She said, “It really suits you, being thinner.”
“Was I too fat?”
“A little. You look better now.”
Her steady, collected voice overawed me. Still, that evening I did try to talk to her. (We were drinking martinis in a terribly hot, noisy bar.)
“You saw our life together,” I said. “And indeed you were very critical as far as I was concerned. Don’t be afraid of hurting me. Try to explain why your father has stopped loving me.”
She smiled rather pityingly. “But, Mama, after fifteen years of marriage it is perfectly natural to stop loving one’s wife. It’s the other thing that would be astonishing!”
“There are people who love one another all their lives.”
“They pretend to.”
“Listen, don’t answer me with generalities, like everybody else. It’s normal, it’s natural: that doesn’t satisfy me. I’m sure I must have had faults. What were they?”
“Your fault was believing that love could last. I’ve grasped the situation: as soon as I begin to grow fond of a man, I find another.”
“Then you’ll never love anyone.”
“No, of course not. You know where that gets you.”
“What’s the point of living if you don’t love anyone?”
I am incapable of wishing that I had not loved Maurice or even of wishing that I did not love him now: I just want him to love me.
I persisted during the days that followed. “Still, look at Isabelle; look at Diana; and the Couturiers: there are marriages that stick.”
“It’s a matter of statistics. When you put your money on married love you take the risk of being left flat at forty, empty-handed. You drew a losing ticket: you’re not the only one.”
“I haven’t crossed the Atlantic to hear you utter commonplaces.”
“It is so far from being a commonplace that you had never thought of it and that you don’t even want to believe it now.”
“Statistics don’t explain why it should happen to me personally!”
She shrugs; she changes the conversation; she takes me to the theater, to the cinema; she shows me the town. But I go relentlessly on. “Did you have the feeling that I did not understand your father? That I was just not up to it?”
“When I was fifteen, of course I did, like all girls who are in love with their fathers.”
“What exactly did you think?”
“That you didn’t admire him enough: for me he was a kind of superman.”
“I was certainly wrong in not taking a greater interest in his work. Do you think he turned against me?”
“Because of that?”
“That or anything else.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did we quarrel a lot?”
“No. Not when I was there.”
“Still, in fifty-five, Colette remembers.…”
“Because she was always clinging to your apron strings. And she was older than me.”
“Then why do you imagine your father is leaving me?”
“At about that age men often feel like starting a new life. They suppose it will go on being new for the rest of their lives.”
Really I can get nothing out of Lucienne. Does she think so badly of me that she finds it impossible to tell me?
16 March.
“You just won’t talk to me about myself: do you think so very badly of me then?”
“What a notion!”
“I know I am being a bore. But I do want to see clearly into my past.”
“It’s the future that counts. Find yourself some men. Or take a job.”
“No. I need your father.”
“Maybe he’ll come back to you.”
“You know perfectly well he won’t.”
We have had this conversation ten times over. I bore her too; I exasperate her. Perhaps if I were to push her far enough she would end up by breaking out and telling me. But she has such patience that I lose heart. Who knows but they may have written to her to tell her about my case and beg her to bear with me?
Dear God! How smooth life is, how clear—it runs so naturally, when everything is going well. And all that’s needed is just one hitch. Then you discover that it’s thick and dark, that you know nothing whatever about anybody, either yourself or anyone else—what they are, what they think, what they do, how they look upon you.
I asked her what she thought of her father.
“Oh, for my part, I don’t sit in judgment on anyone.”
“You don’t think he has behaved like a swine?”
“Frankly, no. He is certainly kidding himself about this woman. He’s a simpleminded soul. But not a swine.”
“You think he has the right to sacrifice me?”
“Obviously it’s tough on you. But why should he sacrifice himself? I know very well I should not sacrifice myself for anyone on earth.”
She said that with a kind of boasting air. Is she really as hard as she likes to make out? I wonder. She seems much less sure of herself than I had thought at first. Yesterday I questioned her about herself. “Listen, I want you to be straight with me: I need it—your father has lied to me so much. Was it because of me that you went off to America?”
“What a notion!”
“Your father is sure of it. And he holds it against me terribly. I know very well that I was burdensome to you. I always was, from the very beginning.”
“Let’s put it that I had no talent for family life.”
“It was my presence you couldn’t bear. You left to get away from me.”
“Don’t let’s exaggerate anything. You didn’t crush me. No. I only wanted to know whether I could stand on my own feet.”
“Now you know.”
“Yes; I know that I can.”
“Are you happy?”
“There you are, that’s one of your words. It really has no meaning as far as I am concerned.”
“Then that is to say you’re not happy.”
Aggressively she replied, “My life suits me splendidly.”
