Bonjour Tristesse & a Certain Smile

  ‘It’s very mild,’ she said. ‘I adore autumn.’

  And I don’t know why, but those words triggered in me the memory of the hotel room in Cannes and Luc at the window saying: ‘What you need is a bath and a good glass of Scotch and then everything will be all right.’ That had been on the first day and I hadn’t been very happy. There was a fortnight to come, a whole fortnight with Luc, day and night. And that was what I most desired just now and it would probably never happen again. If only I had known … But if I had known, it would have made no difference. There was a sentence from Proust about it: ‘It is very rare for happiness to alight exactly on the desire that had summoned it.’30 Last night that rare thing had occurred: when I had come close to Luc’s face, even though it was something I had desired all week, the coincidence of desire and fulfilment had made me feel almost sick. Perhaps it was due simply to the sudden disappearance of the void that my life generally consisted of, a void which was to do with the feeling that my life and I were not in sync. Whereas, on the contrary, at that moment I had had the impression that I was at last in sync with my life and that it was a culmination for me.

  ‘Françoise,’ Pierre called out from behind us.

  We turned round and swapped partners. I found myself in front, beside Luc, walking in step with him along the avenue with its russet tints, and we must have had the same thought, for he shot me a questioning, almost brutal glance.

  ‘Well, there we are,’ I said.

  He shrugged his shoulders sadly; it was an imperceptible movement that somehow gave his expression a lift.

  He took a cigarette from his pocket, lit it as he walked and handed it to me. Whenever anything bothered him, he had this trick up his sleeve. Yet he was a man completely devoid of any nervous mannerisms.

  ‘That guy knows about us,’ he said.

  He said it thoughtfully, with no apparent apprehension.

  ‘Is that serious?’

  ‘It won’t take him long to seize the opportunity of consoling Françoise. I should say, though, that consolation in this case won’t necessarily lead to very much.’

  For a moment I admired his male self-confidence.

  ‘He’s a harmless moron,’ he said. ‘He’s a friend of Françoise’s from university. Do you get the picture?’

  I got the picture.

  He added: ‘It troubles me insofar as it will cause Françoise to be hurt. The fact that it’s you …’

  ‘Obviously,’ I said.

  ‘It would trouble me on your account too if Françoise were to hold it very much against you. She can do you a lot of good, can Françoise. She’s very reliable as a friend.’

  ‘I haven’t any reliable friends,’ I said sadly. ‘I don’t have anything that’s reliable.’

  ‘Are you unhappy?’ he asked, taking my hand.

  I was touched for a moment by this gesture and by the apparent risk it made him run, then I was filled with sadness. Here he was, holding my hand, and we were walking along together with Françoise looking on; but as far as she was concerned it was Luc, the tired man, who was holding my hand. She no doubt thought that he wouldn’t have done that had he had a bad conscience about me. No, he wasn’t running much of a risk. And he was indifferent to risk. I squeezed his hand: it was him, of course, just him. I never ceased to be amazed that the sheer fact of his existence was enough to fill my waking moments.

  ‘I’m not unhappy,’ I replied. ‘I’m not anything.’

  I was lying. I would have liked to tell him that I was lying and that the truth was that I needed him, yet when I was with him, all that seemed unreal. There was nothing, there had been nothing but a pleasant fortnight, and fancies and regrets. Why was I so heartbroken? ‘Sad mystery of love,’ I thought derisively. In fact I was annoyed with myself, for I knew that I was strong enough, free enough, gifted enough to be happy in love.

  Lunch lasted a long time. Looking at Luc upset me. He was handsome and intelligent and weary. I didn’t want to part from him. I made vague plans for the winter. When he left me he told me that he would phone. Françoise added that she would phone too, about taking me to see someone or other.

  Neither of them rang me. Ten days went by. The very name Luc was becoming burdensome to me. Finally he phoned to say that Françoise knew everything and that he would get in touch with me as soon as he could, but right now he was up to his eyes in work. His voice was gentle. I stood stock-still in my room, not really understanding. I was due to have dinner with Alain, but he could do nothing for me. I felt destroyed.

