That Mad Ache & Translator

  “Oh, I’m so miserable,” he thought, “so let’s do it up right.” Having emerged as the victor of the drunken brawl, he played his song eight times in a row, to the general consternation of nearly everyone present, and then had to hand over his identity card to the bartender, as he was at that point completely stripped of cash. He staggered back to his apartment at three in the morning, arriving exhausted but sobered up by the brisk morning air. In a word, he was being a typical young male. At times, anguish can elicit just as much strength, vivacity, and élan as can euphoria.

  Waiting in front of the stairs to his building was Diane, sitting in her Rolls. He had already recognized it from afar, and had nearly done an about-face. But what changed his mind was the thought of her driver, reeling from sleepiness, having had to sit there for hours, waiting for Madame’s boyfriend to come traipsing home whenever he felt like it. So Antoine walked up, opened the door for her, and Diane stepped wordlessly out. She had put her makeup back on in the car, and the rays of dawn not only made her mouth too red but also gave her face, with its well calculated look of indifference, an unintended appearance of immaturity, disorientation, and confusion. And indeed, even in her own eyes she was making a grievous error in coming in the wee hours to try to rekindle her lover’s ardor, just as, two years earlier, she had made a grievous error by falling in love with him. It was simply that whereas this error had so far merely echoed in her life like background music in a movie, persistent but discreet, now it was turning into a cruel and inexorable drumroll.

  She could just see herself as she got out of the car, as she took the hand that Antoine extended her, as she made a last-ditch attempt to savor, for just a few more moments, playing the role of Woman Who Is Loved, before being suddenly plunged into the unknown and terrifying role of Woman Who Has Been Spurned. And just as she was releasing her driver to go home to sleep, she cast a weirdly palsy wink in his direction, almost as if to convey her desperate knowledge that he was about to be the cherished witness of these closing moments of her happiness.

  “Am I disturbing You?”, she asked as they climbed the stairs. Antoine shook his head, opened the door of his room for her, and stepped aside. This was only the second time that she had ever been here. The first time was when they had just met and Diane had found it amusing to spend their first night together in the apartment of this awkward and rather shabbily dressed young man. After that, though, she had offered him the grand lit in Rue Cambon, with all its luxury and pomposity, for this little room, after all, was pretty dingy and uninviting. But right now, she would have given anything in the world to be able to sleep in this rickety bed, with her clothes draped over the hideous chair that matched it. Antoine closed the shutters, switched on the red lamp, and ran his hand across his face. He was unshaven, he seemed to have lost weight in just those few hours, and overall, he had that scruffy look that grief so often brings out in men. And Diane no longer knew what she wanted to say to him.

  Ever since he had precipitously bolted off, she had been turning one phrase over and over in her mind: “He owes me an explanation.” But when you really came down to it, what did he owe her? What could anyone really owe anyone else? She sat down very erectly on the bed, despite feeling terribly tempted to lie down on it and to say, “Antoine, I just felt the need to see you, I was worried, but I’m so sleepy now, come to bed with me.” But Antoine kept on standing in the middle of the room, waiting, and everything about his stance suggested that he wanted to clarify this situation as soon as possible, which is to say, to bring it to a crashing halt, and in so doing, to wound her terribly.

  “That was a rather abrupt exit You made,” said Diane.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  They were speaking like two actors, and he felt it. He was waiting to summon up enough inner strength, enough resolve, to say to her — uttering the poorly written but crucial line in his script — “It’s all over between us.” He was vaguely hoping that she would have some harsh words for him, that she would bring up Lucile, and that her anger would give him enough strength to be brutal. But instead, she seemed gentle, resigned, almost fearful, and for a moment he thought to himself in horror that he really didn’t know this woman at all — and worse yet, that he hadn’t ever really tried to know her. Maybe her devotion to him was for entirely different reasons than he had ever thought. Maybe she saw more in him than just an elusive free spirit who was good in bed. He’d always taken it for granted that she clung to him solely because of her sensual needs and her wounded pride (after all, she’d never managed to squeeze him under her thumb, as she had all her other lovers) — but what if there were other hidden factors behind the scenes? What if, all of a sudden, out of the blue, Diane were to explode in tears? But that would be inconceivable. Diane’s myth, the legend of her invulnerability and of her unflappability, was too solidly anchored in Paris, and he’d heard it repeated so very many times. For a few seconds, these two human beings nearly peered into each other’s core — but then Diane opened her purse, took out her gold compact, and started daubing on more makeup. Although this was a desperate act by a woman in panic, he saw it as a crass act by a woman without feelings.

