The woodwork groaned. From time to time the whole ship quivered like a horse twitching its skin. At one moment.... that icy hand, it seemed to have lost all feeling. Costals pinched one of the fingers, and felt nothing. Sweat drenched his forehead. The anaesthesia of leprosy. Then the feeling in his hand returned. He realized that he had gripped the edge of the upper berth with that hand, and the blood had ebbed from it. But the cold in his head and the pruritus were still there.
At ten o'clock in the evening the sea calmed down a little. The agony ceased, and consciousness returned.
Consciousness.
It is difficult to appreciate the poets when your shoe is pinching. And the vast edifices of the soul come toppling down over a pitching ship, like a palace over an earthquake. Costals, having risen from that pocket of physiological misery, now collapsed into another pocket - of spiritual misery. There he found Christianity.
For anyone who has spent his childhood among Christians there is a good chance that later, whenever he feels frightened, Christianity will rise up in him again; until the day when, fortified by the power of ripe old age, he has finally eliminated the poison from his system. Costals did not hate Christianity. In order for him to hate this religion, it would have had to contaminate someone he loved. And everyone he loved was untouched by it. As for hating it as the religion of the 'enemies of the human race' (Tacitus), he was not sufficiently infatuated with the human race for that. He despised Christianity, nothing more. But, having been brought up in it, his memories enabled him to evoke it easily. And as a novelist he needed to make very little effort to put himself under the skin of a Christian: we have seen this with 'Marie Paradis'.
In the past few days he had contemplated his disease in a more detached way. Much good it had done him: now he was dreaming of how he might Christianize it! Oh! of course, there was no question of 'believing' - although he envied priests, whose faith must make them happy to die (assuming they have faith), but envied them as he envied animals, who he presumed (quite falsely) to have no fear of death. No, there was no question of believing. 'I wept and I believed' (Chateaubriand) remained in his eyes perhaps the most stupid remark in the whole of French literature. It was a question of toning up his ordeal by infusing it with a new kind of poetical substance. He would enter a lay order, retire to a monastery. A leper in the world is pitiful and horrible. But a leper who, thanks to his disease, rediscovers 'the path to the old altars', was both photogenic and elevating: a proved recipe, one of those clichés of the bogus-sublime, sure in its effect. The absurd respect manifested towards the histrionics of monasticism even by the majority of non-believers would reach new heights if the monk's cowl were to cover rotting sores. (It is worth noting that a consumptive who rediscovered 'the path to the old altars' would be of no interest at all.) Costals worked himself up over all this bric-à-brac. No, it could not be said that he was thinking of making a career in Catholico-Hansenian romance, as others in Judaeo-Iiturgical gush or in Pederas-thomism. But he toyed somewhat complacently with a possible 'persona'. It was the same process as at the Bibliothèque Nationale, when he had sought out stirring images about marriage which would make his own bearable. When he had gone skirmishing against Abd el-Krim as a volunteer, it was because he had worked out a formula for himself whereby the taste for adventure prevailed over the fear of death. Now he was working up a formula which would allow him to feel that it was a good thing to die of leprosy. In creating a persona for himself he was taking a hair of the dog that bit him; he was sinning through literature, but he was saving himself through his sin. And if a man as remarkable as Goethe, after having written 'There are four things that are as hateful to me as poison and snakes: tobacco smoke, bugs, garlic and the crucifix', could nevertheless dare to say later 'I would rather that Catholicism did me harm, than that I should be prevented from using it to make my plays more interesting', who could throw stones at one who dreamed of using Catholicism, not to make his works 'more interesting', but to make a leper's life more liveable? He was taking a dose of religion as one takes a dose of quinine.