  I saw Luc twice in the following two weeks, once in the bar on the Quai Voltaire and once in a hotel room where we found nothing to say to each other, either before or after. Everything tasted of ash. It’s always curious to see the extent to which romantic stereotypes are corroborated in real life. It dawned on me that I was definitely not cut out to be the cheerful little accomplice of a married man. I loved him. I should have thought of that, or at least thought about what love might be like, this obsession, this painful lack of satisfaction. I tried to laugh. He didn’t respond. He spoke to me gently and tenderly, as if he were going to die … Françoise had been very hurt.

  He asked me what I was doing with myself. I replied that I was working, I was reading. In fact, whenever I read or went to the cinema, it was only with the thought that I would be able to talk to him about the particular book, or about the film whose director he had told me he knew. I was desperately seeking for bonds between us, bonds other than that rather sordid hurt we had inflicted on Françoise. There weren’t any other bonds, yet it never occurred to us to feel remorse. Nor could I say to him: ‘Remember how it was.’ That would have been cheating and it would have scared him off. I couldn’t tell him that I saw, or thought I saw, his car everywhere in the street, or that I repeatedly started to dial his telephone number without completing it, or that I feverishly questioned my landlady whenever I came in, or that everything led back to him and that I utterly resented myself for it. I was entitled to nothing. But all the same, for me at that moment, ‘nothing’ amounted to his face, his hands, his tender voice, all that unbearable past … I was losing weight.

  Alain was kind, and one day I told him everything. We used to walk for miles and he would discuss my passion as if he were discussing something from literature, which allowed me to take a step back and talk about it myself.

  ‘But you know perfectly well that all this will come to an end,’ he would say. ‘You know that in six months or a year you’ll be making a joke of it.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I would say. ‘It’s not only myself I’m arguing for, it’s everything we’ve been together. It’s Cannes and our laughter and the harmony there was between us.’

  ‘But that doesn’t stop you from knowing that one day it’ll no longer matter.’

  ‘I know that very well, but I don’t feel it. And I don’t care. It’s what’s here and now that matters, that’s all there is.’

  We walked and walked. He would come back with me in the evening as far as the residence and would shake my hand gravely and when I went in I would ask the landlady if Mr Luc H. had phoned. She would say ‘No’ and smile. I would lie down on my bed and think about Cannes.

  I would say to myself: ‘Luc doesn’t love me,’ and it gave me a dull little pain in the region of my heart. I would repeat it again and the pain would return, sometimes just as intensely. Then it seemed to me that I had moved on a bit: the very fact that this little pain was at my disposal, ready to respond to my call, armed to the teeth, whenever I summoned it, meant that it was mine to do with as I pleased. I would say: ‘Luc doesn’t love me,’ and this amazing thing would happen. But even if I had the pain more or less at my beck and call, I couldn’t prevent it from resurfacing unexpectedly during a class or at lunch, taking me by surprise and causing me distress. There were other things I couldn’t prevent either: the daily, perfectly understandable sense of boredom, a larva-like existence in the rain, my fatigue in the mornings, uninspiri
ng classes, conversations. I was suffering. I told myself that I was suffering, I said so with curiosity, with irony, any way at all, rather than face up to the woeful evidence of an unhappy love affair.

  What was bound to happen did happen. I saw Luc again one evening. We went for a drive in his car to the Bois.31 He told me he had to go to America for a month. I said that was interesting. Then the truth hit me: a month! I reached for a cigarette.

  ‘When I get back, you’ll have forgotten me,’ he said.

  ‘Why would I?’ I asked.

  ‘My poor darling, it would be better for you that way, so much better …’ And he stopped the car.

