The Mandarins

‘There’s no doubt Robert is better armed than I against regrets,’ I thought, getting into bed. He works, acts; the future is more real to him than the past. And he writes. All the things that fall outside his normal course of life – misfortune, defeat, death – he puts into his books and considers himself rid of them. But I have no recourse; whatever I lose I can never regain, and there’s nothing to redeem my infidelities. Suddenly I began to weep. ‘These are my eyes that are weeping,’ I thought. ‘He sees everything, but not through my eyes.’ I was weeping, and for the first time in twenty years I was alone, alone with my remorse, my fear. I fell asleep and dreamed I was dead. I woke up with a start, and the fear was still there. And death continues to prowl silently in the room. I switch on the lights, turn them off; if Robert sees the ray of light under my door, he’ll worry. It’s useless; tonight he can’t help me. When I wanted to talk to him about himself, he evaded my questions. He knows he’s in danger; I’m afraid for him. Up to now I’ve always had the fullest confidence in him; I’ve never tried to measure him. For me the measure of all things was Robert. I’ve lived with him as I’ve lived with myself, no distance separating us. But, suddenly, I’ve lost all confidence – in everything. No fixed stars, no milestones. Robert is a man, a fallible, vulnerable man of sixty whom the past no longer protects and the future menaces. I lean back against the pillow, my eyes wide open. To see him better I’ve got to step backwards, far enough back to blot out the view of those twenty years of unquestioning love I’d given him.

It’s not easy. There was a time I did see him from a distance, but I was too young. I looked at him from too far off. Friends had pointed him out to me at the Sorbonne; they spoke of him a great deal, with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels. If that had been true, I think it would have attracted rather than repelled me; I was still rebelling against my pious childhood. In my mind, sin was a touching manifestation of the absence of God, and if someone had told me that Dubreuilh raped little girls I’d have taken him for a saint of sorts. But his vices were minor and his too-well-established fame irritated me. When I began taking his courses, I had already made up my mind that the ‘great man’ was a charlatan. Of course, he was different from all the other professors. He would come rushing into the room like a gust of wind; he was always four or five minutes late. He would survey us for a moment with his large, crafty eyes, and then he would begin speaking in either a very amiable or a very aggressive voice. There was something provocative in his surly face, his violent voice, his bursts of laughter which sometimes seemed to us a little insane. He wore very white shirts, his hands were always carefully manicured, and he was impeccably shaven; it was impossible, therefore, to attribute to negligence his zipper jackets, his pullovers, his clumsy shoes. He preferred comfort to decency with such an obvious lack of restraint that I thought it affected. I had read his novels and didn’t like them at all; I expected them to bring to me some inspiring message, and all they ever spoke to me of were indifferent people, frivolous sentiments, and a lot of other things that didn’t seem to me the least bit essential. As for his courses, they were interesting all right, but he never really said anything worthy of a genius. And he was always so cocksure of being right that I had an irresistible desire to contradict him. Oh, I was convinced, too, that the truth was to the left; ever since my childhood I had sniffed an odour of stupidity and lies in bourgeois thinking, a very foul-smelling odour. And then I had learned from the Gospel that all men are equal, are brothers; that’s one thing I continue to believe in with an unshakable faith. But spiritually, after I had been for so long crammed full of absolutes, the void left in the heavens made a mockery of all morality I had been taught. But Dubreuilh believed there could be salvation here on earth. I let him know where I stood in my first essay. ‘Revolution, fine,’ I said, ‘but what then?’ When he gave me back my paper a week later as we were leaving the classroom, he ridiculed my efforts. According to him, my absolute was the abstract dream of a petty bourgeoise incapable of facing reality. Of course I couldn’t hold my own against him, and he won every round. But that didn’t prove anything, and I told him as much. We resumed our discussion the following week and this time he tried to convince me, rather than overwhelm me. I had to admit that in private discussion he didn’t at all seem to feel that he was a great man. He began chatting with me, rather often after classes, sometimes he walked home with me occasionally taking a longer route than was necessary. And then we began going out together in the afternoons, the evenings. We stopped talking about morality and politics and other lofty subjects. He told me about the people he knew and the things he did, and most of all he would take me for walks, show me streets, squares, quays, canals, cemeteries, suburbs, warehouses, vacant sites, little cafés, and a hundred corners of Paris that were completely new to me. And I began to realize that I had never really seen things I believed I had always known; with him everything took on a thousand meanings – faces, voices, people’s clothing, a tree poster, a neon sign, no matter what. I reread all his novels. And I soon realized I had completely misunderstood them the first time. Dubreuilh gave the impression of writing capriciously, for his own pleasure, completely without motivation. And yet on closing the book, you felt yourself overwhelmed with anger, disgust, revolt; you wanted things to change. To read certain passages from his works, you would take him for a pure aesthete; he has a feeling for words, and he’s interested in things for themselves, in rain and clear skies, in the games of love and chance, in everything. Only he doesn’t stop there; suddenly you find yourself thrown in among people, and all their problems become your concern. That’s why I’m so determined for him to continue writing; I know through my own experience what he can bring to his readers. There’s no gap between his political ideas and his poetic emotions. Because he himself loves life so much, he wants all men to be able to share it abundantly. And because he loves people, everything that’s part of their lives interests him deeply.

