Sylva

by Jean Vercors

  We abandoned ourselves to it all with frenzy: to ecstasy and unconsciousness, to the most oblivious indolence and to sudden fits of erotic rapture that would seize us both together. However, I can only recall confused images of all those hallucinating days. And perhaps even they are imaginary. They have no link with one another. Even when it comes to the rare moments of solitude and clearheadedness which I wrested from Dorothy’s grasp in order to assure myself that I was still in control of my will, I am unable to situate them in time and hardly even in space.

  I can see myself at my hotel once, in the process of having a bath. But when? Another time, on Battersea Bridge, offering my face to the sea-born breeze as if trying to sober up. Still another time in the street market behind Paddington, but I am with Dorothy, and we are floating like sleepwalkers; we must have left Galveston Lane with our minds still cloudy with drugs.

  Apart from that I have only foggy visions, half of which were probably mere dreams. Still, I can see the wallpaper representing parrots amid bamboo reeds-a paper which, though faded, suddenly takes on life and color, and I even hear the rustling of the birds’ wings. For a long time now there is neither day nor night in this room, for Dorothy has drawn the curtains and blinds, as if to enclose us in a warmer, more feverish intimacy. I remember the sour perfume that rises from the body next to me more distinctly than its vague outline under the dim light of the lamp shade. What I recall, however, with illusory precision is Dorothy clad in rags, sitting on the edge of a boat rather like a gondola and filled to the brim with strawberries, peaches, red currants; and also her falling backward and laughing amid the pungent fragrance of the crushed fruit.

  But what is this insinuating sweetness that forces my teeth open, fills my mouth with a voluptuous paste which oddly enough I relish, while burning lips crush mine? A naked Dorothy, her hair in the wind, knee-deep in water and surrounded by foam, beckoning to me to join her-I can see her as if I were there; but to whom belongs this graceful, pearly body, shining with sweat and writhing on the divan to clamor for new pleasures? And whence comes, on the ceiling, that sort of lambent dragon or hippograph, at once motionless and dancing? It suddenly slithers silently down the corner of the room, pokes forward a hazy and hilarious head that almost touches me and melts away.

  Where are we? No more parrots on the walls but green and blue stripes which quiver like the strings of a harp, a very vague memory of a staircase painfully mounted step by step, and here, on a heavy Smyrna carpet the same pearly body lies crucified on a jumble of fabrics; but flung across it there ripples another body, the color of hot sands, and I see a long heavy, black mane spread over two pale twitching legs. But I feel nothing, nothing but a divine lassitude and a universal benevolence which fills me with comprehension and a happy, infinitely quiet pity. Later I too rumple the same black mane that now spreads over my flanks while I submit to bold caresses, and Dorothy’s disheveled blondness covers both our faces and I hear gasping, meaningless words in my ear.

  These are just rare visions among a hundred, but they are all so fluid and evanescent that they escape me as soon as I think I grasp them. Ah, and there are revolting ones too. Can one feel voluptuous pleasure in vomiting? Or is it a memory that has become strangely corrupted? Each spasm of my heaving stomach amplifies in a sensuous swoon and I lie in wait for the next with lascivious expectancy. I also remember a bite-an exchange of bites, I believe. I am digging my teeth into flesh and feel my own shoulder being mauled (I still have the mark). But there is no pain, or rather the pain vibrates deep inside me with the gentle suavity of a cello. Above all these scattered, inconsistent visions, however, there is an all-pervading darkness. A vast, restless obscurity, sometimes faintly melodious, more often pulsating with an endless, droning plaint to which all my flesh responds harmoniously to the very depths of my innermost night…

  To be quite frank, when it still happens, at rare intervals, that I suddenly feel coursing through me a fleeting wave of vague nostalgia, it is always for that darkness and for nothing else. All the rest is only scum, the memory of which sickens me a little, the momentary froth formed by the eddies of that nocturnal, marvelously black and boundless ocean, in which I float for a long while in a weirdly conscious unconscious, an ineffable indifference. I know, unfortunately, that this is still so for Dorothy, that for her all things outside this ocean in which she seeks to lose herself are just foamy impurities, bubbles no sooner formed than burst. And I also know that this attraction is most certainly the worst, because at the bottom of that sweet, yawning darkness lurks the octopus of nothingness.

