Soon the sounds of the street would start up, allowing me to read from the qualitative scale of their sonorities the constantly rising degree of heat amid which they resounded. But in this heat, which a few hours later would be saturated with the scent of cherries, what I found (as when replacing just one ingredient of a medicine by another is enough to change it from a tonic and a stimulant into a depressant) was no longer desire for women but anguish at Albertine’s departure. Moreover the memory of all my other desires was impregnated as much with her and with suffering as with the memory of pleasure. Even Venice, where I had thought that I would find her presence intrusive (no doubt because I felt confusedly that I would find myself needing it there), no longer tempted me, now that Albertine was no longer alive. Albertine had seemed to me an obstacle placed between me and all other things, because for me she had been their container, and it was from her as from a jar that I was able to take them. Now that this jar was broken, I was no longer able to face grasping them, there was not a single one of them from which I did not turn away, despondent, preferring not to taste of it. So that my separation from her was far from opening up for me the field of all possible pleasures that I had believed to be obstructed by her presence. Moreover the obstacle to traveling and to enjoying life that her presence may well have really been had only, as always, hidden other obstacles, which resurfaced intact, now that this one had disappeared. In similar fashion, previously, when some friendly visit prevented me from working, even if I remained alone the following day, I did not work any harder. If an illness, a duel or a runaway horse bring us face to face with death, we realize how richly we would have enjoyed the life, the sexual pleasure and the unknown lands that we are about to be deprived of. And once the danger is past, what we fall back on is the same monotonous existence where we knew none of all this.
Of course these very short nights cannot last long. In the end winter must return, when I would no longer fear the memory of driving with her all through the night until the all-too-hasty dawn. But would the first frosts not bring back to me, preserved in their ice, the germ of my first desires, when I sent the car for her at midnight, when it seemed to take so long before I heard her ring the door-bell, which I could now wait in vain for all eternity to hear? Would I not gather from them the germ of my earlier anxiety, when twice I believed that she would never return? At that time I saw her but rarely; but even the intervals that there were between Albertine’s visits then, making her suddenly emerge from several weeks plunged in the depths of an unknown life which I could not attempt to possess, reassured me and pacified me by constantly interrupting the first inklings of my jealousy and preventing them from fusing into a solid mass in my heart. Just as they had been able to soothe me in those days, so retrospectively those intervals bore the imprint of suffering, now that I was no longer indifferent to the unknown things that she might have done during those periods, and above all, now that no visit from her would ever come again; so that those January evenings when she used to come, and which I had for this reason come to find so sweet, would now fill me not only with their bitter north wind but also with gusts of anxiety which I had not felt at the time, and which would return to me the first seeds of my love, but now grown toxic. And when I thought that I would once again see the start of the cold weather, which had always seemed so sad to me since the days of Gilberte and our games on the Champs-Elysées; and when I thought that evenings would return like that snowy evening when I had waited for Albertine in vain long into the night, then, like an invalid with a weak chest anxious for his body, what concerned me in my soul and what I still feared most at those moments, trying to spare my grief and my heart, was the return of this freezing weather, and I told myself that the hardest period for me to get through would probably be the winter. Since her memory was linked to every season, the only way of forgetting it would have been to forget all of them, even if it meant that I would have to learn to recognize them all over again, like an old man who has suffered from hemiplegia, learning to read again; I would have had to renounce the whole universe. Only a real death of my self, I told myself (were it not impossible), would be capable of consoling me for her death. I did not realize that the death of the self is neither impossible nor extraordinary; it is accomplished without our knowledge and, if necessary, without our consent every day, and I would suffer from the repetition of every sort of day that not only nature but accidental circumstances or more conventional arrangements could introduce into a season. Soon the date when I had gone to Balbec that last summer would return, when my love, which was not yet inseparable from jealousy and which was not concerned with what Albertine might be doing all day long, had so far to go before becoming a love so different and so special in its latter stages, so unique that this last year, when Albertine’s destiny had started to change and had come to an end, appeared to me as full, diverse and vast as a century. Then there would be the memory of later days, but from earlier years; Sundays when the weather was bad and yet everyone had gone out, into the bleak emptiness of the afternoon, when the noise of the wind and the rain would in former times have incited me to act as a “philosopher in the garret,”20 how anxious I would become as I saw the hour approach when Albertine had so unexpectedly come to see me and had caressed me for the first time, breaking off when Françoise had brought the lamp in, at that time, now dead twice over, when it was Albertine who was curious to learn all about me, when my affection for her could legitimately entertain such high hopes! And even, later in the season, those glorious evenings when the sculleries and the girls’ boarding schools, like chapels with their doors ajar and bathed in a golden dust, allow their demi-goddesses to garland the streets and bring their private conversations so close to us that we feverishly desire to penetrate their mythical existence, now recalled nothing more than Albertine’s affections, whose presence by my side prevented me from approaching them.
