A specialist had advised Marthe to go bathing in the sea. While reproaching myself for being malicious, I ordered her not to, not wanting anyone but me to see her body.
But since Marthe had to spend a month at Granville in any case, I was glad that Jacques would be there. I remembered the black-and-white photograph of him that Marthe had shown me on the day we chose the furniture. Nothing frightened me more than young men on the beach. Even then I thought they would be stronger, more handsome, more stylish than me.
Her husband would protect her from them.
In affectionate moments, like a drunk who embraces everyone, I would dream of writing to Jacques, confessing that I was Marthe’s lover and, authorised by this status, commending her to him. Occasionally I envied Marthe, she who was worshipped by both Jacques and me. Shouldn’t the pair of us try and make her happy? During these fits I thought I was being the obliging lover. I would have liked to meet Jacques, explain things to him, why we shouldn’t be jealous of each other. But then my hatred would suddenly set me back on my course.
XXIII
IN EVERY LETTER MARTHE ASKED ME TO GO TO her apartment. This importuning reminded me of a pious aunt of mine who berated me for never visiting my grandmother’s grave. It’s not in my nature to make pilgrimages. Such tiresome duties just circumscribe death, and love.
Aren’t we able think about a dead person, or our mistress, except in a cemetery or a particular room? I didn’t attempt to point this out to Marthe, but simply told her that I went to her house—just as I told my aunt that I had been to the cemetery. Nonetheless I did have to go to Marthe’s house, although in most unusual circumstances.
One day on the train I met the Swedish girl whose guardians wouldn’t allow her to see Marthe. In my solitude I found this young person’s childishness appealing. I suggested that she secretly come and have tea in J … the next day. I didn’t tell her that Marthe was away in case this scared her off, and even said how pleased Marthe would be to see her again. I swear I had no idea just what I was intending to do exactly. I was behaving like children who, when they first meet, try to amaze each other. I couldn’t resist seeing the look of surprise or anger on Svea’s angelic face when I told her that Marthe was away.
Yes, it was probably the infantile pleasure of astonishing someone, because I couldn’t find anything unusual to say to her, whereas she had the advantage of her foreignness, and surprised me with everything she said. There’s nothing more delightful than sudden intimacy between people who don’t understand each other. Around her neck she wore a small gold-and-blue-enamelled cross over a rather ugly dress, which in my mind’s eye I saw quite differently. A true living doll. I felt a growing desire to continue our tête-à-tête somewhere other than in a railway carriage.
What slightly spoilt her convent-girl manner was that she behaved like a pupil at the École Pigier, where she went for an hour every day to learn to speak French and use a typewriter, without deriving much benefit from it. She showed me her typewriting homework. There was a mistake with every letter, corrected in the margin by the teacher. From a hideous handbag, which she had clearly made herself, she removed a cigarette case on which there was a countess’s coronet. She offered me a cigarette. She didn’t smoke, but always carried the case because her friends smoked. She told me about Swedish traditions, which I pretended to be familiar with: St John’s Night, bilberry jam. Then she took out a photograph of her twin sister, which had arrived from Sweden the day before—she was stark naked on a horse and wearing their grandfather’s top hat. I blushed scarlet. Her sister looked so much like her that I thought she was having a joke at my expense by showing me a picture of herself. I bit my lips to subdue their desire to kiss this mischievous innocent. I must have had a savage expression on my face, because she seemed frightened, and looked round for the communication cord.
The next day she came to Marthe’s house at four o’clock. I explained that Marthe was in Paris but would be back shortly. Then I added: “She told me not to let you go until she arrives.” I wasn’t planning to tell her what my ploy was until later.
Luckily she was fond of her food. But my own gluttony took on a hitherto unknown form. It wasn’t tart or raspberry ice cream I hungered for, but to be the tart and ice cream that she was about to put in her mouth. Inadvertently I pulled a face.
It wasn’t lechery that made me lust after Svea, it was gluttony. If I couldn’t have her lips, then her cheeks would be enough.
I spoke clearly and precisely so she would understand me properly. Stimulated by this amusing doll’s tea party, I, who never usually said much, was now annoyed at not being able to speak fast enough. I felt a need for chatter, childish confidences. I put my ear close to her mouth. I drank in her young words.
I forced her to have a liqueur. But then I felt sorry for her, like a bird that you are trying to get drunk.
I hoped her tipsiness would serve my purposes, because it mattered little to me whether she offered me her lips willingly or not. I reflected on how improper it was for this little scene to be taking place in Marthe’s apartment, although I kept telling myself that ultimately I wasn’t depriving our love of anything. I wanted Svea like a piece of fruit, which couldn’t possibly make any mistress jealous.
I held her hands in both of mine, they seemed clumsy, puppy-like. I would have liked to undress her, cradle her. She lay on the couch. I got up, leant over the still-downy place where her hair began and noticed also the soft hairs that grew above her lips. I didn’t assume from her silence that she was enjoying my kisses; just that, being unable to get angry, she couldn’t think of the words to turn me down politely in French. I nibbled her cheeks, expecting sweet juice to come spurting out, as if they were a peach.