Work, going out, brief encounters: it seems an arid sort of an existence to me. She has rough ways, spurts of impatience—not only with me—that seem to betray a conflict. This is certainly my fault too, this refusal of love: my sentimentality sickened her, and she has warped herself in trying not to be like me. There is something stiff, almost unpleasing, about her ways. She has introduced some of the men she knows and I have been struck by her attitude with them—always on the watch, remote, hard; there is no mirth in her laughter.
20 March.
Something is out of beat in Lucienne. There is evil in her—the word horrifies me, and I hesitate to write it; but it is the only one that fits. I have always seen her critical, scornful and fleering; but now it is with genuine ill nature that she tears those she calls her friends to pieces. She delights in telling them unpleasant truths. In fact they are no more than common acquaintances. She has made an effort to display people for my benefit; but usually she lives very much alone. Ill nature. It is a defense: against what? At all events she is not the capable, brilliant, well-balanced girl I had imagined in Paris. Have I failed with both of them? No; oh, no!
I asked her, “Do you agree with your father that Colette has made a dreadfully silly marriage?”
“She made just the marriage anyone would have expected her to make. Love was the only thing she ever thought about, so it was inevitable that she should lose her head over the first fellow she came into contact with.”
“Was it my fault, if she was like that?”
She laughed her mirthless laugh. “You’ve always had a very exaggerated notion of your own responsibilities.”
I persisted. According to her it is the psychoanalytical situation that really matters in a childhood—the situation that exists outside the parents’ range of knowledge and almost in spite of them. The bringing up, in its deliberate, conscious aspect, comes very far behind. My responsibility is nil. Cold comfort. I had never imagined I shoul
d ever have to deny guilt—my daughters were my pride.
I also asked her, “What do you see me as?” She stared at me, amazed. “I mean how would you describe me?”
“You’re very French, very soft, as they say here. Very idealistic, too. You have no defenses, that’s your only fault.”
“The only one?”
“Yes, of course. Apart from that you are full of life, gay and charming.”
It was pretty concise, her description. I repeated, “Full of life, gay and charming.…”
She seemed embarrassed. “And what about you—how do you see yourself?”
“As a marshland. Everything is buried in the mud.”
“You’ll find yourself again.”
No: and perhaps that is the worst side of it all. It is only now that I realize how much value I had for myself, fundamentally. But Maurice has murdered all the words by which I might try to justify it: he has repudiated the standards by which I measured others and myself; I had never dreamed of challenging them—that is to say of challenging myself. And now what I wonder is this: what right had I to say that the inner life was preferable to a merely social life, contemplation to trifling amusements, and self-sacrifice to ambition? My only life had been to create happiness around me. I have not made Maurice happy. And my daughters are not happy either. So what then? I no longer know anything. Not only do I not know what kind of a person I am, but also I do not know what kind of a person I ought to be. Black and white merge into one another, the world is an amorphous mass, and I no longer have any clear outlines. How is it possible to live without believing in anything or in myself?
It shocks Lucienne that New York should interest me so little. Before, I used not to come out of my burrow very often, but when I did I was interested in everything—the countryside, people, museums, the streets. Now I am a dead woman. A dead woman who still has years to drag out—how many? Even a single day, when I open my eyes in the morning, seems to me something whose end I can never possibly reach. In my bath yesterday the mere act of lifting my arm faced me with a problem—why lift an arm: why put one foot in front of another? When I am by myself I stand there motionless for minutes on end at the edge of the pavement, utterly paralyzed.
23 March.
I leave tomorrow. The night all around me is as dark as ever. I cabled to ask that Maurice should not come to Orly. I haven’t the moral strength to face him. He will be gone. I am going back and he will be gone.
24 March.
There. Colette and Jean-Pierre were waiting for me. I had dinner at their apartment. They brought me here. The window was dark: it always will be dark. We climbed the stairs; they put my bags down in the sitting room. I would not let Colette stay and sleep here: I just have to get used to it. I sat down at the table. I am sitting there now. And I look at those two doors—Maurice’s study, our bedroom. Closed. A closed door: something that is watching behind it. It will not open if I do not stir. Do not stir: ever. Stop the flow of time and of life.
But I know that I shall move. The door will open slowly, and I shall see what there is behind the door. It is the future. The door to the future will open. Slowly. Unrelentingly. I am on the threshold. There is only this door and what is watching behind it. I am afraid. And I cannot call to anyone for help.
I am afraid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Paris in 1908, Simone de Beauvoir is a legendary figure. A lifelong companion of Jean-Paul Sartre and a pioneering feminist, she wrote books that are famous throughout the world. Her works of fiction include The Mandarins, All Men Are Mortal, The Blood of Others, When Things of the Spirit Come First, and The Woman Destroyed. Her nonfiction includes The Second Sex, A Very Easy Death, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Force of Circumstance, The Prime of Life, and The Coming of Age. Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
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