My friend is offering me his name and his wealth along with his love. No doubt about it, my master Chance arranges things skillfully; he wants to reward me all at once for my capricious devotion to him. It’s unhoped-for, it’s insane, it’s . . . it’s a little too much!
That dear, honorable man! He’ll await my reply impatiently, he’ll lie in wait on the postman’s route, along with Fossette, my Fossette who delights in playing the lady of the manor, who’s been riding in cars and trotting in circles around saddled horses! . . . He must be spicing his joy with a naive but legitimate pride, the pride of being the gentleman sufficiently classy to raise to his own level, from the basement of the Emp’-Clich’ to the white terrace at Salles-Neuves, “a poor little girl from vaudeville” . . .
Dear, dear heroic bourgeois! . . . Oh, why isn’t he in love with some other such girl? How happy some other one would make him! I don’t think I will ever be able to . . .
If it were merely a question of giving myself! But sex isn’t the only thing involved . . . In the boundless desert of love, sex occupies a fervent but very small place; it’s so fiery that at first you can see nothing else, but I’m not a young ingenue who can be blinded by its glare. Beyond that inconstant flame there lies the unknown, danger . . . What do I know about the man whom I love and who wants me? When we finally arise from our brief embrace, or even from a long night together, we’ll have to start living in each other’s company, for each other. He’ll bravely hide the first disappointments that I cause him, and I’ll conceal mine, out of pride, out of modesty, out of compassion, and especially because I will have expected and dreaded them, because I’ll recognize them . . . I, who freeze when I hear him call me “my dear child,” I who tremble at certain gestures of his, at certain tones of voice that have come back to life, what army of ghosts is lying in wait for me behind the curtains of a bed that is still enclosed? . . .
No reflection is now dancing over there, on the roof of green tiles. The sun has moved away; the lake of the sky, blue a moment ago between two narrow, motionless cloudbanks, is softly fading, changing from turquoise to lemon green. My elbows and my bent knees have gone to sleep. This unprofitable day is about to end, and I’ve made no decisions, I haven’t written, I haven’t torn out of my heart even one of those irrepressible urges whose stormy impetus I once accepted freely, even ready to call such an impetus “divine.”
What am I to do? . . . For today: write a brief letter (because time is short), and tell lies . . .
“Darling, it’s almost six, and I spent the day fighting off a terrible headache. It’s so hot, and the heat arrived so suddenly, that it makes me moan, but, like Fossette when the hearth fire is too strong, I bear no grudge. And then, there was your letter, to boot! . . . It was too much sunshine, too much light all at once, both you and the sky overwhelmed me with your gifts; today I have only just enough strength to sigh, ‘Too much! . . .’ A sweetheart like you, Max, and a lot of love, and a lot of happiness, and a lot of money . . . You think I’m a strong person? Usually I am, it’s true, but not today. Give me time . . .
“Here’s a photo for you. I’ve just received it from Lyons, where Barally took this snapshot. Am I dark enough for you in it, small enough, looking enough like a lost dog, with my arms crossed and that air of having been beaten? Frankly, my beloved friend, this tiny passerby finds it hard to bear the excessive honor and wealth that you’re promising her. She’s looking in your direction, and her mistrustful fox’s muzzle seems to be asking you, ‘Is all that really for me? Are you sure?’
“Goodbye, my darling friend. You’re the best of men, and you deserve the best of women. Won’t you be sorry that you merely chose
“RENÉE NÉRÉ?”
I have forty-eight hours ahead of me . . .
And now, fast! Get dressed and made up; have dinner at one of Basso’s outside tables in the cool breeze amid the aroma of lemon and wet mussels; then dash to the Eldorado down the avenues bathed in pink electric light; and finally, for a few hours, snap the string that’s tugging me back there, ceaselessly . . .
***
Nice, Cannes, Menton . . . I tour, pursued by my growing torment: a torment so sharp, so constantly present that I’m sometimes afraid I’ll see the shape of his shadow next to mine on the yellow sandstone of the piers along the sea front, or on the hot sidewalk where banana peels are rotting . . . My torment lords it over me; it comes between me and my pleasure in living, in observing, in drawing deep breaths . . . One night, I dreamed I wasn’t in love, and that night I slept well, rescued from everything, as if in a gentle death . . .
