He adds in a still lower voice:
“I no longer know anything of what I knew before I had this child. And, you see, since I had her, I have no ideas about anything any more, I know nothing but my ignorance.”
He laughs, at least tries, as he has come to laugh now, falsely.
“I am really astounded, believe me, at such a possibility in life. The love for this child that outlives my age, my old age!”
The woman straightens up. Her hand lets go of the armchair. Her tone becomes sharper, but barely.
“I wanted to talk to someone about Valérie Andesmas,” she says. “I assure you that you can put up with this inconvenience.”
“I don’t know,” Mr. Andesmas complains, “I don’t know if I can.”
“It’s better. No one has talked to you about her and now she’s grown up, it’s better.”
The shade had now spread over the whole plateau. It was already part of the hill. The shade of the beech tree and of the house had toppled over completely into the chasm.
The valley, the village, the sea, the fields are still in the light.
Flocks of birds, in ever greater numbers, fly out of the hillside and wheel wildly in the sunlight of the chasm.
The shade overtakes this house more quickly than those in the village. Nobody had thought of it yet, neither Mr. Andesmas nor Valérie. But the woman notices it.
“Valérie will lose one hour of light here, compared to the village,” she says.
“Mr. Arc hadn’t told me that, you see.”
“Did he know it? Even when we thought of buying it for ourselves, he didn’t mention it,” she adds, “ten years ago.”
“What hurts is to see the sun so close, there.”
“One has to be here the way we are to notice it. Otherwise who would think of it, beforehand?”
She takes several steps on the path, comes back, then sits down, as if reluctantly this time, a few yards from the old man.
“Valérie makes me suffer a great deal,” she says.
She spoke in the same tone of voice about the disadvantages of the house, so that one might think the whole world in her eyes suffers from a contagious disorder, but only from that.
The sweetness of a recent past which contained a jumble of Valérie Andesmas crossing the village square, and what followed, and her suffering too, are equal aspects of this disorder.
Again she moves away toward the path with this walk which is the same as her little girl’s a while before, light, a little off balance, only her legs moving, effortlessly, beneath her straight body. And once more, even in the very depths of his old age, Mr. Andesmas is still able to perceive, dimmed, dying, but recognizable, the reasons one might have had for loving her. She is a woman who cannot help welcoming into her whole body her moods, whether fleeting or lasting. These moods might be languid, gentle, or cruel; the ways of her body would immediately follow in their image.
When she comes back from the path, her walk is sleepy and careful, extraordinarily childlike—deceptively so—and one might imagine that she had been tempted, during the moment she was alone on the path, to escape from the calm disaster she was living. Just as her child might have been tempted.
It was when she had not yet come back that Mr. Andesmas understood he would have liked to see her again and again, until evening, until night, and that he began to dread Michel Arc’s arrival, which would prevent him from seeing her.
He smiles at her.
But she walks by him without looking at him. As she passes on the windy plateau. She pulls the wind behind her. She speaks about it.
“It’s windy. It must be even later than I thought. We have been chatting.”
“Ten past six,” Mr. Andesmas says.
She sits back down in the place she had just left. Still far from him.
Has she noticed this? Or has she noticed it before?
“Valérie’s car is no longer in the square,” she announces.
“Ah! You see,” Mr. Andesmas exclaims.
Once again, the song rose up, ravaged by the distance. The phonograph was turned down earlier than the time before.
“Then I think they won’t be long in coming,” she says. “Both of them are very decent and charming.”
“Ah, aren’t they though,” Mr. Andesmas murmured.
She gets up again, again goes toward the path, comes back again, still possessed by this occupation, the passionate listening to the forest noises coming from the path. She comes back, stops, her eyes half closed.
“You can’t hear the car coming up yet,” she says.
She listens again.
“But the road is steep, longer than you’d think.”
She glances absently at Mr. Andesmas’ motionless bulk, buried in his armchair.
“You are the only one I can talk to about her, do you understand that?”
She goes away, comes back, goes away again.
Does she realize that Mr. Andesmas never takes his eyes off her? Probably not, but even if she knew, this look would not distract her from listening to the forest, to the valley, to the whole countryside, from its most remote horizons up to this plateau. The total impossibility with which Mr. Andesmas is confronted of finding something to do or say to lessen, if only for a second, the cruelty of this frenzy of listening, this very impossibility chains him to her.
He listens like her, and for her, to any noise that might signal an approach to the plateau. He listens to everything, the stirring of the closest branches, their rustlings against one another, their jostlings, sometimes, when the wind increases, the muffled bending of the trunks of the huge trees, the gasps of silence paralyzing the whole forest, and the sudden and successive waves of its rustling by the wind, the cries of dogs and chickens far away, the laughing and talking all mixed into one conversation by the distance, and the singing, and the singing.
When the lilac
. . . my love
When our hope . . .
Sharing one outlook, they both listen. They also listen to the strangled sweetness of this song.
The wind mussed her hair each time she came back from the path. It blew more often and a little stronger. Tirelessly, each time she returned toward Mr. Andesmas, she would push her hair back with her hand and hold it like this a few seconds, and her bared face became the face of past summers when, swimming next to Michel Arc, she must have been told that she was beautiful, like that, for him, Michel Arc.
