Bonjour Tristesse & a Certain Smile

  ‘It’s a very good way. You make up your mind to do something, you do it, you accept the consequences and you’re not afraid.’

  ‘What do you expect me to be afraid of?’ he said in a strangely sad way. ‘Bertrand is not going to kill me. Françoise is not going to leave me. You are not going to love me.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s me that Bertrand will kill,’ I said crossly.

  ‘He’s much too nice for that. In fact, everyone’s nice.’

  ‘It’s nasty people who cause the most trouble, you told me so yourself.’

  ‘You’re right. Anyway, it’s late, come to bed.’

  He said that quite naturally. There had been nothing passionate about our conversation but that phrase ‘come to bed’ did strike me as rather offhand. To tell the truth I was afraid, very much afraid, of the night ahead.

  In the bathroom I put on my pyjamas with trembling hands. They were quite schoolgirlish pyjamas but I had nothing else. When I came back, Luc was already in bed. He was smoking, with his face turned towards the window. I slid in beside him. He held out a steady hand and took mine. I was shivering.

  ‘Take off those pyjamas, you little fool, you’re going to crease them. How can you be cold on a night like this? Are you unwell?’

  He took me in his arms, carefully removed my pyjamas and threw them in a ball on the floor. I pointed out to him that they would get creased after all. He began to laugh softly. All his movements had become incredibly gentle. He was quietly kissing my shoulders and my mouth, while continuing to speak.

  ‘You smell of warm grass. Do you like this room? If not, we can go somewhere else. It’s quite pleasant, Cannes …’

  I was answering ‘Yes, yes’ in a strangled voice. I so much wanted it to be the next morning. It was only when he drew back from me a little and put his hand on my hip that I became carried away. He was stroking me and I was kissing his neck, his torso, everything that I could touch of that dark shadow, silhouetted against the sky through the French window. Finally he slid his legs between mine, I slid my hands over his back, we were sighing together. Then suddenly I no longer saw either him or the sky above Cannes. I was dying, I was going to die yet I was not dying, but I was swooning. Nothing else was of any importance, how could I not always have known that? When we separated, Luc opened his eyes and smiled at me. I fell asleep immediately, with my head on his arm.

  Two

  I had always been told that it was very difficult to live with someone. During the short time I spent with Luc I did think it was, although I didn’t really experience it as such. I thought it was difficult insofar as I was never able to be truly relaxed with him. I was afraid that he might be bored. I couldn’t help observing that, generally speaking, I was more afraid of being bored by others than of seeing them get bored by me, so to have things turned the other way round worried me. Yet how could I find it difficult to live with someone like Luc, who said very little, who asked me no questions (and especially not ‘What are you thinking about?’), who invariably seemed pleased that I was there and who made none of the demands associated with either insensitivity or passion? We lived in step, we had the same habits and the same rhythm. We found each other attractive, everything was going well. And I had no reason to regret his not having made the enormous effort required in order to love someone, in order really to know that person and to dispel their loneliness. We were friends and lovers. We swam together in a Mediterranean that was just too blue for words; we had lunch without saying much, dazed as we were by the sun, and we would go back to the hotel. Sometimes, in his arms, in that great aura of tenderness that follows love-making, I wanted to say to him: ‘Luc, love me, let’s try, allow us to try.’ But I did not say it. I confined myself to kissing his forehead, his eyes, his mouth, all the contours of that new face, that sensitive face that the lips discover after it has been discovered by the eyes. I had never loved a face so much. I even loved his cheeks, although cheeks had always appeared to me to be without much substance, the things that made a face look like a fish. Now when I pressed my face against Luc’s cheeks, which were cool and somewhat rough from the beard that was growing in, I understood why Proust speaks at such length of Albertine’s cheeks.20 Luc also helped me discover my own body, he talked to me about it with interest, but without any indecency, as if it were a precious thing. And yet it wasn’t sensuality that set the tone of our relationship, but something else, a sort of cruel complicity that came about because we were both weary of putting on an act, we were weary of words, we were simply weary.