I reread his books, listened to him, questioned him; I was so taken up with this new life of mine that I didn’t even think of asking myself why, exactly, he enjoyed being with me. I was already so involved that I had no time to discover what was happening inside my own heart. When one night he took me in his arms in the middle of the Jardins du Carrousel, I was offended. ‘I will only kiss a man I love,’ I said coldly. ‘But you do love me!’ he answered calmly. And when he said it, I knew it was true. I hadn’t been aware of it; it had all happened too fast. With Robert, everything happened so fast! In fact, that was precisely the quality in him that had captivated me at first. Other people were so slow, life was so slow. He burned up time and pushed everything out of his way. From the moment I knew I loved him, I followed him eagerly from surprise to surprise. I learned that one could live without furniture and without schedules, skip lunches, not go to bed at night, sleep in the afternoon, make love in a wood as well as in bed. It seemed a simple and joyous thing to me to become a woman in his arms; when the pleasure was frightening, his smile would reassure me. A single shadow lay over my heart – term was nearly over and the thought of being separated from him terrified me. Robert obviously realized that. Was that why he suggested we get married? The idea had never even crossed my mind; at nineteen, it seems as natural to be loved by the man with whom you’re in love as by doting parents or all-powerful God.

‘But I really did love you!’ Robert told me much later. Coming from him, what precisely did those words mean? Would he have loved me a year earlier when he was still taken up body and soul in political battles? And the year I came to know him, couldn’t he have chosen someone else as consolation for his inactivity? That’s the kind of question that serves no purpose whatsoever. Let’s drop it. One thing was definitely certain: he was determined to make me happy, and he did not fail. Up to then I hadn’t been unhappy, but neither had I been happy. I was always in good health and occasionally I had moments which I enjoyed. But most of the time I was plainly and simply disconsolate. Foolishness, lies, injustice, suffering; all around me a deep, black chaos. And how absurd it all was! Those days which repeated themselves from week to week, from century to century, without ever getting anywhere. Living was simply a matter of waiting some forty or sixty years for death to come, trudging along through emptiness. That was why I studied so avidly: only books and ideas were able to hold their own; they alone seemed real to me.

Thanks to Robert, ideas were brought down to earth and the earth became coherent, like a book, a book that begins badly but will finish well. Humanity was going somewhere; history had meaning, and so did my own existence. Oppression and misery contained within themselves the promise of their disappearance; evil had already been conquered, shame swept away. The sky closed above my head and the old fears left me. Robert hadn’t freed me with theories; he simply showed me that to live was sufficient unto life. He didn’t give a damn about death, and his activities weren’t merely diversions; he liked what he liked, wanted what he wanted, and ran from nothing. Quite simply, all I wanted was to be like him. If I had questioned life, it was mostly because I was bored at home. And now I was no longer bored. From chaos, Robert had drawn a full, orderly world, cleansed by the future he was helping to produce. And that world was mine. I had to make my own place in it. Being Robert’s wife wasn’t enough; before marrying him I had never pictured myself making a career of being a wife. On the other hand, I never for a moment dreamed of taking an active part in politics. In that domain, theories can interest me deeply and I harbour a few strong feelings, but practical politics aren’t for me. I have to admit that I lack patience; the revolution is on the march, but it’s marching so slowly, with such tiny, uncertain steps! For Robert, if one solution is better than another, that’s the correct one; a lesser evil he considers a good. He’s right, of course, but no doubt I haven’t completely buried my old dreams of the absolute. It does not satisfy me. And then the future seems so very far off; I find it hard to become interested in men who aren’t born yet. I would much rather help those who are alive at this very moment. That’s why my profession attracted me. Oh, I never believed that you could, from the outside, supply people with a prefabricated salvation. But sometimes only trifles separate them from happiness, and I felt I could at least sweep away those trifles. Robert encouraged me. In that respect he differs from orthodox Communists; he believes that psychoanalysis can play a useful role in bourgeois society and that it might still be of use even in a classless society. And the possibility of rethinking classical psychoanalysis in terms of Marxist ideology struck him as a fascinating idea. The fact of the matter is that my work did interest me, and very deeply. My days were as full as the earth around me. Every morning I awakened more joyously than the day before and every evening I found myself enriched with a thousand new discoveries. It’s an incredible stroke of luck, when you’re only twenty years old, to be given the world by the hand you love. And it’s equally lucky to find your exact place in that world. Robert also accomplished another feat; he guarded me against isolation without depriving me of privacy. We shared everything in common; and yet I had my own friendships, my own pleasures, my work, my worries. If I wanted to, I could spent the night nestled against a tender shoulder. Or, like tonight, I could remain alone and chaste in my room. I look at the four walls and the rays of light under the door; how many times have I known the sweetness of falling asleep while he was working within earshot. It’s been years since we lost our desire for each other, but we were too closely bound in other ways to attach any great importance to the union of our bodies. Therefore we had, so to speak, lost nothing. It seems almost like a pre-war night tonight. Even this worrying that’s been keeping me awake isn’t new; the future of the world has often seemed very black. What is it, then, that’s different? Why has death come prowling again in my room? It continues to prowl. Why?

