The Woman Destroyed

  When I woke up in the morning he was asleep, curled in that odd position with one hand against the wall. I looked away. No impulse toward him at all. My heart was as dreary and frigid as a deconsecrated church in which there is no longer the least warm flicker of a lamp. The slippers and the pipe no longer moved me; they no longer called to mind a beloved person far away; they were merely an extension of that stranger who lived under the same roof as myself. Dreadful anomaly of the anger that is born of love and that murders love.

  I did not speak to him. While he was drinking his tea in the library I stayed in my room. Before leaving he called, “You don’t want to have it out?”

  “No.”

  There was nothing to “have out.” Words would shatter against this anger and pain, this hardness in my heart.

  All day long I thought of André, and from time to time there was something that flickered in my brain. Like having been hit on the head, when one’s sight is disordered and one sees two different images of the world at different heights, without being able to make out which is above and which below. The two pictures I had, of the past André and the present André, did not coincide. There was an error somewhere. This present moment was a lie: it was not we who were concerned—not André, not I: the whole thing was happening in another place. Or else the past was an illusion, and I had been completely wrong about André. Neither the one nor the other, I said to myself when I could see clearly again. The truth was that he had changed. Aged. He no longer attributed the same importance to things. Formerly he would have found Philippe’s behavior utterly revolting: now he did no more than disapprove. He would not have plotted behind my back; he would not have lied to me. His sensitivity and his moral values had lost their fine edge. Will he follow this tendency? More and more indifferent.… I can’t bear it. This sluggishness of the heart is called indulgence and wisdom: in fact it is death settling down within you. Not yet: not now.

  That day the first criticism of my book appeared. Lantier accused me of going over the same ground again and again. He’s an old fool and he loathes me; I ought never to have let myself feel it. But in my exacerbated mood I did grow vexed. I should have liked to talk to André about it, but that would have meant making peace with him: I did not want to.

  “I’ve shut up the laboratory,” he said that evening, with a pleasant smile. “We can leave for Villeneuve and Italy whatever day you like.”

  “We had decided to spend this month in Paris,” I answered shortly.

  “You might have changed your mind.”

  “I have not done so.”

  André’s face darkened. “Are you going to go on sulking for a long while?”

  “I’m afraid I am.”

  “Well, you’re in the wrong. It is out of proportion to what has happened.”

  “Everyone has his own standards.”

  “Yours are astray. It’s always the same with you. Out of optimism or systematic obstinacy you hide the truth from yourself, and when it is forced upon you you either collapse or else you explode. What you can’t bear—and of course I bear the brunt of it—is that you had too high an opinion of Philippe.”

  “You always had too low a one.”

  “No. It was merely that I never had much in the way of illusions about his abilities or his character. Yet even so I thought too highly of him.”

  “A child is not something you can evaluate like an experiment in the laboratory. He turns into what his parents make him. You backed him to lose, and that was no help to him at all.”

  “And you always back to win. You’re free to do so. But only if you can take it when you lose. And you can’t take it. You always try to get out of paying; you fly into a rage, you accuse other people right and left—anything at all not to own yourself in the wrong.”

  “Believing in someone is not being in the wrong.”

  “Pigs will fly the day you admit you were mistaken.”

  I know. When I was young I was perpetually in the wrong and it was so difficult for me ever to be in the right that now I am very reluctant ever to blame myself. But I was in no mood to acknowledge it. I grasped the whiskey bottle. “Unbelievable! You as prosecuting counsel against me!”

  I filled a glass and emptied it in one gulp. André’s face, André’s voice: the same man, another; beloved, hated; this anomaly went down inside my body. My sinews, my muscles, contracted in a tetanic convulsion.

  “From the very beginning you refused to discuss it calmly. Instead of that you have been swooning about all over the place—and now you’re going to get drunk? It’s grotesque,” he said, as I began my second glass.

  “I shall get drunk if I want. It’s nothing to do with you: leave me alone.”

  I carried the bottle into my room. I settled in bed with a spy story, but I could not read. Philippe. I had been so wholly taken up with my fury against André that his image had faded a little. Suddenly he was there smiling at me with unbearable sweetness through the swimming of the whiskey. Too high an opinion of him: no. I had loved him for his weaknesses: if he had been less temperamental and less casual he would have needed me less. He would never have been so adorably tender if he had nothing to beg forgiveness for. Our reconciliations, tears, kisses. But in those days it was only a question of peccadilloes. Now it was something quite different. I swallowed a brimming glass of whiskey, the walls began to turn, and I sank right down.

  The light made its way through my eyelids. I kept them closed. My head was heavy: I was deathly sad. I could not remember my dreams. I had sunk down into black depths—liquid and stifling, like diesel oil—and now, this morning, I was only just coming to the surface. I opened my eyes. André was sitting in an armchair at the foot of the bed, watching me with a smile. “My dear, we can’t go on like this.”

