“It’s obvious, as I observe with a somewhat jealous gratitude, that at that moment she wasn’t thinking of me at all. But what dream was in those eyes of yours, which I don’t see since you were looking down at Fossette paternally? The loving awkwardness of your arms around that little dog moves me and makes me laugh. I am slipping this portrait of you, alongside the other two, into my old leather letter case—you know, the one you think looks mysterious and malevolent . . .
“Send me more photos, won’t you? I took along four; I compare them, I examine you in them with a magnifying glass, to rediscover in each one, despite the finicky retouching and the excessive highlights, a little of your secret being . . . Secret? Oh, no, there’s nothing deceptive about you. I think that any silly girl would know you at a glance as well as I do.
“You know, I say that but I don’t believe a word of it. In my teasing there’s a nasty little desire to oversimplify you, to humble the old adversary in you: that’s the name I’ve always given to the man destined to possess me . . .
“Is it true that there are so many anemones in your woods, and violets? I saw violets around Nancy when I was riding through this area of eastern France—rolling ground, blue with firs, furrowed by lively, glistening streams in which the water is of a greenish black. Was that you, that tall fellow standing there with bare legs in the icy water, fishing for trout?
“Goodbye. We’re leaving for Saint-Étienne tomorrow. Hamond hardly ever writes to me, I complain of it to you. Try to write me often, my dear worry, so that I don’t complain to Hamond about you! Hugs and kisses . . .
“RENÉE.”
We’ve just had dinner at Berthoux’s, a restaurant for performers, Barally, Cavaillon, Brague, I, and the Caveman, whom I had invited. He doesn’t speak, his whole mind is set on eating. It was a real actors’ dinner, noisy and enlivened by a rather sham merriment. Cavaillon paid for a bottle of Moulin-à-Vent.
“You must be bored stiff here,” Brague joked, “if you’re shelling out for a vintage bottle!”
“You said it!” was Cavaillon’s brief reply.
Cavaillon, young but already famous in vaudeville, is the envy of all his colleagues. They say about him, “Dranem is afraid of him,” and that “he earns whatever he wants.” We’ve already crossed paths two or three times with this tall twenty-two-year-old fellow who walks like a snake-man, as if boneless, and swings such heavy fists from his thin wrists. His face is almost pretty, below his blonde hair cut in a bang, but his nervous, wandering purple eyes speak of acute neurosis, close to madness. His constant refrain is, “I’m bored to death!” All day long, he waits for the time of his act, during which he forgets his woes, enjoys himself, becomes young again, and has the audience in his pocket. He doesn’t drink or play around. He invests his money and he suffers from ennui.
Barally, who’s booked for a season at the Célestins, got tipsy talking, laughing (showing her beautiful teeth), and telling stories about the enormous sprees of her youth. She described the theaters in the colonies twenty years ago, when she sang operetta in Saigon in an auditorium lighted by eight hundred kerosene lamps . . . Now penniless and already old, she embodies an outmoded bohemianism, incorrigible and likable . . .
A nice dinner, all the same: you get warm, you huddle for a moment around a table that’s too small, and then goodbye, a goodbye with no regrets: you’ll forget one another by tomorrow, or in a little while . . . Finally you leave again! Five days in Lyons are endless . . .
Cavaillon accompanies us to the Kursaal; it’s too early for him, he can make up in ten minutes, but, gnawed by loneliness and one again mute and somber, he hangs onto us . . . The Caveman, delighted and a little drunk, is singing to the stars, and I’m dreaming, listening to the black wind rising and blowing down the Rhône embankment with a roaring like the sea. How is it that tonight I’m pitching on an invisible surf, like a ship that the ocean sets afloat? It’s a night for sailing to the other side of the world. My cheeks are cold, my ears are frozen, my nose is moist: my entire animal being feels fit, robust, adventurous . . . until we reach the threshold of the Kursaal, where the mildewed heat in the basement chokes my cleansed lungs.