Max replied to my ambiguous letter from Marseilles with a happy, calm letter, one long declaration of thanks without any corrections, in which love became friendly, trusting, proud to give all and receive more—in short, a letter that could make me believe I had written saying, “On such a day, at such an hour, I’ll be yours, and we’ll go off together.”
Are things settled, then? Am I so deeply committed? Is it impatience, is it haste, this nasty mood which, day after day, city after city, night after night, makes me find time so heavy on my hands? . . . Yesterday in Menton, in a family boardinghouse slumbering in the midst of gardens, I was listening to the awakening of the birds and the flies, and the parrot on the balcony. The dawn breeze was bending the palms like dead reeds, and I recognized every sound, all the music of a similar morning last year. But this year, the whistling of the parrot, the buzzing of the wasps in the rising sun, and the breeze in the stiff palms, were all receding, becoming distant from me; they seemed to be murmuring like an accompaniment to my troubles, serving as a pedal point to my idée fixe—to love.
Under my window, in the garden, an oblong bed of violets that the sun hadn’t reached yet looked blue in the dew, beneath mimosas yellow as a chick. Also, against the wall, there were climbing roses, from whose color I guessed that they had no fragrance; they were slightly yellow, a bit green, of the same undecided shade as the sky before it becomes blue. The same roses, the same violets as last year . . . But why, yesterday, was I unable to greet them with that involuntary smile which reflects a harmless felicity that is half physical, that felicity in which the silent happiness of solitary people is expressed?
I’m suffering. I can’t attach myself to the things I see. For one minute more, and then one minute more, I’m caught up in that greatest of all follies, the incurable unhappiness of the rest of my life. Bowed and clinging like a tree that has grown on the brink of an abyss, and whose blossoming will cause its destruction, I’m still resisting, but who can say whether I’ll succeed? . . .
When I calm down, when I abandon myself to my brief future, completely entrusted to the man awaiting me back there, a little picture, a little photo, casts me back into my torment, into my rationality. It’s a snapshot in which Max is playing tennis with some girl. It has no significance: the girl is a passerby, a neighbor invited to lunch at Salles-Neuves; when he sent me that photo of himself, he didn’t even think of her. But I do, and I was already thinking of her before I’d seen her! I don’t know her name; I can hardly see her face, which is dark, tilted backward in the sunlight, in a cheerful grimace displaying a shiny white row of teeth. Oh, if I had my sweetheart here at my feet, or in my hands, I’d tell him . . .
No, I wouldn’t say anything. But writing is so easy! To write, write, to hurl across the white sheets the rapid, uneven handwriting that he compares to my changeable face, exhausted by an excess of expressiveness. To write sincerely, or nearly so! I hope it will bring me some relief, that sort of inner silence which follows an outcry or a confession . . .
“Max, my beloved friend, yesterday I asked you the name of that girl who’s playing tennis with you. I shouldn’t have bothered. For me her name is ‘a girl, every girl, every young woman’ who’ll be my rival a little later, soon, tomorrow. Her name is the unknown female, younger than I, the one I’ll be compared with cruelly, lucidly, and yet not so cruelly or clearsightedly as I myself shall do! . .
.
“Triumph over her? How many times? What does triumph mean when the battle wears you out and never ends? Understand me, understand me! It’s not suspiciousness, it’s not your future infidelity that is crushing me, my beloved, it’s my own decline. We’re the same age; I’m no longer a youngster. Beloved, picture your good looks as a mature man, in a few years, alongside my mature state! Picture me still beautiful, but in despair, and maddened, in my armor of corsets and gowns, in my rouge and powder, in my brittle youthful coloration . . . Picture me as lovely as a mature rose that mustn’t be touched! One lingering look that you bestow on a young woman will be enough to lengthen the sad furrow on my cheek that my smiles have dug there, but a night of happiness in your arms will be even more disastrous to my departing beauty . . . As you know so well, I’m approaching the age when women become more passionate. It’s the age when they commit terrible follies . . . Understand me! Won’t your persuasive, reassuring ardor lead me into the false sense of security characteristic of women who are loved? In an amorous woman whose needs are satisfied, an affected ingenue is reborn for brief, perilous moments, and she indulges in a little girl’s games which make her heavy, desirable flesh tremble. I once shuddered at the lack of self-knowledge displayed by a fortyish woman friend of mine who, when she was undressed and out of breath after sex, used to put on the kepi of her lover, a lieutenant of hussars . . .
