by Anne Serre
XI
With Madame Saintier, it’s done: they’re in love. The narrator, no matter how close an eye he keeps on himself or how often he tries to mend his ways, cannot help but pursue his secret goals. He’s in love, then — so it seems — with Madame Saintier, that is to say he desires her, she desires him and together they make frenzied love, as though searching for the answer to a question that has no answer. From time to time, he thinks of relinquishing his role as a narrator. He toys with the idea. Madame Saintier plays along with him. Were he to insist, for example, that Madame Saintier get a divorce so that he can live with her, he would cease to be a narrator and become a husband, which merits consideration.
He imagines not being a narrator. It’s tempting. He’s a grown man at last. He puts away the diseased part of his brain, stops wanting to wield power, ceases to have a secret, and, when he’s walking in the countryside, takes a serious interest in flowers, plants, geography, archeology, history. He’s willing to look ridiculous when chatting with someone who knows more about something than he does — he isn’t panic-stricken at feeling ridiculous. For Madame Saintier he makes one, then two, then four children, and he doesn’t play weird games with them; he puts his fantasies to one side and sets about raising the children properly. He shuts down his mental echo chamber. Like Véronique, Alain and Patricia, he has boundaries he will not cross. There are things, he declares, he has no wish to know, because like his friends he realizes that this is the only way to keep on top of things and stay sane. When he travels he does so intelligently, not in order to reengage with his dark, orgasmic dreams, but to learn useful, sterling things: a foreign language, a country’s social and political situation. Basically, he tells himself, I’ve sought nothing but enjoyment all these years.
I need to love someone who’s not at all my type. Someone stronger than me, someone better informed and more skilled than I am in my line of work. I need to find a supreme narrator. He casts about but finds no one, since the moment a supreme narrator comes along, he recoils in fright and hides in a corner. Well, well . . . he says to himself, it’s not force I dread, so much as competition . . . Someone as innocent as myself, up to my neck in rivalry? Anxious never to put myself in a situation where I wouldn’t be top dog? Well, I never . . .
You cut a sorry figure, narrator, you’re neither the noble Don Quixote nor noble at all. You’re a bit lame, in fact. But since we are good-natured and hospitable, we who have no name, we who are the name you seek but have still not found, we’re going to give you a hand. Perhaps. Or perhaps not. For the first time in your life, you’re beginning to feel a little less fearful, right? From now on, my friend, you’ve got to listen to us. You’ve got to stop playing your lousy tricks. “But will I still have fun?” sniffles the narrator. For starters, stop acting like a child. It won’t work. “And what about my sorry figure?” groans the narrator. “It’s remained so youthful and prepossessing that people always think I’m ten years younger than I am. It makes me so happy! Do I really have to . . .” Yes. Grow old. Stop clutching at your miserable, new-blown youth. Stop playing all these tricks, because if you carry on like this you’ll be in for a fall. A big one.” “Very well,” says the narrator, who has found his master, “I’m ready. What do I have to do? Where do I have to go? Can I bring a suitcase? Will I need a change of clothes? And how long will I be gone? Can I say goodbye to my friends? Will I be allowed to go and kiss them, and even Monsieur Saintier, who after all . . .” Stop making such a fuss.
XII
To take stock of his books, thoughts and remarks and make sure they’re not confined solely to the affluent classes, the narrator sometimes goes to visit the poor quarter of this or that city, where he encounters hunched bodies and tired, leaden faces. These are the measuring rods he employs to gauge his sentences. Faced with this sad, slow man doing his shopping or this anxious young mother, he asks himself: “Does my book also say something about you? Does it take your existence into account? Does it say anything of your thoughts, your preoccupations, your emotions? Does it somehow do you justice?” The answer is highly uncertain. Much of the time it seems to him: no, neither his book nor his conscience has taken these poor, tired people into account. And, as he makes his way back uptown and comes across people who are increasingly well-dressed, with fewer and fewer worries, with rested faces and well-groomed bodies, he no longer has anything to measure his book against.