  I looked at him. He looked strained and very sad. That showed he knew. He knew everything. He was no longer just a man I had to humour, he was also a friend. All at once I clung to him. I laid my cheek on his cheek. I watched the shadows of the trees and heard my voice saying the most incredible things:

  ‘Luc, I can’t go on like this. You mustn’t leave me. I can’t live without you. You’ve got to stay. I’m alone, I’m so alone. It’s unbearable.’

  I listened in surprise to my own voice. It was a young, frank, beseeching voice. I was telling myself the very things that Luc might have said: ‘Come on now, you’ll get over it, calm down.’ But I went on talking and Luc went on being silent.

  Eventually, as if to staunch that flow of words, he took my head in his hands and kissed me gently on the mouth.

  ‘My poor darling,’ he kept saying, ‘my poor sweetheart.’

  He sounded distraught. I thought: ‘This is it,’ and, simultaneously: ‘I’m greatly to be pitied.’ I began to weep on his jacket. Time was passing, he would soon be taking me back to the residence, exhausted. I would go along with it and afterwards he wouldn’t be there any more. I felt a surge of revolt.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’

  I clung on to him. I wished I could be him, that I could simply disappear.

  ‘I’ll phone you. I’ll see you again before I leave,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, Dominique, forgive me. I’ve been very happy with you. You’ll get over it, you know. We get over everything. I would give anything to …’

  He gestured helplessly.

  ‘To love me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  His cheek was soft, and warm with my tears. I would not be seeing him for a month and he didn’t love me. It was a strange thing, despair. Strange, in that you come through it. He drove me back to the residence. I had stopped crying, I was drained. He rang me the next day and the day after that. On the day of his departure I had flu. He came up for a moment to see me. Alain was there, just calling in, and Luc kissed me on the cheek. He said he would write.

  Five

  Sometimes I woke in the middle of the night with a dry mouth, and even before I had fully emerged from my slumber, something would whisper to me to go back to sleep again, to plunge back into the warmth and unconsciousness that provided my only respite. But I was already saying to myself: ‘It’s just that I’m thirsty; all I have to do is get up, walk over to the washbasin, have a drink of water and go back to sleep.’ But when I was on my feet and caught sight of myself in the mirror by the dim light coming in from the streetlamp, and when the tepid water trickled down my throat, then despair took hold of me and I went back to bed shivering, with a real impression of physical pain. Once I was lying on my stomach with my head in my arms, I would crush my body against the bed as if my love for Luc had been a warm, mortal animal that I could have crushed just like that, in revolt, between my skin and the sheet. And then battle would commence. My memory and my imagination were two fierce enemies. I remembered Luc’s face and Cannes, what had been and what might have been. And my body, so much in need of sleep, was in an endless state of revolt, as was my intelligence, which was sickened by it all. I would sit up and reckon it all out: ‘I am me, Dominique. I love Luc, who doesn’t love me. My love is unreciprocated, so sadness is inevitable. Break it off!’ What’s more, I imagined ways of breaking it off for good, very nobly sending Luc an elegantly expressed letter explaining that it was over between us. But any such letter only interested me insofar as its elegance and nobility might bring Luc back to me. And no sooner did I see myself parted from him by this cruel means than I was already picturing our reconciliation.

  All that I had to do was to shake myself out of it, as good folk say. But for whose sake ought I to shake myself out of it? I was not interested in anyone else, nor even in myself. I was only interested in myself in relation to Luc.

  There was Catherine, Alain, the streets, the boy who kissed me at a party and whom I didn’t want to see again. There was rain, the Sorbonne and cafés. There were maps of America. How I hated America! There was boredom. Would all this never end? Luc had been gone for more than a month. He had sent me one sad, tender little note that I knew by heart.

  What I found comforting was that my intelligence, which until then had been opposed to my passion, making fun of it and ridiculing me and giving rise within me to painful dialogues, was gradually becoming an ally. I no longer said to myself: ‘Let’s put an end to this nonsense,’ but: ‘How can the damage be limited?’ The nights were invariably dreary, bogged down in sadness, but the days sometimes passed quickly, taken up by reading. I thought about ‘Luc and me’ as if we were a case-study, although that didn’t prevent those unbearable moments when I would stop dead on the pavement with that nameless thing overcoming me and filling me with disgust and anger. I would go into a café, put twenty francs into the jukebox and treat myself to five minutes of dolefulness, thanks to our tune from Cannes. Alain ended up loathing it. But I knew every note, it brought back the scent of the mimosa, I certainly got my money’s worth. I did not like myself.

