The Woman Destroyed (13 page)

“Swine! You’re taking your revenge you’re torturing me because I haven’t drooled in admiration before you but as for me money doesn’t impress me nor fine airs nor fine words. ‘Never not for anything on earth’ we’ll see all right we’ll see. I shall stand up for myself. I’ll talk to Francis I’ll tell him what you are. And if I killed myself in front of him do you think that would be a pretty thing for him to remember?… No it’s not blackmail you silly bastard with the life I lead it wouldn’t mean a thing to me to do myself in. You mustn’t push people too far they reach a point when they’re capable of anything indeed there are mothers who kill themselves with their children.…”

Swine! Turd! He’s hung up.… He doesn’t answer he won’t answer. Swine. Oh! My heart’s failing I’m going to die. It hurts it hurts too much they’re slowly torturing me to death I can’t bear it any longer I’ll kill myself in his drawing room I’ll slash my veins when they come back there’ll be blood everywhere and I shall be dead.… Oh! I hit it too hard I’ve cracked my skull it’s them I ought to bash. Head against the wall no no I shan’t go mad they shan’t let me down I’ll stand up for myself I’ll find weapons. What weapons swine swine I can’t breathe my heart’s going to give I must calm down.…

Oh God. Let it be true that you exist. Let there be a heaven and a hell I’ll stroll along the walks of Paradise with my little boy and my beloved daughter and they will all be writhing in the flames of envy I’ll watch them roasting and howling I’ll laugh I’ll laugh and the children will laugh with me. You owe me this revenge, God. I insist that you grant it me.

Monday 13 September. Les Salines
.

It is an astonishing setting, this rough draft of a town lying deserted here, on the edge of a village and outside the flow of the centuries. I went along one half of the hemicycle and climbed the steps of the central building; for a long while I gazed at the quiet splendor of these structures that were put up for functional purposes and that have never been used for anything at all. They are solid; they are real: yet their abandoned state changes them into a fantastic pretense—of what, one wonders. The warm grass under the autumn sky and the smell of dead leaves told me that I had certainly not left this world; but I had gone back two hundred years into the past. I went to fetch things out of the car: I spread a rug on the ground, cushions, the transistor, and I smoked, listening to Mozart. Behind two or three dusty windows I could make out people moving to and fro—offices, no doubt. A truck stopped in front of one of the massive doors; men opened it; they loaded sacks into the back. Nothing else disturbed the silence of that afternoon: I traveled away, a great way off, to the shores of an unknown river; and then when I looked up there I was among these stones, far, far from my own life

For the most surprising thing about it is my being here, and the cheerfulness of my being here. I had not looked forward to the loneliness of this drive back to Paris at all. Hitherto, if Maurice were not there, the girls were always with me, in all my journeys. I had thought I was going to miss Colette’s raptures and Lucienne’s demandingness. And here I am with happiness of a forgotten kind given back to me. My freedom makes me twenty years younger. So much so that when I closed the book I began writing just for myself, as I did when I was twenty.

I never part from Maurice with a light heart. The congress is only going to last a week, yet there was a lump in my throat as we drove from Mougins to the Nice airfield. He, too, he was moved. When the loudspeaker summoned the travelers for Rome he squeezed me tight. “Don’t get killed on the road. Don’t get killed in the plane.” Before he vanished he turned around to look at me again: there was anxiety in his eyes, and I caught it at once. The takeoff seemed to me dramatic. Four-engined planes rise gently into the air—it is a long drawn-out
au revoir
. This jet left the ground with the violence of a last goodbye.

But presently I began to bubble with happiness. No, my daughters’ absence did not sadden me at all—quite the reverse. I could drive as fast or as slowly as I liked, go where I liked, stop when the whim took me. I made up my mind to spend the week wandering about. I get up as soon as it is light. The car is waiting for me in the street or in the courtyard like a faithful animal; it is wet with dew; I wipe its eyes, and full of delight I tear away through the growing sunlight. Beside me there is the white bag with the Michelin maps, the Guide Bleu, some books, a cardigan and my cigarettes—a reticent companion. No
one grows impatient if I ask the owner of the little hotel for her recipe for chicken with crayfish.