What stupid obstinacy! I’m ashamed. During these past four years, in spite of all that’s happened, I somehow managed to persuade myself that everything would be the same after the war as it was before. In fact, only a little while ago I was saying to Paula, ‘It’s just like it used to be, isn’t it?’ This is what I am trying to say to myself: the way it is now is exactly the way it used to be. But no, I’m lying to myself; it’s not and it never again will be the same. Up to now, I always knew in my heart that we would somehow pull out of the gravest crises. Certainly Robert had to pull out of them; his destiny guaranteed that of the world and vice versa. But with the horrifying past behind us, how can anyone have any faith in the future? Diego is dead, too many others have died; shame has returned to the earth, the word ‘happiness’ has lost all meaning. All around me, nothing but chaos again. Maybe the world will pull out of it. But when? Two or three centuries are much too long; our own days are numbered. If Robert’s life ends in defeat, in doubt, in despair, nothing will ever make up for it.

I hear a slight movement in his study; he’s reading, thinking, planning. Will he succeed? And if not, what then? No need to think of the worst; until now, no one has ever eaten us up. We just go on existing, following the whim of a story that isn’t ours at all. And Robert has been reduced to the role of a passive witness. What will he do with himself? I know how much the revolution means to him; it’s his absolute. The experiences of his youth left an indelible mark upon him; during all those years he spent growing up among soot-coloured houses and lives, socialism was his only hope. And it wasn’t because of generosity or logic that he believed in it, but because of necessity. For him, becoming a man meant only one thing: becoming a militant partisan, like his father. It took quite a lot to make him withdraw from politics – the infuriating disillusionment of ’14, his rupture with Cachin two years after Tours, his inability to awaken the old revolutionary flame in the Socialist Party. At the first opportunity, he leaped eagerly into the political arena again, and now he’s more excited about it than ever. To reassure myself I tell myself that he has all manner of resources at his command. After our marriage, during the years he spent away from active politics, he wrote a great deal and was happy. But was he? I chose to believe it, and until tonight I never dared pry into what really went on inside him. I no longer feel very certain about our past. If he wanted a child so soon, it was probably because I alone wasn’t enough to justify his existence. Or perhaps he was trying to take revenge against that future which he could no longer control. Yes, that desire of his to become a father seems rather significant now that I look back upon it. And the sadness of our pilgrimage to Bruay is significant, too. We walked through the streets of his childhood and he showed me the school where his father had taught, the sombre building in which, at the age of nine, he had heard Jaurès. He told me about his first encounters with daily routine and disappointment with pointless work; he was speaking very fast, he sounded very uninterested, and then suddenly he said heatedly, ‘Nothing has changed. But I write novels!’ I wanted to believe it was only a fleeting emotion; Robert was much too lighthearted for me to imagine that he had any serious regrets. But after the Congress of Amsterdam, during that whole period when he was busily organizing vigilance committees, I saw him as he acted when he was really happy, and I had to admit the truth to myself: before then, he had been straining at the leash. If now he finds himself condemned once more to impotence, to solitude, everything will seem useless to him, even writing. Especially writing. Between ’25 and ’32, when he was holding himself in check, he wrote, yes. But it was a lot different then. He still had close ties with the Communists and some of the Socialists; he nourished the hope of a united workers’ front and of a final victory. I know by heart that phrase of Jaurès he used to repeat at every opportunity: ‘The man of tomorrow will be the most complex, the richest in life, that history has ever known.’ He was convinced his books would help to build the future and that the man of tomorrow would read them. That being the case, he wrote. But faced with a sealed future, writing becomes meaningless. If his contemporaries stop listening to him, if posterity no longer understands him, there’s nothing left but to be silent.

