despair), were men saying those words to someone else?

She tried to reassure herself: it was the fault of the time she was living in, such brutal casualness, such eager, hurried lovemaking, and immediately afterwards such cold boorishness: ‘dropping a woman’, turning up at assignations looking bored and tired, setting a heavy price for favours, as women did. And when she asked; ‘Do you love me?’ the reply: ‘How very 1900 of you, my dear …’

That generation, however, was getting older. Others replaced them, young boys who were the opposite of their elders: passionate, emotional, bitter. But they seemed to care for her less and less, for it isn’t enough to keep your face and body young; you have to speak, feel and think exactly like the twenty-year-old children, but without overdoing it, without appearing old-fashioned, without flattery …

She was the mistress of a young Englishman; he was as lovely and youthful as a girl.

‘Are you fond of me?’ she asked shyly, forgetting that
she had already asked him the same question as he held her in his arms.

‘Oh, hang it all, Gladys, a fellow can’t jabber all night about love.’

Little by little the depressing anxiety that grew within her led her to frequent brothels. There, at least, desire was genuine. Every time she waited in the Madame’s little sitting room, her heart beat rapidly, echoing in her chest, she recalled the intoxication of the past: she was still under its poisonous spell, as if venom flowed through her blood.

Like all obsessions, this one did not give her soul a moment’s peace. Just as a miser thinks only of his gold or an ambitious person of attaining honours, so Gladys was in love with the desire to be attractive and with her fear of growing old. ‘Nothing would be easier,’ she thought, ‘than to hide my real age.’

The war had scattered everyone who had known her in the past. And even they … Time goes by so quickly … Everyone forgets so completely … And, for women, contrary to what is believed, there exists a kind of secret pact where age is concerned. ‘I won’t make fun of you, if, in exchange, you will spare me. I’ll flatter you, I’ll say I think you’re beautiful, but when the occasion presents itself, you’ll put in a good word for me, some little compliment that will allow me to feel my proud youth and smile at my lover with less fear and humility. I’ll pretend to forget how old you are and you won’t remind your circle of friends that I too am past fifty. Have pity on me and I will not be cruel or betray you, my poor sister, my comrade. I’ll say, “How ridiculous, you’re only as old as you look” and “Have you heard about that
famous actress? Her lover is cheating on her? She’s keeping him? How do you know? And how many young women are deceived the same way?’ Never will I shout, “Let’s mock that old woman!” And you, you will do the same …’

Gladys would be the first to speak: ‘Why talk about how old a woman is?’ she’d ask, smiling. ‘In this day and age, no one’s interested. If a woman is beautiful and seductive, what else matters?’

Before, she used to say nonchalantly, with ease, ‘Life is too long. What are we meant to do with so many years?’

Now, a sort of superstitious fear prevented such words from leaving her lips. She never spoke of the past, not about Richard or Marie-Thérèse. She had put away all the photos of Marie-Thérèse that used to hang on the walls of her house, for the style of the dresses that the little girl wore were all too revealing of their time. She had kept only one photo of Marie-Thérèse, when she was seven, half-naked, with her hair falling down over her eyes. ‘A little girl whom I lost,’ she would say, sighing.

Everyone thought that Marie-Thérèse had died as a child. Even Gladys had ended up believing it.

She travelled constantly. She never expressed concern about burning her bridges behind her, which sometimes made her seem like an adventuress. ‘I’m bored of this place,’ she would think, but in reality she would leave because she’d seen someone she’d known in the past, or had gone to someone’s house that brought back too many painful memories. It was no longer the light-hearted passion that used to drive her from one place to another, but a kind of tragic fleeing from the past.

On the day of her fiftieth birthday she couldn’t stop thinking ‘You’re fifty. You, Gladys, who only yesterday … You’re fifty, fifty, and you’ll never be young again.’ It was on that day that she went to a brothel for the first time and ever since then, every time her depression became too bitter to bear, every time she was tortured by doubting herself, she would go and spend an hour there.

Whenever some man she’d never met before was more eager, more generous than usual, a sort of heavenly satisfaction filled her heart.

‘But what if someone recognised me?’ she thought. ‘I’m free. And besides, what would they say? That I’m depraved? Ah, they can say I’m depraved, or mad, or a criminal, as long as they don’t say I’m old, that I can no longer inspire love, anything but that abomination, that horror!’

