The Woman Destroyed (2 page)

“No. At my age one has habits of mind that hamper inventiveness. And I grow more ignorant year by year.”

“I will remind you of that ten years from now. Maybe you will make your greatest discovery at seventy.”

“You and your optimism: I promise you I shan’t.”

“You and your pessimism!”

We laughed. Yet there was nothing to laugh about. André’s defeatism has no valid basis: for once he is lacking in logical severity. To be sure, in his letters Freud did say that at a given age one no longer discovers anything new, and that it is terribly sad. But at that time he was much older than André. Nevertheless this extreme gloominess still saddens me just as much, although it is unjustified. And the reason why André gives way to it is that he is in a state of general crisis. It surprises me, but the truth of the matter is that he cannot bring himself to accept the fact that he is over sixty. For my own part I still find countless things amusing: he does not. Formerly he was interested in everything: now it is a tremendous business to drag him as far as a cinema or an exhibition, or to see friends.

“What a pity it is that you no longer like walking,” I said. “These days are so lovely! I was thinking just now how I should have liked to go back to Milly, and into the forest at Fontainebleau.”

“You are an amazing woman,” he said with a smile. “You know the whole of Europe, and yet what you want to see again is the outskirts of Paris!”

“Why not? The church at Champeaux is no less beautiful because I have climbed the Acropolis.”

“All right. As soon as the laboratory closes in four or five days’ time, I promise you a long run in the car.”

We should have time to go for more than one, since we are staying in Paris until the beginning of August. But would he want to? I said, “Tomorrow is Sunday. You’re not free?”

“No, alas. As you know, there’s this press conference on apartheid in the evening. They’ve brought me a whole pile of papers I have not looked at yet.”

Spanish political prisoners; Portuguese detainees; persecuted Persians; Congolese, Angolan, Cameroonian rebels; Venezuelan, Peruvian, and Colombian resistance fighters; he is always ready to help them as much as ever he can. Meetings, manifestos, public gatherings, tracts, delegations—he shirks at nothing.

“You do too much.”

What is there to do when the world has lost its savor? All that is left is the killing of time. I went through a wretched period myself, ten years ago. I was disgusted with my body; Philippe had grown up; and after the success of my book on Rousseau I felt completely hollow inside. Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu; I got Philippe through his
agrégation
*
and managed to make him start on a thesis. I was given a lectureship at the Sorbonne, and I found my teaching there even more interesting than my university scholarship classes. I became resigned to my body. It seemed to me that I came to life again. And now, if André were not so
very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether.

He went out again, and again I stayed a long while on the balcony. I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the Boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson: it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement. When he was sixty Andersen was astonished at being able to cross Sweden in less than twenty-four hours, whereas in his youth the journey had taken a week. I have experienced wonders like that. Moscow in three and a half hours from Paris!

A cab took me to the Parc Montsouris, where I had an appointment with Martine. As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the high Alpine pastures where I used to walk with André with a sack on my shoulders, a smell so moving because it was that of the meadows of my childhood. Reflections, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives it its color and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are
smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.

“Hello!”

Martine was drinking lemon juice on the café terrace. Thick black hair, blue eyes, a short dress with orange and yellow stripes and a hint of violet: a lovely young woman. Forty. When I was thirty I smiled to hear André’s father describe a forty-year-old as a “lovely young woman”: and here were the same words on my own lips, as I thought of Martine. Almost everybody seems to me to be young, now. She smiled at me. “You have brought me your book?”

“Of course.”

She looked at what I had written in it. “Thank you,” she said, with some emotion. She added, “I so long to read it. But one is so busy at the end of the school year. I shall have to wait for July fourteenth.”

“I should very much like to know what you think.”

I have great trust in her judgment: that is to say, we are almost always in agreement. I should feel on a completely equal footing with her if she had not retained a little of that old pupil-teacher deference toward me, although she is a teacher herself, married and the mother of a family.

“It is hard to teach literature nowadays. Without your books I really should not know how to set about it.” Shyly she asked, “Are you pleased with this one?”

I smiled at her. “Frankly, yes.”

There was still a question in her eyes—one that she did not like to put into words. I made the first move. “You know what I wanted to do—to start off with a consideration of the critical works published since the war and then to go on to suggest a new method by which it is possible
to make one’s way into a writer’s work, to see it in depth, more accurately than has ever been done before. I hope I have succeeded.”

It was more than a hope: it was a conviction. It filled my heart with sunlight. A lovely day: and I was enchanted with these trees, lawns, walks where I had so often wandered with friends and fellow students. Some are dead, or life has separated us. Happily—unlike André, who no longer sees anyone—I have made friends with some of my pupils and younger colleagues: I like them better than women of my own age. Their curiosity spurs mine into life: they draw me into their future, on the far side of my own grave.

Martine stroked the book with her open hand. “Still, I shall dip into it this very evening. Has anyone read it?”

“Only André. But literature does not mean a very great deal to him.”

Nothing means a very great deal to him anymore. And he is as much of a defeatist for me as he is for himself. He does not tell me so, but deep down he is quite sure that from now on I shall do nothing that will add to my reputation. This does not worry me, because I know he is wrong. I have just written my best book, and the second volume will go even further.