There were also moments when he seriously believed his passion for coition would prevent him from having leprosy! 'When I get back to Paris and hold Guiguite in my arms, the disease that was taking shape inside me will be nipped in the bud. No, it's inconceivable that such a love of life should fail to get the better of death, it's inconceivable that a certain intensity of joy should fail to repel death.' At other times he thought (still quite seriously) that when he had made love to Guiguite or another once, once only, he would be ready to accept death. He remembered what a nurse had once told him about a badly wounded soldier who tore off his medals and yelled at her with a terrible look in his eyes: 'To hell with France. To hell with medals. All I want is one more f— before I croak.' (Might there not be women who would perform that function as a duty, for men doomed to die? Could not a charity be created for such a purpose? Or better still, why not an order of nuns who would specialize in this sublime form of charity?)
And here he was back in shabby old antiquated, ill-equipped France. No bootblacks, no taxis at the stations, no one to carry your luggage, cigarettes that go out all by themselves. Picard, his manservant, was not at the avenue Henri-Martin. Having gone back to his home in the country during Costals' absence, no doubt he had failed to receive in time the letter asking him to return to Paris. There was a hideous fusty smell in the flat, and a hint of stale tobacco (Picard must have been smoking there and forgotten to open the windows). And another atmosphere: that of a house in which someone has died and which has not been occupied since. And the same old neighbour behind her window. 'Another one who hasn't yet croaked!'
In these empty, dusty, funereal rooms, with their dirty window-panes and rolled-up carpets, another wave of cowardly weakness overcame him, as though the spectres of all the weakness and hysteria that for five months had plagued him here were now assailing him: here, the spirit of Solange took possession of him again. He did not have the heart to unpack, to add to the clutter in his study ('Mind you don't move anything, Picard'). He was cold: it was the 27th of April, the heating was turned off, and the season was hanging back. As was his habit, he stretched himself out on his bed.
It must be borne in mind that at this moment (1) he was a man faced, as far as he knew, with ten years of horrible and incurable disease; (2) his resistance had been lowered by the shock he had received in the Atlas and a day's journey over the mountains, partly on mule-back, followed almost immediately by an eight-hour bus-ride, by seventy-five hours of raging seas, and seven hours in a train; (3) that this cold and dilapidated flat oozed depression from every cranny; and (4) that the shade of Solange, which was omnipresent here, was for him a baleful presence. Small wonder, then, that, lying on his bed, he should give way to self-pity once more. And his cowardice, which on the boat had flowed quite naturally towards religion (whose phantasms had since been dispelled), here quite naturally flowed in the direction of woman. Woman the 'consolatrix'! Woman the 'guardian angel'! Absurd and pernicious preconception of the male, when all it amounts to is this: a defeated man - even if only momentarily defeated - taking refuge with the eternally defeated: the female. (In antiquity, defeat was equated with womanliness; certain peoples, to humiliate their vanquished enemy, branded him with a triangle representing the female organ.) And in what woman did Costals seek refuge? Aberration! He sought refuge in Solange. He turned towards the woman who had done him so much harm, as a dog that has been struck by its master seeks refuge by crawling at its master's feet.
He remembered a notice he had read mechanically in the corridor of the train: 'Admission to the compartments may be refused to persons whose infirmities are of such a nature as to inconvenience other passengers.'
Like a stone dropped into a well, he seemed to hear himself fall into the bottomless pit of eternity.
An absurd idea was germinating inside him, like weeds that spring up from impoverished soil. To support, help, nurse this man whose body
would soon be in the throes of decomposition, who better than Solange? With Solange, no more necropolis-flats, no more of this solitude which terrified him at such moments as this: she had freed him from the spell of solitude. Oh, there was not much nobility in this impulse of his: Costals was giving Solange the look of gratitude he had given to a sympathetic steward when he was sea-sick; but a sick man puts nobility second. Would Solange be prepared to marry him now, knowing his condition? In any case he would put the question in a vague, hypothetical form: 'Would you marry a leper if it was a man you loved?' And he was convinced that her answer would be yes.
On this pillow-case where his head was now resting, surely their heads had touched. Solange was there, and he spoke to her: 'I fled from you twice after giving you hope, and you forgave me. I broke my word, and you forgave me. I mistrusted you and your mother. Now I am making an act of faith in human nature. I am putting myself in your hands. Do what you like with me.' And he ended with a typical invalid's phrase: 'I want to live with my head in your lap.'
