That Mad Ache & Translator

  In fact, their relationship had in large part been determined by two emotional shocks of roughly equal importance: for her, it had been Antoine’s delayed return that famous afternoon, while for him it had been Lucile’s refusal to move into his apartment on the day Charles came back from New York. And Lucile, who did not have a great deal of self-confidence, as is true of many carefree-seeming people, had the confused belief that one day, Antoine would not return, whereas Antoine, for his part, had the confused belief that one night, Lucile would betray him. And almost as if with forethought, they kept these two wounds open, though their happiness should have healed them, much as the survivor of some terrible accident takes pleasure, after six months of painful healing, in reopening with a fingernail the very last scab in order to be able to keep on savoring the perfect smoothness of the rest of their body. Each of them needed, in their own way, a thorn in their side — he, simply because that was his deepest nature, and she, because this shared bliss was too alien for her.

  Antoine woke up early each morning, and his body sensed, before his mind did, the presence of Lucile’s body in the bed, and desired it, even before he had opened his eyes. Half asleep yet smiling, he would slide over to her, and often it took her moaning or the clenching of her hands against his back to finally strip away the last vestiges of his dreams from his mind. Like certain men and many children, Antoine slept deeply and soundly, and there was nothing he loved more than these slow and voluptuous awakenings. As for Lucile, her first awareness of the world each morning was the sensation of being made love to, and she would find herself drifting into consciousness with a mixture of surprise, pleasure, and a vague anger at this half-rape, which deprived her of all of her traditional rituals of waking up — opening her eyes, closing them again, rejecting the new day or else welcoming it — all the confused and deliciously private little conflicts in her soul. Sometimes she’d try to cheat by waking up first and thereby outwitting him, but since Antoine never slept longer than six hours, he always beat her to the punch, and he would just laugh at the annoyed expression on her face, taking enormous pleasure in ripping this woman from the deepest recesses of sleep and plunging her so swiftly into the deepest recesses of love. Most of all, he savored that moment when she would open her eyes, looking lost and uncertain, and then, on recognizing him, would reclose them almost as if under duress, at the very same time as she was tightly winding her arms around his neck.

  Lucile’s suitcases were perched on top of the wardrobe, and inside it, near his two suits, were hanging only those two or three dresses that Antoine liked best. In the bathroom, by contrast, there was plenty of evidence of a woman’s presence, in the form of a plethora of little jars — most of them never even opened — that Lucile had stashed away. While he was shaving, Antoine would let fly one wisecrack after another about the uselessness of herbal face masks to stave off wrinkles, or jabs along those lines. Lucile would counter, saying that one day he would be glad to have such things, that he was aging before her eyes, and that he was in fact terribly ugly. He would kiss her. She would laugh. Paris that summer was extraordinarily beautiful.

  Each morning he would set off for work at 9:30, and she would stay in his room, quite content although hankering for a cup of tea, and yet unable, in her drowsy state, to go down and order one at the corner café. Instead, she would just pull out some book from any of the teetering stacks all over the room, and would read. The church bells that once had driven such a spike into her heart rang out every half hour, and now she was very fond of their sound. Sometimes, when she heard them start to ring, she would even put down her book and just smile out into space, as if she had recovered her childhood. Around 11:30 or so, Antoine would call her up, often with an easy-going tone, but sometimes with the rapid and impatient tone of The Man Who Is Swamped With Work. Each time this happened, Lucile would put on a terribly earnest voice in her replies, but inwardly she would be chuckling away, for she knew how dreamy and lazy he truly was, and she was just at that stage of being in love with someone when you are just as taken with the acts that they put on as you are with their most genuine traits. In fact, in their façades, which you effortlessly strip off, you perceive signs of their deepest trust in you.

  At noon, she would meet up with him at the swimming pool at the Place de la Concorde, and they would sunbathe together and eat sandwiches side by side. Then he would head back to work — unless the sun, their talk, and the brushing of their bare skins, lightly tanned, had stirred up a mad ache in their loins, in which case he would lead her back, in great haste, to his little apartment, to their little apartment, and he would be late for work in the afternoon.