Gloomy as civil servants, we reach those peculiar dressing rooms, which resemble either attics in provincial houses or servants’ garret rooms, with their wretched gray-and-white wallpaper . . . Cavaillon, who has ditched us on the staircase, is already in his dressing room, where I catch sight of him seated in front of his makeup shelf, leaning on his elbows, his head in his hands. Brague tells me that the comic spends his mournful nights that way, prostrated, taciturn . . . I shudder. I’d like to dispel the memory of that man sitting there and hiding his face. I’m afraid of getting to resemble him—stranded and unhappy, lost in our midst, fully aware of his loneliness . . .
“April 18
“YOU’RE AFRAID I may forget you? That’s something new! Max dear, don’t start ‘acting like a harlot,’ as I put it! I think of you, I look at you, from afar, with an attention so keen that at moments you ought to be mysteriously aware of it. Isn’t that so? Across the distance, I make a deep study of you, and I never tire. I see you so clearly! It’s only now that the hours of our rapid intimacy no longer have any secrets for me, and that I am reviewing all our words, all our silences, our glances, our gestures, faithfully recorded with both their pictorial and musical values . . . And this is the time you choose for being coquettish, with one finger at the corner of your mouth: ‘You’re forgetting me! I feel that you’re farther away from me!’ Oh, that second sight which lovers possess!
“I’m getting farther away, it’s true, my friend. We’ve just passed Avignon, and yesterday, when waking up in the train after a two-hour nap, I thought I had slept for two months: spring had arrived on my path, the springtime one imagines in fairy tales, the exuberant, ephemeral, irresistible springtime of the south, rich, fresh, bursting out into sudden greenery, into grass that’s already tall, which the breeze sways and makes iridescent, into purple Judas trees, into paulownias the color of gray periwinkles, into laburnums, wisteria, and roses!
“The first roses, my beloved friend! I bought them at the Avignon station; they had barely opened, their sulfur yellow was highlighted with carmine, they were as translucent in the sunlight as an ear tinged with bright blood, they were adorned with soft leaves and curved thorns like polished coral. They’re here on my table. They smell of apricot, vanilla, very good cigars, and well-groomed brunettes—the very fragrance, Max, of your dry, dark hands . . .
“My friend, I’m letting myself be dazzled and reanimated by this new season, this vigorous, hard sky, the particular golden hue of these stones which the sun caresses all year long . . . No, no, don’t pity me for departing at dawn, because in this part of the world dawn emerges, nude and purple, out of a milky sky, and is refreshed by the sound of church bells and by flights of white pigeons . . . Oh, please understand that you mustn’t write me ‘tidy’ letters, that you mustn’t think about what you’re writing! Write anything, what the weather is like, at what time you get up, how cross you are with your ‘salaried Gypsy’; fill the pages with the same loving word, repeated like the call of an amorous bird to its mate! My dear lover, I need your disorder to correspond to the disorder of this springtime, which has burst through the soil and is consuming itself in its own haste . . .”
I rarely reread my letters. I did reread this one, and I did let it go out, but with the odd impression that I was doing something wrong, making a mistake, and that it was on its way to a man who shouldn’t read it . . . I’ve been a little giddy ever since Avignon. Back there, the lands of fog melted away, behind the screens of cypresses bent by the Alpine wind. The silken rustling of the tall reeds came in through the lowered window of my railroad car, that day, along with a fragrance of honey, fir, shiny buds, lilacs still unopened, that bitter smell of lilacs before they’re in blossom, a mixture of turpentine and almonds. The shadow of the cherry trees is violet on the reddish earth, which is alread
y cracking with thirst. On the white roads that the train crosses or runs along, a chalky dust rolls in low “devils” and powders the bushes . . . The murmur of a pleasing fever constantly hums in my ears, like the buzzing of a far-off swarm of bees . . .
Defenseless, open to this (foreseen) excess of aromas, colors, and heat, I allow myself to be caught off guard, carried away, persuaded. Can such sweetness possibly be free from danger?
The deafening Canebière is teeming at my feet, below my balcony, that Canebière which rests neither day nor night, and on which aimless strolling takes on the importance and self-confidence of office-holding. If I lean over, I can see, gleaming at the end of the street, behind the geometric lacework of the ships’ tackle, the water of the port and a fragment of thick blue sea dancing in small, short waves . . .
