The Woman Destroyed (20 page)

I can’t remember the exact words, but that was the meaning of this hideous scene. I was possessive, overbearing and encroaching with my daughters just as I was with him. “You encouraged Colette to make an imbecile marriage; and it was to escape from you that Lucienne left.”

That put me beside myself; I shouted again, and I wept. At one moment I said, “If you think all this evil of me, how can you still love me?”

And he flung this into my face—“But I don’t love you anymore. I stopped loving you after the scenes of ten years ago.”

“You’re lying! You’re lying so as to hurt me!”

“It’s you who are lying to yourself. You claim to love the truth: so just you let me tell it to you. After that we can make up our minds.”

So for eight years now he has not loved me and he has been going to bed with other women—with the little Pelleria, for two years, with a South American patient that I know nothing about at all; with a nurse at the hospital; and lastly
for eighteen months past
with Noëllie. I screamed: I was on the edge of hysteria. Then he gave me a tranquilizer and his voice altered. “Listen, I don’t really mean all I have just said. Only you are so unfair you make me unfair too.”

He deceived me, yes, that was true. But he had never stopped being fond of me. I asked him to go away. I stayed there, shattered, trying to grasp this scene, trying to disentangle the true from the false.

A recollection came back to me. Three years ago I came home without his hearing me. He was laughing on the telephone—that affectionate, collusive laugh I knew so well. I did not hear the words; only that tender complicity in his voice. The ground shifted under me—I was in another life, one in which Maurice could have deceived me and in which I could have been hurt to the screaming point. I walked in noisily. “Who were you telephoning?”

“My nurse.”

“You’re very chummy with her.”

“Oh, she’s a delightful girl—I adore her,” he said in an absolutely natural voice.

There I was back in my own life, beside the man who loved me. What is more, I should not have believed my eyes if I had seen him in bed with a woman. (And yet the memory is there, entire, painful.)

He went to bed with those women; but did he no longer love me? And how much truth was there in what he said against me? He knows very well that we both decided everything together as far as the resident post and our marriage were concerned—before this morning he has never for a moment claimed that this was not so. He has manufactured grievances to excuse himself for deceiving me—he is less guilty if I am at fault. But still, why did he pick on those? Why that dreadful remark about the children? I am so proud of having made a success of them, each in a different way, each according to her own character. Like me, Colette had a vocation for home life—by what right was I to thwart it? Lucienne wanted to stand on her own feet—I did not prevent her. Why all this unjust rancor on Maurice’s part? My head aches, and I can no longer think clearly at all.

I phoned Colette. She has just left me—midnight. She was good for me: she was bad for me. I can no longer tell which is good and which is bad as far as I am concerned. No, I was not bossy, possessive, encroaching; over and over again she assured me that I was an ideal mother and that her father and I got on perfectly well together. Family life
was
wearisome to Lucienne as it is to many young people, but that was not my fault. (Lucienne’s relationship with me was complex, because she worshiped her father—a classical Oedipus. That proves nothing against me.) She grew cross. “I think it’s disgusting of Papa to say what he did to you.”

But she was jealous of Maurice, because of Lucienne: she is aggressive toward him—too eager to find him in the wrong. Too eager to comfort me too. Lucienne, with her hard sharpness, would have been a better informant. I
talked to Colette for hours and hours, and I’m no further forward for it.

I am in a dilemma. If Maurice is a swine, then I have wrecked my life, loving him. But perhaps he had reasons for not being able to bear me any more. In that case I must look upon myself as hateful and contemptible, without even knowing why. Both suppositions are appalling.

Wednesday 2 December
.

Isabelle thinks—or at least that’s what she says—that Maurice did not mean a quarter of what he said. He has had affairs without telling me—that is perfectly usual. She had always told me a faithfulness lasting twenty years is an impossibility for a man. Clearly Maurice would have done better to tell me, but he felt completely bound by his promises. As for his grievances against me, he has no doubt just made them up: if he had married me unwillingly I should have sensed it—we should not have been so happy. She advises me to wipe the slate clean. She still thinks I have the winning position. Men choose the easiest solution—it is easier to stay with one’s wife than to plunge into a new life. She made me telephone an old friend of hers for an appointment. This friend is a gynecologist; she has great experience of marital problems, and Isabelle thinks she may be able to help me to understand my difficulties. Very well.

