‘I was just thinking about you. There’s a new bebop band at the Kentucky. What do you say to going along? It’s ages since we’ve been dancing.’
‘I haven’t a bean,’ I said pitifully.
‘My mother gave me ten thousand francs the other day. Let’s have a few more drinks and then let’s go.’
‘But it’s only eight o’clock,’ I objected. ‘It doesn’t open till ten.’
‘We’ll have several drinks,’ said Bertrand cheerfully.
I was delighted. I really loved dancing the fast bebop movements with Bertrand. The jukebox was playing a jazz melody that made me move my legs to the rhythm. When Bertrand paid the bill, I realized that he must have had quite a lot to drink. He was quite merry. Anyway, he was my best friend, he was a brother to me, I loved him dearly.
By the time ten o’clock came we had taken in five or six bars. In the end we were completely drunk. We were ridiculously merry but not sentimental with it. When we got to the Kentucky the band had begun to play, there was almost nobody there and we had the dance floor more or less to ourselves. Contrary to what I had expected, we danced very well together; we were very relaxed. I loved that music more than anything. I loved the rush it gave me, and the pleasure my whole body had in keeping up with it. We only sat down when we wanted to have a drink.
‘Music,’ I said in a confidential tone to Bertrand, ‘jazz music, equates to freedom from care, speeded-up.’
He stopped in his tracks.
‘That’s exactly what it is! Very, very interesting. An excellent formulation. Well done, Dominique!’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘The whisky’s vile at the Kentucky. But the music’s good. Music equals freedom from care. But care about what?’
‘I don’t know. Listen, there’s the trumpet. It isn’t just carefree, it’s philosophically necessary. It had to go to the very end of that note, didn’t you sense that? It was necessary. It’s like love, you know, physical love. There’s a moment when you’ve got to … when it just can’t be other than what it is.’
‘Exactly. Very, very interesting. Shall we dance?’
We spent the night drinking and swapping high-flown pronouncements. By the end there was a dizzying whirl of faces and feet and Bertrand’s arm sending me spinning far away from him and the music hurling me back towards him and the incredible heat and the incredible suppleness of our bodies.
‘They’re closing up,’ said Bertrand. ‘It’s four a.m.’
‘It’s closed at my place too,’ I remarked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
It was true that it didn’t matter. We were going to go back to his place, we were going to lie down on his bed and it would be perfectly normal for me to feel Bertrand’s weight on me that night, just as all through the winter, and for us to be happy together.
Eight
In the morning I lay up close to him while he slept, his hip against mine. It must have been early. I couldn’t get back to sleep and I said to myself that I was not really there at all, any more than he was, sunk in his dreams. It was as if my true self were somewhere very far away, far beyond the houses in the suburbs, far beyond trees or fields, further back than childhood, motionless at the end of a path. It was as if that girl, bending over that sleeping form, were only a pale reflection of the calm, inexorable self whom I was in any case already stepping aside from, in order to live. It was as if I had chosen to have a life rather than an immutable self and had left that statue at the end of a path, in the half-light, with all the lives that it might have had, but had refused, perched on its shoulders like so many birds.
I stretched, then got up and got dressed. Bertrand was waking up, asking me questions, yawning, running his hands over his cheeks and his chin, complaining about needing to shave. I arranged to see him that evening and went back to my room planning to work, but in vain. It was atrociously hot and getting on for noon. I was due to have lunch with Luc and Françoise. There was no point in starting work for the sake of an hour. I went out again to buy a packet of cigarettes, came back and smoked one, realizing suddenly, as I was lighting it, that I had performed every one of my actions that morning in a state of complete oblivion. For hours there had been nothing driving me but a vague instinct telling me to stick to my routine. There had been nothing, not for a moment. And where would I have found anything? I didn’t set store by the marvellous smile of a fellow human being on the bus, or by the throbbing life of the streets, and I did not love Bertrand. I needed someone or something. I said this to myself almost aloud as I lit my cigarette: ‘Someone or something’, and it sounded melodramatic, but also funny. So, just like Catherine, I had sentimental highs when I loved love and the words relating to love: ‘tender’, ‘cruel’, ‘sweet’, ‘trusting’, ‘excessive’; yet I loved no one. Luc, perhaps, when he was there. But since the previous day I hadn’t dared think about him. I did not like the taste of renunciation that filled my throat when I remembered him.
I was waiting for Luc and Françoise when a strange dizziness took hold of me and sent me rushing to the washbasin. When it was over I raised my head and looked at myself in the mirror. I had had plenty of time to do the calculations. ‘So,’ I said aloud, ‘it’s happened.’ The nightmare that I knew so well for having so often lived through it mistakenly was beginning again. But this time … perhaps it was the whisky of the previous evening and there was really nothing to get worked up about. I was already having a fierce inner debate, while looking at my reflection in the mirror with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. I had very probably been caught out. I would tell Françoise. Françoise was the only person who could help me in the circumstances.