So he goes back. And very often, faced with a man or a woman with an embittered mouth and a slow step, he says to himself despairingly that he might just as well throw his book away when he gets home. He doesn’t feel for these people the sympathy he feels for the lunatics with their astonishing speech, yet in their company he throws off his oversized narrator’s outfit like a coat that is much too heavy, and only then does he have the impression of belonging to the human race. He stops playing to the gallery. He stops pretending to be in love. He makes his way along the sidewalk without ceremony, without gloating, without puffing out his chest. He walks gravely at their side, musing that one day he will die and these people will die with him. Were he to fall here among them, were he to collapse in a heap on the sidewalk, which is covered this summer with beautiful, aniseed-colored pollen, they wouldn’t cry out or make a fuss. They would call an ambulance perhaps, without saying much. He’s tempted to fall here among them. Were he to fall one day, he would like it to be among them.
In the meantime, there’s his great story to be told. And there are moments when the landscape’s demand for the story is so vociferous as to be deafening. No matter where the narrator is walking, he can never find rest, since the rivers gleaming white in the sun and the haughty, high trees, the landlocked lakes and slender branches, the immovable summits and seemingly blameless meadows are all in conversation with him, demanding he intervene, in the same way that someone who is deeply unhappy will sit before you in grim-faced silence, hoping with all his soul that you will find the word that will free him to tell his story.
Whenever the narrator sits down by a green lake or a tall tree and is sad, as he is just now, the two of them — the lake and the narrator, or the tree and the narrator — remain there without speaking for quite some time. “Come on,” the narrator eventually pipes up, since he’s accustomed to speaking in public: “Instead of gaping at one another like stuck pigs, why don’t we try talking . . .” The leaves on the tree stir; a breath of wind ruffles the surface of the lake. “I don’t like these power games,” lets slip the narrator, flinging a pebble into the water. “I beg you, you might at least look at me.” And it’s now that — for all his sorrow and his many defeats, and despite the absence of proof that weighs on him like a verdict handed down by some mysterious court — he starts to sing the story for the tenth, the hundredth time. The words come in droves, clumsy, enchanted, nudging their way with difficulty through the nonconducting block of the narrator’s grief. But he has his herd under control, the narrator; he’s skilled, he knows his animals and how to call them.
Very weak that day, having just come back from the lake and his conversation with the trees, but having advanced a little all the same, just a few sentences, the narrator scans the countryside in search of a kindly presence. But of course! here she is, it’s Madame Saintier, walking in the mountains, searching for him perhaps, and bringing him sandwiches and something to drink. “I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she says, a little out of breath and laden with victuals like a mother at teatime, “but I thought . . .” Oh my, how weak he is! And nobody has noticed a thing! She hands him the bottle and he drinks from it like a teat. The weight of the teat is almost too heavy for his lips. She hands him a sandwich and he bites into it, unable to say a word. Seated beside him without touching him — heaven forbid, he would drop dead were someone to touch him now, and she understands this perfectly! — she pulls her skirt down over her knees and, narrowing her eyes, gazes into the distance without speaking.
Gradually he feels the warm
th returning. His body, threatened with extinction, slowly comes back to life. He can say a few words now, and it’s getting easier to drink from the bottle. She remains silent. The story continues to arrive. They spend a long evening by the water’s edge: she, who has understood everything and no longer wishes to murder him, quite the contrary; he, who has still not learned to love but feels able now to be loved, succored, assisted, on the strict understanding that there can be no word for this. Devotedly, she waits for him to speak first. She could wait like this for a hundred years without showing the least sign of impatience. He knows this, he can feel it, and is deeply grateful to her. Little by little, then, as his body slowly comes back to life and the blood once more begins to circulate in his deadened limbs, in the same way that he had grown taller and taller and stronger and stronger by chasing after his mother, he ceases to be an infant at the breast and is three, then seven, then twelve, then seventeen, then twenty-seven, and lo! he’s a grown man. Drinking from the bottle becomes very easy, swallowing the sandwich, too, and then speaking, as he says to her: “We should go now. It’s getting chilly.” How proud he is to be able to place his arm around this woman’s shoulders!
