The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  Solange said that the boats at their moorings, with their heart-shaped sterns and their perpetual rocking motion, made her think of hearts in torment. Costals said that, swinging against each other, they reminded him rather of a row of dervishes. Then he delivered a poetic speech about 'boats with women's flanks which are like steeds beneath you, like mares taking a jump when the waves lift them and one feels them rippling beneath one with all the life that is theirs, and one helps them on with the complicity of love.' He confessed that whenever he was in a boat on a sea furrowed by waves, he could not help falling prey to a certain sensual perturbation. Solange refused to admit defeat: she compared the gentle motion of the moored boats, drawing slightly apart, then coming together again, to that of prams being rocked to and fro by seated mothers to send their infants to sleep.

  Costals said that their combat with images on a given theme was like the alternating songs of the herdsmen of ancient Greece, and that she deserved the laurel wreath for her image of the prams.

  'I won the wreath for the taming of the cats. You've won it in the image tournament. What will the decider be?'

  'Which of the two of us can stare longest at the sun.'

  Costals flexed his biceps: the sun and he (or 'he and the sun'): they were pals! He'd show her!

  Solange raised her head and her pupils widened. She gazed calmly at the sun.

  'You looked sideways!'

  'Sideways? Oh, how can you be so unfair!'

  'Let's begin again.'

  He glanced towards the sun, then, with the air of a photogenic dictator, focused his eyes.... In fact he focused nothing, for no sooner had his gaze struck the fiery zone than his head sank, his eyes filled with tears, his eyelids clenched tight like those of the aurochs when Ursus breaks its neck.

  'Ah, the dirty dog!'

  The chatoune turned tranquilly towards the zenith. Her features stiffened, her pupils became so immense that they devoured the cornea almost entirely. And she stared at the sun.

  If Costals did not fall on his knees, it was because, in spite of everything, he was a fairly civilized man. And if he did not say there and then 'I'll marry you', it was because he still retained a modicum of good sense. But he had to make an effort to prevent himself from doing so. He was certainly determined to marry her. Could any man but he be the lord and master of She-who-stares-at-the-Sun? (Surely there must be a hieroglyph which meant just that: He, or She, who stares at the sun.) He had thought her an ordinary little bourgeoise, but no, she was someone of his calibre, even superior to him. She had proved it with a supreme sign. He imagined her sculpted in granite, seated, her hands on her knees, with the head of a cat. And he seated at her side, his hands on his knees, with the head of a lion. And their tails were entwined. And two rays of sunlight, carved in the rock, descended upon them both. They would take a Coptic priest with them from Cairo, and their union would be blessed on the ruins of Heliopolis. To celebrate the marriage, he would give a great public feast in Alexandria, at which he would do battle with a lion. Yesterday there had been no question of having children. Now all that was changed: they would have fourteen sons. Yes, from the moment they moved on to the superhuman plane, all values were changed. From the moment she had stared at the sun, Costals' literary work retreated to the background; their reign was all. For it would be too stupid if they could not find some tribe to reign over: since already, for her beauty alone, Solange was adored by the children of Europe, there must surely be a child-race that would adore her. And the strength he would draw from her would be great enough to enable him to deal simultaneously with his realm, his work, and his fourteen sons. Before the scene on the jetty, Solange had been a curb on his wilder flights. Now that he knew she was worthy of them, he would make her participate in these flights; she would be one of the ingredients of his poetry. Before, he could find no place for her in his life. Now she had one. Once again he realized that it was not marriage that had made him hesitate so much as Solange's presumed mediocrity. Now that she had given proof that she partook of the superhuman, he thought of their marriage: 'It would be madness to let it slip.'

  Costals had not drunk more than a glass of wine the whole day. But when they returned to the hotel, he was so intoxicated with her, or rather with his own idea of her, in other words so intoxicated with himself, that he hastened to wrap a wet towel round his head to ease the strain of the laurel wreath. As the reader himself may equally feel the need to wrap a wet towel round his head, let us pause for a while.

