There was a silence between the girl and the man and one would have thought them distracted, attentive only to the softness of the air. Then once again the man started to speak. He said:
“We really agree, you know. You see, when I talked of this woman and of people who managed not to be entirely happy I did not mean that it was a reason for not following their example, for not trying in one’s own turn and in one’s own turn failing. Nor that one should deny longings such as you have for a gas stove, which would be to reject in advance all that might follow from it, such as a refrigerator or even happiness. I don’t doubt the truth of your hopes for a moment. On the contrary I think they are exactly what they should be. I really do.”
“Must you go? Is that why you said all that?”
“No, I have no need to go. I just didn’t want you to misunderstand me, that’s all.”
“The way you talked like that, all of a sudden drawing conclusions from everything we had said, made me think that perhaps you had to go.”
“No, I have nothing to go for. I just wanted to say that I understood you and like everything about you. And I was going to add that if there was one thing I didn’t quite understand, and I hate being a bore on this subject, it is still the fact that you take on so much extra work and that you always agree to do whatever they ask. Don’t blame me for coming back to it, but I can’t agree with you on this point even if I do understand your reasons. I am afraid. . . . What I am really afraid of is that you might feel that if you accept all the worst things that come your way you will one day have earned the right to be finished with them forever. . . .”
“And if that was the case?”
“Ah, no. I cannot accept that. I don’t believe that anything or anyone exists whose function it is to reward people for their personal merits, and certainly not people who are obscure or unknown. We are abandoned.”
“But if I told you it was not for that reason but so that I should never lose my horror for my work, so that I should go on feeling all the disgust I felt for it as much as ever.”
“I am sorry but even then I could not agree. I think you have already begun to live your life and even at the risk of repeating this endlessly to you and becoming a bore I really must say that I think things have already started for you, that time passes for you as much as for anyone else, and that even now you can waste it; as you do when you take on work which anyone else in your place would refuse.”
“I think you must be very nice to be able to put yourself into other people’s places and think for them with so much understanding. I could never do that.”
“You have other things to do; if I can think about other people it is only because I have the time for it, and as you said yourself, it is not the best kind of time.”
“Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps the fact that I have decided to change everything is a sign that things have begun for me. And the fact that I cry from time to time is probably also a sign and I expect I should no longer hide this from myself.”
“Everyone cries, and not because of that, but simply because they are alive.”
“But one day I checked up on my position and I discovered that it was quite usual for maids to be expected to do most of the things I have to do. That was two years ago. For instance there’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that sometimes we have to look after very old women, as old as eighty-two, weighing two hundred pounds and no longer quite right in their minds, making messes in their clothes at any hour of the day or night and whom nobody wants to bother about.”
“Did you really say two hundred pounds?”
“Yes, I am looking after one now; and what’s more, last time she was weighed she had gained. And yet I would have you appreciate the fact that I haven’t killed her, not even that time two years ago after I had found out what was expected of me. She was fat enough then and I was eighteen. I still haven’t killed her and I never will, although it becomes easier and easier as she gets older and frailer. She is left alone in the bathroom to wash and the bathroom is at the far end of the house. All I would have to do would be to hold her head under water for three minutes and it would all be over. She is so old that even her children wouldn’t mind her death, nor would she herself since she hardly knows she is there any more. But I look after her very well and always for the reasons I explained, because if I killed her it would mean that I could imagine improving my present situation, making it bearable, and that would be contrary to my plan. No, no one can rescue me except a man. I hope you don’t mind my telling you all this.”
“Ah, I no longer know what to say to you.”
“Let’s not talk about it any more.”
“Yes, but still! You said it would be easy to get rid of that old woman and no one, not even she herself, would mind. I am still not giving you advice but it seems to me that in many cases other people could do something of that nature to make their lives a little easier and still be able to hope for their future as much as before?”
“It’s no good talking to me like that. I would rather my horror became worse. It is my only chance of getting out.”
“After all, we were only talking. I just wondered whether it might not be almost a duty to prevent someone from hoping so much.”
“There seems no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that I know someone like me who did kill.”
“I don’t believe it. Perhaps she thought she had killed someone but she couldn’t really have done it.”
“It was a dog. She was sixteen. You may say it is not at all the same thing as killing a person, but she did it and says it is very much the same.”
“Perhaps she didn’t give it enough to eat. That’s not the same as killing.”
“No, it was not like that. They both had exactly the same food. It was a very valuable dog and so they had the same food: of course it was not the same as the things the people in the house ate and she stole the dog’s food once. But that wasn’t enough.”
“She was young and longed for meat as most children do.”