  Those afternoons were the occasions when Lucile would take long leisurely strolls through Paris, bumping into friends or at least vague acquaintances, sipping on tomato juice in various sidewalk cafés. And, of course, since she radiated happiness, everyone talked to her. In the evenings, there were all the movies, the inviting drives one could take through the outskirts of town, all the half-empty cabarets where she would teach him to dance, all those unknown and easy-going faces teeming in the summer streets of Paris — and all the things they wanted to whisper to each other and all the ways they wanted to caress each other.

  At the end of July, they bumped into Johnny at the Café Flore. He had just gotten back from a whirlwind weekend jaunt to Monte Carlo, and he had in tow a curly-headed young lad named Bruno. Johnny expressed delight on seeing them looking so happy together and asked them why they didn’t get married. At this suggestion they erupted in laughter and pointed out to him that they weren’t the type to be concerned about the future, but that even if they had been, marriage was a nutty idea. Johnny admitted that this was probably the case, and joined them in chuckling. But after they had walked off, he muttered, “What a shame” with a tone that intrigued his friend Bruno. Johnny, however, met Bruno’s queries with an oddly wistful expression that the youth had never seen on him before, and to close matters, Johnny bluntly declared, “You wouldn’t understand — it was just bad timing,” an answer that seemed to satisfy the curiosity of his companion, whose role, to tell the truth, had nothing whatsoever to do with understanding anything.

  August rolled around and although Antoine had a month of vacation time, he was out of money, so he and Lucile had to stay at home.

  Without any warning, it abruptly turned exceedingly hot that month, and all of Paris felt overwhelmed by the oppressive atmosphere of frequent thunderstorms with short but very violent downpours that left the streets exhausted yet renewed, like recuperating patients or young mothers who have just given birth. Lucile spent almost three weeks just sitting on the bed in her dressing gown. Her summer wardrobe consisted solely of bathing suits and cotton slacks, which she had bought for the beautiful warm days on the beaches of Monte-Carlo or Capri, where she had expected to go with Blassans-Lignières as in previous summers, and changing it was out of the question. So she read voraciously, smoked, went out and bought tomatoes for her lunch, made love with Antoine, talked about literature with him, and fell asleep. Whenever there was a thunderstorm, she felt terrified and would rush to snuggle up tightly against him, and he, touched by her fear, would explain in scientific terms all the murky goings-on between cumulus clouds, but she only half-believed it all, and he would call her “my little pagan” in a churned-up voice, but he never managed to churn her up in return until the last thunderclap had long since faded into the distance.

  Sometimes he would cast a furtive, questioning glance at her. Her laziness, her incredible ability to do nothing at all and never to think about the future, her remarkable capacity for finding happiness in a long series of empty, inactive, indistinguishable days — all this struck him at times as outrageous, even verging on the repulsive. He knew very well that she loved him and that, for that reason, she wasn’t going to grow tired of him any sooner than he would of her, but his intuition told him that what he was now seeing of her lifestyle was representative of her deepest essence,
and he realized that it was only thanks to their mutual physical passion that he was able to put up with her perpetual stagnation. He often felt as if he had discovered a mysterious beast, an unheard-of plant, a mandrake. But whenever he felt this way, he would draw near to her on the bed, slide in between the sheets, never growing tired of their wild abandon, of their mingled sweat, of their torrid exhaustion, and in this way he would rediscover for himself, and in the clearest possible manner, that she was, after all, not a beast but a woman.

  Over time, each of them had become completely familiar with the other one’s body, had even made it a sort of scientific inquiry, although this science was not fully reliable since it was based on trying to give the other one pleasure, and so it was often utterly forgotten in the white heat of their lovemaking. At such moments it seemed inconceivable that they hadn’t ever met in the first thirty years of their lives. And no day was allowed to come to an end until each had declared to the other, several times over, that apart from the moment they were experiencing right then, nothing else was real or had the slightest meaning.