  “What’s more, Lucile doesn’t love me, so I must simply be unlovable,” he concluded in his mind, in a momentary burst of insincere self-loathing of a sort that unhappiness often brings on, and he lit up a cigarette.

  He flicked his match into the fireplace — an annoyed and impatient gesture, which she assumed was due to boredom, and which aroused her anger. She forgot about Antoine and her passion for him, and her only concern became herself, Diane Mirbel, and the cruel fashion in which a man, her lover, had abandoned her for no apparent reason at the high point of a soirée, and in front of all her friends. She, too, reached for a cigarette with a trembling hand, and he offered her a match. The smoke had an unpleasant acrid taste. She had smoked too much and she suddenly realized that the chaotic and polyphonic racket that for the last few minutes had been driving her up a wall without her having even consciously noticed it was simply the chirping of birds in the street. They were awakening with the dawn and were greeting, delirious with joy, the first rays of sunlight to reach Paris.

  She looked at Antoine and said, “Might I be told the reason for Your rushing off that way? Or is that none of my business?”

  “I can tell You,” replied Antoine, directly returning her gaze, and just then a strange little expression that she’d never before seen distorted his mouth. “I’m in love with Lucile.” “Lucile Saint-Léger,” he then stupidly added, as if there could possibly have been the slightest doubt about who it was.

  Diane’s gaze fell. This evening’s purse had a little scratch on top. This was unacceptable. She stared very intensely at the rip, seeing nothing other than it, and trying with all her might to focus her thoughts uniquely on it. “Now where in the world could I have done that ?” She kept on waiting for her heart to start up again, for a sudden flash of daybreak, for anything at all — a phone ringing, a bomb dropping, a voice screaming in the street — to come and drown out the silent shouting inside her head. But nothing came, and the birds outside the window kept right on idiotically twittering, and this frenzy, this hubbub, was simply hateful.

  “Well, well…”, said Diane. “You might have told me about this a little earlier.”

  “I didn’t really know it,” replied Antoine. “I wasn’t sure, I thought I was just jealous. But the point is, she doesn’t love me — that’s clear enough now — and I’m going to be miserable for good…”

  He could have gone on. This was actually the first time he’d ever spoken to anyone about Lucile, and it gave him a bittersweet kind of pleasure that made him forget, with typically masculine obliviousness, that it was Diane that he was telling all this to. She, on the other hand, retained but a single word of what he had said: “jealous”.

  “What would You be jealous about? One can only be jealous about what is one’s own, as You’ve told me a dozen times… So, w
ere You her lover?”

  Antoine did not reply. Anger began to surge into Diane, and to liberate her.

  “Are You jealous of Blassans-Lignières? Or does his little cutie have another two or three lovers on the side? In any case, my poor Antoine, You’d be hard put to maintain that girl’s lifestyle on Your salary, if that’s of any consolation to You.”

  “That’s hardly the point,” he snapped back. And all at once he hated Diane for judging Lucile in just the same way as he himself had done four hours earlier. He wouldn’t permit her to cast aspersions on Lucile. He’d told her the truth and now she should simply go away, should leave him alone to commune with his memory of Lucile at the Pré-Catelan, her eyes brimming with tears. Had she cried solely because he was hurting her wrists, or was it because she cared about him?

