by Albert Cohen
'I love you,' he said one more time that day, which was a day for love, like all their days.
To thank him, she took his hand and on it dropped a curiously small but noisy kiss. Words, the very words which had made her drunk with happiness at the Ritz, those self-same words now merely earned a stunted dwarf of a kiss which made a faintly rude noise.
Outside, the universal, unrelenting rain articulated their unhappi-ness. Trapped in their love-nest, sentenced for life to love's hard labour, they lay side by side, handsome, tender, loving and utterly aimless. What could be done to stir their torpor? He held her close to give their torpor a stir. She curled up into a ball against him. What now? They had long ago unwound the very last strand of their cocoon of memories, thoughts, and shared tastes. The cocoon of their sensuality too: there was not really much mileage in sex. She snuggled up closer to the man of her life, and he felt sick with pity. He had not answered her question, and the poor creature did not dare ask again. Oh, what they needed now was a good couple of hours of adultery at the Ritz! Coming to him secretly, at four, heart thumping and eyes aflutter, with the pain and joy of knowing that come what may she would have to tear herself away at six, she wouldn't dream of asking him what they were going to do!
'Darling, the rain's easing off. Don't you think we ought to go out just for a little while? It would do you good.'
If they'd still been in Geneva, and she had still been living with Deume, and she were due back in Cologny two hours from now, would she be suggesting a healthy stroll outside? No, she'd cling to him like a limpet until the very last moment, stimulated, alive! And when she got back to Cologny she would be quite beastly to poor Deume, she would focus the whole of her affective being on the lover she saw so rarely, concentrate all her feelings on him until their next meeting. And how delicious to think that next month the husband would be away and they'd be able to make the most of it by spending three days at Agay, three whole days which she would pat and pet in anticipation, three winged days which she would stroke and caress during the bleak and cheerless evenings spent in her husband's company. But now he was the husband, a husband to be kissed noisily on the cheek, like a baby. She even talked to him like a husband sometimes. Hadn't she said only the other day that she had one of her headaches?
'They're dancing downstairs,' she said.
'Yes, they're dancing.'
'That music is so vulgar.'
'Terribly.' (Peeved because she's not down there too, she's doing her level best to get her own back, he thought.)
'They've put a notice up in the lobby,' she said after a moment's silence. 'From now on there'll be dancing every afternoon.'
'Good.'
He sharpened his nose with his fingers. So, she was keeping abreast of what went on in the hotel, was she? Showing an interest in the world that was out of bounds, yearning for green pastures whereon the general grazed. And why not, poor thing? She was a normal, healthy girl. He pictured her standing with lips half open reading the notice in the lobby, like a beggar with her nose pressed against a cakeshop window. He kissed her on both cheeks. 'Thank you,' she said, and her little thank-you made him ache inside.
'Listen darling, what say if we went down? I feel like dancing with you.'
So that was it! She hungered to be among other people! If all she wanted was to dance with him, why didn't she simply suggest tripping the light fantastic here, in her room, to the sound of her damned gramophone? Oh no, he wasn't enough, she needed other people! She needed to see and be seen by other people! In Geneva, when he'd asked if she would be prepared to be cast away with him on a desert island, she'd looked thrilled! He resisted the temptation to remind her how thrilled she'd been. No, it would only ferment inside her and she'd end up realizing that he was not the be-all and end-all, indispensable and all-sufficing. There were truths which were best left unsaid.
Should they wander down and join the dance? For the people downstairs, dancing was a legitimate sexual game, a kind of time-off from a strictly ordered social existence. But the two of them had coupled times without number: surely they didn't still have to go in for all that jigging and prancing? Ridiculous idea! It was also out of the question. Downstairs were the Forbeses, downstairs was Society. The Forbes fracas had happened the day before yesterday. In two days the ghastly redhead must have gossiped to any number of her own kind. By now they must all be in the know. Of course, all the people downstairs were stupid and vulgar. There were only middle middle-class people in the hotel, and he'd chosen it deliberately to avoid running the risk of meeting anyone from the old days. In the old days he would not have condescended to rub shoulders with such riff-raff. Now that he was in no position to do so, these common people became important, desirable, an aristocracy.