Finally I kissed her lips. An uncomplaining victim, she bore with my caresses, closed her eyes and mouth. Her only gesture of rebuff was to move her head slightly from side to side. I didn’t mistake this for a response, but my lips deluded themselves into believing it was. I stayed there, close to her in a way that I had never been with Marthe. Her act of resistance, which in fact wasn’t one, gratified my impertinence, my laziness. I was naïve enough to imagine that things would continue in the same vein, and that raping her was going to be easy.
I had never undressed a woman before; I had usually been undressed by them. So I set about it awkwardly, starting by taking off her shoes and stockings. I kissed her feet and her legs. But when I went to unfasten her blouse, Svea struggled like a little devil who doesn’t want to go to bed and has to be undressed forcibly. She lashed out with her feet. I grabbed them in mid-air, held onto them, kissed them. But then finally I had had my fill, just as gluttony wanes after too much cream and delicacies. I now had to tell her about my hoax, that Marthe was away on holiday. I made her promise that if she bumped into Marthe she wouldn’t tell her about our meeting. I didn’t say that I was Marthe’s lover, but I let it be understood. When I had sat down next to her again, and asked politely whether we might see each other again at some point, in her delight at the secrecy she answered: “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I never went back to Marthe’s apartment. And perhaps Svea never rang the bell at the locked door. I was aware how culpable my behaviour was for the moral climate of the time. It was probably the circumstances that had made Svea seem so special. Would I have found her desirable anywhere else apart from in Marthe’s room?
Yet I felt no regrets. It wasn’t thinking about Marthe that made me abandon the young Swedish girl, it was because I had had all the sweetness out of her.
A few days later I got a letter from Marthe. With it was one from her landlord, telling her that his house wasn’t a lovers’ meeting place, and about the use I was making of having access to her apartment, where I had taken a woman. So I have evidence of you being unfaithful, said Marthe. She wasn’t going to see me again. No doubt she would suffer, but she preferred that to being made a fool of.
I was familiar with empty threats, all it would take to quash
them was a lie, even the truth, if necessary. But I was offended that in a letter breaking off our relationship, Marthe hadn’t mentioned suicide. I accused her of being cold-hearted. I considered her letter undeserving of any explanations. Because in a similar situation, rather than contemplating killing myself, I would have felt it more fitting to threaten Marthe. It was an ineradicable sign of my age and schooling—I thought that certain lies are dictated by the laws of passion.
A new task arose as part of my amorous initiation—to justify myself to Marthe, accuse her of trusting me less than she did her landlord. I pointed out that it was just a stratagem on the Marins’ part. Svea had come to see her one day when I was writing in her apartment, and if I invited her in it was because, seeing the girl from the window, and knowing she had been forbidden to see Marthe, I didn’t want her to think that Marthe held her personally responsible for this unpleasant estrangement. She had probably come in secret, at the cost of countless problems for herself.
Hence I was able to tell Marthe that Svea was just as fond of her as ever. I finished by saying how much of a consolation it had been to be able to talk about Marthe in her own home with her closest friend.
This scare caused me to curse a love that compels us to explain our actions, when I would have preferred not to have to explain anything, to myself or anyone else.
And yet love must afford many advantages, I reflected, because men put their freedom in its hands. I was in a hurry to be strong enough to dispense with love, and thus not have to give up any of my desires. I didn’t realize that on the scale of subjugation, it is far better to be a slave to your heart than to your senses.
Just as a bee gathers nectar and enriches the hive, a lover enriches his love with every desire that seizes hold of him in the street. He lets his mistress have the benefit of them. I had still to discover that self-restraint which makes the unfaithful faithful. If a man were to lust after a girl and transfer this fervour to the woman he loves, his desire—all the more intense because unsatisfied—will make this woman believe that she has never been loved so much. She is being deceived, but in the eyes of society her honour is intact. From conclusions such as this comes promiscuity. So we shouldn’t be too hasty to condemn men who, in a sudden access of passion, are capable of cheating on their mistress; we shouldn’t accuse them of being superficial. They find their duplicity distasteful, and wouldn’t dream of confusing happiness with pleasure.
Marthe was waiting for me to exonerate myself. She begged me to forgive her for being so critical. I did so, with bad grace. She wrote to her landlord and, not without irony, asked him to be kind enough to allow me to invite one of her friends to her apartment while she was away.
XXIV
WHEN MARTHE CAME BACK TOWARDS THE END of August, she didn’t go to J …, but went to live at her parents’ house, which meant they could extend their summer holiday. These new surroundings, where Marthe had spent her whole life, acted on me like an aphrodisiac. My weary senses, my secret longing to have the bed to myself, all vanished. I didn’t spend a single night at home. I was in a blazing hurry, like someone who is going to die young and thus works twice as hard. I wanted to have the best from Marthe before motherhood ruined her.
Her childhood bedroom, which she had denied to Jacques, became our room. I enjoyed seeing the picture above the single bed of her at her first communion. I also made her look at another one of herself, as a baby, so that our child would be like her. Enchanted, I wandered round this house where she had been born and had blossomed. In a boxroom I found her cradle, which I wanted her to use, and made her get out her vests, her tiny little knickers, all Grangier family heirlooms.