They make their way up through the fields. Aware that the narrator is prone to bouts of depression, and knowing how to avoid triggering one, she’s still mindful not to talk too much, while he, who feels ashamed of his affliction and tries to combat it, seeks cautiously, earnestly to bond with this woman. He says a few words, with a kind of bumbling self-assurance; she knows exactly how to respond, which draws him out. He carries on, a little less awkwardly than before, until their conversation resembles one of those interminable, mantra-like greetings that people in traditional societies exchange, without looking at one another, each time they meet. It’s not information they’re exchanging, still less are they showing off their wit: it’s a ball they’re passing between them, a ball they’re tossing gently back and forth like two people playing with night and day, while all around them the world achieves the amazing feat of remaining in a state of equilibrium, thanks to their exchange.
This must be what love is, thinks the narrator. How cautious they are! How careful not to clash! It’s as though they can only touch one another with intangible things. Yet here is the narrator capable of sitting down behind the steering wheel of a car, and Madame Saintier of snapping in her seat belt with panache. They drive along by the shore of the lake, past the dam and then on through a village like actual human beings, human beings who had gone to spend a pleasant afternoon swimming and lying beside a lake. They swig on a water bottle in the car, where some blue flowers she has picked for him are drying on the back seat. They stop at an inn for a drink. Up it comes, life, up it comes. Most of the narrator’s numbness has gone. Even his right hand is working. “My right hand’s working again,” he says. “That’s good,” she says.
XIII
Henceforth, he would much prefer not to be abandoned by the story, for it does him a world of good, airlifting him so high above the earth that he has the impression of writing like an angel. “I’m going to throw a party,” the narrator informs Madame Saintier. “If it’s all right with you, I’m going to throw a party at your chalet and invite a few friends, including my great friend Fanny. To bring Fanny to the chalet is to welcome into my heart, in glory, a part of the world I have long kept at arm’s length, have long been afraid of — so afraid, in fact, that I would go and hide in a corner to cry. Thanks to you,” he tells Madame Saintier, “a happy ending of sorts is taking shape. Because of the boundless hospitality you have shown me at the chalet, because we have fought together in the mountains, because I was terrified of your power, but also because we have stood our ground” (for the first time, the narrator says “we”) “and because you have turned your kind eyes on me, Fanny can now leave the country asylum and the edge of the woods where a death that is menacing because you can’t communicate with it prowls, and board a train in her red dress from which her skinny, nervous arms emerge.”
“This afternoon, we’ll go and meet her at the station, you and I. She’s about to step ashore on this newfound land where she knows I live and which I have often described to her at length.” “Is she curious about it?” asks Madame Saintier. “I don’t know,” replies the narrator, “at any rate, it’s the first time she has agreed to come, perhaps just to make me happy. But I don’t suppose she’ll stay long. She has other plans. No doubt she’ll tell us about them.” And the narrator thinks of the sky: will the weather be fine when Fanny arrives? It would be lovely if the sky were soft and blue with a few white clouds. It would be marvelous if it were mild and sunny, something like spring. “I think she’ll be bringing spring,” he says. Whereupon Madame Saintier (who has never met Fanny) tries on two or three outfits before deciding on the second one, while the narrator rushes about in a frenzy, sprucing up his room and laughing. “But Fanny couldn’t care less about tidy little interiors!” he says to himself, laughing even harder. It’s noon, then two, then three o’clock. They don’t know what to do, Madame Saintier and the narrator, to pass the time. On the station platform, a good thirty minutes before the train is due to arrive, he has the impression of acting out a very ancient scene, of being back in the world of his ancestors, where someone was waiting for someone on a platform one day and something momentous occurred, something that would determine the lives, sufferings and pleasures of generations to come. He’s a bit scared. He feels very lonely. Despite the friendly presence of Madame Saintier, and though he has a little more support than if he had been standing there on his own, he’s still alone in the world in waiting for Fanny.
She arrives, and it’s spring. In her red dress from which her skinny brown arms emerge, she walks toward them with a smile, holding a small suitcase in her right hand. She doesn’t say anything earth-shattering. Oh no, it’s way better than that. She says things like: “Yes, I had a pleasant journey.” “Are you tired?” asks the narrator with somewhat exaggerated civility. “No, no, just a bit thirsty.” Delicately they take their places on metal chairs on a café terrace, and the narrator, overawed by the coming of spring, feels swaying with joy inside him a child’s rattle, a carillon of bells.
