As for me, if you're playing some abominable game with me, which at this moment I'm inclined to believe you are (I mean at the very moment of writing these words, for at other moments I tell myself you're merely a child juxtaposed with a man rich in solemn meditation and weighty experience, Faust and Eliakim inextricably merged, in other words a monster - though if you are such a monster you cannot help yourself and are forgiven) - if you're playing a game with me quite consciously, I can only tell you I'm not strong enough for you, and cry 'Pax'. And in any case I'm not playing any more. You were once an element of vitality, of inner fecundity, of active torment in my life. Now there's nothing. You dry everything up, like the wind. You have mummified the tenderness, so fresh, so deep, so absolute, which I felt for you. Like a sort of white frost, you have blighted feelings which, had they flowered, could have brought forth wonderful fruit. So much so that you have relieved me (in this at least you operated a cure) of the misery and the fear of growing old. I wanted to stay young during the time I loved and was loved, because to my mind a woman of forty in bed.... But now, what does it matter? There are moments now when it seems to me that I can no longer give you anything at all, moments when it seems to me that you have pulled out by the roots everything that blossomed inside me, and that you could fall ill, even die, without my feeling anything. Quite honestly, even that time in Paris I wasn't all that sorry to leave you. I went home drunk, as it were, with a sort of deliverance, and for a week I was almost happy by comparison. As soon as I got home, I removed your photograph from the wall of my room. But it was really only a gesture. I put it back later. Why not? It was doing me neither good nor harm. I can see myself writing you a solemn farewell, and next time I come to Paris, asking you to kiss me like a sister, so that at least I shall have had one kiss from you. It would be the only thing I should ever have asked of you. Because I would have you know once and for all that I have never begged anything from you, your company, your friendship, your intimacy, or your love. I offered, and you turned me down; quite a different matter. My pride permitted me to offer. It would not permit me to beg.
Wednesday
As I have said: all I feel towards you now is emptiness, exhaustion - the very thing you wanted. And yet, this emptiness is itself a feeling, is still superfluous in my life. As long as you are still in my life, as long as I have still not cut all the threads that bind me to you, I shall not be available for anyone else. I shall never dissociate - my body to another, my heart to you. And if another should give me or allow me love, or its semblance, I shall not keep my friendship for you.
(Not much loss ... For to have from a man what I have from you is to have lost him already. Nothing in the present, nothing in the future, nothing to remember.... And anyhow, a woman doesn't go on giving her friendship to a man who has refused it.) You are the only friend I could not keep in a normal life. Costals, the friend of the family, my children's favourite uncle, no, never! The reverse side of my feeling for you is nothingness, just as the reverse side of your sensual excesses is Jansenism. You will represent lost love for me, not friendship. You won't turn the torrent into an irrigation channel, nor the wild pony into a plough-horse. And so desperately, at the moment, do I need that normal life in which you can have no part, so desperately do I need to embrace reality rather than dreams, to hold in my arms a man or a child of my own, so grateful will I be to the nice ordinary chap who allows me to love him, that I shall give myself to him entirely, with my will at least. Even more than this, though I don't much care for children, in my desperation I have reached the point of wanting a child without a husband. Because, since the man refuses to be loved, and one cannot bear him if one does not love him, only the child can take one out of oneself. And so, whatever happened, I should no longer need you. Yes, I should infinitely prefer to have a beloved creature in my arms, even if he didn't love me at all, than to have his purest, most exclusive tenderness in his absence.
Friday
I can bear it no longer, I can bear it no longer. A human being has a certain capacity for suffering; beyond that, he dies or finds release no matter how. Suffering cannot indefinitely remain suffering; it changes into something else. For four months - ever since Paris - you have kept me living in a house on fire. Either I had to die of asphyxiation, or jump out of the window and break my back - which is what I have done.
I don't beg, I shall never beg anything at all from you. But I tell you again, solemnly, irrevocably: if I have to give up hope of being yours some day, life will no longer have any meaning for me. After all, Costals, after all, I must live! Is there not a single sentence in the hundreds of letters I've written to you that might touch your heart even now? I want to go on hoping, persuading myself that your attitude is the result of scruples. When you come to realize, in six months' or a year's time, that you're ruining my life, perhaps ... Perhaps between now and then you'll give me your love. Perhaps you'll have ceased to believe that I'm a 'nice person' whom it would be wrong to 'lead astray'. Perhaps curiosity - for my body and what it can offer you - will have got the better of you. If you had met me in a railway carriage, perhaps, for the fun of it... If I hadn't loved you, and had wounded you or angered you, perhaps you would have done violence to me, for the sheer pleasure of overcoming me and dominating me.... (It's true that if I didn't love you I wouldn't want to be yours.) I can still wait. A year or two more, perhaps ... My youth is not yet over. I don't look my age, I've often been told. If I hadn't admitted my age to you, you would think me younger. All you can see in me is a black-clad provincial, an earnest intellectual. Whereas, if I were at all happy, however illusorily, I would still be capable of so much playfulness, such a blossoming out.