But I didn’t tell Françoise. I didn’t dare. And then at lunch Luc insisted on pouring us drinks, so I forgot about it for a bit and tried to be rational. But how was I to know whether Bertrand, who was so jealous of Luc, had not found this way of keeping me? I reckoned I had all the symptoms …
The day following the lunch ushered in a week of hot weather, it was summer come early, the like of which I would not have thought possible. I walked about the streets, for my room was so hot it was unbearable. I questioned Catherine vaguely about possible solutions to my dilemma, without daring to confess anything to her. I no longer wanted to see Luc or Françoise; they were strong, free individuals. I was as sick as a dog and had bouts of nervous giggling. I had no plans and no strength. By the end of the week I was sure that I was expecting Bertrand’s child and I felt more composed. I was going to have to take some action …
But on the day before the exam I knew that I had been mistaken and that in fact it had been nothing but a bad dream, and I sat the written paper laughing with relief. Quite simply I had thought of nothing else for ten days and it was a miracle for me to rediscover other people. Everything was becoming possible again, things were looking up. Françoise happened to visit me in my room, was horrified at how swelteringly hot it was and suggested that I should go round to theirs to prepare for the oral exam. So I worked on the white rug in their flat, alone, with the shutters half closed. Françoise would come home at around five, would show me what she had bought, would try without much conviction to test me on the syllabus and it would end up with our joking together. Luc would arrive and would join in our laughter. We would go and have dinner on the terrace of a restaurant and they would drop me back at my place. On only one day of that week did Luc get home before Françoise, coming into the room where I was working and kneeling down beside me on the rug. He took me in his arms and kissed me without a word, over my notebooks. It seemed to me as if I were rediscovering his mouth, as if it were the only mouth I had ever known and as if I had thought of nothing else for the past fortnight. Then he told me that he would write to me during the holidays and that, if I wanted, we could meet up somewhere for a week. He stroked the back of my neck and sought my mouth. I wanted to stay leaning on his shoulder like that until night fell, perhaps complaining softly that we did not love
each other. The academic year was over.
PART TWO
One
It was a long, grey house. A meadow ran down to the River Yonne, ensconced among its reeds and its creamy currents, the sluggish, green Yonne, overhung by poplar trees and with swallows flying overhead. There was one tree that I especially liked to lie down under. I would go there and stretch out with my feet against its trunk and my thoughts lost in its branches, which I could see high above, swaying in the wind. The earth smelt of warm grass and gave me a feeling of lingering pleasure, along with a sense of my own powerlessness. I knew that landscape in rain and shine. I had known it long before I knew the streets of Paris and the River Seine and before I knew men: it never changed.
With my exams miraculously over and done with, I was able just to read and would then make my way slowly back up to the house for meals. My mother had lost a son fifteen years earlier in somewhat tragic circumstances and ever since had suffered from a depression which had soon become part and parcel of the house itself. Within those walls sadness took on a flavour of pious devotion. My father walked about on tiptoe and carried shawls around for my mother.
Bertrand had been writing to me. He had sent a curious letter, unclear and full of allusions to the last night we had spent together, the evening we had gone to the Kentucky, a night during which, he said, he had been lacking in respect towards me. It hadn’t seemed to me that he had been more lacking in respect than usual and since, as far as that area of our lives was concerned, we had a very straightforward and satisfactory relationship, I had tried at length to work out what he was alluding to, but in vain. It had finally dawned on me that he was trying to introduce into our relationship an element that would ensure a deep sense of collusion between us, a strong eroticism. He was looking for something to bind us together, he was clutching at straws, and for once what he chose to clutch at was something rather base. At first I resented him for complicating what had been the happiest and indeed the purest thing between us, but I did not know that in some cases people would rather look for any explanation, even the worst, than accept the obvious and the banal. And for him, the obvious and the banal was that I did not love him any more. Besides, I knew that it was me he was missing, and no longer us, since there hadn’t been an ‘us’ for a month, and this awareness pained me even more.
As for Luc, there was no word from him during that month, just a very nice card from Françoise to which he had added his signature. I kept repeating to myself with a certain inane pride that I did not love him, the proof being that I was not suffering from his absence. I did not realize that, in order for this to be at all convincing, I should have felt chastened by the fact of my not loving him and not, as I did feel, triumphant. In any case, all these niceties irritated me. I normally had myself so well in hand.
And then I loved that house, although I should have been so bored in it. I was bored, of course, but it was a pleasant kind of boredom, not the boredom that I was ashamed of experiencing when I was with people in Paris. I was very kind and considerate to everyone. I took pleasure in being so. Wandering from one piece of furniture to another, from one field to another, from one day to the next and there being nothing else to do, what a relief that was! Acquiring a kind of gentle tan on my face and body as a result of staying put, waiting, and yet not waiting, for the holidays to be over. Reading. The holidays were one enormous, dull, yellow blur.
At last the letter from Luc arrived. In it he said that he would be in Avignon on 22 September. He would await me there, or, if not me, then a letter from me. I decided on the spot to be there myself and the month just past looked like having been blissfully simple. But it was so like Luc, the calm tone, the ridiculous, unexpected choice of Avignon, the apparent lack of interest. I set about weaving a web of lies and wrote to Catherine asking her to send me a fake invitation to something. When she did so, she sent me another letter along with it, saying how surprised she was, since Bertrand was on the Côte d’Azur with all the gang, so who could I be going to meet up with? She was distressed by my lack of trust in her. She saw nothing to justify it. I sent her a note of thanks, merely pointing out that, if she wanted to make Bertrand suffer, all she had to do was to tell him about my letter … which she did anyway, out of friendship for him, of course.