Dusk is about to fall, but it is still warm. It is one of these heart-touching moments when the world is so well attuned to men that it seems impossible that they should not all be happy.

Tuesday 14 September
.

One of the things that really pleased Maurice was the intensity of what he called “my awareness of life.” It has revived during this short colloquy with myself. Now that Colette is married and Lucienne is in America I shall have all the time in the world to cultivate it. “You’ll be bored. You ought to look for a job,” Maurice said to me at Mougins. He went on and on about it. But I do not want one; not for the moment, anyhow. I want to live for myself a little, after all this time. And for us, Maurice and I, to make the most of this double solitude that we have been deprived of for so long. I have plans by the dozen in my mind.

Friday 17 September
.

On Tuesday I telephoned Colette: she had flu. She protested when I said I was coming straight back to Paris—Jean-Pierre was looking after her very well. But I was worried, and I got back that same day. I found her in bed, much thinner: she has a fever every evening. When I went into the mountains with her back in August—even then I was anxious about her health. I can’t wait for
Maurice to examine her, and I should like him to call Talbot in for a consultation.

Here I am with still another protégée on my hands. When I left Colette after dinner on Wednesday it was so mild that I drove down to the Latin quarter: I sat on the terrace of a café, and I smoked a cigarette. At the next table there was a teen-age girl who gazed longingly at my pack of Chesterfields: she asked me for one. I talked to her: she evaded my questions and got up to go. She was about fifteen, neither a student nor a prostitute, and she aroused my curiosity—I suggested giving her a lift home in my car. She refused, hesitated, and then in the end she confessed that she did not know where she was going to sleep. She had escaped that morning from the center where Public Assistance had put her. I kept her here for two days. Her mother, who is more or less mentally deficient, and her stepfather, who loathes her, have given up their rights over her. The judge who is in charge of her case promised to send her to a home where she will be taught a trade. Meanwhile for these six months past she has been living “provisionally” at this center, where she
never
goes out—except on Sunday, to church, if she wishes—and where she is given nothing to do. There are some forty of them there, adolescent girls, physically well looked after, but pining away from boredom, weariness and despair. At nights each is given a sleeping pill. They manage to save them up. And one fine day they swallow all they have hoarded. “Running away or trying to commit suicide—that’s what you have to do in our place for the judge to remember you,” Marguerite told me. It is easy to run away; it often happens; and if it does not last long the escape is not punished.

I promised her I should move heaven and earth to get her transferred to a home, and she let herself be persuaded to go back to the center. I boiled with anger when I saw her go through the door, her feet dragging, her head bowed. She is a pretty girl, not stupid at all, very sweet-tempered, and all she asks is to work—her youth is being hacked to pieces: hers and the youth of thousands like her. Tomorrow I shall ring up Judge Barron.

How hard Paris is! Even on these balmy autumn days this hardness weighs me down. I feel obscurely low-spirited this evening. I have made plans for changing the girls’ room into a cozier place to sit in than Maurice’s consulting room or the waiting room. And I am coming to realize that Lucienne will never live here anymore. The house will be quiet, but very empty. But above all I am racked with anxiety about Colette. What a good thing Maurice is coming home tomorrow.

Wednesday 22 September
.

Here is one of the reasons—indeed the main reason—why I have not the least wish to be tied down to a job: I should find it hard to bear if I were not entirely free to help the people who need me. I spend almost all my days at Colette’s bedside. Her temperature will not go down. “It’s nothing serious,” says Maurice. But Talbot wants analyses. Terrifying notions run through my mind.