  “Where did You meet up with her?” asked Diane’s voice, floating in the distance. “Here?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Afternoons.” And he remembered how Lucile’s face looked at the height of their passion, and her body, her voice, everything that now he’d lost through his stupidity and stubbornness, and he felt like kicking himself. There would be no more footfalls of Lucile in the stairwell, no more lazy languishing in the brilliant afternoon sun, no more Rouge et Noir scenes… Nothing was left at all. And the look he gave Diane was so wistful and so full of yearning that she recoiled from him.

  “Although I never really thought that You loved me,” she said, “I did give You credit for at least a certain degree of respect for me. But now, I fear…”

  He looked at her without a drop of empathy and all at once in his eyes she detected an implacably hard male world, a world where a man was unable to respect a mistress whom he didn’t love. Perhaps she was even giving him too much credit. Most likely, Antoine did respect her in some vague sense, but deep down she must be, in his eyes, the cheapest of whores, for she had shared her bed with him for two years without insisting that he love her nor that he tell her he did, and she had never even said it to him herself. And now, too late, she began to see in Antoine’s yellow eyes the harsh childhood he had suffered — brutal, austere, and utterly devoid of, and therefore starved for, words of love, scenes of affection, exclamations of tenderness. Reserve and elegance such as hers would mean nothing to someone with such a background. And she instinctively knew that if she were to flop herself down on this bed as she so wished to do now, and were to beg him to join her, he would be taken aback and vaguely disgusted. After all, he was used to her socialite persona, to the face that she had been showing him now for two full years, and he wouldn’t be interested in seeing another one.

  There was no doubt that her haughty demeanor was now costing her dearly. But she was now also discovering that this pride that was holding her erectly seated on Antoine’s bed at dawn, this pride that was so central to and so inseparable from her aristocratic persona that she had almost forgotten it existed, was her clearest, most intimate, most precious ally. Like a born horseman who unexpectedly discovers that his thirty years of riding have just allowed him to dodge the wheels of an onrushing bus, Diane, astonished, was witnessing this pride, this neglected or at best seldom exploited gift of hers, as it spared her from the worst fate possible — namely, coming to despise herself as a result of Antoine’s withdrawal of his love.

  “Why tell me this today,” she asked softly, “when You probably could have continued in the same way for a long time? I didn’t suspect anything much was going on between the two of you. Or rather, I had stopped thinking it was.”

  “I guess I’m just too miserable to be able to lie,” replied Antoine. And he realized, to his surprise, that it was true — he would easily have been able to lie all night to Diane, consoling her and regaining her confidence, if only he’d been sure of seeing Lucile again the next day, or if he’d been sure of her love for him. Such bliss would allow him to do anything and, for a brief moment, he understood Lucile — her glibness and her ability to cover up, for which he had so severely rebuked her in these past few weeks. But now it was too late, too late — he had mortally wounded her, and now she wouldn’t ever want to have anything more to do with him. But then what on earth was this other woman doing here in his apartment?

  Diane, sensing the drift of his thoughts, blindly struck out at him, lacing her acid words with honey. “And so what becomes of Your dear Sarah in all of this? Has she finally died — for keeps, this time?”

  Antoine said nothing in reply, but simply stared at her in pure rage — a look that she far preferred to that vaguely friendly but ever so distant look that he had been giving her only moments earlier. She was homing in on the very worst in him — his lack of empathy, his nastiness, his unforgivable qualities — and this afforded her some slight relief.

  “I think it would be best if You left now,” he said, after a long silence. “I wouldn’t want us to part in some ugly scene, for You’ve always been so kind to me.”

  “I have never been kind to anyone,” said Diane as she rose to her feet. “It’s just that in certain circumstances, I found You to be quite good company. That’s all.”

  She was holding herself perfectly erect in front of him, looking directly at him, and he had no way of knowing that it would have taken only the tiniest trace of a fond memory or of pity to cross his face for her to suddenly collapse in tears in his arms. But he felt no nostalgia for what he was leaving behind, and so she merely offered him her hand and watched him mechanically bend over to kiss it — and the expression of unbearable pain that crossed her face as for the final time she glimpsed that blond nape of his neck had already totally vanished as he raised his head. She whispered “Au revoir,” bumped herself a little as she passed through the door frame, and then slipped into the stairwell.