For a moment he had a passionate desire for this marriage to take place, and as soon as possible. He got up and rushed to the telephone. She must come tonight! If she delivered her 'yes' that evening, how much stronger he would feel when he heard the other 'yes', his doctor's: 'Yes, you have the disease'! But the telephone was dead. It must have been cut off during his absence, because, away in the Atlas, he pretended not to know where to pay his bill. So he would have to go out and send a telegram. Solitude, at other times so dear, now wore the face of desertion.... Well then, having dressed and gone out, he would take the opportunity of fleeing from the necropolis. His bags were still unpacked. He would go to a hotel, at least until the following day.
At the hotel he wondered what to do. And then his strength reasserted itself (perhaps it was also because the room was clean and tidy). He went back to his work, as a cat goes back to the mouse to tease it a bit more. He settled down at a table and took up his manuscript again at the point where he had left it in the Atlas the day he had discovered the spot. As in the avenue Henri-Martin, when he was working serenely between two pre-nuptial affairs, everything else was obliterated. A man will believe that, were he to see hand-cuffs on his wrists, he would faint. When he has them on, not only does he not faint, but he realizes that it is perfectly possible to enjoy a drink with hand-cuffs on your wrists. In the same way Costals - convinced that sooner or later this writing hand would be a shrivelled stump, that pus would flow from his nostrils, that his genitals would rot away and drop off - scribbled and scratched out and devoted three minutes of his short life to finding the 'exact word'. When the telephone rang (Solange saying whether or not she was going to come), he made an impatient gesture.
After all, there are women, too, who take up their knitting, just like that, after a great upset...
21
Solange had resigned herself without any reservations to the fact that Costals was not going to marry her. Unfulfilled desires become reabsorbed - as we shall see presently with the other heroine of this tale. Resigned: but she nevertheless retained for him, incoercibly, an affection tinged with love. 'Like iron to a magnet...I'm attached to him like iron to a magnet.'
The letters she received from Africa, so tender, so regular, convinced her that this affection was reciprocated. 'No, no! I don't want to lose you!' The cry that had burst from her went on echoing still. 'No matter what, as long as I can remain on the same terms with him as when he left.' The loss of their physical relations did not bother her. The loss of his kisses and attentions, or merely his presence, for good, was unthinkable (losing them for a time she could bear without too much pain). If, from Morocco, Costals had renewed the proposition whereby she would spend part of each week at the avenue Henri-Martin (but he was careful not to do so, only too pleased that she had failed to grasp that life-line), she would not have reacted with the indignation she had shown when he had suggested it three months before; she had not taken long to knuckle under. She melted at the thought of Genoa, and quite shamelessly had asked in one of her letters whether they might not return to Italy. He had excused himself on some pretext or other. Not long afterwards she had returned to the charge, but her ambitions had lowered: could they not, in the spring, have a little escapade of three or four days on the outskirts of Paris. He had replied evasively.... Of course, Solange was not unaware that she would lose him altogether when she married - but there was plenty of time to think of that. Girls are always convinced that 'it' will happen of its own accord.
Mme Dandillot had received Costals' 'latest' without too much distress. And with even less surprise, for she had never shared Solange's confidence in the solidity of their engagement. Perhaps, too, her widowhood enabled her to withstand the blow more easily: she was put out, but she did not let it get on her nerves, as it would have done if M. Dandillot had been a third party in the affair, and it is nerves, above all, that are women's undoing. Thus, ten years before, she had felt much stronger, much more mistress of herself, from the day she had started sleeping in her own room (her bed, in which she could shift about as she liked, her sheets, which were only used for her!): marriage is hell with a communal bedroom; with separate rooms it is no more than purgatory; without cohabitation at all (simply meeting twice a week), it might be paradise. Incapable of vindictiveness, except towards her husband, Mme Dandillot bore Costals no grudge. She was content to take refuge in platitudes, which are the haven of all women. A woman has too much need to feel protected to stray very far from platitudes. 'Disillusionment is all one can expect from men. Such is life. The best thing to do is to love ... a Dream. Illusion is best because it forms the basis of our poor human loves. . . . ' With such vacuous nonsense she lulled Solange, and lulled herself, as one lulls infants to sleep with stories about elves.