  They were at the window, after dinner.

  On the suburban hills, rows of street-lamps bordering avenues invisible in the darkness made a diadem of pearls about the city. Houses full of modest angels each playing with its little paradise. A stretch of beach against which the surf lapped contentedly, rising here and there like a horse tossing its head to show its rider its white-flecked forehead. The high places of silence above them, and the stars, each named after some erotomaniac God, the stars recumbent like cattle in a meadow, a few of them apart from the rest, as a bull stands apart from the herd, waiting to attack some young passer-by who ventures off the road. To the left, the Milky Way seemed to rise from a hill, like smoke from some dying sacrificial fire.

  'I love big cities,' he exclaimed passionately, dreaming of all the human material waiting to be corrupted there. And, like an electric current, he felt the three 'phases' of his relationship to the world pass through him: (1) how to enjoy it; (2) how to guard against it; (3) how to make game of it.

  'I love any city when I'm there with you,' she said. 'I'd like any provincial hole, or the country, or the desert just as much, if I were there with you.'

  Continually, now, she sought physical contact with him, which was something quite new. She had put her arm round his waist (a thing she had never done before) and laid her head on his chest. From the open window on the floor below them rose a 'heady' female scent. She kissed his hand, his mouth, his forehead. He laughed. 'Why do you laugh?' she asked, her face a little anxious and abashed. He did not answer. He was laughing to see her so amorous, she who had always been so cold. But it was she who laughed when, having slid his hand inside her clothes by complicated routes, he plucked the hairs at the base of her spine.

  For the first time in her life she had wanted something. Thereto she had dedicated a new-found will, a fresh strength, unused for twenty-one years. She had wanted this stranger to be hers for ever, and she felt that after all their torments he was ready to be at last. How normal, how natural it was, this life they had lived in common since yesterday! It was as if she had never lived in any other way. How quickly her past had closed up behind her! And the more aware she became of it the more her love grew, as a torrent swells gradually more and more. It was really the thought of marriage that was the cradle of her love, as it was, or had been, the grave of love for Costals. And she leaned against her man, with all the primordial heaviness of her sex, heavy as a rain-sodden tree, murmuring a confused prayer: 'O God, make my happiness last! I shall never grow weary of it.... '

  'Look at that light-house,' she said. 'Wouldn't you think there were people inside it following one another perpetually without ever catching up? That's something one mustn't do in life.'

  And indeed there were shadows flitting across the illuminated beacon of the light-house, always equidistant from one another.

  'The waves also go on chasing one another without ever catching up,' said Costals. 'It's an interesting reflection, though I distrust metaphors with philosophical pretensions. Metaphors should just be metaphors, and not try to pass themselves off as something more.'

  For a long while they gazed at the nocturnal city and the commonwealth of stars, and then he said:

  'These houses, already full of youthful sleepers, torment me. They remind me that there are things that I do not possess. As far as my eyes can reach, and well beyond, across the whole face of the earth, my people stretch: all those to whom, as a writer, I have brought something vital, and who are ready to off
er me a token of their gratitude. This brings me no joy, for I have no use for their tokens: I know that what they are ready to offer me is never what I want. There are as many unknown women as there are stars in sight as I speak to you now who have written me page after page assuring me of their gratitude, their admiration, their friendship, and what have you. But if, one night, I were to knock at their door and say: "I am he whose name is alive at the other end of the earth, and yet it is as a supplicant that I have come to your door. I have come to receive my reward for what I have given you. You who said to me one day, with such fervent simplicity: 'I would like to give you pleasure', you who so far forgot yourself as to kiss my hand, lead me now to that room where the flesh of your flesh lies sleeping, and let me know her. I shall not harm her, I shall not turn her against you, I shall cover her with my riches and she will flower beneath my riches; she will flower beneath the riches of my rain and of my summer. Woman is the warrior's reward, but the children of men are the reward of the poet, and mothers who shut their eyes are the dew of the human species" - if I said all that to them, I should doubtless be met by closed faces and mouths full of insults. And the thought pains me. But what pains me even more, perhaps, is the thought that there are mothers who would be prepared to offer me the flesh of their flesh, for love of me and my works, but who do not know that that is the only thing I want of them, that I spurn the incense of their praise and the smoke of their sacrifices.'