Since Monday Maurice has been very attentive, as he always is when he has gone too far.

“Why did you let me live eight years in falsehood?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“You ought to have told me you didn’t love me anymore.”

“But that’s not true—I said it out of anger. I have always been very fond of you indeed. I insist upon that.”

“You can’t be fond of me if you think half of what you said. Do you really think I have been a possessive mother?” Of all the unkindnesses that he hurled at me, that was most certainly the one that stung me most.

“Possessive: that is too strong.”

“What then?”

“I always said you coddled the children overmuch. Colette’s reaction was to model herself too tamely upon you; Lucienne’s was to be antagonistic—an attitude that has often distressed you.”

“But which helped her find herself in the end. She is happy with her lot, and Colette with hers: what more do you want?”

“If they really are happy.…”

I did not go on. His mind is full of reservations. But there are answers I would not have the strength to hear: I do not ask the questions.

Friday 4 December
.

Pitiless memories. How did I manage to push them aside and take away their sting? A certain look in his eye two years ago at Mykonos, when he said to me, “Do buy yourself a one-piece swimsuit.” I know—I knew then. A certain amount of fat on my thighs: my stomach no longer completely flat. But I thought he didn’t mind. When Lucienne made fun of the fat grannies in bikinis, he
cried out, “What are you talking about? What harm does it do? Just because you’re growing old that’s no reason to deprive your body of sun and air.” I wanted sun and air; and it did no harm. And yet—maybe because of those very pretty girls who came onto the beach—he said that to me. “Buy yourself a one-piece swimsuit.” And I didn’t buy it, so there.

And then there was that quarrel last year, the evening when the Talbots came to dinner, together with the Couturiers. Talbot was playing the great big boss; he congratulated Maurice on a paper about the origin of certain viruses, and Maurice looked delighted, like a schoolboy who has been awarded the form prize. That irritated me because I don’t like Talbot: when he says of someone, “He’s an asset!” I could slap him. After they had gone, I said to Maurice, laughing, “Soon Talbot will be saying of you, ‘He’s an asset!’ Lucky you!”

He grew cross. He reproached me more sharply than usual for not caring about his work and for underestimating his successes. He told me that it didn’t interest him to be prized in general if I never gave a damn for what he did in particular. There was so much bitterness in his voice that all at once my blood froze.

“How inimical you are!”

He looked quite taken aback. “Don’t talk nonsense!”

Afterward he persuaded me that it was just a quarrel like so many others. But the chill of death had breathed upon me.

Jealous of his work: I must admit that that is not untrue. For ten years on end, through Maurice, I carried out an
experiment that fascinated me—following the relationship of the doctor with the patient. I took part in it: I advised him. He saw fit to break this bond between us—such an important one for me. After that I confess that I was hardly very zealous about watching his progress passively and from afar. His progress left me cold: that was true. It is the human being I admire in him, not the scientist. But “castrating woman”—that is unfair. I only refused to feign enthusiasm I did not feel: he used to love my sincerity. I can’t bring myself to believe that it wounded his vanity. There is no small-mindedness in Maurice. Or is there, and has Noëllie found out the best way of exploiting it? Revolting idea. My head is filled with confusion. I thought I knew what kind of person I was: what kind of person he was. And all at once I no longer recognize us, neither him nor me.

Sunday 6 December
.

When this happens to other people it seems to be a limited, bounded event, easy to ring around and to overcome. And then you find yourself absolutely alone, in a hallucinating experience that your imagination had not even begun to approach.

