The Woman Destroyed

  Martine stroked the book with her open hand. “Still, I shall dip into it this very evening. Has anyone read it?”

  “Only André. But literature does not mean a very great deal to him.”

  Nothing means a very great deal to him anymore. And he is as much of a defeatist for me as he is for himself. He does not tell me so, but deep down he is quite sure that from now on I shall do nothing that will add to my reputation. This does not worry me, because I know he is wrong. I have just written my best book, and the second volume will go even further.

  “Your son?”

  “I sent him proofs. He will be telling me about it—he comes back this evening.”

  We talked about Philippe, about his thesis, about writing. Just as I do, she loves words and people who know how to use them. Only she is allowing herself to be eaten alive by her profession and her home. She drove me back in her little Austin.

  “Will you come back to Paris soon?”

  “I don’t think so. I am going straight on from Nancy into the Yonne, to rest.”

  “Will you do a little work during the holidays?”

  “I should like to. But I’m always short of time. I don’t possess your energy.”

  It is not a matter of energy, I said to myself as I left her: I just could not live without writing. Why? And why was I so desperately eager to make an intellectual out of Philippe when André would have let him follow other paths? When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.

  In the kitchen Marie-Jeanne was busy getting the dinner ready: we were to have Philippe’s favorite dishes. I saw that everything was going well. I read the papers and I did a difficult crossword puzzle that took me three quarters of an hour: from time to time it is fun to concentrate for a long while upon a set of squares where the words are potentially there although they cannot be seen: I use my brain as a photographic developer to make them appear—I have the impression of drawing them up from their hiding places in the depth of the paper.

  When the last square was filled I chose the prettiest dress in my wardrobe—pink and gray foulard. When I was fifty my clothes always seemed to me either too cheerful or too dreary: now I know what I am allowed and what I am not, and I dress without worrying. Without pleasure either. That very close, almost affectionate relationship I once had with my clothes has vanished. Nevertheless, I did look at my figure with some gratification. It was Philippe who said to me one day, “Why, look, you’re getting plump.” (He scarcely seems to have noticed that I have grown slim again.) I went on a diet: I bought scales. Earlier on it never occurred to me that I should ever worry about my weight. Yet here I am! The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I look after it with bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting old friend who needed my help.

  André brought a bottle of Mumm, and I put it to cool; we talked for a while and then he telephoned his mother. He often telephones her. She is sound in wind and limb, and she is still a furious militant in the ranks of the Communist Party; but she is eighty-four and she lives alone in her house at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. He is rather anxious about her. He laughed on the telephone; I heard him cry out and protest; but he was soon cut short—Manette is very talkative whenever she has the chance.

  “What did she say?”

  “She is more and more certain that one day or another fifty million Chinese will cross the Russian frontier. Or else that they will drop a bomb anywhere, just anywhere, for the pleasure of setting off a world war. She accuses me of taking their side: there’s no persuading her I don’t.”

  “Is she well? She’s not bored?”

  “She will be delighted to see us; but as for being bored, she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”

  She had been a schoolteacher with three children, and for her retirement was a delight that she has not come to the end of yet. We talked about her, and about the Chinese, of whom we, like everybody else, know so very little. André opened a magazine. And there I was, looking at my watch, whose hands did not seem to be going around.

  All at once he was there: every time it surprises me to see his face, with the dissimilar features of my mother and André blending smoothly in it. He hugged me very tight, saying cheerful things, and I leaned there with the softness of his flannel jacket against my cheek. I released myself so as to kiss Irène: she smiled at me with so frosty a smile that I was astonished to feel a soft, warm cheek beneath my lips. Irène. I always forget her: and she is always there. Blond; gray-blue eyes; weak mouth; sharp chin; and something both vague and obstinate about her too-wide forehead. Quickly I wiped her out. I was alone with Philippe as I used to be in the days when I woke him up every morning with a touch on his forehead.

  “Not even a drop of whiskey?” asked André.

  “No, thanks. I’ll have some fruit juice.”

  How sensible she is! She dresses with a sensible stylishness; sensibly stylish hairdo—smooth, with a fringe hiding her big forehead. Artless makeup; severe little suit. When I happen to run through a woman’s magazine I often say to myself, “Why, here’s Irène!” It often happens too that when I see her I scarcely recognize her. “She’s pretty,” asserts André. There are days when I agree—a delicacy of ear and nostril: a pearly softness of skin emphasized by the dark blue of her lashes. But if she moves her head a little her face slips, and all you see is that mouth, that chin. Irène. Why? Why has Philippe always gone for women of that kind—smooth, standoffish, pretentious? To prove to himself that he could attract them, no doubt. He was not fond of them. I used to think that if he fell in love … I used to think he would not fall in love; and one evening he said to me, “I have great news for you,” with the somewhat overexcited air of a birthday child who has been playing too much, laughing too much, shouting too much. There was that crash like a gong in my bosom, the blood mounting to my cheeks, all my strength concentrated on stopping the trembling of my lips. A winter evening, with the curtains drawn and the lamplight on the rainbow of cushions, and this suddenly opened gulf, this chasm of absence. “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life—in short, succeed on every level. And they don’t really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold.