  Antoine lived three floors up, and it was only after descending two flights of stairs that she stopped, turning for a moment towards the moist and dirty wall of the landing, and pressed against it her celebrated face and her elegant, slender hands, now no longer of the slightest use to her.

  CHAPTER 16

  Antoine spent two weeks all alone. He walked a great deal, not speaking to anyone, and wasn’t even surprised when he would run into someone he knew, some lady in Diane’s coterie of friends, and was completely snubbed by her. He knew the rules of the game: having been brought by Diane into a small social set that was not his own, he was automatically expelled therefrom the moment that he left her. This was the protocol, and the perfunctory friendliness that Claire extended to him one evening when he encountered her by chance struck him as quite exceptional. In any case, she mentioned that Lucile and Charles were vacationing in Saint-Tropez, and she didn’t seem in the least surprised to find out that Antoine knew nothing of it. It seemed perfectly natural that in casting out one woman, he should have irreparably lost the other one, too, forever. This realization actually made Antoine chuckle a little bit, although these days he felt less and less inclined toward laughter.

  A snatch of a poem by Apollinaire kept running through his head: “Though ambling through mon beau Paris, I have no heart to perish here. The herds of buses, bellowing…” He didn’t recall how it went on, and made no effort to track it down. And it was quite true that Paris was taking on a beauty ever more heartbreaking, blue, blonde, and languid, and it was also true that he no more had the heart to die here than to live here. When he thought about it, in fact, everything was for the best. Lucile was on the coast of the Mediterranean, which she’d told him she adored, so she was doubtless very happy once again, for that was the kind of life she was made for, and perhaps she was even sleeping with some handsome local lad behind Charles’ back. As for Diane, she was going around in public with a young Cuban diplomat; he’d seen a charming snapshot of the couple at the opening performance of some ballet in some newspaper. Antoine himself was reading, not drinking at all, and once in a while he would get all twisted up in pangs of rage in the middle of the night when thinking about Lucile. All of this struck him as being clearly inevit
able.

  Hope had fled, for his memory gave him no reason to have any. The only images he could recall any longer were Lucile’s passion in bed, and his own as well, but these recollections tore him apart rather than comforting him, for one can never be totally sure of how intense one’s partner’s pleasure is — nor, more troublingly, can one ever be sure that some stranger won’t one day come along and bring an equal or even greater pleasure to one’s former lover. Although he was convinced that he would never again know such carnal bliss as he’d known with Lucile, he had a hard time believing that she felt that way about him.

  Sometimes he would once again see her haunted face that day when he had come home so late, and he would once again hear her saying, “You know, Antoine, I love you — and it’s for keeps.” And each time this happened, he would feel that he’d blown his chances that day, that he should have focused a little more on her mind and a little less on her body, and he kept thinking that although he had obviously possessed Lucile totally on the physical level, he had completely overlooked her essence as a human being. To be sure, they had laughed uproariously together, and shared laughter was a sine qua non for true love — but that in itself was not enough. All he needed to convince himself of this was to replay in his mind the strange sense of wistfulness that had suddenly overcome him right in the middle of his fury that last evening at the Pré-Catelan when he had spotted tears filling Lucile’s eyes. For a man and a woman to really love each other fully, it wasn’t enough for them to have given each other moments of ecstasy, or for them to have made each other laugh uproariously — they also had to have made each other suffer. Of course, Lucile might well disagree with this. Actually, at this point, she wouldn’t agree or disagree with anything he said, for she was no longer part of his life. And he would then suddenly cut off this internal dialogue, this pointless rehashing of things with her, which he went through twenty times a day, and he would abruptly rise from the spot where he had abruptly sat down while walking through Paris. There was no end in sight to this torment.