Philippe, who was known as Brunet because of his brown skin (he called his father 'La Dine', a nickname for which no explanation, sensible or otherwise, was forthcoming), was still, at the age of nearly fourteen, physically very much a child: undeveloped, and his voice still unbroken. In character also he was very much a child, but at the same time terribly quickwitted and alert: a little backward physically, very advanced mentally. He was not an adolescent, he was a precocious child: not at all the same thing. One day in Paris at the age of ten, finding himself without enough money to go home by underground, he had gone and sung in people's courtyards until he had made enough for his fare. When he was eleven, Costals, who himself had not been born innocent (innocents do not notice such things), had discovered a hole made by Philippe in the door of Mlle du Peyron's bathroom.
He was not a rebellious or ill-natured or even wearisome child - wearisome as children are in their high spirits. Not one of those children whose mien one studies anxiously when they wake up in the morning to see if they are in a good or a bad mood and whether the day will be possible or unbearable. He was a little highly-seasoned, but he was straight. He was not pure, but he was healthy. He zigzagged violently, but without ever leaving the road. Disinterested; warm-hearted; intelligent, in a down-to-earth way (all Costals' efforts to inject him with a more high-flown conception of the universe - a philosophy of the universe - had failed); and with the restfulness one finds in boys who are not interested in sport. Although at first sight he appeared to be a typical French boy of 1927 - in other words a horrible little guttersnipe - he was not a guttersnipe, for he was never mean or nasty: he never did anything despicable.
The surest way of winning the confidence and friendship of a young boy is not to be his father. Brunet, however, confided in his father far more than most boys. He also lied to him less than is usual. Costals did not always understand his son, and he was sometimes annoyed by this, or rather irritated with himself on account of it. Whereas with women he could tell almost without fail what was going to be produced out of the hat, what was going to be their reaction in any given circumstance, with Philippe he was not so sure. Perhaps it was because women's reactions have something mass-produced, or - shall we say? – traditional ['In France, women are too much alike. They have the same way of being pretty, of entering a room, of writing, of loving, of quarrelling. No matter how often you change from one to another, it always seems to be the same one.' - Prince de Ligne] about them. Perhaps it was simply because what happened inside their heads did not seem worth bothering about. He considered them far less mysterious than men, especially in childhood. There is no comparison, from this point of view, between boys and girls. Who was it (Vauvenargues or Chamfort?) who said, cruelly, that one must choose between loving women and understanding them? Costals loved them, and had never tried to understand them, had never even wondered whether there was anything in them to understand.
'La Dine!'
'Shut up! Let me read Malebranche.'
'You make me sick with your branch! I say, I had a lovely dream last night.'
'What did you dream?'
'I dreamt I was eating noodles with tomato sauce.'
'Is that what you interrupted me for? What a pain in the neck the child is!'
There was more horse-play. Suddenly, at the height of the struggle, Brunet, with his face a few inches away from his father's, stopped and studied it attentively.
'I'm looking at you. I'd forgotten your face. Yesterday at the station I wondered if I'd recognize you when you got off the puff-puff. Luckily I remembered your overcoat. It's a pretty awful one! A fifteen-hundred-franc overcoat! Really, you have no taste. I shall have to come with you when you buy your togs.'
'He too forgets faces ... ' Costals mused. He himself was liable to forget the faces of his mistresses, his best friends, to forget everything, in fact. When one of his own traits came back at him like this from his son, he felt a bit uneasy. 'Nonsense! he's a good kid, and I love him - so we should get by all right.' (Which was anticipating a bit.)
Meanwhile Brunet was still staring at his father. 'I'm fond of you, you know. You're a good sort,' he said at last, and kissed him. Costals kissed him back, on his eyelids, rather from a sort of sense of the proprieties, of the necessary reciprocities, than from any keen impulse.
'Is that the way you kiss women?' the boy asked. 'Go on, show me how you do it.'