  After dinner we would always make our way to the same rather sinister bar behind Rue d’Antibes. There was a small band, and when we first went there, Luc had asked them to play the tune ‘Lone and Sweet’, which I had already mentioned to him. He had turned to me in triumph.

  ‘That’s the one you want, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s good of you to have thought of it.’

  ‘Does it remind you of Bertrand?’

  I replied that it did a bit, it had been in jukeboxes for quite a while. He looked put out.

  ‘That’s a nuisance. But we’ll find another one.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When you have an affair you have to choose a tune to go with it, that’s how it is, and a perfume, and landmarks, for the future.’

  I must have taken on a rather peculiar look, because he began to laugh.

  ‘At your age you don’t think about the future. But I’m preparing for an enjoyable old age, with records to play.’

  ‘Have you a lot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ I said, feeling irked. ‘When I’m your age I imagine I’ll have a whole collection of them.’

  He took my hand cautiously.

  ‘Are you offended?’

  ‘No,’ I said wearily. ‘But it’s rather strange to be saying to yourself that a whole week of your life, an exciting week that you’ve spent with someone, will be reduced in a year or two to nothing more than a record. Especially if the someone knows that already and proclaims it.’

  To my annoyance I could feel tears in my eyes. It was the way he had said: ‘Are you offended?’ When people spoke to me in a certain tone it always made me want to wail.

  ‘Apart from that, I’m not offended,’ I went on shakily.

  ‘Come on,’ said Luc, ‘let’s dance.’

  He took me in his arms and we began to dance to Bertrand’s tune, which in any case sounded nothing like the very good recording of it in the jukebox. As we danced, Luc all of a sudden clasped me in his arms fiercely with what no doubt could be called a despairing tenderness, and I clung on to him. Then he stopped holding me so tightly and we talked about other things. We found a tune that we could not but choose, since at the time it was being played everywhere.

  Apart from that slight clash, I behaved well, I was very cheerful and I reckoned that our little escapade was a great success. And then, I admired him, I could not help admiring his intelligence and stability and his man’s way of according to things their exact importance, their weight, without being either cynical or complacent. Only, I wanted to say to him, sometimes with annoyance: ‘But, after all, why do you not love me? That would be so much more restful for me. Why not let there be passionate love between us, like a kind of glass partition which can sometimes distort things, yet which is so very convenient?’ But no, we were two of a kind, allies and accomplices. I could not reduce myself to being merely the object of his love, any more than he could force himself to love me: it was not within his power, he had neither the strength nor the wish to do so.

  The week we had anticipated was coming to an end. However, Luc did not say anything about our leaving. We had become very tanned and had acquired a rather dishevelled look as a result of nights spent in the bar talking, drinking and waiting for dawn, a white dawn breaking over an unfeeling sea, all boats at rest, and with the crazy, elegant crowd of seagulls dozing under the eaves of the hotel. We would go back then, would greet the same
drowsy bellboy and Luc would take me in his arms and we would make love, giddy with fatigue. We would wake up at noon and go for a swim.

  On that particular morning, which was to have been our last, I really believed that he loved me. Walking about the room, he had taken on a hesitant look which intrigued me.

  ‘What have you said to your family? That you would go home when?’

  ‘I told them in about a week.’

  ‘If it suited you, perhaps we could stay on for another week?’

  ‘Yes …’

  It was dawning on me that I had never really thought I would have to leave. My whole life would go by in that hotel, which had become so hospitable and accommodating, like a big ship. With Luc, all my nights would be sleepless nights. We would move gently towards winter, towards death, still talking as if everything were provisional.

  ‘But I thought Françoise was expecting you?’

  ‘I can sort that out,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave Cannes. I don’t want to leave Cannes and I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I replied in the same calm, restrained voice.