  It was he, the past, the present, André, the same man: I acknowledged it. But there was still that iron bar in my chest. My lips trembled. Stiffen even more, sink to the bottom, drown myself in the depths of loneliness and the night. Or try to catch this outstretched hand. He was talking in that even, calming voice I love. He admitted that he had been wrong. But it was for my sake that he had spoken to Philippe. He knew we were both so miserable that he had determined to step in right away, before our break could become definitive.

  “You are always so gay and alive, and you have no idea how wretched it made me to see you eating your heart out! I quite understand that at the time you were furious with me. But don’t forget what we are for one another: you mustn’t hold it against me forever.”

  I gave a weak smile; he came close and put an arm around my shoulders; I clung to him and wept quietly. The warm physical pleasure of tears running down my cheek. What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love.

  “I know why I lied to you,” he said to me a little later. “Because I’m growing old. I knew that telling you the truth would mean a scene: that would never have held me back once, but now the idea of a quarrel makes me feel weary. I took a shortcut.”

  “Does that mean you are going to lie to me more and more?”

  “No, I promise you. And in any case I shan’t see Phillippe often: we haven’t much to say to one another.”

  “Quarrels make you feel tired: but you bawled me out very thoroughly yesterday evening, for all that.”

  “I can’t bear it when you sulk. It’s much better to shout and scream.”

  I smiled at him. “Maybe you’re right. We had to get out of it.”

  He took me by the shoulders. “We are out of it, really out of it? You aren’t cross with me anymore?”

  “Not anymore at all. It’s over and done with.”

  It was over: we were friends again. But had we said everything we had to say to one another? I had not, at all events. There was still something that rankled—the way André just gave in to old age. I did not want to talk about it to him now: the sky had to be quite clear again first. And what about him? Had he any mental reservations? Was he serious in blaming me for what he called my
systematically stubborn optimism? The storm had been too short to change anything between us: but was it not a sign that for some time past—since when?—something had in fact been imperceptibly changing?

  Something has changed, I said to myself as we drove down the motorway at ninety miles an hour. I was sitting next to André; our eyes saw the same road and the same sky; but between us, invisible and intangible, there was an insulating layer. Was he aware of it? Yes, certainly he was. The reason why he had suggested this drive was that he hoped it might bring to life the memory of other drives in the past and so bring us wholly together again: it was not like them at all, however, because he did not look forward to deriving the least pleasure from it. I ought to have been grateful for his kindness: but I was not. I was hurt by his indifference. I had felt it so distinctly that I had almost refused, but he would have taken the refusal as a mark of ill will. What was happening to us? There had been quarrels in our life, but always over serious matters—over the bringing up of Philippe, for example. They were genuine conflicts that we resolved violently, but quickly and for good. This time it had been a great whirling of fog, of smoke without fire; and because of its very vagueness two days had not quite cleared it away. And then again in former times bed was the place for our stormy reconciliations. Trifling grievances were utterly burned away in amorous delight, and we found ourselves together again, happy and renewed. Now we were deprived of that resource.

  I saw the signpost: I stared and stared again. “What? Milly? Already? We only set off twenty minutes ago.”

  “I drove fast,” said André.

  Milly. When Mama used to take us to see Grandmama, what an expedition it was! It was the country, vast golden wheat fields, and we picked poppies at their edges. That remote village was now nearer to Paris than Neuilly or Auteuil had been in Balzac’s day.

  André found it hard to park the car, for it was market day—swarms of cars and pedestrians. I recognized the old covered market, the Lion d’Or, the houses and their faded tiles. But the square was completely changed by the stalls that were set up in it. The plastic pots and toys, the millinery, tinned food, scent and jewelry, were in no way reminiscent of the old village fairs. It was Monoprix or Inno shops spread out in the open air. Glass doors and walls: a big glittering stationery shop, filled with books and magazines with shiny covers. Grandmama’s house, once a little outside the village, had been replaced by a five-story building, and it was now right inside the town.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “It’s not my Milly anymore.” Nothing is the same anymore, and that’s certain: not Milly, not Philippe, not André. Am I?

  “Twenty minutes to reach Milly is miraculous,” I said as we got back into the car. “Only it’s not Milly any longer.”

  “There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.”

  I reflected. “You’ll laugh at my optimism again, but for me it’s above all miraculous.”

  “But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.”

  “I don’t think so. You do lose in yourself as well, but you also gain.”

  “You lose much more than you gain. To tell you the truth, I don’t see what gain there is, anyhow. Can you tell me?”

  “It’s pleasant to have a long past behind one.”

  “You think you have it? I don’t, as far as mine is concerned. Just you telling it over to yourself.”

  “I know it’s there. It gives depth to the present.”

  “All right. What else?”

  “You have a much greater intellectual command of things. You forget a great deal, certainly; but in a way even the things one has forgotten are available to one.”