She was, as we know only too well, defenceless where her daughter was concerned. She sought in Solange the justification of her own existence: as often happens, mediocrity in her case expressed itself in unselfishness. She had advised Costals to 'travel', but she had not forbidden him all relations with Solange. Their mutual correspondence was not much to her liking, because it kept alive in the girl a feeling which it would have been wiser to suppress; at the same time, seeing the happiness it gave Solange, she refrained from asking Costals to disappear for good and all. These muddled women wallowed in ambiguity, a state to which they were suited by nature. When Solange alluded, as though to something that went without saying, to the relations she would resume with Costals on his return 'on a footing of simple friendship', Mme Dandillot did not turn a hair. She realized that one day she would have to insist that the situation be brought to an end, if she was to get her daughter married (for she did not, any more than Solange, imagine them continuing once Solange was married). But she put off this decision, vaguely hoping that one or other of them would tire of it all and break it off without her having to intervene.
Solange, therefore, on her way to Costals' hotel, had the impression that she was taking up her life again more or less at the point where she had left it three months earlier: one simply stepped over the corpse of the Hippogriff and carried on. She had even, though she still wore a little make-up, reverted to her pre-engagement hair style. The permanence, the immutability of all these women: Andrée Hacquebaut, Rhadidja, Solange.
Costals awaited her in the hotel lounge, in order to have an excuse for not kissing her, for fear of contagion. When she held up her face and he said: 'Not in public. Later on,' she was a little taken aback. But his words were at once so sweet and tender. How simply everything picked up again! And this time, if there was the melancholy of transitory things (a transitoriness that might perhaps last a long time), there was also the restfulness of no longer having to try, of no longer being tense and strained. And of no longer having to torment him, of seeing him happy, now that things were at last as he liked them and as he always wanted their relationship to be: a liaison, nothing more.
Costals had decided not to talk to
her seriously until after dinner. Dinner, in a restaurant, was full of ease and gaiety. He told her about his travels and his work. He rummaged in her hand-bag as of old, making amiably disobliging remarks about the absurd objects he found in it. He teased her, for he teased even the women he did not love. She told him that her boils and her decalcification were over. 'It was a foregone conclusion: I had only to tell you I'd never marry you for you to be restored to health. And I'm sure our urine is no longer pale!' (It was true that in the past three months all her 'little troubles' had vanished, although logically they should have increased after the final blow; but the body is no more logical than the soul. Unless patent medicines.... But that would be too simple, wouldn't it?) He refrained from swearing at her when, every time he turned his head, she took the opportunity of extracting her various appliances from her bag and touching up her face. He talked very loud, as very young people do, and since whatever he said was always 'impossible', she (sitting on her gloves - one of her idiosyncrasies) had to reprimand him: 'Not so loud!'
'Everything's so like it was a month ago,' [Pardonable inaccuracy (Author's note).] she exclaimed. 'The same table in the same restaurant.... I'd never have thought, when you went away, that one day we'd meet again here.'
A little rashly, for it is always a mistake to rub people's noses in their defeats, Costals said:
'But something in you has changed. I have a feeling that if I suggested that you should come and live with me from time to time, you'd accept. And yet you jibbed at the idea in January.'
'I've already told you that people would get to know, and the scandal would rebound on Mummy. But there might be a compromise solution. Without living in your flat, I could come and spend part of the day there a few days a week, breathe the same atmosphere as you, take part in your daily life. I'd be taken for your secretary, and besides, I could be in fact: I'd so much like to do something for you, for your work. And why shouldn't you say I was your cousin? Surely we could find a vague family link somewhere.'
The Lepers Page 14