  But since I myself am here at my desk, writing this story, I need hardly say that I was able to wrest myself in time from this mortal attraction. The tragedy is that I alone could do so, for I could not bring Dorothy back with me. I abandoned her, as a mountaineer on the verge of being carried away cuts the rope that ties him to his partner, thus saving his life but losing his honor. But now I am convinced that I did the right thing.

  For Dorothy was not an inert body at the end of a rope, too dazed to help in her own rescue. On the contrary, she tugged with all her strength, in the wild hope of making me lose my grip, of pulling me down into the chasm with her. Did jealousy, Sylva’s existence, play some part in this ruthless passion, this frenzied and perverse attempt? I am not able to answer with certainty. But I no longer doubt that Dorothy loved me after her fashion, with honesty at first when she ran away, and then, when contrary to expectations I seemed to give myself up to her, with that fierce blaze in which she tried to consume me.

  She almost succeeded. First, there was the shock of the drug: the intoxication with an oceanic unconscious, in which a riot of the senses alone subsists, stuns like a flash of lightning, and it takes all one’s will power to resist its dazzle. And then, this vertiginous absence meant total oblivion, and oblivion of Sylva first of all. I never thought nor dreamed of her a single time during that long illumination. And finally, the vacuum thus created cried out to be filled, and I imagined myself gorged with one love only-for Dorothy; for in my rapt state I confused the passing infatuation in which she engulfed me in her wake with a genuine passion.

  Fortunately, this period during which we abandoned ourselves to our self-destructive fury-a period which, in my muddled memory, seems without beginning or end- did not actually last very long. A few days at most. We woke up from it for some quite earthly but forceful reasons; namely, that one cannot live without food or drink. As if in a half-sleep I recall Dorothy opening tins of sardines or pineapple-but such stopgaps cannot suffice in the long run. So if only to buy food or to cook it, we necessarily had to resume, now and then, a less overwrought, less radiantly befuddled life, and emerge into normal consciousness. For Dorothy, undermined by long intoxication, these periods of even very brief abstinence were a painful ordeal through which she hurried blindly until she could take the plunge into the drug and nepenthe. As for me who was still intact, those awakenings meant a coldly recording clear-sightedness: the stained divan, the dirty carpet, a foul-smelling disorder, not only in the room but about Dorothy herself, slouching wearily about in trodden-down slippers, unwashed, uncombed, heavy-lidded, and with flaccid, swollen lips.

  At the same time I gradually became aware of the key fact of her life. I had wondered, at rare moments, what she was living on, since she no longer worked (and it seemed improbable to me that Dr. Sullivan could or would encourage her situation with financial support). The answer could be found upstairs, in the room with the blue and green striped wallpaper. I realized the part the dark-haired woman must have been playing in Dorothy’s life for a long time. She was the one who had found her the flat below her own, and she too had since been supplying her, perhaps with money, but certainly with drugs.

  The first time I saw this woman clearly, I mean without being dazed with drugs myself, I was struck by her rather hideous beauty. She could not have been much older than Dorothy and I had firsthand knowledge of the slender youthfulness of her body; but her face
was a field of ruins. I have never again seen such a face and I trembled at the idea that it prefigured what Dorothy would look like in a few years’ time. Not that the wrinkles that lined it were particularly deep, but they were flabby and shifting. As if a colony of worms had settled under the mortified skin. She was called Viola. I presume, from her Southern accent, that she came from Malta, Cyprus or Egypt. Perhaps she was a Copt. She worked in a film studio and came home around teatime, when Dorothy would make tea between two doses of the drug.