On 21 September, carrying only light luggage, I set off for Avignon, which fortunately is on the way to the Côte d’Azur. My parents took me to the station. I left them with tears in my eyes, not knowing why. For the first time it seemed to me that I was leaving behind my childhood and the security of the family. I already hated Avignon.
As a consequence of Luc’s silence and the distant tone of his letter, I had conjured up quite a hard, detached image of him, and I arrived in Avignon feeling quite guarded, a mental outlook that did not sit well with a supposedly amorous rendezvous. I was not going away with Luc because he loved me nor because I loved him. I was going away with him because we spoke the same language and because we found each other attractive. When I thought about it, these reasons seemed rather slight and the trip itself a terrifying venture.
But once again Luc surprised me. He was standing on the station platform looking anxious. Then, when he saw me, his look changed to one of delight. When I got off the train he gave me a hug and kissed me lightly.
‘You’re looking great. I’m glad you’ve come.’
‘You too,’ I said, referring to his appearance. Indeed, he was looking tanned and slim and much more handsome than he had looked in Paris.
‘There’s no reason for us to stay in Avignon, you know. We’re going to go and take a look at the sea, because, after all, that’s what we’re here for. After that we’ll decide what we’re doing.’
His car was parked in front of the station. He threw my case into the back and we set off. I felt completely dazed and slightly disappointed, which was not how it should have been. I didn’t remember him being either so seductive or so cheerful.
Our route was lovely. It was lined with plane trees. Luc smoked and we bowled along in the sun with the hood down. I kept saying to myself: ‘There, I’ve made it, this is it.’ Yet it didn’t matter to me, it didn’t matter at all. I might just as well have been sitting under my poplar tree with a book. In the end the fact that I was so detached from what was taking place made me cheer up. I turned towards him and asked him for a cigarette. He smiled:
‘Are you feeling better?’
I began to laugh.
‘Yes, I’m feeling better. I’m just wondering what I’m doing here with you, that’s all.’
‘You’re not doing anything. You’re going on a drive, you’re smoking, you’re wondering whether or not you’re going to be bored. Don’t you want me to kiss you?’
He stopped the car, put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. It was a very good way of acknowledging each other’s presence. I laughed a bit as we kissed and we set off again. He held my hand. He understood me. For two months I had been living with near-strangers who were frozen in a state of mourning in which I could not participate, and it seemed to me that, very slowly, life was beginning again.
The sea was astonishing; for a moment I was sorry that Françoise was not there so that I could tell her that it really was blue, with red rocks and yellow sand, and that it was very well done. I had been rather afraid that Luc might point it out to me with an air of triumph while watching for my reactions, which would have forced me to reply with much rhetoric and to make faces expressing my admiration, but he merely indicated it as we arrived in Saint-Raphaël.
‘There’s the sea.’
And we drove on slowly into the evening, with the sea alongside us growing pale until it faded into grey. In Cannes Luc stopped the car on la Croisette19 in front of a huge hotel whose lobby horrified me. I knew that, to feel any enjoyment, I would have to forget about the decor and the bellboys; the latter I would have to turn into familiar figures who didn’t look my way or pose a threat. Luc was having a powwow with a haughty-looking man behi
nd a desk. I would rather have been anywhere else but there. Sensing this, he put his hand on my shoulder as we crossed the lobby and ushered me along. Our room was immense, almost all white, with two French windows looking out over the sea. There was a hubbub of porters and luggage and of windows and wardrobes being thrown open. There I was in the midst of it all, my arms dangling by my sides, indignant at my own inability to react.
‘So here we are,’ said Luc.
He cast a satisfied glance round the room and went to lean over the balcony.
‘Come and look.’
I rested my elbows on the railing beside him but at a respectful distance. I had no wish at all to look out nor to be on familiar terms with this man whom I didn’t really know. He glanced at me.
‘Come now, you’ve gone all shy again. Go and have a bath and come back and have a drink with me. I can see that there’s nothing will cheer you up but luxury and alcohol.’
He was right. Once I had changed I stood leaning on the balcony next to him, with a glass in my hand, and complimented him a thousand times on how nice the bathroom was, and the sea. He told me that I looked most radiant. I replied that he did too and we gazed at the palm trees and the crowds below in a satisfied way. Then he went off to change, leaving me with a second whisky, and I walked about barefoot on the thick carpet humming to myself.
Dinner went off well. We talked about Françoise and Bertrand with a lot of good sense and affection. I hoped I wouldn’t meet Bertrand but Luc said that we were bound to bump into someone or other who would be only too happy to spill the beans, to both him and Françoise, and that it would be time enough to worry about that in the autumn. I was touched by the fact that he was running that risk on my account. I yawned as I told him, because I was asleep on my feet. I also told him that I liked his way of approaching things.
Bonjour Tristesse & a Certain Smile Page 15