My hand, on the edge of the balcony, crushes the latest note from my friend, in answer to my letter from Lyons. In it he recalls, out of context, that my colleague Amalia Barally doesn’t like men. Like the “normal” and “well-balanced” human being that he is, he didn’t fail to cast some joking aspersions on my old friend, and to label as “vice” something he doesn’t understand. What would be the good of explaining it to him? . . . Two women embracing will never be more to him than a depraved couple, and not the melancholy, touching picture of two weak creatures who may have taken refuge in each other’s arms to sleep there, to weep there, to flee from men who are often cruel, and to enjoy, rather than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves alike, insignificant, forgotten . . . What would be the use of writing, pleading my case, and arguing? . . . My sensual friend understands nothing but love . . .
***
“April 24
“Don’t do it, don’t do it, I beg of you! To show up here without any warning—that wasn’t your serious intention, was it?
“What I would do if I suddenly saw you coming into my dressing room, as you did five months ago at the Empyrée-Clichy? Of course, I’d hold onto you, have no doubt. That’s the very reason why you mustn’t come! I’d hold you, darling, clutched to my heart, to my bosom that you’ve caressed so much, to my lips, which are losing their bloom from no longer being kissed . . . Oh, how I’d hold you! . . . That’s the reason why you mustn’t come . . .
“Stop alleging our mutual need to regain courage, to derive from each other the energy that a new separation would entail. Leave me all alone to do my work, which you don’t like. There are only twenty days left before I return; is that so bad? Let me finish my tour with a rather military sense of duty and an honest working woman’s diligence, in which our happiness ought to play no part . . . Your letter frightened me, darling. I kept expecting to see you come in. Be careful not to crush your beloved, don’t heap unforeseen sorrow or joy on her . . .
“RENÉE.”
The canvas awning is flapping overhead, so that sunlight and shade alternate on the outdoor tables of this restaurant on the harbor where we’ve just had lunch. Brague is reading the newspapers and, from time to time, gives a shout and talks to himself. I don’t hear him, I hardly see him. We’ve been used to each other for so long that we’ve done away with politeness, vanity, modesty, and every kind of lie . . . We’ve just eaten sea urchins, tomatoes, and salt cod. In front of us, between the oily sea lapping at the sides of the boats and the openwork wooden railing enclosing our tables, there’s a strip of sidewalk on which busy people who look as happy as idlers are parading by; there are fresh flowers, carnations tightly tied in bunches like leeks, their wet stems in green pails; there’s a stand loaded with black bananas smelling of ether and with shellfish dripping with sea water: urchins, sea squirts, two types of clams, and bluish mussels, amid lemons and little bottles of pink vinegar . . .
I cool my hand on the belly of the white water cooler, patterned like a melon, that is sweating on the table. Everything here belongs to me and possesses me. Tomorrow I won’t think I’ve taken this image away with me, but it seems as if a ghost of me, detached from me like a leaf, will remain here, a little stooped with fatigue, her transparent hand held out and resting on the side of an invisible water cooler . . .
I observe my ever-changing kingdom as if I had almost lost it. And yet, there’s no threat to this easygoing roaming life, except for a letter. It’s here in my little bag. Oh, how my sweetheart can write when he wants to! How clearly he makes himself understood! Here, on eight pages, is what I can finally call a real love letter. It has the requisite incoherence, the shaky spelling in two or three places, affectionateness, and . . . the proper masterfulness. A haughty masterfulness that settles me and my future, my entire short life. Absence has done its work: he suffered without me, then he reflected and carefully planned for a lasting happiness; he proposes marriage to me just as if he were offering me a sunny field all enclosed with solid walls . . .
“My mother had some objections, but I’m letting her object. She has always done whatever I wanted. You’ll win her over, and, besides, how much time will we spend with her? You like to travel, my darling wife? You’ll get to travel till you’re sick of it; the whole world will be yours, until you get to like only a small corner of it—ours—where you’ll no longer be Renée Néré, but Madame My Wife! That kind of star billing will have to be enough for you! . . . I’m already seeing after . . .”
What is he already seeing after? . . . I unfold the thin onionskin sheets, which rustle like banknotes: He’s seeing after a change of address; because the third floor in his brother’s town house was never more than a suitable bachelor’s apartment . . . He has his eye on something on the fashionable Rue Pergolèse . . .