  “In your line, maybe. For my part, I am more and more ignorant of everything that is not my own special subject. I should have to go back to the university like an ordinary undergraduate to be up to date with quantum physics.”

  “There’s nothing to prevent your doing so.”

  “Perhaps I will.”

  “It’s strange,” I said. “We agree about everything; yet not in this. I can’t see what you lose in growing old.”

  He smiled. “Youth.”

  “It’s not in itself a valuable thing.”

  “Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you’ve lost that, you’ve lost everything.”

  He had spoken in such a tone that I dared not accuse him of self-indulgence. There was something gnawing at him, something I knew nothing about—that I did not want to know about—that frightened me. It was perhaps that which was keeping us apart.

  “I shall never believe that you can no longer create,” I said.

  “Bachelard says, ‘Great scientists are valuable to science in the first half of their lives and harmful in the second.’ They consider me a scientist. All I can do now is try not to be too harmful.”

  I made no reply. True or false, he believed what he was saying: it would have been useless to protest. It was understandable that my optimism should often irritate him: in a way it was an evasion of his problem. But what could I do? I could not tackle it for him. The best thing was to be quiet. We drove in silence as far as Champeaux.

  “This nave is really beautiful,” said André as we went into the church. “It reminds me very much of the one at Sens, only its proportions are even finer.”

  “Yes, it is lovely. I have forgotten Sens.”

  “It’s the same thick single pillars alternating with slender twinned columns.”

  “What a memory you have!”

  Conscientiously we looked at the nave, the choir, the transept. The church was no less beautiful because I had climbed the Acropolis, but my state of mind was no longer the same as it had been in the days when we systematically combed the Ile de France in an aged secondhand car. Neither of us was really taking it in. I was not really interested in the carved capitals, nor in the misericords that had once amused us so.

  As we left the church, André said to me, “Do you think the Truite d’Or is still there?”

  “Let’s go and see.”

  The little inn at the water’s edge, with its simple, delightful food, had once been one of our favorite places. We celebrated our silver wedding anniversary there, but we had not been back since. This village, with its silence and its little cobbles, had not changed. We went right along the main street in both directions: the Truite d’Or had vanished. We did not like the restaurant in the forest where we stopped: perhaps because we compared it with our memories.

  “And what shall we do now?” I asked.

  “We had thought of the Château de Vaux and the towers at Blandy.”

  “But do you want to go?”

  “Why not?”

  He did not give a damn about them, and nor indeed did I; but neither of us liked to say so. What exactly was he thinking of, as we drove along the little leaf-scented country roads? About the desert of his future? I could not follow him onto that ground. I felt that there beside me he was alone. I was, too. Philippe had tried to telephone me several times. I had hung up as soon as I recognized his voice. I questioned myself. Had I been too demanding with regard to him? Had André been too scornfully indulgent? Was it this lack of harmony that had damaged him? I should have liked to talk about it with André, but I was afraid of starting a quarrel again.

  The Château de Vaux, the towers at Blandy: we carried out our program. We said, “I remembered it perfectly, I did not remember it at all, these towers are quite splendid.…” But in one way the mere sight of things is neither here nor there. You have to be linked to them by some plan or some question. All I saw was stones piled one on top of the other.

  The day did not bring us any closer together; I felt that we were both disappointed and very remote from one another as we drove back to Paris. It seemed to me that we were no longer capable of tal
king to one another. Might all one heard about noncommunication perhaps be true, then? Were we, as I had glimpsed in my anger, condemned to silence and loneliness? Had that always been the case with me, and had it only been that stubborn optimism that had made me say it was not? I must make an effort, I said to myself as I went to bed. Tomorrow morning we will discuss it. We will try to get to the bottom of it. The fact that our quarrel had not been dissipated was because it was merely a symptom. Everything would have to be gone into again, radically. Above all, not to be afraid of talking about Philippe. A single forbidden subject and our dialogue would be wholly frustrated.

  I poured out the tea, and I was trying to find the words to begin this discussion when André said, “Do you know what I should like? To go to Villeneuve straightaway. I should rest there better than in Paris.”

  So that was the conclusion he had drawn from the failure of yesterday: instead of trying to come closer he was escaping! It sometimes happens that he spends a few days at his mother’s house without me, out of affection for her. But this was a way of escaping from our tête-à-tête. I was cut to the quick.

  “A splendid idea,” I said curtly. “Your mother will be delighted. Do go.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to come?” he asked, in an unnatural tone.

  “You know very well that I haven’t the least wish to leave Paris so early. I shall come at the date we fixed.”

  “As you like.”

  I should have stayed in any case: I wanted to work and also to see how my book would be received—to talk to my friends about it. But I was much taken aback at the way he did not press me. Coldly I asked, “When do you think of going?”

  “I don’t know: soon. I have absolutely nothing to do here.”