La Chamade

  August came and Antoine had a month's holiday. But he was short of money and, consequently, remained at home with Lucile.

  It suddenly turned very hot in Paris that August, the air was oppressive and sultry, and brief, violent showers left the streets exhausted but fresh, as convalescents or young mothers after childbirth. Lucile spent most of three weeks in a dressing-gown, on her bed. Her summer wardrobe consisted of bathing-suits or cotton slacks designed for the balmy days at Monte Carlo or Capri where she usually went with Blassans-Lignières, and there was no question of changing it. She read extensively, smoked, went out to buy tomatoes for lunch, made love with Antoine, discussed books with him, and went to sleep. The storms, of which she had such fear, threw her into his arms and he would comfort her, giving long scientific explanations and sombre stories about cumulus formations that she only half believed, and he called her 'my little pagan', emotion in his voice. But he could not manage to make her share his emotion until the last clap of thunder had long since disappeared. At times, he glanced at her, furtively, inquiringly.

  Lucile's laziness, her enormous capacity for idleness, never looking ahead, her faculty for happiness—to pass days so empty, so lifeless and monotonous—at times seemed to him fantastic, almost monstrous. He was sure that she loved him, could no more be bored with him than he with her, but he felt that this mode of life was what came closest to her real nature, while he knew that it was only passion that caused him to support this perpetual vacuity. It seemed as though he had come across a mysterious animal, an unknown plant, a mandrake. Then he would turn to her, slip between the sheets, never tired of their pleasure, their blended perspiration, their exhaustion, and he proved to himself, in the most precise manner, that she was only a woman. They had gradually acquired an exact knowledge of their bodies, had all but made a sort of science of it, a fallible science, as it was based on a concern for the pleasure of the other, and it often disappeared, disarmed and powerless, before one's own pleasure. Such moments made it seem impossible that they had not known each other for thirty years. And a day could not die when they were not obliged to admit to themselves, again and again, that nothing else was true, nothing had value except the moment that they were living then.

  So August went by like a dream. The night before the first of September, toward midnight, they lay side by side and Antoine's alarm clock, useless for a month, had resumed its frantic march. It would ring at eight o'clock. Antoine lay on his back, motionless, and his hand, holding a cigarette, was hanging outside the bed. The rain had begun to fall in the street, slowly, softly, and he guessed that it was warm, he even imagined that it was salty like the tears dropping quietly on his cheek from Lucile's open eyes. He had no need to ask the reason for these falling drops, neither of Lucile nor the clouds. He knew that summer was over and that it had been the finest summer of their lives.

  Part Three Autumn

  I saw that all beings are fated to be happy. Action is not life, but the means of squandering vigour, a nervous irritation.

  - Arthur Rimbaud

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Lucile impatiently awaited the bus at the Place de l'Alma. It was a particularly cold and rainy November, and the little bus shelter was crowded with shivering, sullen, almost aggressive people. She had preferred to wait outside, her wet hair sticking to her face. What was more, she had forgotten to take a waiting-number when she arrived. And there was, of course, a woman who snickered nastily when Lucile remembered it, six minutes later. At that moment, she bitterly regretted her car, the sound of rain pattering on its hood, the uncertain curves that she took on the wet cobblestones. The only real charm of money, she thought, was that it permitted one to avoid all this: the exasperation, the other people. She had been to the Palais de Chaillot film library, where Antoine, annoyed by her indolence, had, in an almost imperious tone, advised her to see one of Pabst's masterpieces. The film really was a masterpiece, but she had been obliged to stand in line for a half-hour with a band of boisterous, impudent students, and she asked herself why she had not stayed quietly at home and finished the book by Simenon that so fascinated her. It was now six-thirty, she would arrive later than Antoine and perhaps this would cure him of a deplorable mania he had developed: involving Lucile in outside activities. He said that it was not normal, not healthy, that, after having led an agitated social life for three years, with what he termed human relations, she now shut herself up in a room, with nothing to do. She could not tell him that she was beginning to discover that a city, even Paris, became terrifying, with only some bus tickets and two hundred francs in your pocket when you were accustomed to living otherwise. It would have humiliated him almost as much as it did her. She recalled having lived like that at twenty, and she did not care for the idea of beginning again at thirty. A bus arrived, the first numbers, far from hers, were called and the poor wretches who did not get on the bus returned to their glass rabbit-hutch. A kind of animal despair overcame Lucile. In half an hour, with a little luck, she would catch the bus that took her within three hundred yards of Antoine's room, three hundred yards that she would walk in the rain and she would arrive tired, ugly, dishevelled, to join a man as weary as she was. And if he asked enthusiastically what she thought of Pabst, she would be tempted to tell him about the crowd, the buses, the infernal regime to which workers are subjected, and he would be disappointed. A bus went by without stopping. Suddenly, she decided to walk home. An old lady walked up to the machine that dispensed the tickets. Lucile impulsively offered her own:

  'Here, take mine, I'm walking home.'

  The woman gave her an inquiring, almost hostile glance. Perhaps she thought that Lucile acted out of charity, because she was old, or Heaven knows what. People were becoming distrustful. They were so full of worries, problems, stupid television and hysterical newspapers, that they no longer had a notion of largess.

  Lucile was almost apologetic: 'I live quite near, I'm already late and the rain has let up a bit, hasn't it?'

  The 'hasn't it?' was almost a plea, she thought, as she glanced insincerely at the sky, for it was raining as hard as ever. At the same time, she thought. 'What do I care if the woman disapproves of me? If she doesn't want the ticket, she can throw it away. I really don't mind if she waits another half-hour.' She felt totally helpless: 'What came over me? I should have done like everyone else: thrown it away. What is this mania to want to please, to establish affectionate relations on the Place de l'Alma, at six-thirty in the evening, in front of a bus? To want everyone to love me? Affectionate relations, great sentimental outbursts with strangers take place between two whiskies, at people's homes if they can afford it, or in a secluded bar, or during a revolution.' At the same time, she desperately wanted to prove herself wrong. The woman stretched out her hand and took the ticket.

  'That's very kind of you,' she said, smiling.

  Lucile returned her smile and moved away. She would follow the quay to the Concorde, cross the river and walk down the Rue de Lille. She suddenly remembered having taken the same walk one evening, the first evening, when she had met Antoine. But spring had just begun then, the young man was a stranger, and they had wandered of their own free will in the warm, solitary night, ignoring the taxis for other reasons than those which prevented her from hailing one now. 'I really must stop grumbling,' she thought. What were they doing tonight? They were supposed to dine with Lucas Solder, a friend of Antoine's. Solder was a fervent and garrulous journalist with a marked taste for abstract ideas. He amused Antoine and would have amused Lucile if his wife, who had been left behind long ago, had not always tried to engage Lucile in conversations that ranged from the latest bargain sales to female disorders. Moreover, Nicole, who liked to do things herself, concocted economical, uneatable dinners. 'I should have been happy to dine at the Relais-Plaza' muttered Lucile as she walked on. 'I would have had a frozen daiquiri with the barman, and ordered a hamburger and a salad. Instead of a thick soup, the revolting stew, dried cheese and the three sorts of frui
t that are waiting for me. You'd think only the rich had a right to light meals ...' She lulled herself for a moment with this image, the half-empty Plaza bar, the affable waiters and she, sitting alone at a table, idly reading a newspaper and watching American women in mink coats as they went by. A little sick at heart, she realised that the image did not include Antoine, that she had imagined herself without him. It had been a long time since she had had a meal alone, it was true, but she felt guilty. She ran down the Rue de Lille and up the stairs. Antoine lay on the bed, reading Le Monde—she apparently was fated to live with men who read Le Monde—, he sat up and she threw herself into his arms. He was warm, smelt of cigarette smoke, and looked immense stretched out like that on the bed; she never tired of his bony body, the light eyes, the strong hands that brushed aside her dripping hair. He muttered something about crazy women who wandered about in the rain.

  'Well,' he asked at last, 'what about the film?'

  'It was magnificent,' she said.

  'Admit that I was right in sending you to see it.'