  The same voice as his. For a moment I thought he perhaps loved me but didn’t want to tell me so. It made my heart do a somersault in my chest. Then I remembered that these were only words, that in fact he liked me a lot and that that was enough. We were simply granting ourselves one more happy week. Afterwards I would have to leave him. Leave him? But why would I leave him? For whom? To do what? To go back to that restless boredom, that fragmented solitude of mine? At least, when he looked at me, it was he whom I saw; when he spoke to me it was he whom I tried to understand. It was he who interested me, he whom I wanted to be happy. He, Luc, my lover.

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ I went on. ‘To tell the truth, I hadn’t given any thought to leaving.’

  ‘You don’t give thought to anything,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Not when I’m with you.’

  ‘Why? Do you feel young and irresponsible?’

  He was wearing a mocking little smile. Had I shown the slightest tendency towards it, he would have quickly eliminated from our relationship any hint of its being a case of ‘the little girl and her marvellous protector’. Fortunately I was feeling perfectly adult. I was feeling adult, and blasé with it.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I feel completely responsible. But responsible for what? For my life? My life is something very pliable, as soft as putty. I am not unhappy. I am content enough, though not really happy. I am nothing, except that I’m fine with you.’

  ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘And I’m really fine with you too.’

  ‘So let’s do some satisfied purring.’

  He broke into laughter.

  ‘You’re like an angry pussycat as soon as anyone attacks your little portion of the absurd,21 your little dose of daily despair. I don’t care about making you “purr”, as you say! Nor do I care about your being blissfully happy with me. I would find that boring.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I would feel alone. That’s the one thing about Françoise that frightens me: when she is beside me, saying nothing, and is happy like that. On the other hand, it’s very satisfying, sexually and socially, to make a woman happy, even if you ask yourself why.’

  ‘So basically it’s fine,’ I said, straight out. ‘There is Françoise whom you make happy and there is me whom you’re going to make just slightly unhappy in the autumn.’

  I had no sooner uttered those words than I regretted them. He turned to me.

  ‘You, unhappy?’

  ‘Not unhappy,’ I replied, smiling, ‘just a little disoriented. I’ll have to find someone to take care of me and no one else will be as good at it as you are.’

  ‘Be sure not to tell me about it,’ he said angrily.

  Then he changed his mind.

  ‘Actually, yes, do tell me about it. Tell me everything. If a certain person is unpleasant to you, I’ll thrash him. If not, I’ll speak well of him to you. In short I’ll be a real father to you.’

  He took my hand, turned it over and kissed the palm gently and at length. I laid my free hand on the back of his neck. He seemed very young, very vulnerable and very kind, this man who had offered to take me on an escapade that had no future and where no sentimentality was involved. He was honest.

  ‘We’re honest people,’ I said sententiously.

  ‘We are,’ he replied, laughing. ‘Don’t smoke your cigarette like that, it does nothing to make you look like an honest woman.’

  I drew myself up in my polka-dot dressing gown.

  ‘Well, am I an honest woman? If so, what am I doing in this sick, luxury hotel, in this courtesan’s get-up, with someone else’s husband? Am I not entirely typical of those delinquent young ladies from Saint-Germain-des-Prés22 who break up marriages without a second thought?’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ he said remorsefully. ‘And I’m the husband, up to now a model husband, who has been led astray by his senses, I’m the sucker, the unfortunate sucker. Come here …’

  ‘No, no. I’m refusing you, I’m sending you packing in the most despicable way. Having lit the fires of lechery in your veins, I am refusing to quench them. So there!’

  He collapsed on to the bed with his head in his hands. I sat down beside him, solemnly. And when he raised his head again I fixed him with a harsh stare.

  ‘I am a dangerous woman.’

  ‘And what am I?’

  ‘You are a wretched human reject who was once a man … Luc! One more week!’

  I threw myself down next to him, I entwined my hair in his. He was burning yet cool against my cheek. He smelt of the sea and salt.