'Shh.... Now, now.'
'Had you ever kissed a woman by the time you were fourteen?'
'Of course.'
'I kissed Francine Finoune. She said to me: "Give me a kiss and I'll take you to the cinema." So I kissed her.'
'Where?'
'There.' (He pointed to a spot on his cheek.)
'And did you like it?'
Philippe eyed his father as though, by the mere suggestion that this kiss might have given pleasure, he had insulted him.
'Oh, come off it.'
'The day you find you like kissing Francine Finoune, you must let me know, because I shall have one or two things to tell you.'
'Catch me telling you that! Anyway, we've quarrelled. She asked me for ten francs. So I gave her a clout.'
'She takes you to the cinema, and yet you refuse her ten francs. Is that fair?'
'Oh, that's a detail.'
Costals searched his pocket for a cigarette ... and found a roll of peppermints. Hardly a week ever passed without Brunet giving his father some such 'surprise', a little present slipped into his pocket - sweets, a packet of cigarettes, or some such thing. Costals gave the child a light. This was the signal for another standing joke - Brunet blowing, rapidly one after the other, several puffs of smoke into Costals' hair. The latter then had to don his son's beret as quickly as possible. When he took it off, his head would be smoking. Vast amusement, each time as fresh as ever. The smouldering skull of the genius!
'Poor La Dine, I'm wasting your time.'
'It's never a waste of time being with you.'
Costals had stretched himself out on the bed again; having abandoned La Recherche de la Vérité, he was reading Cri-Cri over his son's shoulder. Philippe burst out laughing every other minute. He seemed to be not quite himself unless he had a pretext for laughing, and everything was a pretext. He would throw his head right back, and in the middle of his brown face, at the summit of his whole being, his dazzling white teeth, small and regular as the incisors of a cat, shone like snow on a mountain top. Scarcely for a moment, during the hour they had been together, had he ceased to laugh - radiating sweetness and good humour. One could see at once that he was a child who was rid of his parents. All this was well attuned to Costals' own constant good humour - the natural condition of a man of sense.
A wire-haired fox terrier appeared in the doorway, gave a muffled 'woof of approval, and disappeared after this benison. The terrier, who answered to the name Hairynose, was the only person in the house who maintained a high moral tone. He often watched with a look of severity as Costals and his son played the fool; it was obvious that he was judging them. The examination would end with a deep sigh. Then this paragon would put his nose to his behind and go back to sleep.
Several times Costals tried to get up, but Brunet held out his arms towards him, stretching them as a cat stretches out its fore-paws, and Costals, who knew this gesture well and found it touching, gave in.
After a time, Brunet crumpled up his Cri-Cri and threw it aside violently, as though suddenly horrified at having enjoyed it; then he bent down and laid his head on his father's chest. With him there was always, beneath the playfulness, a desire for physical contact; he was always finding reasons for rubbing against his father, either in their rough-and-tumbles, or by suddenly clasping him in his arms and trying to make him dance the fox-trot, or jumping on his back, or taking his arm in the street. (And then there was his girlish way of giving a start and turning away his head whenever anything painful or cruel was mentioned, such as an operation, or even a thermometer.) Costals, finding himself clo
se to him like this, and touched by his need for affection, felt that the least he could do was to kiss him again. He thought to himself: 'He's charming, he's cuddly, he smells good, the softness of his skin is not of this world. And yet I haven't the same sort of tenderness for him that I have for a woman. Why? It's strange.' The fact was that Costals was capable of feeling strong tenderness only for people he desired. He thought the bridge of Philippe's nose, just below the eyes, was too wide (like a lion cub, perhaps), and this single small feature that he did not like prevented him from responding with complete spontaneity to his son's caresses. And he watched himself, afraid of appearing cold - for he was very fond of his son - and making sure that, in the matter of caresses, he would always have something to spare. He also wondered, as he wondered about women: 'Why does he enjoy embracing me?' And he could not understand.