  'Yes, I admit it,' she answered.

  She was standing in the bathroom, admitting still, a towel in her right hand, and she saw suddenly, in the mirror, a mysterious little smile. She was disconcerted for an instant, then slowly passed the towel over the glass, as though wiping away an accomplice who should not have been there.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She waited for Antoine in the small bar on the Rue de Lille where they habitually met about six-thirty in the evening. She discussed racing with a waiter named Etienne, a rather good-looking, very talkative man, whom Antoine suspected of harbouring a sentimental weakness for Lucile. She had sometimes taken his advice about horses and the results were always disastrous, and Antoine, when he arrived, glanced at them suspiciously, not from jealousy but from fear of a material calamity. Lucile was in very good spirits that day. They had slept late after spending the night in making triumphant, complicated plans that she could no longer remember very clearly, but which sent them rapidly to the seashore, to Africa, or to an ideal country house near Paris. Meanwhile, Etienne, his eyes sparkling, talked to her of a certain Ambroisie II, quoted at ten-to-one, who was a sure thing at Saint-Cloud the next day. And the solitary, thousand-franc note that slept in Lucile's pocket would not doubt have changed hands if Antoine had not arrived looking excited. He kissed Lucile, sat down, and ordered two whiskies, which, considering that it was the 26th of the month, was a sign of celebration.

  'What's happened?' asked Lucile.

  'I talked to Sirer,' said Antoine (and, faced with Lucile's perplexed expression), 'you know, the editor of Le Réveil. He has a job for you, in the archives.'

  'The archives?'

  'Yes, it's interesting enough, not too much work and he'll give you a hundred thousand francs a month as a start.'

  She looked at him, aghast. Now she remembered what they had talked about the night before. They had agreed that Lucile's life was not the life for her, that she should do something. She had enthusiastically welcomed the idea of working, she had even developed a poetical picture of herself working for a newspaper, climbing the ladder, rung by rung, to become one of the brilliant women journalists of whom they talked so much in Paris; of course she would have plenty of work and many worries, but she felt that she had enough courage, humour and ambition to reach the top. They would rent a magnificent flat, at the paper's expense, as they would be forced to entertain a great deal, but every year they could escape and go boating, for at least a month, on the Mediterranean. She had expanded this theory with fervour before Antoine, who was at first sceptical, then gradually, he became interested, for nothing could be more convincing than Lucile with a project, especially when it was a project so crazy, so contrary to her personality as this one. But what could she have drunk or read last night to launch her on such a scheme? She had no more ambition than she had tenacity, no more desire for a career than to commit suicide.

  'It's very good pay for that type of paper, you know,' said Antoine.

  He seemed delighted with himself. She looked at him with affection: he was still under the influence of their nocturnal conversation, he must have thought about it all day, moved heaven and earth. It was extremely difficult to find that sort of job, so numerous were the housewives who, at the verge of nervous breakdowns caused by idleness, would have paid to scrub floors providing it was in a publishing house, fashion salon, or a newspaper office. And now, there was that crazy Sirer ready to actually pay her. She, who liked nothing but idleness. Life was stupid. She tried to smile at Antoine.

  'You don't seem enchanted,' he said.

  'It seems too good to be true,' she replied gloomily.

  He threw her an amused glance. He knew very well that she regretted her nocturnal decisions, he also knew that she did not dare to tell him so. But he truly thought that she could not avoid boredom in living as she did, that she would become weary of life and of him. In a whisper, he also told himself that a hundred thousand francs, added to his own salary, would offer Lucile an easier life. With a man's optimism, he imagined Lucile gaily buying two little dresses each month. Naturally, they would not be original models, but they would suit her perfectly because she had such a good figure. She would take taxis, see her friends, take a little interest in politics, the world in general, in others at last. He would doubtless be sorry not to find her waiting when he came home, like an animal snuggled into its burrow, this woman who subsisted only on books and love, but nevertheless, he would feel vaguely reassured. For there was something about this static life, the veracity of the present, the contempt for the future that frightened, even vaguely vexed him, as if she were to have been only an element of decoration, a studio setting, which one burns, inexorably, when the film is finished.