  ‘There, there, old thing,’ Alain would say patiently, ‘there, there.’

  I didn’t much like people calling me ‘old thing’, but in this instance it was comforting.

  ‘You’re kind,’ I would say to Alain.

  ‘Not at all,’ he would say. ‘I’ll be writing my thesis on the subject of passion so it’s purely self-interest.’

  But the music convinced me. It convinced me that I needed Luc. I knew very well that my need was both connected to, and separate from, my love. I could still distinguish in him, on the one hand, the human being, the person I had been complicit with, and, on the other hand, the object of my passion, the enemy. And that was definitely the worst part, being unable to take less account of him, in the way you can generally take less account of people who respond to you with half-heartedness. There were also times when I said to myself: ‘Poor Luc, what a strain and nuisance I would be to him!’ And I despised myself for not having been able to keep things light, all the more so because that would perhaps have bound him to me out of wounded pride. But I knew very well that the idea of wounded pride would have been alien to him. He wasn’t an adversary, he was Luc. There was no getting round it for me.

  One day when I was coming down from my room at two o’clock to go to class, the landlady held out the telephone to me. My heart no longer beat furiously when I took it, because Luc was away. I immediately recognized the low, hesitant voice of Françoise.

  ‘Dominique?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  On the staircase all was still.

  ‘Dominique, I should have phoned you sooner. Do you want to come and see me all the same?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I was keeping my voice so much under control that I must have sounded quite urbane.

  ‘Would you like to come this evening at six?’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  And she hung up.

  I was both upset and pleased to have heard her voice. It brought back memories of that weekend, the car, lunches in restaurants, all the previous settings.

  Six

  I didn’t go to my class. Instead I walked about the streets wondering what she could have to say to me. Mine was the classic reaction: I felt I had suffered too much for anyone to hold anything agains
t me. When six o’clock came, it was raining a little. The streets were damp and glistening beneath the streetlights, like the backs of seals. Going into the lobby of the apartment block, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I had shed a lot of weight, hoping vaguely that I would fall seriously ill and that Luc would come and sob at my deathbed. My hair was wet and I had a hunted look. I would inspire in Françoise her perennial kindness. I remained looking at myself for a moment. Perhaps I would have been able able to manipulate the situation, get really close to Françoise, prevaricate with Luc and evade the issue. But for what? How could the issue be evaded when my feelings were as they were, for once absolute, unconditional and wholehearted. I had been truly astonished and impressed by the strength of my love, but I had forgotten that it represented nothing, except, as far as I was concerned, an occasion to suffer.

  Françoise opened the door to me with a half-smile and looking rather scared. I went in and took off my raincoat.

  ‘Are you well?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘Sit down.’ Then, more formally: ‘I mean, do please sit down.’

  I had forgotten that she had started to call me tu. I sat down. She was looking at me, visibly surprised at my pitiful appearance, which made me feel sorry for myself.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She automatically poured me a whisky. I had forgotten how it tasted. There was that aspect too: I had been thrown back on my dismal room and student catering. Even so, the red coat they had given me had come in very useful. I felt tense and desperate, so wound up in fact that it almost gave me confidence.

  ‘So, there we are!’ I said.

  I raised my eyes to look at her. She was sitting on the couch opposite, staring at me without speaking. There was still the possibility that we would talk of other things and that, on leaving, I would say in an embarrassed way: ‘I hope you don’t hold it too much against me.’ It was up to me. All I had to do was quickly to start talking before that silence became a confession on either side. But I said nothing. I had at last arrived at a critical moment, that was what I was now experiencing.