“She poisoned the dog. She stayed awake a long time mixing poison with its food. She told me she didn’t even think about the sleep she was losing. The dog took two days to die. Of course it is the same as killing a person. She knows. She saw it die.”
“I think it would have been more unnatural if she had not done it.”
“But why such hatred for a dog? In spite of everything he was the only friend she had. One thinks one isn’t nasty and yet one can do something like that.”
“It is situations like that which should not be allowed. From the moment they arise the people involved cannot do otherwise than as they do. It is inevitable, quite inevitable.”
“They knew it was she who killed the dog. She got the sack. They could do nothing else to her since it is not a crime to kill a dog. She said that she would almost have preferred them to punish her, she felt so guilty. Our work, you know, leads us to have the most terrible thoughts.”
“Leave it.”
“I work all day and I would even like to work harder but at something else: something in the open air which brings results you can see, which can be counted like other things, like money. I would rather break stones on the road or work steel in a foundry.”
“But then do it. Break stones on the road. Leave your present work.”
“No, I can’t. Alone, as I explained to you, alone I could not do it. I have tried, without success. Alone, without any affection, I think I should just die of hunger. I wouldn’t have the strength to force myself to go on.”
“There are women roadmenders. I’ve seen them.”
“I know. I think about them every day. But I should have started in that way. It’s too late now. A job like mine makes you so disgusted with yourself that you have even less meaning outside it than in it. You don’t even know that you exist enough for your own death to matter to you. No, from now on my only solution is a man for whom I shall exist; only then will I get out.”
“But do you kn
ow what that is called . . .?”
“No. All I know is that I must persist in this slavery for some time longer before I can enjoy things again, things as simple as eating.”
“Forgive me.”
“It doesn’t matter. I must stay where I am for as long as I have to. Please don’t think that I lack good will because it is not that. It is just that it is not worthwhile trying to make me hope less—as you put it—because if I tried to hope less than I do, I know that I would no longer hope at all. I am waiting. And while I wait I am careful not to kill anything, neither a person nor a dog, because those are serious things and could turn me into a nasty person for the rest of my life. But let’s talk a little more about you: you who travel so much and are always alone.”
“Well, yes, I travel and I am alone.”
“Perhaps one day I will travel too.”
“You can only see one thing at a time and the world is big, and you can only see it for yourself with your own two eyes. It is little enough and yet most people travel.”
“All the same, however little you can see, I expect it is a good way of passing the time.”
“The best, I think, or at least it passes for the best. Being in a train absorbs time as much as sleeping. And a ship even more: you just look at the furrows following the ship and time passes by itself.”
“And yet sometimes time takes so long to pass that you feel almost as if it was something which had been dragged out of your own insides.”
“Why not take a little trip for eight days or so? For a holiday. You need only want to. Couldn’t you do that? While still waiting of course.”
“It’s true that waiting seems very long. I joined a political party, not because I thought it would help my personal problems but I thought it might make the time pass more quickly. But even so it is very long.”
“But that is it exactly! Since you are already doing something outside your job, and you go to this Dance Hall, since in fact you are doing everything you can to be able to leave your present job one day, then surely you could also make a short journey while waiting for your life to take the turning you want it to?”
“I did not mean anything more than I said: that sometimes things seem very long.”
“All you need to do is change your mood just a fraction and then you could take a little voyage for eight days or so.”
“On Saturday when I come back from dancing I cry sometimes as I told you. How does one make a man desire one? Love cannot be forced. Perhaps it is the mood that you were talking about which makes me so undesirable: a feeling of rancor, and how could that please anyone?”
“I meant nothing more about your mood than that it prevented you from taking a holiday. I wouldn’t advise you to become like me, a person who finds hope superfluous. But you must see that from the moment you decided it was best to let that old woman live out her days, and that you must do everything they ask of you, so as one day to be free to do something quite different, then it seems to me that as a kind of compensation you could take a short holiday and go away. Why, even I would do it.”
“I understand, but tell me what would I do with a holiday? I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. I would simply be there looking at new things without them giving me any pleasure.”
“You must learn, even if it is difficult. From now on as a provision against the future you must learn that. Looking at new things is something one learns.”
“Yes, but tell me again: how could I ever manage to learn how to enjoy myself in the present when I am worn out with waiting for the future? I wouldn’t have the patience to look at anything new.”
“It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. It wasn’t very important.”
“And yet if you only knew, I would so much like to be able to look at new things.”
“Tell me, when a man asks you to dance with him, do you immediately think he might marry you?”
“Yes. You see I’m too practical. All my troubles come from that. But how could I be anything else? It seems to me that I could never love anyone before I had some freedom and that can only come to me through a man.”