Once, the wind is strong enough to blow all her hair onto her face and, tired of having to make this mechanical gesture once more, of pushing it back, she does not do it. She no longer has a face, or eyes. Instead of moving forward on the plateau, she stands there, on the path, waiting for the end of the gust that mussed her hair.
The gust ends and once again she makes that sensible gesture. Her face reappears.
“So much blondness, so much, so much useless blondness, I thought, so much idiotic blondness, what could it be good for? Except for a man to drown in it? I didn’t immediately realize who would to the point of madness love to drown in that blondness. It took me a year. A year. A strange year.”
The shade starts to overtake the fields, it approaches the village.
More numerous, exuberant shouts rise from the valley.
The path remains empty.
“People are in the streets,” she says.
“You were telling me, Mrs. Arc,” Mr. Andesmas says hastily, “you were telling me that the curtain of the grocery had been pushed aside.”
“And the car isn’t there any more,” she went on. “And they aren’t dancing any more. And it’s already too cool to go to the beach.”
She comes up to the old man, slowly. And slowly, she speaks.
“The curtain was pushed aside. I have time, I have plenty of time to tell you. Yes. The curtain was pushed aside. And she crossed the whole square again, unconcerned. I already told you. I could tell you again. She appeared. The bead curtain covered her, she freed herself from it. And that
day I heard the almost deafening noise, which I was to hear thousands of times, of the bead curtain falling back after her. I could also tell you how, like a swimmer, she pushed it aside, her eyes closed for fear of hurting herself with the beads, and that it was after she had gone through the curtain, in the sunlit square that she opened her eyes, with a slightly embarrassed smile.”
“Oh, I see, I see,” Mr. Andesmas exclaimed.
The woman went on even more slowly.
“And, taking her time, she crossed the square.”
The song began again.
She listened to it without speaking, attentively.
“So,” she said, “that’s the most popular song this summer.”
She starts moving toward the path again, comes back again, and then, giving up this maneuver, she sits down like a lump right where she is. She leaves her hair to the mercy of the wind, her idle hands stroke the earth.
“Beauty, we all know it,” she says, “starting with ourselves. In love, we are told, how beautiful you are. Even when mistaken, who doesn’t know what it is to be beautiful and the peace you feel to hear it said, whether as a lie or not? But Valérie didn’t, Valérie, when I first knew her, as unbelievable as this may seem, was still very far from guessing how sweet it is to hear this said, how longed for. But without knowing it, she was yearning for it, she was wondering who, some day, would come to her, speaking these very words, for her.”
“She crossed the square,” Mr. Andesmas says, “you had gotten to that.”
“She was already grown up, Mr. Andesmas, your child was already grown up, I assure you.”
There was a lull in the village.
Her mouth half open, dazed by her own intensity, she stops talking—her eyes are following Valérie’s black car on the road along the sea. Mr. Andesmas also sees this car.
She is the one to start talking again.
“It took me a year,” she goes on, “to unravel the enormous problem posed by the wonderful blondness of your child. One year simply to accept its existence, to admit it as a fact: Valérie’s existence, and to overcome my fright at the idea that she was still being offered without any reservations, to whom? To whom?”
Valérie’s car is no longer visible.
The road along the beach leads deep into the pine forest beyond it at the foot of the hill, but to the east, where it is still sunny.
The car has gone beyond the turn-off for Valérie’s house.
Again she starts pulling her hair back into place after each gust of wind. Mr. Andesmas watches her gesture as much as he listens to her words. This gesture remains the same as the one Michel Arc’s wife must have made always.
“She knew it, she already knew it, in her heart, what you were saying. . . .” Mr. Andesmas moans.
“One doesn’t know it by oneself. No, she did not know it.”
Mr. Andesmas raised himself from his armchair and whispered:
“But she knows it, she knows it.”
The woman mistakenly thought this was a question. She answered.
“You shouldn’t ask this horrible question,” she said. “Tomorrow, or tonight, perhaps she will know it?”
Severely she examined the shapeless bulk of Mr. Andesmas.
“Did you see her car go along the beach, Mr. Andesmas?”
“I saw it.”
“Then we are in the same boat, both of us, at this moment which is perhaps the very one when she will find out.”
Very quickly she is somewhere else, crucified on that sunny square Valérie was crossing.
“The first walk across the square,” she said, “that morning, of Valérie’s, so blond, as you know, even you, her father, that walk followed by strange eyes, she didn’t pay any attention to it, certainly, and yet she says she remembers it. She claims she raised her head and saw me.”
“But you couldn’t not have known that Valérie was my child,” Mr. Andesmas wailed.
“After she had left the grocery, but long after she had gone, I understood that Valérie was a child. But only afterward. After having thought about it.”
“She walked out with? With?”
“Yes!” she cried.
A long, deep, rumbling laugh shook Mr. Andesmas’ body. And she, she burst into a loud laugh that stopped halfway in its flight.