He turned and looked at her. She was waiting submissively. She was waiting importunately. I'll do whatever you wish. But I insist on being happy. Come on, show me a good time, improvise, prove to me that I didn't ruin my life by rushing headlong into this love of ours.
What could he come up with to avoid seeing her wilt and droop? What had a mind worthy of higher tasks been doing for weeks and weeks? Finding ways of preventing her being bored, or at least of preventing her knowing that she was bored. What titbit could he throw her today? Cannes again, and buying new dresses, and the rest of the social substitutes? She'd soon get tired of that. And nothing he could do would ever be as good as a stupid conversation with the Forbeses of this world. Was it worth reviving the dodge he'd used the other day and say he was bored? No. He couldn't bear to see her cry.
'Darling, what are you thinking about?'
'The Treaty of Versailles.'
'Oh, I'm sorry.'
He bit his lip. Oh the look of respect on her face! The girl was stupid enough to believe that he could be bothered to waste time thinking about such a piece of stupidity, even respected him for it! And why was she so respectful? Because the treaty, the product of impoverished brains, fell within the ambit of the great social world, and also because she still thought he was Under-Clown-General. Poor, honest Protestant girl, who'd believed him at once when he told her he'd arranged to go on leave for eighteen months, which sounded more plausible than a year.
The music which rose from downstairs in celebration of the spirit of fraternal communion was intolerable. She wouldn't even have noticed it the first night they'd spent together at Agay. Of course, with her poor, loyal conscious mind she worshipped her darling, wanted no one else but him, relied on him alone. But her unconscious was drawn by the tom-tom beat of the tribal dance. Poor girl, she was suffocating and did not know it, suffocating behind the prison bars of love. Should he make a sudden grab for her, as though he intended to ravish her? She might like that. Oh what a sorry business! Oh the humiliation! Oh those times in Geneva, so impatient to see each other again, the joy of being together, of being alone together! The laughter of the corporate crowd downstairs was an abomination! It floated up, and she listened to the terrible laughter which reminded them of their isolation. Quick, a substitute!
'Darling, let's go see a film.'
'Oooh yes!' she cried. 'But close your eyes. I'll get dressed. Shan't be long.'
He shut his eyes since coyness was the order of the day. The darling girl, so ready to fall in with his plans, had been instantly overjoyed. Yes, but in the old days in Geneva she would have been appalled if he'd suggested going to the cinema instead of staying in her little sitting-room kissing and ogling and talking endlessly. Solal of Agay had been ousted by a rival: Solal of Geneva.
*
In the taxi ferrying them to Saint-Raphaël she took his hand and scattered tiny kisses on the silk of his shirt cuff. That was because they were on their way to a change of scenery, he thought, heading towards something other than love, towards an ersatz version of a social life. But there was something else, something much more deplorable. The woman now stupidly pecking at his heavy silk cuff was kissing elegance, which meant wealth, which implied social distinction and th
erefore power. But if he were to tell her that, she would protest vehemently and talk about souls and never understand, far less admit, that deep-down she regarded the sumptuous silk wristband of his shirt as an extension of her Solal's soul. She was far too noble-minded for that and not nearly bright enough, thank God on both counts. Oh, she might not know it, but what she really admired about him was the fact that he was the powerful embodiment of social orthodoxy. He was a man who had risen high and would rise higher yet, she thought with her unconscious mind, which, as snobbish as anyone else's, yearned to be the wife of an ambassador. Woe betide the man he would be later on. He yanked on the wristband of his shirt which she had kissed and tore it, then smiled at the trailing silk tatter and pressed it to his eyes.
'Darling, why . .. ?' she said in a scared voice.
'Me juve,' he said in the accent of the Jews of Poland. 'Me like destructions, me like destructions wery much.'