  And so August rolled by in a dreamlike fashion. On the eve of September first, towards midnight, they were lying side by side, and Antoine’s alarm clock, which had sat there for a full month without once making a single tick, resumed its relentless march. It was set for eight in the morning. Antoine was lying motionless on his back, and his hand, which was holding a cigarette, was dangling down toward the floor. Rain began to fall lightly on the pavement, making gentle, slow splashes, and he guessed that the drops were warm, even suspected that they were salty, just like the tears he felt against his cheek, tears that had just started to roll, very quietly, out of Lucile’s open eyes. There was no need for him to ask either her or the clouds what the reasons were for these salty drops. He knew very well that the summer was over, and though it was over, no doubt it had been the most beautiful time of their lives.

  PART THREE

  L’Automne

  Je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité

  du bonheur. L’action n’est pas

  la vie mais une façon de

  gâcher quelque force,

  un énervement.

  — Arthur Rimbaud

  I saw that all beings drift inexorably

  towards happiness. Being active

  isn’t life, but merely a way

  of wasting strength —

  just an annoyance.

  CHAPTER 18

  Lucile was waiting for the bus at the Place de l’Alma and was getting very annoyed. It was unusually cold and rainy this November, and the little booth at the bus stop was jammed with shivering people, sullen and nearly hostile. She had therefore chosen to stand outside of it, and her wet hair was plastered on her face. To make matters worse, she’d forgotten to take a number when she’d walked up, and six minutes later, when she finally remembered and took one, some woman chortled nastily at her. All at once, she felt a terrible pang of longing for her car, the sound of raindrops pelting its roof, and the timid turns she made on slick cobblestone streets. The only real charm of money, she reflected, was that it let you avoid all these hassles: waiting, annoyances, other people. She had just been at the Cinémathèque du Palais de Chaillot, where Antoine, exasperated by her lethargy, had suggested — in a tone verging on the imperious — that she go see a masterwork by the classic German director Pabst. The alleged masterwork had indeed turned out to be one, but she’d had to wait in line for a half hour surrounded by a horde of bratty, loudmouthed students, and the whole while she found herself wondering why she hadn’t stayed comfortably at home in Antoine’s little room and finished a thriller by Simenon, in which she was deeply engrossed.

  It was already after 6:30, she would get home after Antoine did, and just maybe, that might cure him of his recent deplorable obsession, which consisted in trying to drag Lucile into the outside world. He kept on telling her that it was abnormal and unhealthy, after having led a lively high-society life for three years, including what he referred to as “human relations”, for her now to remain totally insulated in some tiny room with nothing at all to do. She would never have dared to tell him that she was just coming to realize that any city, even Paris, once you had gotten used to living well in it, turned terrifying when you had to deal with taking numbers for buses and had only 200 francs on your person, for it would humiliate him to hear such a thing almost as much as it humiliated her. After all, she clearly recalled getting by on little at twenty, and it troubled her to think that at thirty she was unable to take up such a lifestyle again.

  Just then a bus pulled up, and the driver called for the first set of numbers, far lower than hers, and the unfortunate higher numbers all retreated into their glorified glassy rabbit-hutch. A sort of animal despair began to overwhelm Lucile. Within a half hour, if she wasn’t unlucky, she’d be climbing onto a bus that would carry her to within 300 meters of Antoine’s room — 300 meters that she’d have to negotiate through sheets of rain — and then she’d arrive tired, unkempt, and disheveled, only to encounter her equally exhausted companion. And if he were to inquire enthusiastically as to her reaction to the Pabst film, she’d feel like telling him instead about the unsavory throngs, the buses, and the horrid rat race that working people were subjected to, and he would be very disappointed.

  Another bus passed by, this one without even stopping. Out of the blue, she decided to walk home instead. Just then, an elderly lady wandered up and reached out to take a number from the machine. On a whim, Lucile proferred her her ticket: “Here, take mine — I’m going to hoof it.”