Judge Barron saw me this morning. Very friendly. He thinks Marguerite Drin’s case heartbreaking: and there are thousands like it. The shocking thing is that there is no place designed for these children and no staff capable of looking after them properly. The government does
nothing. So the efforts of the juvenile courts and the social workers come to nothing—run up against a wall. The center where Marguerite is staying is only a transit point: after three or four days she ought to have been sent on elsewhere. But where? It is a complete vacuum. These girls stay on at the center, where nothing has been arranged in the way of occupation or amusement. But still he will try to find Marguerite some sort of a place somewhere. And he is going to advise the workers at the center to let me see her. The parents have not signed the paper that would finally do away with their rights, but there is no question of their taking the child back: they do not want her and from her point of view too it would be the worst possible solution.

I left the law courts vexed with the system’s ineptitude. The number of juvenile delinquents is rising: and the only measure contemplated is greater severity.

I happened to find myself in front of the door of the Sainte Chapelle, so I went in and climbed the spiral staircase. There were foreign tourists and a couple gazing at the stained glass, hand in hand. For my part I could not concentrate upon it. I was thinking of Colette again, and I was worried.

And I am worried now. Reading is impossible. The only thing that could ease my mind would be talking to Maurice: he will not be here before midnight. Since he came back from Rome he spends his evenings at the laboratory with Talbot and Couturier. He says they are getting near to their goal. I can understand his giving up everything to his research. But this is the first time in my life that I have a serious worry that he does not share.

Saturday 25 September
.

The window was black. I had expected it. Before—before what?—when by some extraordinary chance I went out without Maurice there was always a streak of light between the red curtains when I came back. I would run up the two flights of stairs and ring, too impatient to look for my key. This time I went up the stairs without running; I pushed my key into the lock. How empty the apartment was! How empty it is! Of course it is, since there is no one in it. No, that’s not it: usually when I come home I find Maurice here, even when he is out. This evening the doors open onto wholly empty rooms. Eleven o’clock. Tomorrow the results of the analyses will be known, and I am afraid. I am afraid, and Maurice is not here. I know. His research must be carried through. Still, I am angry with him.
I need you, and you aren’t here!
I feel like writing those words on a piece of paper and leaving it in an obvious place in the hall before I go to bed. Otherwise I shall be bottling it in, as I did yesterday, and as I did the day before that. He always used to be there when I needed him.

I watered the potted plants; I began to tidy the books and I stopped dead. I had been astonished by his lack of interest when I talked to him about arranging this sitting room. I must tell myself the truth: I have always wanted the truth and the reason why I have had it is that I desired it. Well, then. Maurice has changed. He has let himself be eaten up by his profession. He no longer reads. He no longer listens to music. (I used so to love our silence and his attentive face as we listened to Monteverdi or Charlie
Parker.) We no longer go out together in or around Paris. It might almost be said we no longer have any real conversation. He is beginning to be like his colleagues who are merely machines for getting on and for making money. I’m being unfair. He doesn’t give a damn for money or social success. But ever since he decided, ten years ago, against my wishes, to specialize, gradually (and that was what I had been afraid of) he has grown hard. Even at Mougins this year I thought him remote—intensely eager to get back to the hospital and the laboratory, absent-minded and indeed moody. Come! I might as well tell myself the truth right through to the end. The reason why my heart was so heavy at Nice airfield was those dismal holidays behind us. And the reason why I had so vivid a happiness in the deserted saltworks was that Maurice, hundreds of miles away, was close to me again. (What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.) Anyone would say he was no longer interested in his private life. How easily he gave up our trip to Alsace last spring! Yet my disappointment grieved him deeply. I said cheerfully, “A cure for leukemia is certainly worth a few sacrifices!” But there was a time when for Maurice medicine meant the relief of men and women made of flesh and blood. (I was so disappointed, so taken aback, when I did my course at the Cochin, by the professors’ coldhearted jollity and the students’ uncaring attitude; and in that extern’s fine dark eyes I saw distress and fury of the same kind as mine. I believe I loved him from that moment on.) I am afraid that now his patients are merely cases for him. Knowing concerns him more than healing. And even in his relations with people close to him he is growing remote, he who
was so alive, so cheerful, as young at forty-five as when I first met him.… Yes, something has changed, since here I am writing about him, about myself, behind his back. If he had done so, I should have felt betrayed. Each of us used to be able to see entirely into the other.