  I was on my own, and quite happy to be so, in a deckchair in front of the hotel, facing the sea. On my own except for a few elderly English ladies. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and Luc had had to go to Nice to do various complicated things. I rather liked Nice, at least the shabby side of Nice, between the station and the Promenade des Anglais.23 But I had declined to go with him because I had suddenly wanted to be on my own.

  So there I was on my own, yawning, exhausted through lack of sleep, and feeling wonderful. I couldn’t light my cigarette without my hand trembling a bit as it held the match. The September sun, not giving out much warmth, caressed my cheek. For once I felt very good about myself. ‘We only feel good when we’re tired,’ Luc used to say, and it was true that I was one of those people who only feel good when they have killed off that part of themselves that is truly alive, that is demanding and full of care, that part of them that asks the question: ‘What have you made of your life and what do you want to make of it?’ to which I could only reply: ‘Nothing.’

  A very handsome young man went by; I looked him up and down a bit with what seemed to me marvellous indifference. Good looks, generally speaking, and to some extent at least, made me feel rather embarrassed. They seemed somehow indecent and beyond my reach. The young man was pleasant to look at but didn’t seem real. Luc cancelled out other men. By contrast, I did not cancel out other women for him. He took pleasure in looking at them, even without passing comment.

  Suddenly I saw the sea only through a mist. I felt myself suffocating. I put my hand to my forehead and found it bathed in sweat. The roots of my hair were soaked through. A drop of sweat was slowly running down my back. Death was probably nothing more than this, a blue mist and a gentle sense of falling. If I could have died there and then, I would not have put up a struggle.

  I seized on those words as they brushed up against my conscious mind and before they could tiptoe away and elude me: ‘I would not put up a struggle.’ And yet there were things that I loved greatly: Paris, certain smells, books, love and my present life with Luc. My intuition told me that there was probably no one I would be better off with than Luc, that he had been meant for me from all eternity and that, without a doubt, fate was involved when people met. My destiny was for Luc to leave me and for me to start all over again with someone else, which I
would do, of course. But I would never again feel the same way with anyone else as I did with him: so not alone, so tranquil and with a sense of holding back so little. Only, he was going to go back to his wife, he was going to leave me to my room in Paris, to interminable afternoons, to fits of despair and to liaisons that wouldn’t work out. I began to snivel quietly out of self-pity.

  After three minutes of this I blew my nose. Two deckchairs away from me an elderly Englishwoman was staring at me, not with compassion, but with a curiosity that made me blush. I looked at her attentively. For a moment I was overcome with incredible respect for her. She was a human being, another human being. She was looking at me and I was staring back at her, in the sun, as if both of us were dazzled by a kind of revelation: two human beings not speaking the same language and looking at each other in mutual astonishment. Then she got up and limped off, leaning on her stick.

  Happiness is a flat expanse without landmarks. Hence I have no precise memory of that period in Cannes, apart from those few unhappy moments and Luc’s laughter and, in the room at night, the faint, beseeching fragrance of summer mimosa. Perhaps, for people like me, happiness is no more than a kind of absence, an absence of worry, a reassuring absence. It was an absence I was now familiar with, and I was familiar too with sometimes meeting Luc’s gaze and having the impression that all was in fact well: he was facing up to the world on my behalf. He would look at me and smile. I knew why he smiled and I wanted to smile too.

  I remember a moment of elation one morning. Luc was lying on the sand. I had been diving from a kind of raft, then I climbed up to the topmost of the diving boards. I saw Luc and the people on the beach, and the sea that awaited me obligingly. I was going to fall and bury myself in it. I was going to fall from a great height and I would be alone during my fall, mortally alone. Luc was watching me. He made a gesture of pretending to be afraid and I let myself go. The sea fluttered up towards me; when I hit the surface I hurt myself. I got back to the shore and came and collapsed against Luc, showering him with water. Then I laid my head on his dry back and kissed his shoulder.