“Yes, yes, I’m rambling, I frighten you. You don’t understand. This letter should have a long preamble with all the thoughts I’m concealing from you, thoughts that have been poisoning my existence for so many days now . . . Love is so simple, isn’t it? You never saw it with this ambiguous, tortured face? We fall in love and give ourselves to each other, and then we live happily ever after, isn’t that the way it goes? Oh, how young you are, and worse than young, since your only suffering is to wait for me! Not possessing what you desire: that’s the limit of your hell, which some people endure for as long as they live . . . But to possess what you love and to feel your sole treasure crumbling, melting, and vanishing like a golden powder slipping through your fingers! . . . And not to have the awful courage to open your hand and let the whole treasure go, but instead to clench your fingers together more tightly all the time, to cry out, to implore, so that you can hold onto . . . what? A little precious trace of gold in the hollow of your palm . . .
“You don’t understand? Little one, I’d give anything in the world to be like you, I wish no one but you had ever made me suffer, I’d like to cast away my old distress caused by experience . . . Help your Renée as best you can, beloved, but if my hope is henceforth only in you, am I not already half-despairing? . . .”
My hand is still clutching the bad, too-thin penholder. On the table, four big sheets testify to my haste in writing, as does the disorderliness of the letter, in which the handwriting rides up and down, getting wider or narrower—handwriting responsive to my thoughts . . .
Will he recognize me in this untidiness? No. I’m still concealing things. I’m telling the truth, yes, but the whole truth?—I can’t, I mustn’t.
In front of me, in the square swept by a breeze that was strong a while ago but is now weakening and dropping like a weary wing, the curving wall of the Nîmes amphitheater raises its roughened, russet stones against an opaque, slate-colored slice of sky that foretells a storm. The stifling air lingers in my room. Under this heavy sky, I want to revisit my elysian refuge, the Jardin de la Fontaine.
A rattling cab and a worn-out horse haul me to the black gate that guards this never-changing park. Hasn’t last year’s springtime magically lasted, awaiting me? This spot is so enchanted, with an unalterable springtime suspended over it all, that I’m afraid of seeing it crumble and dissolve into mist . . .
Ardently I touch the hot stones of the ruined temple, and the burnished leaves of the spindle trees, which feel wet. The Baths of Diana, which I lean over, are still reflecting, and always will reflect, Judas trees, terebinths, pines, paulownias with mauve blossoms, and bushes of purple double thorn . . . An entire reflected garden is upside down below me and, decomposed in the aquamarine water, changes into dark blue, the violet of a bruised peach, the brown of dried blood . . . This lovely garden, this lovely silence, in which only the imperious green water splashes with a muffled sound, this transparent, dark water, blue and gleaming like a vigorous dragon! . . .
A harmonious double avenue of trees ascends to the Tour Magne between clipped walls of yew trees, and I rest for a moment beside a stone trough in which the clouded water is green with slender cress and tiny croaking frogs with delicate little hands . . . Up there, at the very top, a dry bed of fragrant pine needles welcomes me and my torment.
Below me, the lovely garden looks flat, its open places arranged geometrically. The approach of the storm has driven away every intruder, and the hail, the hurricane, ascend slowly from the horizon, in the ballooning flanks of a dense cloud rimmed with white fire . . .
All this is still my kingdom, a small portion of the magnificent wealth that God bestows on passersby, nomads, and the solitary. The earth belongs to whoever stops for a moment, observes, and passes on; all of the sunshine belongs to the naked lizard basking in it . . .
In the depths of my worried mind, a vast trading is taking place, a spirit of barter that is weighing obscure values and half-hidden treasures; it’s a debate that’s rising and confusedly blazing a trail toward the daylight . . . Time is of the essence. That whole truth, which I had to conceal from Max—I owe it to myself. It isn’t beautiful, it’s still weak, frightened, and a little treacherous. As of now, it can only utter laconic sighs to me: “I don’t want . . . I mustn’t . . . I’m afraid!”