At this point Old Mother Hubbard (their nickname for the old lady) poked her head round the half-open door like a little tousled field mouse and beamed at the charming spectacle they presented.
to Pierre Costals
Paris
Andrée Hacquebaut
Saint-Léonard
15 March 1927
Not a day has passed since my return without the tears springing to my eyes under the impact of a painful memory. But it only lasts a few seconds. The rest of the time I live, I laugh, I talk, I write. Apparently unscathed. What brings my wound home to me is the fact that I can no longer sing. Before, I used to sing all the time, even in my worst moments. Now it not only won't 'come' to me, but if I make an effort it won't 'come out'. Oh Costals, what makes men suffer? There is only one suffering: loneliness of heart. I have made a list of my blessings: freedom, health, leisure, my daily bread (dry bread, but still), comparative youth, and so on. And yet, telling myself that other human beings might passionately envy all this does not make me any happier. Even if the list could be extended ad infinitum, I would only have to put down the absence of love on the debit side for the whole of the credit column to be reduced to zero. The truth is that I no longer enjoy anything. Only on Saturday did I find a little peace, when I went to Confession in order not to break completely with the practice of religion. With God and yourself together forbidding me to love you, I ought to be convinced!
I had a dream the other night. Its origin is easy to guess. We were walking through Paris in the rain. And I kept forgetting things - once it was a fur - and I would climb back up interminable staircases while you waited for me below at the corner of the street. I would rejoin you, we would set off again, once again I would find I had forgotten something, I would go back, climb the stairs again, search again.... And, as usual in dreams, the search involved unbelievable trouble, I had to rummage through a mass of things, there was no end to it, and I was obsessed all the time with the fear that you would have got tired of waiting. But I always found you on the pavement waiting for me, your face contorted with impatience, like an angry little cat. This dream consoled me a little, as a sign that you were not lost to me.
And yet, if I were to judge by your silence....
Oh, no reproach intended, no sulking (I know what sulking costs me). I cannot conceive of there ever being the slightest shadow of reproach between us. Whatever you do, whatever happens, nothing will ever weaken my admiration for you, my devotion and gratitude. But my affection is beginning to succumb, from anaemia, because it feels wasted. It cannot go on living off itself for ever. That would be a superhuman task, like having to go on filling the Danaids' bottomless barrel, until one collapses. It might be possible for a girl of twenty. At thirty (minus thirty-nine days! ) one no longer has the energy. I can sense that you are deeply involved elsewhere. All my enthusiasm is dead. Permanently wrapped up in you as I am, how could I possibly endure without torment those long deserts in our friendship?
What have I had from you? Such meagre oases! Not an hour of intimacy. Two years ago, you had me to your house several times. Since then, always outside - at concerts, in restaurants, in the street. It's as though you were afraid of something. There remained your letters, rare as they were.
(I would have far preferred you to do nothing for me in the practical sphere but to write to me more often. My correspondence with you is an eternal monologue.) But if even the letters disappear! Remove both physical presence and letters from a friendship, and what remains? I know there are men who go for weeks, even months, without seeing or writing to one another, and yet remain firm and devoted friends. But I am not a man. Each empty post leaves me crushed for a whole hour, and upsets my entire day. A word from you, on the other hand, is like a drop of oil on a fire: it kindles a passionate fervour in me ...
If I am to keep a small corner in your heart, I must first of all write you shorter letters, mustn't I?
Your Andrée.
I have decided to laugh as little as possible from now on, because of my wrinkles.