  When we met again in a more or less normal state, she gave me a look of connivance above her full cup, a salacious wink which would have been enough to make me understand, had I not guessed it already, that I was a mere extra, an instrument of pleasure, that she tolerated my presence near Dorothy for this reason only, just as she must have tolerated a good many other lovers before me. The overheavy teapot having almost slipped out of Dorothy’s hands, I caught it by its long, banana-shaped spout.

  “Fie, fie,” said Viola, with a ribald smirk, “what manners!” And stroking my cheek, she added: “But if that’s what you fancy, we’ll get you suited-the more, the merrier.” Whereupon Dorothy gave a nervous burst of laughter and tousled my hair.

  Had I been in a completely normal state I believe that so much vulgarity and Dorothy’s laughter would have promptly driven me out of that room forever. But the powder box was, as usual, lying about on the table like a simple salt cellar, and indeed everybody helped himself almost absent-mindedly, as if to a pinch of salt, thus sustaining a blissful torpor in anticipation of more violent exploits. So that I too, I am afraid, gave a cowardly snicker in answer to Viola’s obscenities, and the one I have reported is just a specimen. All the same, her filth left an indelibly nauseous imprint on my mind, and heightened my disgust. Whereas Dorothy’s spineless submissiveness, the same no doubt that she had shown to her infamous husband, and for similar reasons, gradually made me lose all hope of ever being able to wrest her away. Perhaps it made me also lose all desire for her-and well before I even realized it.

  In point of fact, I believe I soon realized (though maybe only confusedly at first) that the choice was no longer the one I had foreseen. It no longer lay in the pressing alternative of saving Dorothy or abandoning her, but in the no less pressing one of abandoning her or being shipwrecked with her. I continue to think, though, that she loved me-with the love of a praying mantis; only she too realized very soon that I would prove recalcitrant and not allow her to suck my brains. At all events, the frenzied ardor she showed in those first days, when I did not resist the drive to drag me down, was lazily abandoned as soon as she felt me draw back-or at least so I imagined. Why else did she begin to treat me with sly indignity-if the term still means anything in this context?

  I well remember the last slights. Returning from one of the brief strolls I took to ventilate my mind as well as my lungs, like a frog coming up for air, I found the door closed. I mounted the stairs and there indeed were the two women, almost comatose, gorged with drugs. Dorothy raised a languid hand to show the powder box, clearly meaning: “Help yourself if you care to.” She could not have informed me more openly that I was merely being tolerated.

  I left them and stayed away for two days. Dorothy called me upon the second evening. “What’s the matter? Please come!” When I arrived, she wept. It was a spark of hope and I thought my time had come. I implored her to leave this room, this house, and settle at the hotel with me. She did not answer but her tears had dried. She threw herself back on the bed and remained motionless for a long time, looking up at the ceiling. I did not speak either. I was waiting. At last she murmured, still without moving, “Come back tomorrow.” I left the room wordlessly and she let me go.

  The next day was a Sunday. When I walked into the room, the other woman was there. I turned on my heels, but she caught my arm, made me sit down by force. “Come on! Come on!” she said, sitting down opposite me. “Let’s have it out.”

  Dorothy was sprawling on an armchair, munching her Turkish delight. She avoided my eyes.

  For a few seconds, Viola observed each of us in turn, her eyes screwed up ironically. “Well?” she said. “A lover’s quarrel?” She must have seen me stiffen and went on in a less mocking tone: “Why do you complicate things? We were getting on so well, the three of us. Wouldn’t I have more reason than you to show jealousy? Everything would be all right if you’d do your bit. But don’t imagine that I’ll ever give up this adorable kitten-to anyone. You may as well give up hope. She is attached to me, and faithful too, like a kitten. Aren’t you, my little puss?” She held out one arm and Dorothy, letting herself slide down from the armchair, came and squatted at her knees, laid her cheek on one thigh, and from there gazed at me with placid eyes.

  That is the last picture I have of Dorothy. More than all her slow, vile self-abasement, that spineless look of bestial cowardice confirmed that the battle was lost. Her father had told me, “The worst of it is that she seems happy.” Perhaps it wasn’t the right word. Rather than happy, I would say that she had contentedly sunk into a peaceful abdication, a definite renunciation of what little human freedom she had conserved until that day.