To reassure her, he kissed her lips once more, and then again, marvelling inwardly at this strange custom which was so widely practised by men and women. The taxi stopped outside the Chic Cinema. He told the driver to wait and smiled mysteriously, congratulating himself on having speculated so successfully on the stock market during his years of Under-Clowning-General. Being rich was his revenge. He was a tramp, but a tramp with money. He enjoyed letting the torn silk of his shirt-cuff trail across the marble counter of the ticket office.
They made their way into the small auditorium, which smelled of sweat and garlic, sat down and waited. Eventually the elderly house lights flickered, faltered, and then went out. In the darkness, which rustled with the chomping of peanuts, she took his hand and asked in a whisper if he was happy. He assented with an equine toss of his head, and she snuggled up to him, for the second feature was just beginning. An American penitentiary. Prisoners behind bars. He envied them, because they had hierarchies, a social life: they were a criminal fraternity, but a fraternity for all that. Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the only social life he had, she so pure in profile that it broke his heart. What were they doing in this awful cinema which stank of plebeian feet? They'd come looking for happiness. And was it to experience the bliss of being in this reeking flea-pit that they had both ruined their lives? She squeezed his hand. So she can feel how much she loves me, he thought. But there was no life in her grip; it was mere politeness. The wonder of their sublimely joined hands as they stood at the window of her sitting-room on that first night, after the Ritz, would never return.
Throughout the entire film, he chewed on his obsession. Sentenced to passion for life. Other people were smart, they committed adultery on the quiet. Which meant obstacles, infrequent meetings, rapture. Whereas they, fools that they were, were buried alive under their love. Some were even smarter, they managed the thing honourably. The woman arranged to get a divorce, then the pair of them remarried, respected by friends and neighbours who all knew exactly where they stood on what had happened. Should he marry her? That was a solution which he'd already ruled out.
The interval. The house lights flickered and brashly splashed a milky glare over the numbed audience, who blinked as reality returned, then roused themselves as a greasy crone with kiss-curls went among them chanting 'Hices, loverly choc-hices, confeckshunry.' Disengaging their hands, the two lovers talked about the film to escape the awkwardness of silence, and, as they prattled on vacuously, Solal was overcome by a sense of his own decline and fall from grace. There they sat, quietly discussing the film, two beings apart, smartly dressed, cut off from the carefree, chummy, babbling, confident, slobbering, ice-cream-licking rabble. He was suddenly aware that an apologetic note had crept into his voice, as though he were a ghetto Jew afraid of drawing attention to himself. She was making herself inconspicuous too, speaking in whispers just as he did, and he realized that in her unconscious mind the poor girl knew that they were outcasts.
Abandoning humility and going on the attack, he began talking too loudly, beckoned to the usherette with her tray, bought a bag of sweets, handed it to Ariane, who smiled, said thank you, helped herself to a mint, and popped it into her mouth after removing the paper. So it had all been for this! The wonder of dancing together at the Ritz had been for this! The fervour of their first night had led him here, to a dirty little cinema where he sat prosaically sucking mints, feeling sick at heart, dismally sucking mints and listening while his lovely girl, once so wild, so crazy, talked shyly about a second-rate film, visibly awkward and ill at ease, his darling, morbidly self-conscious, his darling girl, and refusing to admit it. Why not go all the way and buy a couple of choc-ices now, so that they could suck them together, for the masochistic pleasure of sinking even lower?