I am afraid of not sleeping and I am afraid of sleeping, on the nights that Maurice spends with Noëllie. That empty bed next to mine, these flat, cold sheets.… I take sleeping pills, but in vain; for I dream. Often in my dreams I faint with distress. I lie there under Maurice’s gaze, paralyzed, with the whole world’s anguish on my face. I expect
him to rush toward me. He glances indifferently in my direction and walks off. I woke up and it was still night—I could feel the weight of the darkness; I was in a corridor; I hurried down it, and it grew narrower and narrower; I could scarcely breathe. Presently I should have to crawl and I should stay wedged there until I died. I screamed. And I began calling him more quietly, weeping as I did so. Every night I call him: not him—the other one, the one who loved me. And I wonder whether I should not prefer it if he were dead. I used to tell myself that death was the only irremediable misfortune and that if he were to leave me I should get over it. Death was dreadful because it was possible; a break was bearable because I could not imagine it. But now in fact I tell myself that if he were dead I should at least know whom I had lost and who I was myself. I no longer know anything. The whole of my past life has collapsed behind me, as the land does in those earthquakes where the ground consumes and destroys itself—is swallowed up behind you as you flee. There is no going back. The house has vanished, and the village and the whole of the valley. Even if you survive there is nothing left, not even what had been your living space on earth.

I am so destroyed by the morning that if the daily woman did not come at ten o’clock I should stay in bed every day until past noon, as I do on Sundays: or even all day long, when Maurice does not come back to lunch. Mme. Dormoy senses that something is wrong. Taking away the breakfast tray, she says reproachfully, “You haven’t eaten anything!”

She presses me, and sometimes for the sake of peace I
swallow a square of toast. But the mouthfuls won’t go down.

Why doesn’t he love me anymore? The question is why did he love me in the first place. One never asks oneself. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself—exactly oneself and no one else—and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else. He loved me, that’s all. And for ever, since I should always be me. (And I have been astonished at this blindness, in other women. Strange that one can only understand one’s own case by the help of other people’s experience—experience that is not the same as mine, and that doesn’t help.)

Stupid things fleeting through one’s head. A film I saw when I was a child. A wife going to see her husband’s mistress. “For you it’s only fun. But I love him!” And the mistress is moved, and she sends the wife to take her place at the nocturnal rendezvous. In the darkness the husband takes her for the other one, and in the morning he comes back to her, looking shamefaced. It was an old silent film that the studio put on for laughs, but that stirred me a great deal. I can still see the wife’s long dress, and her bandeaux.

Talk to Noëllie? But it’s not just fun for her: it’s a major undertaking. She would tell me that she loved him too; and certainly she’s very fond of all that he can give a woman nowadays. For my part I loved him when he was twenty-three—an uncertain future—difficulties. I loved him with no security; and I gave up the idea of a career for myself. Anyhow I regret nothing.

Monday 7 December
.

Colette, Diana, Isabelle: and I who did not like confiding! And Marie Lambert this afternoon. She has had a great deal of experience. I should so like it if she could make things clear to me.

What appears from our long talk is how little I myself understand my own case. I know the whole of my past by heart, and all at once I no longer know anything about it. She asked me for a short, written summary. Let’s have a try.

As Papa practiced it at Bagnolet, medicine seemed to me the finest calling in the world. But during my first year I was shattered, sickened and overwhelmed by its daily horror. Several times I could not take it. Maurice was a senior medical student, and the very first time I saw him I was moved by what I saw in his face. We had neither of us had anything more than passing affairs. We fell in love. It was wild, passionate love, and it was steady, sober love: love. He was bitterly unfair the other day when he said I had made him give up the idea of a resident post: up until then he had always taken complete responsibility for his decision. He was fed up with being a student. He wanted an adult life, a home. As for our solemn promise of faithfulness, it was he who was keener on it than I because his mother’s second marriage had given him a morbid horror of breaks and separations. We married in the summer of ’44, and the beginning of our happiness coincided with the intoxicating joy of the Liberation. Maurice liked the idea of social medicine. He found a job at Simca. It tied him down less than local practice, and he liked the working-men, his patients.