Moreover, to the memory of these purely natural hours I would have to add the mental landscape which makes of them something unique. When, later, I was to hear the goatherd’s horn in the first days of fine, almost Italian weather, the same sunshine would now mingle with its light the anxiety of knowing that Albertine was at the Trocadéro, perhaps with Léa and the two girls, now the familiar, domestic and almost conjugal sweetness of a spouse, however cloying, whom Françoise was going to bring back home. I had felt that my pride was bolstered by this telephone message from Françoise, transmitting the homage paid by Albertine in returning with her. I had been mistaken. If it had intoxicated me, it was because it had made me feel that the woman whom I loved really belonged to me, lived only for me, and, even at a distance, without my needing to worry about her, looked on me as her lord and master, returning at a snap of my fingers. And thus this telephone message had been a package of sweetmeats sent to me from the farthest reaches of the Trocadéro region, which happened to contain sources of happiness irradiating me with their pain-killing molecules and healing balm, finally restoring me to such sweet and carefree spirits that all I had to do—yielding unrestricted by the slightest care to Wagner’s music—was await Albertine’s undoubted return, feeling a coolness and a total lack of impatience in which I ought to have recognized happiness, but failed to do so. And the cause of my happiness in her returning, obeying me, and belonging to me, was to be found, not in pride, but in my love. I would have found it pointless now to be able to snap my fingers and order fifty women to return, even from the Indies, let alone the Trocadéro. But that day, sensing Albertine approaching me submissively, while I was alone in my room playing music, I had breathed in, scattered like dust on a sunbeam, one of those substances which are good for the soul, as others are healthy for the body. Then, half an hour later, there had been Albertine’s arrival, then, afterward, the drive with Albertine, an arrival and a drive which I had considered boring because for me they were guaranteed in advance, but which because of this very guarantee, as soon as Françoise had telephoned me to say that she was bringing her
back, had filled the following hours with a golden peace, had turned them as it were into a second day entirely different from the first, because its emotional foundations were entirely different, making the day quite unique, adding its original touch to the variety of those that I had previously known, a day which I could never have imagined—as we are unable to imagine a restful summer’s day if such days have not existed in the calendar of days that we have experienced—a day which I could not be absolutely certain to recall, for its tranquility was now overlaid with the suffering that I had not felt at the time. But much later, when I gradually moved backward through the times that I had spent on the way toward loving Albertine, when my cauterized heart was able to detach itself from Albertine, long after her death, then, when I was at last able to recall without suffering the day when Albertine had gone shopping with Françoise instead of staying at the Trocadéro, I remembered that day pleasurably as one belonging to a mental season which I had not previously known; I at last remembered it while no longer adding suffering to it, but on the contrary, rather as we remember certain summer days which we found too hot at the time, and where it is only after the event that we extract from their alloys the pure, hallmarked gold and the indelible lapis lazuli.
In this way these few years not only imposed upon the memory of Albertine, which made them so unhappy, the changing colors, varying modalities and dying embers of their seasons and their hours, from their late June afternoons to their winter evenings, from moonlight over the sea to dawn on returning home, from snow in Paris to autumn leaves at Saint-Cloud,21 but also transformed the particular ideas that I had successively formed of Albertine, of the physical appearance with which I pictured her at each of these moments, and of the greater or lesser frequency with which I saw her in any particular season, making the season itself seem more or less diffuse or concentrated, of the hours of anxious waiting that she had provoked, of the desire that I felt for her at certain moments, of hopes nourished and then lost; all this modified the nature of my retrospective sadness just as much as the impressions of light and scent which were associated with it, and complemented each of the solar years that I had lived through and which even with just their springs, autumns and winters were already so sad because of their memory being inseparable from her, augmenting it with a sort of sentimental year where the hours were not defined by the position of the sun but by time spent waiting for a rendezvous; where the length of the days or the changes in temperature were measured by the rise in my hopes, the progress of our intimacy, the gradual transformation of her face, the places she had visited, the frequency and style of the letters that she had sent me during her absence, her greater or lesser eagerness to meet me when she had returned. And finally if each of these changes of weather and season yielded a different Albertine, it was not only through the evocation of similar moments. But we should not forget that, even before I fell in love, each season had made a different man of me, with different desires because he had different perceptions, a man who, having dreamed of nothing but storms and cliffs the night before, awoke ready to leave for Italy, once the indiscreet light of springtime had let the scent of roses seep through the cracks in the shutters of his uneven slumbers. And even when I was in love, had not my changing mental atmosphere and the varying pressure of my beliefs from one day to the next diminished the visibility of my own love, was it not one day high and rising, another day steady and fair, and another, falling to storm point? For we exist only through what we possess, and we possess only what is actually present, since so many of our memories, moods and ideas leave us and travel to faraway places, where we lose sight of them! Then we can no longer enter them into the accounting system whose sum is our whole being. But they find secret ways of returning within us. And some evenings, having fallen asleep hardly missing Albertine any longer—we can miss only what we remember—I awoke to find that a whole fleet of memories had sailed into my clearest consciousness and had become marvelously distinct. Then I wept for the things which I saw so well and which for me the day before had been utterly absent. Albertine’s name and her death had changed their meaning; her betrayals had suddenly resumed their old significance.