With you, as far as I'm concerned, it must be everything or nothing. As I have told you, I no longer have any feeling for you, nothing live, nothing that moves. But if you yourself were to move, it would move. For what is latent beneath it is not friendship but love. It could burst forth again, as a flame springs up from what seemed to be nothing but dead wood and ashes. If the worst came to the worst I could kill this latent love, or at least stifle it, prevent it from coming to the surface; what I cannot do is dilute it. In order to go on feeling anything for you at all, I must have the certitude that one day you will be more than a friend. One evening we exchanged a lot of fine phrases, you and I - especially you - about friendship between men and women. Friendship between men and women is what music is to the instrument that produces it. Friendship between men and women is something totally disembodied and ethereal, something totally different from sensuality, but which can only exist through sensuality. Friendship is no longer possible between us without a pact, a solemn promise that one day it will be something else. One day? When? Whenever you like - in six months, in a year, if that is your whim. But what I must have is your firm promise, your promise on everything you hold most sacred. Then I can wait. Otherwise I can bear it no longer, not a moment longer. Unless I change the present, in which I am torn between hope and despair, into irrevocable past or potential future, unless I pull out the knife, I shall go mad.
A.
This letter remained unanswered.
The scene took place in a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne. (Each of these restaurants in the Bois evoked contradictory memories for Costals: hours of intoxication when he was there with a woman he had not yet enjoyed; hours of deadly boredom when he was there with a woman who was already his.) Birds could be heard flitting from branch to branch, their shadows streaking the trunks of the trees as they passed. Above a lawless world, they flew to kill time.
He was saying to Solange:
'I'm not in love with you, nor you with me, and that's as it should be. For God's sake, don't let's alter it! So, you've never had any feelings for a man?'
'Never.'
'Never been kissed?'
'Sometimes, by surprise. And I fled at once. But never twice, If you only saw me snubbing people!'
'But look at those handsome young men. Why wouldn't y
ou want them to love you?'
'I realize they have handsome faces. But what difference do you think that makes to me? What connection is there between my affection and a handsome face?'
'And yet I only fell for you because of your face!'
'Ah, but you're a man.'
'Never been deeply unhappy either?'
'No.'
'Never cried?'
'I don't know what it means.'
'Well, well!' he thought, 'here's the ideal cold fish.' At the same time he was surprised that she should allow him to stroke her hair and her legs and kiss her in public. 'It's all very inconsistent. ... But what is consistent, except the behaviour of characters in novels and plays?'
As they were sitting down to table, a small child who was walking past with some other diners caught sight of Solange and stopped, entranced by her face. 'I don't know why children always like me,' she remarked. Costals, seeing the child's expression, understood why: because they were dazzled by her beauty. And this took him back, full of wonderment, to those days of old when beauty had a power of its own.
When the waiter said: 'As Madame wishes...." Costals frowned: this 'Madame' raised the spectre of the nuptial Hippogriff. 'What's at the back of her mind? And her parents'? Mistress? Wife? Bah! Never mind all that. If the Hippogriff rears its head there'll be plenty of time to try conclusions once more with my old enemy.'
Costals had always been struck, not so much by the (perfectly legitimate) tendency of girls to see matrimony wherever they go, and to want men to marry them, as by their obstinate belief that he might consider marrying them, even if such a contingency was so improbable as to verge on the grotesque. It seemed to him that each one of them was accompanied by a Chimera - remember, a Chimera has claws - which they mounted at the slightest provocation, or no provocation at all, to gallop around in an element in which they were so much at home that they seemed to be capable of anything - that is to say in a cloud of unreality. He had christened this Chimera 'the Hippogriff', and the word had become a familiar one on his lips and on those of the young ladies who did him the honour of having designs on him. According to whether the idea of a possible marriage gained or lost ground in their imaginations (for in Costals' it was always in neutral) the Hippogriff was said to be thriving or losing weight. Sometimes Costals would 'feed the Hippogriff', sometimes the Hippogriff was 'insatiable', and one of the most chaste of these girls had even gone so far as to designate a certain part of her anatomy, with which she was obsessed, the 'hippogriffic part'. Costals spent his time fighting against the Hippogriff, endeavouring to kill the monster - in other words to convince his girl-friends that nothing in the world would persuade him to marry them. But, like all good mythical creatures, the Hippogriff, brought low, had no sooner breathed its last than it came to life again more fiery than ever. Nothing is more difficult than to persuade a young woman that one has no desire - none whatsoever - to dedicate one's life to her.