  'When do I begin?' asked Lucile.

  She was really smiling now. She could, after all, try. She had worked before, in her younger days. She would probably be a little bored, but she would hide that from Antoine.

  'The first of December. In five or six days. Are you pleased?'

  She threw him a suspicious glance. Could he really believe that she was pleased? She had already noted streaks of sadism in him. But he looked innocent, convinced. She nodded gravely:

  'I'm very pleased. You're right, it couldn't have lasted.'

  He leaned across the table and kissed her so tenderly, so impulsively, that she knew he understood her. Her cheek against his, she smiled and they made fun of her, together, indulgently. And of course, she was relieved that he understood, because she did not like him to mislead himself concerning her, but at the same time, she kept a slight resentment because she had pretended.

  At home that evening, Antoine, pencil in hand, indulged in optimistic financial calculations. He would, of course, take care of the rent, the telephone bill, the tiresome small expenses. Lucile's hundred thousand francs would pay for her dresses, car fare and lunches—there was a very good canteen, very gay, at the Réveil, where he could have lunch with her—, and Lucile, seated on the bed, listened with stupefaction to these figures. She wanted to tell him that a dress from Dior cost three hundred thousand francs, that she hated the bus—even if it was direct—and that the very word canteen made her want to run away. She felt snobbish, exasperatingly and definitively snobbish. But when he had stopped walking up and down, and had turned to her with an undecided smile, as though he were incredulous of himself, she could not help smiling back. He was like a child, he kept daily accounts as all children do, he established budgets like a state minister, he played with numbers as men love to do. What did it matter, after all, if her own life had to conform to these chimerical equations, as long as it was Antoine who expressed them?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It seemed that she had been there for years, but it had only been fifteen days since she had entered the office at the Réveil. It was a large, grey room, crowded with desks, cupboards, filing cabinets and the only window looked out on a small street in the market distr
ict. She worked with a young woman called Marianne: three months pregnant, very likeable, very efficient, and who spoke with the same moving vigilance of the future of the newspaper and the expected child. She referred to them both in the masculine gender, certain that the baby would be a boy, and it sometimes happened that Lucile, when Marianne proffered an optimistic remark, such as: 'They won't stop talking about him' or: 'He'll go far', wondered for a moment if she meant the Réveil or the future Jerome. Together they sorted newspaper clippings, looked for files, as the orders arrived, on India, penicillin or Gary Cooper, and restored order to the same jumbled files when they were returned. What irritated Lucile was the urgent, serious atmosphere of the place, and the sinister notion of efficiency that droned constantly in their ears. One week after her arrival, she had been present at a general meeting of the editorial staff, a veritable reunion of bees, buzzing with rehashed-ideas—to which they had, with demagogic attention, invited the ants from the ground floor and the archives. During two hours she had assisted, groggily, at an accelerated human comedy where toadyism, conceit, gravity, mediocrity, set the pace in the general concern to augment the circulation of Jerome's rival. Only three men had not made fatuous offerings, the first because he systematically sulked, the second because he was managing editor and—she hoped—a nonplussed managing editor, and the third because he seemed to be a little more intelligent. She had given a lively account of the meeting to Antoine, who, after having laughed warmly, had told her that she exaggerated and that she always saw the dark side of things. She had, in fact, become visibly thinner. She was so bored that she was even incapable of finishing the sandwich at noon which—avoiding the canteen, having tried it for the first and the last time—she would order in a nearby café, while reading a novel. At six-thirty, sometimes eight o'clock (Lucile, my dear, I'm sorry to keep you so late, but you know we're going to press the day after tomorrow), she vainly looked for a taxi, then ended, beaten, by taking a bus, standing up usually, for she still found it repugnant to fight for a seat. She looked at the tired, worried, haggard faces of her fellow passengers, and she felt seized with revolt, more for them than for herself, because all of this, for her, was but a bad dream and she would awaken any moment. But, at their flat, Antoine waited for her, he took her in his arms, she knew again the sentiment of being alive.