  'You ought to slip a veiled appeal into your next novel, in the style of an advertisement: "Mothers wishing provide tangible proof admiration M. Pierre Costals by putting him in touch daughters requested communicate. Utmost discretion. Please send photographs." And perhaps you might even add: "Tokens M. Costals' gratitude will surpass all expectations".'

  Solange's jocular tone failed to conceal her underlying acerbity. People who know nothing about life (and pride themselves thereon by calling themselves 'particular') are always rather acid towards those who have some human experience. She did not at all approve of Costals' bringing home to her the extent of his appetites at the end of a day when they had come so perceptibly closer to each other. To which he might have retorted that old father Zeus, in the Iliad, is no more tactful towards his ever-loving when, inviting her to share his bed, he enumerates all 'the others' on the pretext of attesting that he likes her best of all; and enumerates no less than seven, with a suitable encomium for each.

  Nevertheless Costals replied with the utmost seriousness:

  'It's a good idea, and by giving it to me you improve your own prospects. Yes, I shall launch an appeal on those lines in my next book. Let them understand who may. I'm tired of being loved so inadequately, in a sterile and pointless way - it makes me sad and reproachful like a dog whose master, with stupid persistence, goes on offering it a piece of meat it doesn't want, when there's some vanilla cream on the table which would make it burst into speech with joy.'

  'If I remember right, the Minotaur needed seven boys and seven girls every year. Is that your ration?'

  'I have no ration. People say a lot of things against lust. They say it's disappointing - that it makes one sad - that it prevents one from working - that it prevents one from being an entirely moral person. But what they don't say, and this is one of the most striking things about it, is that it's never-ending. In the act of love-making one thinks to oneself: "What riches I'm storing up for myself. With this, I'm well provided for." But no. Your mistress gives you pleasure and happiness, and you feel desire, affection and esteem for her; but at the same time you go on chasing, and one day in three your pursuit brings you someone new. Well, if you're suddenly deprived of all that, it's as if you had never had anyone at all, you're as starved, as empty, as if you'd never had anyone. It's like water through a sieve. During the dog-days, we're irritated because science has failed to tap some of that excessive heat in order to return it to the atmosphere during the excessive cold of winter. Happiness is like summer: it doesn't go on radiating. There is nothing to be got from the memory of it when we feel cold. There are sensations that write in indelible letters. Happiness writes white.'

  She felt sorry for him. She was always so glad when she had an excuse to feel sorry for him. And whereas a few minutes earlier she had felt herself to be of very little account in his life, now she felt indispensable once more, to protect him from the cold.

  'Dear Minotaur, may I suggest that if you need this perpetual renewal of fresh bodies, there could be no better proof that none of the women you've known has fully satisfied you.'

  'Perhaps, on the contrary, it's because a woman has fully satisfied me that I feel such a desire to begin again with another - with all the others.'

  They went back into Solange's room. The only light came from the pink lamp above the bed. This pink light was a novelty: there was no pink light in the avenue Henri-Martin; and there was something virginal about it. It was also the first time (apart from the 'hostelry') he had seen Solange in a bedroom that had not done duty for others of his women.

  He asked point-blank:

  'But after all, why do you want to marry me?'

  'To be happy, of course!'

  How she had blurted it out!'To be happy.' O wise response! He always liked people who spoke without shame of their 'will to happiness'.

  'I do so want it to happen!' she said fervently.

  And he, sincere but prudent:

  'And I so want you to be happy!'