This letter remained unanswered.
to Pierre Costals
Paris
Andrée Hacquebaut
Saint-Léonard
31 March 1927
What does this silence mean - this barrier of silence that I have to break through to reach you? I love you as one loves a child who has a heart disease and is doomed to die at twenty. I know I shall lose what little I have of you, that is to say the right to correspond with you, etc. - your presence in my life, the slight interest you have in me. I also know that I shall make no attempt to cling on to you. All I ask is not to be stabbed in the back: it's the only expression I can think of to describe these appalling betrayals through silence, which leave me floundering in ignorance and incomprehension, groping in the void like a blind man with his stick, or a mystic seeking God in the darkness of spiritual desolation. Even the mystics have need of the sacraments, which are a substitute for the real presence. I love everything about you: even your raillery and your harshness give me happiness, and anyway they fortify me against you; whereas your silence paralyses and destroys me. You can deal me blow after blow and I shall be able to withstand them. But do not take a cowardly advantage of the weapons of silence and absence.
If you only knew what it is not to have any contact with you - either in person or through letters - that is not broken up by these weeks of total separation! The lack of continuity between us! All these things that come to nothing, that absence makes abortive, when it was essential to strike while the iron was hot. Everything evaporates through absence, like the heat of a room through an open door. How do you expect anything to develop, or even survive, between us in such a disjointed situation? No sooner have I left you than I find the words I ought to have said to you (such a stream of things I ought to tell you to explain this or that, to rectify the idea you have of me ...), but I cannot say them because we see each other so rarely. So I am reduced to my letters, which irritate you and which have no effect on you, and it is only in my room, alone, that I speak out to you and convince you.
It is not your behaviour I'm complaining of, you understand. It isn't even your indifference to my distress. It isn't you at all, it's the uncertainty — that abyss of absolute uncertainty within whose depths anything can lie hidden without one's knowing: accident, illness, changes of heart, ill-founded grievances, misunderstandings....
Write to me anything you like, but write to me. Be it only an empty envelope - like those the Maréchal de Luxembourg asked Rousseau to send him - so that I know you are still alive.
I believe in you in spite of everything, as one must, our preacher used to say, believe in God in spite of everything.
Andrée.
This letter remained unanswered.
to Pierre Costals
Paris
Andrée Hacquebaut
Saint-Léonard
23 April 1927 9 p.m.
I am thirty years old today, Costals.
It is Sunday. Sunday, a bad day for me even at the best of times. The weather has been divine, too divine. Alas, I'm beginning to know them, these desolate springtimes,
these summers that go by one after the other like empty baskets: not one of them, not one, has fulfilled its promise. How terrible it is, this sensation of sterility in a season when everything aspires towards renewal. Must one always see these intoxicating things through a horrible veil of deprivation? What is the point of being pretty? (For how much longer?)
This afternoon there was the usual hubbub of the boule- players. Seven times, from my room, I heard the hotel gramophone play the famous tune from Louise: Depuis le jour où je me suis donnée ... From time to time there were cheers and rounds of applause, for there was some kind of reunion party going on. Before dinner there was a thunderstorm. Now everything at the hotel is lit up al giorno, the tables on the terrace glistening, rain-soaked. The soft air brings me the sound of dance music, and the sweet orange smell from a languishing acacia branch. I can see two young men in dinner jackets coming out of the hotel, their shirt-fronts shining, too, and their patent leather shoes in the mud. Their carefree happiness pains me.
I am thirty. That's that. The age of waiting is over, the age of realization has begun: I have reached the turning-point. What I need now is a past rather than a future, memories rather than hopes. This is the age at which film stars in America commit suicide, because they have nothing more to expect from life. I still have everything.
In my mind's eye I see myself at the bedside of a dead child or a dead husband. Of course it must be terrible to have had and then to have no longer; but not to have had at all is worse. If only I were younger, or older! Younger, I wouldn't yet have had enough of this purely cerebral life and this purely platonic, intellectual, cold friendship: when I first met you, I didn't care about love, I didn't need it, I was sufficient unto myself, my body didn't interest me. Older, I should no longer be in a position to 'make a life' for myself, I should no longer have anything to lose by resigning myself to friendship pure and simple, I could even be quite happy with it. Thirty, for me, is either too early or too late.
The Girls Page 10