As they make their way from the café to the chalet, he hears himself showing the sights to Fanny, pointing out a church, a garden, a fountain. She listens, while hanging from her arm is the small, heavy suitcase she doesn’t find heavy at all. She’s neither hot nor cold, and when you think she’s about to laugh, she doesn’t, just as when she speaks it’s never to say something the narrator had divined in advance. “That’s what spring is,” he muses, “something continually surprising and always true.” He shows her the roundabouts and roads. He talks far too much, of course, but he’s feeling a bit emotional. She barely looks at him, and she certainly doesn’t touch him with so much as a fingertip, not once. She does something quite remarkable: while he’s hastily delivering his little introductions and welcoming addresses, she doesn’t once interrupt him. She always responds, but only when he has reached the end of his interminable sentence, and when she disagrees, she does so quietly, gently.
At the chalet, while she goes up to her room to unpack, he retires to his, so excited and so overcome with emotion that he paces around the room four times, smiling and rubbing his hands, straightening a picture, pulling up the blanket, moving an object on the dresser a few inches, then putting it back as it was. He’s only half listening. He doesn’t want to eavesdrop or spy on her as he does with the other guests, but he can’t be altogether deaf, of course, to the coming of spring. Ten minutes, he tells himself, after glancing at his watch. Ten minutes, then I’ll go back down. In the meantime, he flings open the window and gazes out at the horizon, which he knows by heart. “Did you buy the house for the view?” he had asked Madame Saintier on his first day there, when he discovered the huge panorama of blue mountains. “Among other things,” she had replied.
Fanny’s room is at the other end of the
chalet. “What’s she doing?” he whispers to Madame Saintier, who’s making her way silently along the corridor. “She’s listening to music, I think,” Madame Saintier replies. “Well, I never . . .” murmurs the narrator, who rubs his hands and doesn’t know quite what to do with his ten fingers, his footsteps, his flaming heart or the timorousness that has taken hold of him since the arrival of spring. As for Fanny, here she is, at suppertime, coming down with great naturalness and simplicity to the dining room. She doesn’t realize what an event she is, thinks the narrator. Whenever I’m facing outward in my story, she has her back turned; and when I’m the one with my back turned, she faces outward. Whenever I go off into the mountains, she stays behind, here in the valley; and when she’s the one who goes off into the mountains, I’m the one who stays behind. It’s a movement that goes on outside us, over which we have no control. She’s the other side of my face, as I am of hers. “Relatively speaking,” declares Fanny, with just a hint of irony. “Yes, of course, relatively speaking,” the narrator repeats hastily, a little shamefaced.
XIV
The following evening, however, the party doesn’t at all turn out to his advantage. It’s his friends who, like Fanny, had arrived at the chalet the evening before, who begin: “Narrator, don’t put us in your story,” they say, “we have no wish to be there.” If he tries to explain that a story is always collective, that they are necessarily involved in putting it together: “Well, in that case,” they declare rudely, “we may not wish to remain friends with you any longer. For you see, narrator, we have our own lives and thoughts, our own feelings, every bit as delicate as yours, if not more so, and to find ourselves turned into forms which, I can assure you, bear very little resemblance to ourselves, is most unpleasant. We have no wish, narrator, to be turned into characters. We loathe the idea of becoming characters.” “That’s only natural,” murmurs the narrator. “But without you, I’m dead.” “At least change our names,” protests Alain. “I don’t remember saying that,” murmurs Madame Saintier. “It’s really not fair,” declares Fanny, “that I and others whom you claim so fervently to love are the very people you fleece. You’re a wolf, narrator, and I detest your story. What on earth were you thinking when you set me down in a ‘country asylum’? Who do you take me for? How dare you turn me into a sort of paper puppet!” “But that’s the whole point,” mumbles the narrator, “it’s not you I have painted, it’s an image that you call to mind.” “And this body you describe. How dare you describe my body and my arms and my hands!” exclaims Fanny. “Because sometimes I bore that body,” grumbles the narrator. “Oh you did, did you? And why exactly did you bear it? So that you could make use of it perhaps? So that you could take possession of it? “Perhaps,” says the narrator. “Perhaps I do nothing cleanly. Perhaps, in spite of myself, I can only act inside a book.”