  The woman looked back at her quizzically, almost hostilely. Perhaps she thought Lucile was making this gesture out of charity, on account of her age or God knows what. It seemed that people were growing more and more suspicious all the time. They were so constantly overwhelmed by frustrations, worries, idiotic TV shows, and trashy newspapers that there was no room left to believe in disinterested benevolence.

  Lucile practically apologized for her action, saying, “I live just a stone’s throw away, I’m already running late, and anyway, the rain’s letting up a bit, isn’t it?”

  This last little question verged on begging — and she felt like a total hypocrite as she turned her eyes towards the sky, since it was actually raining harder than ever. All the while, she was ruminating, “But what earthly difference should the approval of this old lady make to me? So what if she doesn’t want my ticket and throws it away? I couldn’t care less if she has to wait a half hour longer.”

  Her distress kept on mounting: “What ever came over me? I should have done what anyone else would do: toss the ticket in the garbage. Where did I get this dumb idea of wanting to be nice, wanting to radiate generosity on the Place de l’Alma at 6:30 in the evening at some random bus stop, wanting to get everybody to like me? These warm feelings, these spontaneous spurts of affection for total strangers, that kind of thing happens in the homes of well-heeled gentry over a couple of whiskeys, or else in some plush bar, or in a revolution.” But even as she was thinking these thoughts, she was desperately hoping to prove to herself that she was wrong. The woman extended her hand to Lucile and took the number from her. “It’s very kind of you,” she said, and smiled.

  Lucile flashed a shaky smile back at her, and walked off. Her plan was to follow the quais along the river as far as the Place de la Concorde, then cross it and take the Rue de Lille. And suddenly it struck her that she had followed exactly this same route on foot one evening — the very evening she’d met Antoine. But that had been in early spring when the fellow was still a stranger to her, and they’d set off on foot of their own free will in the warmth of that lonely night, spurning all the passing taxis for reasons very different from those keeping her from hailing one today. “I’ve got to stop this moaning and groaning,” she said to herself. And what were their plans for the evening, anyway?

  They were scheduled to have dinner at the home of Lucas Solder, a friend of Antoine’s. He was a f
rustrated journalist who loved to talk and was prone to getting carried away by high abstractions. Antoine always enjoyed his company, and Lucile would have, too, were it not for his wife, who, each time she was left in the dark by the men’s abstractions, would try to engage Lucile in conversations on topics as far-ranging as the latest sales at the Galeries Lafayette, or various female afflictions. To make matters worse, Nicole, who loved to “just throw things together”, always cooked up the cheapest and the most inedible of meals.

  “I would so happily have eaten at the Relais Plaza,” mused Lucile as she trudged along. “I would have ordered a daiquiri with ice, chatted with the bartender, and then gotten myself a hamburger and a salad — instead of having to face that heavy soup, that foul stew, those dried-out cheeses, and the lousy fruits that await me tonight. Who says that only the rich have the right to eat sparsely?” And for a few moments, she indulged herself by imagining the half-empty bar at the Relais Plaza, the ever-present gladiolas down at the far end of the counter, the friendly waiters she knew, and herself sitting alone at a little table, casually reading a newspaper while watching American ladies strolling along in their mink coats. But with a sudden pang she realized that this rêverie of hers didn’t involve Antoine at all, that she’d imagined herself without him in her life. It had been a good long while since she’d dined alone, to be sure, but she nonetheless felt stricken with guilt.

  As she approached the Rue de Poitiers, she started to trot, and when she reached the staircase, she ran up it. She found Antoine stretched out on the bed engrossed in Le Monde — it seemed she was fated to be with men who read Le Monde — and when he sat up, she threw herself into his arms. He was so warm, he smelled like cigarette smoke, he was so big and strong like this, lying on this bed… She would never tire of this big-boned body, these bright eyes, these rough hands now running through her drenched hair. He mumbled something or other about crazy women wandering around in the rain.