How could she have appeared dead to me, when now in order to think of her I had at my disposal only the same images that I saw alternately when she was alive: bent over the swiftly turning mythological wheel of her bicycle, harnessed on rainy days into the vulcanized warrior’s tunic that made her bosom bulge, her turban-helmeted head swarming with serpents, as she spread terror throughout the streets of Balbec; on the evenings when we took our champagne out into the woods of Chantepie, her changed, provocative voice, her face lit by a pale fire reddening only at the cheekbones, which, since I found it difficult to see in the car in the darkness, I drew toward the moonlight and which I tried now in vain to recall or to visualize in the endless darkness. A small statuette in our crossing to the island, or a peaceful figure with her coarse-grained skin as she sat at the pianola, she was by turns swift and stormy, provocative and diaphanous, or an unmoved and smiling angel of music. Each Albertine was attached to a moment, to a date where I was transported when I visualized her again. Then again, past moments do not stay still; they maintain in our memory the momentum which was driving them toward the future—toward a future which itself has already become the past—dragging us in their wake. I had never caressed Albertine in her wet-weather rubber-wear, I wanted to ask her to remove her armor, in order to explore with her the love of life under canvas, the fraternity of travel. But it was no longer possible, she was dead. And then again, for fear of corrupting her, I had pretended never to understand her on those evenings when she seemed to offer me certain pleasures; pleasures however which, had I not adopted this attitude, she might not have sought elsewhere, and which now excited the most frenzied desire in me. I would not have felt them in the same way if they had been provided by someone else, but I could travel the whole world over in search of the girl who might do so without ever meeting her, for Albertine was dead. It seemed that I had to choose between two facts and decide which was true, so blatantly did the death of Albertine—which arose for me out of a reality which I had not known, her life in Touraine—contradict all the thoughts that linked me to her, my desires, my regrets, my tenderness, my rage and my jealousy. Such a wealth of memories borrowed from her life’s inventory, such a profusion of emotions evoking or involving her life, seemed to make it unbelievable that Albertine could be dead. Such a profusion of feelings, for while my memory preserved my affection it also preserved its whole variety. It was not Albertine alone who was only a succession of moments, it was also myself. My love for her had not been simple: to curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to my feelings of almost domestic sweetness, feelings sometimes of indifference, sometimes of jealous rage. I was not one single man, but the march-past of a composite army manned, depending on the time of day, by passionate, indifferent or jealous men—jealous men who were never jealous of the same woman. And doubtless this would be the source of an eventual cure, which I did not desire. The individuals in a crowd may without our noticing be replaced one by one, and others again may come to suppress or supplement them, so that at the end of the day a change has been accomplished which it would be impossible to imagine in a single, unitary being. The complexity of my love and my identity multiplied and diversified my suffering. And yet they could still be classified under the two heads whose alternation had ruled the whole life of my love for Albertine, ruled in turns by confidence and jealous suspicion.
If (bearing as I did the double yoke of the present and the past) I found it so difficult to accept that Albertine, who was so alive within me, was dead, perhaps it was just as paradoxical that my suspicion of misdeeds committed by Albertine, who today was stripped of the flesh that had enjoyed them and who was no longer capable of them or responsible for them, should excite in me such suffering, which I would happily have blessed if I could have seen in it the proof of the spir
itual presence of a materially non-existent person, instead of the inevitably fading reflection of impressions which she had caused me in the past. A woman no longer capable of experiencing pleasure with other women should no longer have excited my jealousy, if only I could have brought my affections up to date. But this was impossible, because they could locate their object, Albertine, only in memories where she still lived on. Since at any moment when I thought of her, I resuscitated her, her infidelities could never be those of a dead woman, for the moment when she had committed them became the present moment, not only for Albertine but also for whichever of my selves was suddenly enlisted to contemplate her. So that no anachronism could ever separate the indissoluble couple where each new guilty woman was immediately matched with a woeful, jealous, but always contemporaneous, lover. During her last few months I had kept her locked up in my house. But now in my imagination Albertine was free; she used this freedom ill, she prostituted herself to all and sundry. Previously I had never stopped thinking about the uncertain future that unfolded before us, and I tried to read it. And now what was cast before me like the shadow of the future—as worrying as the future, because it was as uncertain, as difficult to decipher and as mysterious but even more cruel, because unlike the future, it did not allow me the possibility or the illusion of intervening to change it, and also because it would unfold as far as my life itself, without my companion being there to alleviate the suffering that it caused me—was no longer Albertine’s future, but her past. Her past? This is not the right term, since in jealousy there is neither past nor future, for what it imagines is always present.
The Fugitive Page 10