As darkness returned to the auditorium which now filled with the plebeian smell of orange peel, the second half of the programme began. She took his hand gently once more, and the newsreel unwound. Dromedaries with their minds on loftier things sailed superciliously along a Cairo street then disappeared behind a police checkpoint on the Friedrichstrasse which dissolved to a fire-ball engulfing a factory in California which was rapidly extinguished by a Parisian downpour through which sprinted runners sponsored by a daily newspaper, and the winner stood panting, a broad smile all over his face, not knowing what to do with his hands, and swigged champagne proffered by a solicitous interviewer, and Hitler barked like a dog, and in Rio de Janeiro grinning Negro beggars climbed on their knees up the steps of a baroque church pursued by a slow-motion demonstration of football action, the forwards kicking the ball through an unreal, weightless world in which strength and power were lazily protracted, endlessly booting the ball with an unhurried balletic sureness of touch, and Miss Arkansas panicked when she realized that she only had six seconds to impress the judges and did her tragic best to look attractive only to be replaced by two crashed Canadian trains and the Sultan of Morocco walking up the ship's gangplank to greet Marshal Lyautey and as he went holding the hem of his robes behind which Mussolini bawled defiance, hands on hips and chin almost touching his forehead, and cars skidded in an arc as they entered a corner where there was a gang of kids wearing jumpers advertising Menier Chocolate, and Oxford beat Cambridge in the Boat Race, and Marshal Pilsudski bowed his drooping moustache to a tall Romanian queen, and a twitching French cabinet minister pinned a medal to a velvet cushion then disagreeably yapped a speech under an umbrella, and had he not himself, had he not too been a cabinet minister, and was now a nobody who sucked mints?
Then the first of the main features began to roll. Holding hands once more (like two drowning persons clinging to each other, he thought), they were subjected to a display of flesh belonging to a young female star of the silvery screen who had animal lips, alarming, Hottentot-thick lips, like the sucker of some gigantic tapeworm or the maw of a sea monster, and enormous breasts, which were the mainstay of her talent, ten kilos of constantly bared fat which had made her world-famous. After a few minutes he got up, and they left just as the revolting trollop was exhibiting her large posterior, which was her secondary talent.
'We'll go back to the hotel and dance for a while,' he said, as they got into the taxi.
She snuggled up to him. Like at the Ritz, like on their first evening, she thought, and she took his hand again and raised it to her lips while he brooded over the curse which doomed them perpetually to their own company, condemned them to possess nothing but their love. Should he move out and see her just once a week to allow her to experience the joy of being together again? But what would they both find to do on the other six days?
They danced among the other couples in the main ballroom of the Royal. Whenever the band stopped playing, they went back to their table, dignified and silent, while the in-crowd chatted animatedly, for they were all acquainted and none of them was having, at least not overtly, an affair with any of the others. Each time the band struck up again, the gentlemen, all lawyers or in the silk business or the army and graceful despite hernias and varicose ulcers, rose and courteously approa
ched the wives of recorders and members of the bench and begged the honour. Certain ladies, some with hairy chins, accepted with girlish delight and got coquettishly to their feet. Others refused in the time-honoured manner, with refined, modest, wistful smiles, like grateful but quite untouchable maidens. Each and every one was asked to dance, except the celestial Ariane Cassandre Corisande, nee d'Auble.
'I have a slight headache,' she said after their sixth dance. 'Would you like to go up?'
They rose and left. But when they got to the lift she asked him if he felt like casting an eye over the magazines in the lobby. There was an issue of Vogue that she would rather like to look at. She doesn't realize that in reality she's afraid to go back to her room and be alone with me, he thought. He acquiesced, and they sat down at the table where the magazines and newspapers were kept. Keeping her voice down, she asked him if she could hold his hand and said that he meant everything in the world to her. That's true, he thought, and she means all the world to me too, though it does not get us very far.
At the far end of the lobby, ten large, imposing ladies of the middling station were sturdily ensconced. Stoutly settled on their behinds, entrenched in their armchairs, fully accoutred and queens of all they surveyed, they were knitting voraciously and actively conversing in pairs. The hands and mouths of these aged hellish guardians of the proprieties worked unceasingly, implacably, for they were in no doubt of their fitness to sit thus in judgement. Poring over their magazines, intermittent objects of the scrutiny of the knitting hellcats, the two lovers held hands, pretended to read, and, over the interference from the dance-band nearby, listened to the muddled snatches of conversation which reached them in discrete bursts and fragments, like some potent litany.