Afraid of growing old, of being deceived, of suffering . . . A subtle choice guided my partial sincerity while I was writing that letter to Max. This fear is the hairshirt that cleaves to the skin of Love when he’s born, and gets tighter on him, the more he grows . . . I’ve worn that hairshirt, it doesn’t kill you. I’d wear it again if . . . if I couldn’t help it . . .
“If I couldn’t help it . . .” This time, the formula is clearly stated! I’ve read it written in my mind, and I still see it there printed, like a judge’s sentence, in bold small capitals . . . Ah, I’ve just taken the measure of my paltry love and released my true hope: to escape.
How can I manage it? Everything’s against me. The first obstacle I run into is this recumbent woman’s body blocking my way, a voluptuous body with closed eyes, a body voluntarily blind, stretched out, prepared to die rather than abandon the place where it’s been happy . . . That woman, that dumb animal hellbent on pleasure, is me. “You’re your own worst enemy!” Oh, I know, God how I know! Will I also conquer someone a hundred times more dangerous than the greedy animal: the deserted child who trembles within me, weak, nervous, ever ready to hold out her arms and beg, “Don’t leave me alone”? This child fears the night, solitude, sickness, and death; in the evening she draws the curtains over the black panes that frighten her, and languishes from the mere ailment of not being loved sufficiently . . . And you, my beloved adversary Max, how will I get the better of you, while tearing myself apart? All you’d have to do is put in an appearance, and . . . But I’m not sending for you!
No, I’m not sending for you. That’s my first victory . . .
The stormcloud is now passing above me, shedding, drop by drop, a lazy, fragrant liquid. A star of rain splatters on the corner of my lip and I drink it; it’s warm and sprinkled with a sweet dust that tastes of jonquils . . .
***
Nîmes, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse . . . four days without repose, and four nights! I arrive, I wash, I eat, and I dance to the sound of musicians unsure of themselves and merely sight-reading; I go to bed (is it worth the trouble?), and I leave again. I get thin with fatigue and no one complains: pride above all! I change theaters, dressing rooms, hotels, and hotel rooms as unconcernedly as soldiers on maneuvers. My makeup case gets chipped, and its tin base shows. My
costumes get threadbare and, cleaned hastily with gasoline before the show, give off a sour odor of rice powder and petroleum. I repaint with carmine the cracked red sandals I wear in Dominance, and my Dryad tunic is losing its acid shade of grasshopper- and meadow-green. Brague is splendid in his multicolored filth: his embroidered leather Bulgarian breeches, stiff with the artificial blood that spatters it nightly, resembles a newly flayed oxhide. Onstage, the Old Caveman is scary in his tow wig, which is shedding, and his discolored, smelly hare skins.
Yes, very hard days, in which we gasp, between a blue sky swept by occasional long, thin clouds which seem to have been shredded by the wind from the Alps, and a soil cracking and crazing with thirst . . . Besides, I have a second load on me. When my two companions reach a new town, they free their shoulder of the strap that’s been weighing it down and, unburdened, think of nothing but a foaming pint of beer or an aimless stroll. But for me, there’s the hour when the mail arrives . . . The mail! Letters from Max . . .
In the glass pigeonholes, or on the greasy tables on which the doorkeeper scatters the mail with a backhand stroke, I am immediately electrified to see that flowery round handwriting, that blue envelope: goodbye to repose!
“Hand it over! That one! . . . Yes, yes, I tell you it’s for me!”
Good Lord, what’s in it? Reproaches, supplications, or perhaps only, “I’m on my way . . .”
I waited four days for Max’s reply to my letter from Nîmes; for four days I wrote to him affectionately, concealing my profound agitation in a wordy affability, as if I had forgotten that letter from Nîmes . . . At such a distance, you’re forced to carry on a spotty epistolary dialogue, you express your melancholy by fits and starts, haphazardly (though sadly) . . . For four days I awaited Max’s reply, impatient and ungrateful when all I found was my friend Margot’s old-fashioned but graceful tall “Italian hand,” or old Hamond’s minuscule scrawl, or Blandine’s postcards.