“And another question: if a man doesn’t ask you to dance do you still think he might marry you?”
“I think less then because I am at the Dance. When I dance I get carried away by the movement and the excitement and at those moments I think a man might most easily forget who I am, and even if he did find out he would mind it less under those circumstances than at any other time. I dance well. In fact I dance very well and when I am dancing I feel quite different from my usual self. Ah, sometimes I don’t know what to do any more.”
“But do you think about it while you are at the Dance Hall?”
“No. There I think of nothing. I think before or afterwards. There it is as if I were asleep.”
“Everything happens, believe me. We think that nothing will ever happen but it does. There is not a man among all the millions who exist, not a single one, who hasn’t known the things you are waiting for.”
“I am afraid you don’t really understand what it is I am waiting for.”
“I am talking, you see, not only of the things you know you want but also of the things you want without knowing. Of something less immediate, something of which you are still unaware.”
“Yes, I follow what you are saying. And it is true that there are things I don’t know of now. But all the same I would so like to know how those things happen.”
“They happen like anything else.”
“Just as I know I am waiting?”
“Exactly. It is difficult to talk to you of things you know so little. I think that those things either come about suddenly, all at once, or else so slowly that one scarcely notices them. And when they have happened and are there they don’t seem at all surprising: it feels as if they had always been there. One day you will wake up and there it will all be. And it will be the same for the gas stove: you will wake up one day and not even be able to explain how it came to be there.”
“But what about you? You who are always traveling and who seem, if I have understood you, to attach so little importance to events.”
“But the same things can happen anywhere without any warning. In places like trains. And the only difference between the things which happen to me and those you want for yourself are that in my case they are without a future: there is nothing one can do with them.”
“I don’t know what to say but I think it must be very sad to live as you do, always with events which can have no future. I think that from time to time you must cry too.”
“But no. One gets used to it like everything else. And good gracious me everyone has cried at least once, every single one of all the millions of people on earth. That proves nothing in itself. Perhaps I should also explain that as far as I am concerned the tiniest thing can make me happy. I like waking up in the morning for instance and quite often I find myself singing while I shave.”
“Oh, but surely singing proves nothing to someone who talks as you do?”
“But you must understand: I like being alive and I should have thought that was the one point on which no one could make a mistake.”
“I don’t know what it feels like. Perhaps that is why I understand you so badly.”
“Whatever the cause of your unhappiness—and I really can find no other word for it—you must, you really must, show a little good will.”
“But I am worn out with waiting and yet I go on waiting. It is more than I can do to wash that old woman and yet I go on washing her. I do all the things which are really too much for me. What more do you ask?”
“By good will I mean that you could, perhaps, wash her as you would wash anything else—a saucepan for example.”
“No, I tried that but it was no good. She smiles, she smells bad. She is human.”
“Alas. What can one do?”
“Sometimes I don’t know myself. I was sixteen when this life began for me. At the beginning I didn’t pay too much att
ention and now look where I am. I am twenty and nothing has happened to me, nothing, and that old woman never manages to die and is still there. And nobody has asked me to be his wife. Sometimes I even think I must be dreaming, that somehow I must be inventing so many difficulties.”
“Why not work for another family? One where there are no old people? Find a place with some advantages—although naturally I know they could only be relative.”
“That wouldn’t help. Whatever the family was like it would always treat me as something apart. In my kind of work changing jobs means nothing, since the only real change would be for such jobs to be abolished. If I did manage to find a family such as you describe I wouldn’t really be able to put up with them any better than I do with my present one. And then just through changing and changing, without changing anything I would end by believing in, I hardly know what, some sort of fate and that would be worse than anything. No. I must stay where I am right up to the moment when I can leave forever. Sometimes I believe in it so much. I can hardly tell you how much. As much as I know I am sitting here.”
“Well, then, while slaying where you are, you could still take that little journey. I believe you could.”
“Yes, perhaps. Perhaps I could make that journey.”
“Of course you could.”
“But from all you said that city you talked about must be very far away. Immensely far.”
“I reached it by little stages, taking fifteen days in all, stopping off here and there for a day at a time. But someone who could afford to do so could reach it by one night in the train.”
“You can be there in a night?”
“Yes, and already it is full summer there. Of course I couldn’t be certain that someone else would find it as beautiful as I did. I suppose it is quite possible that someone else might not like it at all. I imagine I didn’t see it with the same eyes as a person who found nothing there but the place itself.”
“But if one knew in advance that another person had been happy there I think one would look at it with different eyes. We’re only talking. . . .”
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