  An hour later I was on the train taking me back to Wardley Station.

  Chapter 29

  I HAD opened a book but I was not reading. Through the carriage window I watched the English countryside pass by. How lovely it can be in September! The pastures are green again and have the mellow softness of velvet. The ancient oaks, standing all alone in the middle of the fields like tortured sentinels, are only just beginning to turn brown, while the birches on the banks of soft-spoken brooks are already blazing with a million gold coins stirred by the wind. I had lowered the window a little so that I too might be lashed by the cold air, and I felt the process of rebirth. Viola and Dorothy, the padded room, all the sensual details of the past days-how quickly it all receded! A bad dream. The good thing about a nightmare is the awakening and its concurrent lighthearted feeling. And best of all was my joyous impatience to see Sylva again.

  For now I knew, I knew that I was justified, that I was right to love her. I kept repeating to myself, with gladness, the truth that had flashed upon me once before but which I had later tried to forget: the dazzling intuition that the quality of a soul is not measured by what it is but by what it becomes. I amused myself by applying this new yardstick to my fellow travelers in order to check its accuracy. First that child sitting opposite me. Yes, where does it spring from, this poignant interest we take in childhood, even the tenderest one, if not from the mysterious future it bears within itself, from which we expect so much hidden wealth? Why would I otherwise show such benevolent curiosity for the stupid puerile pranks of that little boy in his school cap with the fading colors of King’s Lynn College, who doesn’t stop fidgeting, kicks my shin every now and then and keeps sniffling all the time? What he is is still an uncouth harum-scarum, a handful of scrubby ignorance. But what he will become-what promise! Whereas his grandfather, next to him, absorbed in his study of The Times, his head no doubt stuffed with noble thoughts and all sorts of knowledge, has stopped “becoming.” He is forever what he is today, congealed in his past-present until his death.

  Yes, isn’t that the true curse of old age, that it is this petrifying fountain? From which only a few genuises escape-a Moses, a Leonardo? And how many men, alas, though still young and full of strength, have already reached the same point? Solidified, sclerosed-when they have not slowly been reduced to less than themselves by the drugged lethargy of habit? That chap in the corner, for instance. His briefcase announces his activeness in the world, but his torpid, indifferent eyes, flaccid lips and sagging jaw confess that his soul stagnates at a low altitude. Plainly there is little chance that it will ever rise any higher. He may, for all I know, be a good father, a good husband, a good citizen: is he a man at all? Yes, but made of wax-a dummy.

  Whereas Sylva!

  Whereas you, my sweet and exquisite Sylva, though you may stil
l be closer to a fox than to a woman, it is yet a fact that ever since the death of your friend Baron and the poignant self-discipline you then displayed, you have been striving to climb, sometimes in torment, almost a rung a day.

  The train had just sent a family of hares scampering away into the stubble, thus recalling to my mind a walk we had taken after the dog’s death. Sylva did not skip about as usual. On the contrary, she was walking demurely between Nanny and me, hanging on our arms, every now and then rubbing her cheek, with an almost melancholy tenderness, against my shoulder or her nurse’s. She often made us stop (which she never used to do) to observe, with a strange intensity, a tree, a stook, the flowers in the fields. She did not ask any questions, and Nanny or I would say, “This is a walnut tree, this is hay, these are thistles”- but was she listening? We never knew, and she would set off again, gently pulling us along but not answering.

  We had taken a small, stony path between two freshly mown fields. Suddenly, and almost under our feet, a hare flushed and streaked along a furrow, straight as an arrow. I felt Sylva, quite close to me, give a violent start, and already I could see her galloping after the hare as she would have done only a few days ago; but her impulse seemed to collapse there and then or, more exactly, to melt and dissolve. She just gazed musingly after the disappearing hare, then turned her head away, and we continued our walk as if nothing had happened.