After dinner, when night had fallen, they strolled down the avenue des Acacias. Hardly a bench there had not been turned into a bed for a couple glued together; yet nobody threw a bucket of water over them, as over rutting mongrels. 'Perhaps they'll teach me some new tricks,' thought Costals. But no; at each gesture they made he scoffed: 'Why, I know that one, fat-head!' Dismal how limited the register of caresses is. These couples, as identical in their reactions as in their postures, exasperated him in the end, with their apparent conviction that they were the only people in the world, and the smiles they gave you to invite you to admire their happiness, which would end up with the vitriol bottle and the intravenous injection. Truly a gigantic miasma of vulgarity (literature, films, newspapers, sentimental songs ... ) bore down on this unhappy man-woman combination. How bitter it was to be unable to escape it! After the tenth pair, Costals felt paralysed. 'In ten minutes' time, I shall be one of these puppets. Come on, I must take the plunge. Four or five more of these ecstatic couples and I'll no longer have the heart.'
He indicated a secluded path, making sure it was not one he already had memories of (no super-impressions - he was already too inclined to mix everything up).
'Shall we go down there?'
'If you like.'
They made their way through the trees, and came to a sort of clearing, where two iron chairs awaited them side by side, by special arrangement of the goddess Prema.
All at once he had her on his shoulder, her head thrown back, her eyes closed, offering her half-open mouth, not returning his kisses but letting him devour the inside of her mouth and her lips, never opening her eyes, never uttering a word. How was it possible that this slender form had become so solid and heavy in his arms? She was all corseted in rubber, armoured like a young Menelaus. At one moment she gave a little moan, as though she were about to burst into tears; from the way she clenched her lips against his, he guessed that she would one day have an aptitude for biting, and he felt her pointed nails scrape on his jacket, like the claws of a cat he had been holding in his arms thinking it was happy when in fact it was impatient to be off and would scratch him at any minute and escape. She took his wrist and gripped it more and more tightly, evidently trying to stop his embraces but failing to do so; and then a shudder ran through her. And all the time the paradise of her face lay open, motionless, and he was everywhere upon it with his mouth. She did not embrace him, did not even make the slightest show of doing so; she did not move her lips, never once returned a kiss. When he knelt down, she bowed her head completely, hiding her face. That she was his for the taking was patently obvious, but, as we have seen, he liked to proceed by degrees; besides, at that moment, sentiment was stronger in him than sensuality. And all the time he heard her rapid breathing.
From time to time he raised his head to recover his breath. A deep, protective silence seemed to have shaped itself to the very contours of their embrace. He caught sight of a stretch of water on their left that he had not noticed before; perhaps it had approached noiselessly so as not to take them by surprise. It glistened, motionless, beneath the thirsty trees. Fifty yards away from them there was a lighted car, with people who must have been picnicking on the grass, and children playing.
Never would he forget her face when she opened her eyes for the first time and drew herself up - her eyes, normally rather screwed up, but now dilated, immense, staring at him without blinking. He scarcely recognized her; and she was seeing him for the first time; they were discovering each other. He said to her, as though she were really unrecognizable: 'Is it still you?' She said 'Yes', in a voice that was scarcely audible.
His watch pointed to half past midnight. 'We must go.' She got up without a word. Her hair had come undone, making her look like a little girl. She tidied it - in what a silence! It was he who handed her her hairpins, on the tips of his fingers. Then she stood in front of him, as she had stood the other day outside her house, smaller than he, her forehead bowed a little shyly, but her eyes still looking up at him without blinking, literally rooted in his. An unforgettable look, heart-rending in its directness. An unforgettable disharmony - or rather harmony - between her bowed, seemingly submissive head and this look of candour, almost provocative in its pride. She sought no higher than the face that was before her; her world stopped there.
He took her in his arms again, this time standing up, she with her head on his shoulder, he so intent on her mouth that he no longer knew who she was save by the taste of her mouth. He moved her from his left to his right shoulder with the same gesture - exactly the same - as that by which the matador transfers the bull from his left to his right side in the close toreo; with the same pose - exactly the same - as the matador adopts at that moment, feet firmly planted, slightly apart, back slightly arched; with the same grave expression - exactly the same - as the matador wears, and in his soul the same absolute mastery over himself and the other: intoxication and self-possession compounded in him as earth and water are compounded in clay. His domination over her was absolute, and he knew it. If he had said to he
r: 'Let's stay here all night', she would have stayed. If he had said 'Undress,' she would have stripped herself naked. She was subjugated. But if anything was equal to his domination over her it was his desire not to take advantage of it, or even to hurt her by pressing her too closely to him - for he could feel the play of his muscles, all that strength which, even if he were divested of intelligence, talent, money, would go on living within him for years to come, and tomorrow would make her happy. And his only precise sensations were the hardness of Solange's teeth, which he touched with his lips, and the scraping of her nails down his jacket, like one of those gestures people make in their death-throes.
The Girls Page 16