  Philippe and Irène had left for Sardinia the day the university closed, at the beginning of June. While we were having dinner at that table where I had so often obliged Philippe to eat (come, finish up your soup: take a little more beef: get something down before going off for your lecture), we talked about their journey—a handsome wedding present from Irène’s parents, who can afford that sort of thing. She was silent most of the time, like an intelligent woman who knows how to wait for the right moment to produce an acute and rather surprising remark: from time to time she did drop a little observation, surprising—or at least surprising to me—by its stupidity or its utter ordinariness.

  We went back to the library. Philippe glanced at my desk. “Did the work go well?”

  “Pretty well. You didn’t have time to read my proofs?”

  “No; can you imagine it? I’m very sorry.”

  “You’ll read the book. I have a copy for you.” His carelessness saddened me a little, but I showed nothing. I said, “And what about you? Are you going to get back to serious work on your thesis again now?” He did not answer. He exchanged an odd kind of look with Irène. “What’s the matter? Are you going to set off on your travels again?”

  “No.” Silence again, and then he said rather crossly, “Oh, you’ll be vexed; you’ll blame me; but during this month I have come to
a decision. It is altogether too much, teaching and working on a thesis at the same time. But unless I do a thesis there is no worthwhile future for me in the university. I am going to leave.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to leave the university. I’m still young enough to take up something else.”

  “But it’s just not possible. Now that you have got this far you cannot drop it all,” I said indignantly.

  “Listen. Once upon a time being a don was a splendid career. These days I am not the only one who finds it impossible to look after my students and do any work of my own: there are too many of them.”

  “That’s quite true,” said André. “Thirty students is one student multiplied by thirty. Fifty is a mob. But surely we can find some way that will give you more time to yourself and let you finish your thesis.”

  “No,” said Irène, decisively. “Teaching and research—they really are too badly paid. I have a cousin who is a chemist. At the National Research Center he was earning eight hundred francs a month. He has gone into a dye factory—he’s pulling down three thousand.”

  “It’s not only a question of money,” said Philippe.

  “Of course not. Being in the swim counts too.”

  In little guarded, restrained phrases she let us see what she thought of us. Oh, she did it tactfully—with that tact you can hear rumbling half a mile away. “Above all I don’t want to hurt you—don’t hold it against me, for that would be unfair—but still there are some things I have to say to you and if I were not holding myself in I’d say a great deal more.” André is a great scientist of course and for a woman I haven’t done badly at all. But we live cut off from the world, in laboratories and libraries. The new generation of intellectuals wants to be in immediate contact with society. With his vitality and drive, Philippe is not made for our kind of life; there are other careers in which he would show his abilities far better. “And then of course a thesis is utterly old hat,” she ended.

  Why does she sometimes utter grotesque monstrosities? Irène is not really as stupid as all that. She does exist, she does amount to something: she has wiped out the victory I won with Philippe—a victory over him and for him. A long battle and sometimes so hard for me. “I can’t manage this essay; I have a headache. Give me a note saying I’m ill.” “No.” The soft adolescent face grows tense and old; the green eyes stab me. “How unkind you are.” André stepping in—“Just this once.…” “No.” My misery in Holland during these Easter holidays when we left Philippe in Paris. “I don’t want your degree to be botched.” And with his voice full of hatred he shouted, “Don’t take me, then; I don’t care. And I shan’t write a single line.” And then his successes and our understanding, our alliance. The understanding that Irène is now destroying. I did not want to break out in front of her: I took hold of myself. “What do you mean to do, then?”

  Irène was about to answer. Philippe interrupted her. “Irène’s father has various things in mind.”

  “What kind of things? In business?”

  “It’s still uncertain.”

  “You talked it over with him before your journey. Why did you say nothing to us?”

  “I wanted to turn it over in my mind.”

  A sudden jet of anger filled me: it was unbelievable that he should not have spoken to me the moment the idea of leaving the university stirred in his mind.

  “Of course you two blame me,” said Philippe angrily. The green of his eyes took on that stormy color I knew so well.

  “No,” said André. “One must follow one’s own line.”

  “And you, do you blame me?”

  “Making money does not seem to me a very elevating ambition,” I said. “I am surprised.”

  “I told you it is not just a question of money.”

  “What is it a question of, then? Be specific.”

  “I can’t. I have to see my father-in-law again. But I shan’t accept his offer unless I think it worthwhile.”