  Yet, since the previous day - and above all since the scene on the jetty - he had begun to think of them as 'we'. Their harmony was complete, and his trust in her immense. What she said and what she did left an impression of ease, of familiarity, of absolute naturalness; they were on a footing of equality; they had only to let their souls give forth their emanations without in any way constraining them. It seemed to Costals that already he had fallen into the habit of thinking of the future in relation to her. His erstwhile exaltation having spent itself, he nevertheless found that it really was marriage that he now fundamentally desired. But what he was physically incapable of was saying the word that would bind him.

  'In Athens, the betrothed girl dedicated her childhood plaything - your rabbit - and a lock of her hair to Artemis. In Boeotia, when she arrived at her husband's house for the first time, a wheel of the chariot that brought her there was burnt, to show that henceforth she could never leave this house again. In Rome, when they had reached that point, the bridegroom took his wife in his arms and carried her over the threshold....'

  'I wonder if you're strong enough to carry me....'

  He sensed the naïve challenge behind the remark, and did not like it. He lifted her up, and she clung to his neck, glueing her mouth to his. Carrying her, he crossed the two bathrooms, but stopped on the threshold of his own room and put her down. The corners of her mouth drooped, and her eyelids fluttered.

  He suggested that they should finish the day by reading together.

  'Shall we read Tolstoy's Diary, for instance - "waiting for each other at the foot of the page", as the saying is? We could begin at the page where he writes: "For fifty years, without a break, woman has been going down in my estimation." Unless you'd prefer the passage which begins with that graceful quotation from Gogol: "Lord, there was already enough filth of every kind in the world. Why did you have to add woman?"'

  One may guess what these pleasantries led to: much romping and playfulness. Nevertheless, that night he did not go to her, for fear of spoiling, by sensations which she was liable to reduce to mediocrity, a day that had passed off so successfully. Perhaps also in order to show her that she sufficed him without those sensations. Alone in his bed, he turned over, half-laughing to himself, and murmuring: 'My little girl!' And he thought: 'It would be a crime to reject her now, and it's already almost wicked of me to leave her in uncertainty as I'm doing. Yes, now that I've brought her to such a stage of love and hope, it's my duty to marry her.'

  He woke up in the night and heard the sound of raindrops. He remembered
that the window of her bedroom had been half-open when he left her. He was afraid she might catch cold, and crept stealthily towards her door - curious, incidentally, to know whether she had locked it. But no; he went in. He did not look at her asleep: how was he to know? - since she did not want to be seen naked, or to be seen dressing or having a bath, perhaps she would be angry if she learnt that he had seen her asleep.... He merely noticed that she was lying curled up, and promised himself to tell her next day that it was bad for the circulation. Between rounds in the boxing gymnasium, he was always told: 'Stretch your legs well out.... '

  He closed the window. On the way back, he kissed the foot of her bed.

  Costals' Diary

  29 September - Enchantment of fascist cats, challenge to the sun, nocturne at the window. . . . Yesterday was a day of wonders. After these two radiant days, today we get down to the prose. Five years since I cohabited with a woman. Reapprenticeship.

  Palazzo Rosso, Bianco, etc. Luckily I know it all. Better not to have seen a museum at all than to have seen it only once in the company of a woman, unless she's exceptional. Margaritas....

  Anxious about her all the time. Is she bored? Does she think I'm nice enough to her? Was she embarrassed by my shouting at the curator? Have I been idiotically extravagant enough for her to consider that I'm a man of the world? If she says to me: 'Don't bother about me,' is she sincere or merely being tactful? (a woman's ideal being to be served in small things and to serve in great). When I get back to my room an hour before dinner, having been alone with her without a break since ten o'clock in the morning, I feel an absolute physical need to lie down, heart thumping, convinced I've got a fever. A feeling of nervous exhaustion. A feeling of dispersion. A feeling of losing grip. It is three quarters of an hour since I left her, and the nervous vibrations inside me have not yet subsided. My handwriting has been quite changed by it all.