I didn’t miss her apartment in J …, where the furnishings lacked the charm of even the most unsightly family furniture. It had nothing to teach me. Yet here, all this furniture, on which Marthe must have bumped her head when she was small, reminded me of her. Not only that, but we were alone, without town councillors or landlords. We behaved no better than savages, we walked around the garden, a true desert island, virtually naked. We lay on the lawn, had tea under an arbour covered with clematis, honeysuckle and Virginia creeper. We fought over bruised plums that I picked up still warm with sun, each holding one end in our mouth. My father had never managed to get me to do any work in the garden at home like my brothers did, yet I took care of Marthe’s. I raked, I weeded. In the evening after a hot day, I felt the same exhilarating manly pride from quenching the thirst of the soil and the parched flowers as I did from satisfying the desires of a woman. I had always regarded happiness as foolish—I now realised just how powerful it was. Thanks to my care and attention the flowers bloomed, the chickens dozed in the shade when I’d thrown them some seed—just kindness?—just selfishness! Dead flowers and thin chickens would have brought sadness to our island of love. The water and seed I gave them was intended more for myself than for flowers and chickens.
With this renewed love, I either forgot or disregarded what I had recently learnt. I took the promiscuity that was incited by being at this family house for the end of promiscuity. So the last week of August and the month of September were my only time of real happiness. I didn’t cheat, I didn’t hurt myself or Marthe. I couldn’t see any more obstacles. At the age of sixteen I contemplated a way of life that people wish for in their maturity. We would live in the country; we would be for ever young.
Lying beside her on the lawn, stroking her face with a blade of grass, slowly and deliberately I described to Marthe what our life would be. Since her return, Marthe had been looking for an apartment for us in Paris. When I announced that I wanted to live in the country, her eyes brimmed with tears: “I’d never have dared suggest it,” she said. “I thought you’d be bored all on your own with me, that you needed to be in a town.” “You don’t know me very well,” I replied. I would have liked to live near Mandres, where we had once gone for a walk, and where cultivators grow roses. It so happened that I had smelt these roses since then, when Marthe and I had been out for dinner in Paris and caught the last train back. In the station forecourt, labourers were unloading enormous crates which filled the air with perfume. When I was a child I had often heard about the mysterious train full of roses that went past while children were asleep.
But Marthe said: “Roses only flower for a short time. After that, aren’t you afraid you might think Mandres was ugly? Wouldn’t it be more sensible to find somewhere that isn’t as beautiful, but which has just as much charm?”
I had to admit she had a point. My longing to enjoy the roses for two months of the year made me forget that there were ten other months, and my choice of Mandres showed me yet again just how fleeting our love was.
Often, on the pretext that I was going for walk or invited out somewhere, I didn’t have dinner at F … and would stay with Marthe.
One afternoon I found her with a young man in airman’s uniform. It was her cousin. Marthe, who I never called by the familiar ‘tu’, got up and kissed me on the neck. Her cousin smiled at my discomfiture. “There’s nothing to worry about with Paul, my love,” she said. “I’ve told him everything.” I was embarrassed, and yet enchanted to think that Marthe had told her cousin all about her love for me. The young man, who was charming and shallow, and whose sole concern was making sure his uniform didn’t conform to regulations, seemed delighted at our affair. To him it was a great practical joke on Jacques, whom he despised for not being an airman or a barfly.
Paul reminded her about the childhood games that the garden here had witnessed. I was burning with questions, because what they were talking about showed me Marthe in a new light. Yet at the same time it saddened me. I was too close to my own childhood to have forgotten the games that are unknown to our parents; adults either can’t remember such games, or view them as an unavoidable evil. I was jealous of Marthe’s past.
When, laughing, we told Paul about the spiteful landlord and the Marin’s grand reception, in a moment of drollery he offered us his bachelor apartment in P
aris.
I noticed that Marthe didn’t dare tell him that we were planning to live together. I had the feeling that although he encouraged our relationship as a form of amusement, if there were to be a scandal, he would just follow the crowd.
Marthe got up from the table and served dinner. The servants had gone to the country with Madame Grangier, because Marthe, discreet as ever, insisted that she preferred living à la Robinson Crusoe. Believing their daughter to be a romantic, and that you should no more argue with a romantic than you should with a lunatic, her parents left her to herself.
We lingered over dinner. Paul fetched the best vintages from the cellar. We were in high spirits, something we would probably regret, for in a sense Paul was party to our adultery. He sneered at Jacques. By keeping quiet there was a danger that I might make him see how tactlessly he was behaving; so I thought it best to join in the game rather than humiliate this glib cousin of hers.
By the time we noticed how late it was, the last train to Paris had already gone. Marthe offered Paul a bed for the night. He accepted. I gave her such a look that she added: “And you’re staying too, my love, naturally.” It made me feel as if I was in my own house, married to Marthe, and that one of my wife’s cousins had come to stay, when, outside our bedroom door, Paul said goodnight to us and kissed his cousin on both cheeks in the most natural way possible.
XXV
The Devil in the Flesh Page 8