When she was sure that she was attractive, that the man was looking at her with admiration, even after lovemaking, she felt a shiver of joy that was almost physical, a thousand times sweeter than the other kind. Here was a man: a businessman with a clean-shaven, cold face. Ten years ago she wouldn’t have looked at him twice. Now he was asking, ‘Could we meet again somewhere else?’

And she felt overwhelming satisfaction rise up in her heart.

She had reached that age when women no longer change: they simply decompose, but in a way that is hardly noticeable, beneath a mask of powder and make-up. Paris was indulgent, spared her, along with the others. She was graceful and elegant. If someone said, ‘Gladys Eysenach?
But she’s an old woman …’ another voice would immediately reply, ‘She still looks so attractive. It’s so natural, so like a woman to wish to remain young. It does no harm to anyone.’

She kept her delicate bare neck uncovered in the cold wind; in the street, her body was so svelte that she looked like a young woman and her face looked thirty, perhaps forty, though only early in the morning or late at night. But she wasn’t satisfied with that: she wanted to be twenty again, to dance until dawn, then to look as smooth and fresh as a flower, without powder or lipstick, as she had in the past.

In the street, a man turns round and smiles at her. She looks at him calmly, indifferently, like a woman who isn’t interested. The passer-by is in a hurry; he walks away. And she, who at first had shivered in delight, now anxiously tries to remember: ‘Would that have happened with a man in the past? Wouldn’t he have kept trying? Wouldn’t he have followed me anyway, just for the pleasure of watching my beautiful body from behind, trying to imagine the curve of my hips under my clothing? But what was the point of thinking of the past? The past doesn’t exist. These are just dreams, memories of a time gone that weigh down on me and obsess me. Lucky Marie-Thérèse,’ she sometimes thought, ‘to be taken by death while still so young. Youth … The passion of youth … All passion is tragic, in the end; every cursed desire is tragic, for you never really get what you dreamed of.’

Depressing thoughts at early daybreak after staying up and drinking all night, thoughts that taste of ashes, bitterness and absinthe: New Year’s Eve always made her feel like this.

At the next table a woman smiled at Gladys. She had dyed hair and her pendant fell between her hideous, grotesque, sagging breasts. Though her eyes – her old, sunken eyes did try to smile, the rest of her face was so scarred, plastered over, stitched together, that a smile couldn’t easily spread across its painted surface.

‘Gladys …’

Drunk, stiff, carefully holding a glass of champagne in her hand – it was covered with rings and deformed by gout – the spectre walked towards Gladys. ‘You don’t recognise me. Oh, my darling, what a joy it is to see you again, truly a joy! And still so beautiful! You haven’t changed at all, really. It’s Lily Ferrer. Ah, how I resented you. Do you remember George Canning? He was so handsome! He was killed in the war. So many dead,’ she cawed, ‘so many dead.’

She sat down next to Gladys. She looked at her affectionately: it did her good to see a woman, barely ten years younger than herself, who retained such miraculous youthfulness. A wonderful gift, even if granted to someone else, raises hope within the heart. ‘It could happen to me. Why not? Yes, in spite of the reflection I see in the mirror, in spite of the young lover I pay, why not?’

‘And who’s the lucky man, Gladys? I’ve had terrible disappointments, great sadness, yes, I have. A young man in whom I had placed all my trust betrayed me horribly. But that’s always the way it’s been. I’ve never had any luck,’ she said, sighing. ‘Are you happy?’

Gladys said nothing.

‘No? Ah, men have changed. Do you remember? In our day,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘such manners, such
devotion. Men would love a woman for years without even a word of encouragement. They would give up everything for her. Lose everything for her. And now? Why is it different? Why? Is it because of the war?’

Gladys stood up and held out her hand. ‘Forgive me, darling. My friend is calling to me. Goodbye. It was nice to see you again. But I’m leaving tomorrow, leaving Paris …’

Suddenly Lily remembered something. ‘Your daughter must be grown up by now. Is she married?’

‘No, no,’ said Gladys hastily, for her lover was coming towards her. ‘No. Didn’t you know? She died …’

‘How terrible for you,’ murmured the old woman compassionately.