The Woman Destroyed

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H
AS
my watch stopped? No. But its hands do not seem to be going around. Don’t look at them. Think of something else—anything else: think of yesterday, a calm, ordinary, easy-flowing day, in spite of the nervous tension of waiting.

Tender awakening. André was in an odd, curled-up position in bed, with the bandage over his eyes and one hand pressed against the wall like a child’s, as though in the confusion and distress of sleep he had needed to reach out to test the firmness of the world. I sat on the edge of his bed; I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Eight o’clock.”

I carried the breakfast tray into the library: I took up a book that had arrived the day before—I had already half leafed through it. What a bore, all this going on about non-communication. If you really want to communicate you manage, somehow or other. Not with everybody, of course, but with two or three people. Sometimes I don’t tell André about my moods, sorrows, unimportant anxieties; and no doubt he has his little secrets too; but on the whole there is nothing we do not know about one another. I poured out the China tea, piping hot and very strong. We drank it as we looked through our post: the
July sun came flooding into the room. How many times had we sat there opposite one another at that little table with piping hot, very strong cups of tea in front of us? And we should do so again tomorrow, and in a year’s time, and in ten years’ time.… That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise. Were we thirty, or were we sixty?

André’s hair had gone white when he was young: in earlier days that snowy hair, emphasizing the clear freshness of his complexion, looked particularly dashing. It looks dashing still. His skin has hardened and wrinkled—old leather—but the smile on his mouth and in his eyes has kept its brilliance. Whatever the photograph album may say to the contrary, the pictures of the young André conform to his present-day face: my eyes attribute no age to him. A long life filled with laughter, tears, quarrels, embraces, confessions, silences, and sudden impulses of the heart: and yet sometimes it seems that time has not moved by at all. The future still stretches out to infinity.

He stood up. “I hope your work goes well,” he said.

“Yours too,” I replied.

He made no answer. In this kind of research there are necessarily times when one makes no progress: he cannot accept that as readily as he used to do.

I opened the window. Paris, sweltering beneath the crushing summer heat, smelled of asphalt and impending storms. My eyes followed André. Maybe it is during those moments, as I watch him disappear, that he exists for me with the most overwhelming clarity: his tall shape grows smaller, each pace marking out the path of his return; it vanishes and the street seems to be empty; but in fact it is a field of energy that will lead him back to me as to his
natural habitat: I find this certainty even more moving than his presence.

I paused on the balcony for a long while. From my sixth floor I see a great stretch of Paris, with pigeons flying over the slate-covered roofs, and those seeming flowerpots that are really chimneys. Red or yellow, the cranes—five, nine, ten: I can count ten of them—hold their iron arms against the sky: away to the right my gaze bumps against a great soaring wall with little holes in it—a new block: I can also see prismlike towers—recently built tall buildings. Since when have cars been parked in the tree-lined part of the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet? I find the newness of the landscape staringly obvious; yet I cannot remember having seen it look otherwise. I should like two photographs to set side by side, Before and After, so that I could be amazed by the differences. No: not really. The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.

The card indexes and blank paper on my desk urged me to work; but there were words dancing in my head that prevented me from concentrating.
Philippe will be here this evening
. He had been away almost a month. I went into his room. Books and papers were still lying about—an old gray pullover, a pair of violet pajamas—in this room that I cannot make up my mind to change because I have not the time to spare, nor the money; and because I do not want to believe that Philippe has stopped belonging to me. I went back into the library, which was filled with the scent of a bunch of roses, as fresh and simpleminded as so many lettuces. I was astonished that I could ever have thought the apartment forlorn and empty. There was nothing
lacking. My eyes wandered with pleasure over the cushions scattered on the divans, some softly colored, some vivid: the Polish dolls, the Slovak bandits and the Portuguese cocks were all in their places, as good as gold.
Philippe will be here
.… I was still at a loss for anything to do. Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that.

I made up my mind to go out and get a breath of the summer heat. A tall Negro in an electric-blue raincoat and a gray felt hat was listlessly sweeping the pavement: before, it used to be an earth-colored Algerian. In the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet I mingled with the crowd of women. As I almost never go out in the morning anymore, the market had an exotic air for me (so many morning markets, beneath so many skies). The little old lady hobbled from one stall to another, her sparse hair carefully combed back, her hand grasping the handle of her empty basket. In earlier days I never used to worry about old people: I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving. Now I see them—men and women: only a little older than myself. I had noticed this old lady at the butcher’s one day when she asked for scraps for her cats. “For her cats!” he said when she had gone. “She hasn’t got a cat. Such a stew she’s going to make for herself!” The butcher found that amusing. Presently she will be picking up the leavings under the stalls before the tall Negro sweeps everything into the gutter. Making ends meet on a hundred and eighty francs a month: there are more than a million in the same plight: three million more scarcely less wretched.

I bought some fruit, some flowers, and sauntered along. Retired: it sounds rather like rejected, tossed onto the scrap heap. The word used to chill my heart. The great stretch
of free time frightened me. I was mistaken. I do find the time a little too broad over the shoulders; but I manage. And how delightful to live with no imperatives, no kind of restraint! Yet still from time to time a bewilderment comes over me. I remember my first appointment, my first class, and the dead leaves that rustled under my feet that autumn in the country. In those days retirement seemed to me as unreal as death itself, for between me and that day there lay a stretch of time almost twice as long as that which I had so far lived. And now it is a year since it came. I have crossed other frontiers, but all of them less distinct. This one was as rigid as an iron curtain.

I came home; I sat at my desk. Without some work I should have found even that delightful morning insipid. When it was getting on for one o’clock I stopped so as to lay the table in the kitchen—just like my grandmother’s kitchen at Milly (I should like to see Milly again)—with its farmhouse table, its benches, its copper pots, the exposed beams: only there is a gas stove instead of a range, and a refrigerator. (What year was it that refrigerators first came to France? I bought mine ten years ago, but they were already quite usual by then. When did they begin? Before the war? Just after? There’s another of those things I don’t remember anymore.)

André came in late; he had told me he would. On leaving the laboratory he had attended a meeting on French nuclear weapons.

“Did it go well?” I asked.

“We settled the wording of a new manifesto. But I have no illusions about it. It will have no more effect than the rest of them. The French don’t give a damn. About the deterrent, the atomic bomb in general—about anything.
Sometimes I feel like getting the hell out of here—going to Cuba, to Mali. No, seriously, I do think about it. Out there it might be possible to make oneself useful.”

“You couldn’t work anymore.”

“That would be no very great disaster.”

I put salad, ham, cheese, and fruit on the table. “Are you as disheartened as all that? This is not the first time you people have been unable to make headway.”

“No.”

“Well, then?”

“You don’t choose to understand.”

He often tells me that nowadays all the fresh ideas come from his colleagues and that he is too old to make new discoveries: I don’t believe him. “Oh, I can see what you are thinking,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”

“You’re mistaken. It is fifteen years since I had my last idea.”

Fifteen years. None of the sterile periods he has been through before have lasted that long. But having reached the point he has reached, no doubt he needs a break of this kind to come by fresh inspiration. I thought of Valéry’s lines

Unlooked-for fruit will come from this slow gestation. The adventure in which I have shared so passionately is not over—this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success. I do not understand much about André’s work, but my obstinate confidence
used to reinforce his. My confidence is still unshaken. Why can I no longer convey it to him? I will
not
believe that I am never again to see the feverish joy of discovery blazing in his eyes. I said, “There is nothing to prove that you will not get your second wind.”