  I argued a little longer, as mildly as possible, trying to persuade him of the value of his thesis and reminding him of earlier plans for papers and research. He answered politely, but my words had no hold on him. No, he did not belong to me anymore; not anymore at all. Even his physical appearance had changed: another kind of haircut; more up-to-date clothes—the clothes of the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. It was I who molded his life. Now I am watching it from outside, a remote spectator. It is the fate common to all mothers; but who has ever found comfort in saying that hers is the common fate?

  André saw them to the elevator, and I collapsed onto the divan. That void again.… The happy day, the true presence underlying absence—it had merely been the certainty of having Philippe here, for a few hours. I had waited for him as though he were coming back never to go away again: he will always go away again. And the break between us is far more final that I had imagined. I shall no longer share in his work; we shall no longer have the same interests. Does money really mean all that to him? Or is he only giving way to Irène? Does he love her as much as that? One would have to know about their nights together. No doubt she can satisfy his body to the full, as well as his pride: beneath her fashionable exterior I can see that she might be capable of remarkable outbursts. The bond that physical happiness brings into being between a man and woman is something whose importance I tend to underestimate. As far as I am concerned sexuality no longer exists. I used to call this indifference serenity: all at once I have come to see it in another light—it is a mutilation; it is the loss of a sense. The lack of it makes me blind to the needs, the pains, and the joys of those who do possess it. It seems to me that I no longer know anything at all about Philippe. Only one thing is certain—the degree to which I am going to miss him. It was perhaps thanks to him that I adapted myself to my age, more or less. He carried me along with his youth. He used to take me to the twenty-four-hour race at Le Mans, to op art shows and even, once, to a happening. His mercurial, inventive presence filled the house. Shall I grow used to this silence, this prudent, well-behaved flow of days that is never again to be broken by anything unforeseen?

  I said to André, “Why didn’t you help me try to bring Philippe to his senses? You gave way at once. Between us we might perhaps have persuaded him.”

  “People have to be left free. He never terribly wanted to teach.”

  “But he was interested in his thesis.”

  “Up to a point, a very vaguely defined point. I understand him.”

  “You understand everybody.”

  Once André was as uncompromising for others as he was for himself. Nowadays his political attitudes have not weakened, but in private life he keeps his rigor for himself alone: he excuses people, he explains them, he accepts them. To such a pitch that sometimes it maddens me. I went on, “Do you think that making money is an adequate goal in life?”

  “I really scarcely know what our goals were, nor whether they were adequate.”

  Did he really believe what he was saying, or was he amusing himself by teasing me? He does that sometimes, when he thinks me too set in my convictions and my principles. Usually I put up with it very well—I join in the game. But this time I was in no mood for trifling. My voice rose. “Why have we led the kind of life we have led if you think other ways of life just as good?”

  “Because we could not have done otherwise.”

  “We could not have done otherwise because it was our way of life that seemed to us valid.”

  “No. As far as I was concerned knowing, discovering, was a mania, a passion, or even a kind of neurosis, without the slightest moral justification. I never thought everybody else should do the same.”

  Deep down I do think that everybody else should do the same, but I did not choose to argue the point. I said, “It is not a question of everybody, but of Philippe. He is going to turn into a fellow concerned with dubious money-making deals. That was not what I brought him up for.”

  André reflected. “
It is difficult for a young man to have oversuccessful parents. He would think it presumptuous to suppose that he could follow their steps and rival them. He prefers to put his money on another horse.”

  “Philippe was making a very good start.”

  “You helped him: he was working under your shadow. Frankly, without you he would not have got very far and he is clear-sighted enough to realize it.”

  There had always been this underlying disagreement between us about Philippe. Maybe André was chagrined because he chose letters and not science: or maybe it was the classic father-son rivalry at work. He always looked upon Philippe as a mediocre being, and that was one way of guiding him toward mediocrity.

  “I know,” I said. “You have never had any confidence in him. And if he has no confidence in himself it is because he sees himself through your eyes.”

  “Maybe,” said André, in a conciliating tone.

  “In any case, the person who is really responsible is Irène. It is she who is pushing him on. She wants her husband to earn a lot of money. And she’s only too happy to draw him away from me.”

  “Oh, don’t play the mother-in-law! She’s quite as good as the next girl.”

  “What next girl? She said monstrous things.”

  “She does that sometimes. But sometimes she is quite sharp. The monstrosities are a mark of emotional unbalance rather than a lack of intelligence. And then again if she had wanted money more than anything else she would never have married Philippe, who is not rich.”

  “She saw that he could become rich.”

  “At all events she picked him rather than just any pretentious little nobody.”

  “If you like her, so much the better for you.”

  “When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But I do find Irène disheartening.”

  “You have to consider the background she comes from.”

  “She scarcely comes from it at all, unfortunately. She is still there.”