“With candy!” she went on, “She was looking at no one, at no one, in spite of what she now says, just at the bag of candy! She stopped a second. She opened the bag and took out a piece, unable to wait any longer.”
She looks at the pine forest in which Valérie’s car has been swallowed up.
“That is how, afterward, I remembered her as a child. How old was she exactly?”
Mr. Andesmas said it again.
“Over sixteen. Almost seventeen. Two months short. Valérie was born in autumn. In September.”
Mr. Andesmas is overwhelmed with words, he trembles from this unaccustomed flow of words.
“She was still a very little girl because of your love. But you didn’t know that very soon, and no matter what you did to prevent it, she would be old enough to leave you.”
She stops talking. And in this silence, brought on by her, the graceful memory of an old suffering slides into Mr. Andesmas’ heart.
“But this other little girl, yours?” he moans.
She does not take her eyes from the pine forest which hides Valérie’s car.
“Let her be,” she says.
“Where is she? Where could she be?” Mr. Andesmas cries out.
“She’s there,” she says slowly. “There. She thinks she’s lost something, she’s looking in the square. I can see her. She’s there.”
Her eyes leave the forest, wander over the plain, move closer to the village.
“I recognize her by her blue dress.”
She points toward a spot Mr. Andesmas can no longer see.
“There,” she says. “She’s there.”
“I can’t see her,” Mr. Andesmas complains.
The graceful memory of his old suffering hardly stirs within him, hardly more than the memory of the inconsolable regret for a love glimpsed and, barely seen, stifled, and with thousands of others, forgotten.
Its grief is borne only by the very old flesh of this destroyed body. That is all. This time his head is spared the trouble of having to suffer.
“She won’t find anything,” Mr. Andesmas says. “Nothing.”
Can she really see her child, who in the sun and the dust of the square is looking for her memory?
“While she is looking,” she says, “she’s not unhappy. It’s when she finds that she’s upset, when she finds what she is looking for, when she remembers clearly having forgotten.”
Slowly she turns her head, seized again by the spectacle of the pine forest and the sea. The forest keeps its secret. The sea is empty.
Mr. Andesmas loses sight of her as suddenly as he had noticed before.
As though she is chilly, she suddenly clasps her shoulders.
“Little by little day after day, I started thinking about Valérie Andesmas, who would soon be old enough to leave you. You understand?”
With slow steps she moves closer to the chasm, not waiting for an answer from Mr. Andesmas. He is afraid she will let go of her shoulders, he thinks that once she has let go of her shoulders, nothing will keep her from going a little farther toward the chasm. But she lets go after turning back to him again. Mr. Andesmas’ fear at seeing her move toward the chasm is so violent that he could have believed that his age, right then, inadvertently, was receding from him.
“Are you asleep, Mr. Andesmas? You’re not answering me any more?”
Mr. Andesmas points to the sea. Mr. Andesmas has forgotten the child forever.
“It is not as late as you think,” he says. “Look at the sea. The sun is still high. Look at the sea.”
She does not look, shrugs her shoulders.
“Since they’ll come anyway and since the later it gets the closer the time comes when they’ll b
e here, why worry?”
Laughter exploded somewhere on the hill.
The woman freezes, like a statue, facing Mr. Andesmas. The laughing has stopped.
“It was Valérie’s laugh and Michel Arc’s,” she cries. “They were laughing together. Listen!”
She adds, laughing herself:
“At what, do you know, can you imagine?”
Mr. Andesmas raises his stiff, neatly cared-for hands in a gesture of ignorance. She comes toward him walking like a weasel, she seems very gay all of a sudden. Does he wish she would leave now? He imagines the plateau deserted once she has left and so when she moves close to him, he listens with all his strength.
“You know what? It’s by giving her candy that I got to meet her. A sweet tooth, hasn’t she, Valérie?”
“Yes, a sweet tooth!” Mr. Andesmas admits.
He smiles, incurable, at this memory.
“I’m the one,” she says, “who taught her to escape during your siestas.”
Mr. Andesmas leads her on.
“Was it necessary?”
“Yes. She could still hardly bear leaving you alone at your age. The only time it was possible was siesta time, your long siestas.”
“This house?”
“Michel Arc showed it to her during a walk.”
“The terrace?”
“It would be an idea, he told her. It would be nice to have a house, so high up on the hill, with a terrace where you could see good weather coming, and storms, where you could hear every sound, even those from the other side of the bay, in the morning, in the evening, at night too.”
“They didn’t laugh just now as you claimed,” Mr. Andesmas says. “We didn’t hear the car drive up.”
“If they come by way of the pond, it’s such a long walk that they would have left the car much farther down, and that’s why we wouldn’t have heard it. It doesn’t matter actually, we’ll know soon enough.”
Again laughter exploded from another part of the hill. She listens.
“Some children perhaps?” she asks. “It’s over by the pond.”
“Yes,” Mr. Andesmas declares.
Her good mood dies away. She comes back close to the armchair, very close.
“What do you think?” she asks very softly. “Is it worth our waiting longer? A while ago I took advantage of your confidence. I told you I was sure they would come, but it isn’t true, I’m not sure of anything.”
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