In a burst of brutal hilarity, I crush the letter and exclaim:
“Well? Is no one consulting me? What’s my role in all this?”
Brague raises his head, then takes up his paper again, saying nothing. His discretion, compounded of equal parts of reserve and indifference, isn’t so easily caught off guard.
I wasn’t lying when I wrote to Max two days ago: “I see you so clearly now that I’m far from you!” I hope I’m not seeing him too clearly! . . . Young, too young for me, idle, free, loving, yes, but spoiled: “My mother has always done whatever I wanted . . .” I can hear his voice uttering those words, his beautiful voice—dark, varied, attractive, and as if theatrically trained, his voice that embellishes his words—and I hear, like a diabolical echo, another voice, muffled, rising from the depths of my memory: “The woman who can run my life hasn’t been born yet! . . .” A coincidence, if you like . . . but all the same I feel as if I have just swallowed a little piece of sharp glass . . .
Yes, what’s my role in all this? That of a happy woman? . . . This sunlight, imperiously penetrating my intimate camera obscura, is making it hard for me to think . . .
“I’m going back to the hotel, Brague: I’m tired.”
Brague looks at me over his paper, his head tilted toward one shoulder to avoid the thread of smoke rising from his cigarette, which hangs, half-extinguished, from the corner of his mouth.
“Tired? Not sick? It’s Saturday, you know! The Eldorado audience will be lively: get hold of yourself!”
I don’t take the trouble to reply. Does he take me for a raw beginner? Everyone knows this Marseilles audience, both irritable and good-natured, which scorns timidity and punishes cockiness, and can’t be won over unless you give it everything you’ve got . . .
The act of undressing, and the coolness on my skin of a bluish shantung kimono that’s been laundered twenty times, dispel my incipient headache. I refrain from stretching out on my cot, afraid I might fall asleep: I haven’t come here for a rest. Kneeling on an armchair by the open window, I lean on its back, rubbing my bare feet together behind me. In the last few days I’ve rediscovered the habit of plunking myself down on the edge of a table, sitting down sidewise on the arm of an easy chair, and maintaining awkward poses on uncomfortable chairs for a long time, as if my brief stops on my journey weren’t worth the trouble of settling in or relaxing with
any premeditation . . . The hotel rooms I sleep in look as if I’d just come in for fifteen minutes; my cloak is flung here, my hat there . . . It’s only in the railroad car that I show myself obsessively orderly, what with my bag, my rolled-up rug, my newspapers and books, and the rubber cushions propping up my rigid slumbers; I fall asleep quickly like a seasoned traveler, and I disarrange neither my veil, tied like a nun’s headband, nor my skirt, which is pulled down to my ankles.
I’m not resting. I want to force myself to reflect, but my thoughts jib, escape me, and run away down the path of light opened for them by a sunbeam that has landed on the balcony and is now shifting onto a roof that’s a mosaic of green tiles; there it halts childishly to play with a reflection, the shadow of a cloud . . . I struggle, I lash myself . . . Then I yield for a minute and start all over again. It is battles like this that give exiles like me such wide-open eyes, eyes that find it so hard to detach their gaze from some invisible lure. The sour-faced exercise of hermits . . .
Hermits! What will I think of when my lover summons me, ready to take charge of me for my whole life? . . .
But I don’t know what this “whole life” is. Three months ago, I used to utter those horrible words, “ten years,” “twenty years,” without understanding them. Now it’s time to understand them! My lover is offering me his life, the improvident, generous life of a young man who’s about thirty-four, like me. He has no doubts about my youthfulness, he doesn’t see the end—mine. His blindness denies me the right to change, to grow old, whereas every moment, added to the moment just gone by, is already purloining me from him . . .
I still have the wherewithal to satisfy him; even more: to dazzle him. I can put aside this face, as if taking off a mask; I have another, more beautiful, one, which he has glimpsed . . . And my undressing is like other women’s self-adorning; having been Taillandy’s model before becoming a dancer, I’m used to eluding the perils of nudity; I can walk naked under a strong light as if in a complicated drapery. But . . . for how many years am I still equipped to do so?