“Your son?”

“I sent him proofs. He will be telling me about it—he comes back this evening.”

We talked about Philippe, about his thesis, about writing. Just as I do, she loves words and people who know how to use them. Only she is allowing herself to be eaten alive by her profession and her home. She drove me back in her little Austin.

“Will you come back to Paris soon?”

“I don’t think so. I am going straight on from Nancy into the Yonne, to rest.”

“Will you do a little work during the holidays?”

“I should like to. But I’m always short of time. I don’t possess your energy.”

It is not a matter of energy, I said to myself as I left her: I just could not live without writing. Why? And why was I so desperately eager to make an intellectual out of Philippe when André would have let him follow other paths? When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.

In the kitchen Marie-Jeanne was busy getting the dinner ready: we were to have Philippe’s favorite dishes. I saw that everything was going well. I read the papers and I did a difficult crossword puzzle that took me three quarters of an hour: from time to time it is fun to concentrate for a long while upon a set of squares where the words are potentially there although they cannot be seen: I use my brain as a photographic developer to make them appear—I have the impression of drawing them up from their hiding places in the depth of the paper.

When the last square was filled I chose the prettiest dress in my wardrobe—pink and gray foulard. When I was fifty my clothes always seemed to me either too cheerful or too dreary: now I know what I am allowed and what I am not, and I dress without worrying. Without pleasure either. That very close, almost affectionate relationship I once had with my clothes has vanished. Nevertheless, I did look at my figure with some gratification. It was Philippe
who said to me one day, “Why, look, you’re getting plump.” (He scarcely seems to have noticed that I have grown slim again.) I went on a diet: I bought scales. Earlier on it never occurred to me that I should ever worry about my weight. Yet here I am! The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I look after it with bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting old friend who needed my help.

André brought a bottle of Mumm, and I put it to cool; we talked for a while and then he telephoned his mother. He often telephones her. She is sound in wind and limb, and she is still a furious militant in the ranks of the Communist Party; but she
is
eighty-four and she lives alone in her house at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. He is rather anxious about her. He laughed on the telephone; I heard him cry out and protest; but he was soon cut short—Manette is very talkative whenever she has the chance.

“What did she say?”

“She is more and more certain that one day or another fifty million Chinese will cross the Russian frontier. Or else that they will drop a bomb anywhere, just anywhere, for the pleasure of setting off a world war. She accuses me of taking their side: there’s no persuading her I don’t.”

“Is she well? She’s not bored?”

“She will be delighted to see us; but as for being bored, she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

She had been a schoolteacher with three children, and for her retirement was a delight that she has not come to the end of yet. We talked about her, and about the Chinese, of whom we, like everybody else, know so very
little. André opened a magazine. And there I was, looking at my watch, whose hands did not seem to be going around.

All at once he was there: every time it surprises me to see his face, with the dissimilar features of my mother and André blending smoothly in it. He hugged me very tight, saying cheerful things, and I leaned there with the softness of his flannel jacket against my cheek. I released myself so as to kiss Irène: she smiled at me with so frosty a smile that I was astonished to feel a soft, warm cheek beneath my lips. Irène. I always forget her: and she is always there. Blond; gray-blue eyes; weak mouth; sharp chin; and something both vague and obstinate about her too-wide forehead. Quickly I wiped her out. I was alone with Philippe as I used to be in the days when I woke him up every morning with a touch on his forehead.

“Not even a drop of whiskey?” asked André.

“No, thanks. I’ll have some fruit juice.”

How sensible she is! She dresses with a sensible stylishness; sensibly stylish hairdo—smooth, with a fringe hiding her big forehead. Artless makeup; severe little suit. When I happen to run through a woman’s magazine I often say to myself, “Why, here’s Irène!” It often happens too that when I see her I scarcely recognize her. “She’s pretty,” asserts André. There are days when I agree—a delicacy of ear and nostril: a pearly softness of skin emphasized by the dark blue of her lashes. But if she moves her head a little her face slips, and all you see is that mouth, that chin. Irène. Why? Why has Philippe always gone for women of that kind—smooth, standoffish, pretentious? To prove to himself that he could attract them, no doubt. He was not fond of them. I used to think that if he fell in love
… I used to think he would not fall in love; and one evening he said to me, “I have great news for you,” with the somewhat overexcited air of a birthday child who has been playing too much, laughing too much, shouting too much. There was that crash like a gong in my bosom, the blood mounting to my cheeks, all my strength concentrated on stopping the trembling of my lips. A winter evening, with the curtains drawn and the lamplight on the rainbow of cushions, and this suddenly opened gulf, this chasm of absence. “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life—in short, succeed on every level. And they don’t really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold.

Philippe and Irène had left for Sardinia the day the university closed, at the beginning of June. While we were having dinner at that table where I had so often obliged Philippe to eat (come, finish up your soup: take a little more beef: get something down before going off for your lecture), we talked about their journey—a handsome wedding present from Irène’s parents, who can afford that sort of thing. She was silent most of the time, like an intelligent woman who knows how to wait for the right moment to produce an acute and rather surprising remark: from time to time she did drop a little observation, surprising—or at least surprising to me—by its stupidity or its utter ordinariness.