And what then? What will become of him? It’s awful to think of a living creature turning into foam, but there’s an even worse fate: that of a paralysed man who can’t move his tongue. It’s far better to be dead. Will I find myself some day hoping for Robert’s death? No. That’s unthinkable. He’s had hard blows before and he’s always got over them. He’ll get over them again. I don’t know how, but he’ll surely think of something. It’s not entirely impossible, for example, that one day he’ll become a member of the Communist Party. Now, of course, he wouldn’t dream of doing it; his criticisms of their policies are too violent. But suppose the party line changes, suppose there comes a day when, excepting for the Communists, there is no coherence left. If that ever happens I wonder if Robert won’t end up by joining them rather than remaining inactive. I don’t like that idea. It would be much harder for him than for anyone else to take orders with which he didn’t agree; he’s always had his own definite opinions on what tactics to use. And it would be useless for him to attempt to be cynical; I know he’ll always remain faithful to his old principles. The idealism of others makes him smile; he has his own, and there are certain Communist methods he would never accept. No, that’s no solution. There are far too many things that keep them apart; his humanism isn’t the same as theirs. Not only would he be unable to write anything sincere, but he would be forced to reject his whole past.

‘Too bad,’ he’ll tell me. Just a little while ago he said, ‘One book more or less isn’t very important.’ But does he really believe that? As for me, I value books greatly, too much perhaps. When I was an adolescent, I preferred books to the world of reality, and something of that has remained with me – a slight taste for eternity. Yes, that’s one of the reasons why I take Robert’s writings so much to heart. If they perish, both of us will once more become perishable; the future will be nothing but the grave. Robert doesn’t see things that way, but neither is he the perfect militant completely unconcerned with himself. He definitely hopes to leave a name behind him, a name that will mean a great deal to a great many people. And after all, writing is the thing he loves most in the world; it’s his joy, his necessity; it’s he, himself. Renouncing writing would be suicide for him.

Well, all he would have to do is resign himself to writing to order. Others do it. Others, but not Robert. If I had to, I could imagine him working actively for a cause halfheartedly. But writing is something else again; if he were no longer able to express himself freely, the pen would fall from his hand.

Now I see the impasse. Robert believes completely in certain ideas, and before the war we were positive that one day they would be realized. His whole life has been devoted to enriching them and preparing for their birth. But suppose they’re never born? Suppose the revolution takes a different tack, turns against the humanism Robert has always defended. What can he do? If he helps build a future hostile to all the values in which he believes, his struggle becomes absurd. But if he stubbornly insists on maintaining values that will never come down to earth, he becomes one of those old dreamers whom, above all, he has always wanted not to emulate. No, between those alternatives, no choice is possible. In either case, it would mean defeat, impotence; and for Robert that would be a living death. That’s why he’s thrown himself so energetically into the fight. He tells me the present situation offers an opportunity he’s been waiting for all his life. All right. But it also carries with it a graver danger than any he has ever experienced, and he knows it. Yes, I’m sure he’s already told himself everything I’ve been thinking. He’s told himself that his future might be nothing but the grave, that he’ll be buried without leaving any more trace of himself than Rosa and Diego. And it’s even worse: perhaps the men of tomorrow will look upon him as a dunderhead, a fool, a charlatan, a drone, a complete failure. It may even be that one day he’ll be tempted to look upon himself through their mean, cruel eyes. In that case, he’ll live out the rest of his life in disillusionment. Robert disillusioned! That would be an even more intolerable horror than death itself. I can accept my death and his, but never his disillusionment. No. To think of waking up tomorrow, and the next day, and all the days that follow, with that monstrous menace on the horizon! I won’t stand for it. No. But I can say no, no, no; I can say it a hundred times, and it won’t change a thing. I’ll wake up facing that menace tomorrow and all the days after that. When you’re faced with an inescapable fact, you can at least choose to die. But when it’s nothing more than a baseless fear, you have to go on living with it.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_7e85457a-4e1e-5001-a74e-b7ef8ffe05ff)

The next morning the radio confirmed the German collapse. ‘It’s really the beginning of peace,’ Henri repeated to himself, sitting down at his desk. ‘At last I can start writing again!’ He would, he assured himself, write every day from now on. But what exactly would he write? He didn’t know and he was perfectly content not to know; always before he had known only too well. Now he would attempt to talk to the reader without premeditation, as one writes to a friend. And perhaps he would at last succeed in saying all those things for which he had never found room enough in his too carefully constructed books. There are so many things one would like to preserve with words but which are forever lost. He raised his head and looked through the window at the cold sky. What a pity to think that this winter morning would be lost; everything seemed so precious: the white, virginal paper, the smell of alcohol and stale cigarette ends, the Arab music drifting up from the café next door. Notre Dame was as cold as the sky, a tramp with a huge collar of bluish chicken feathers was dancing in the middle of the street, and two girls in their Sunday clothes were watching him and laughing. It was Christmas, it was the German collapse, and life was beginning again. Yes, all those mornings, all those evenings, that he had let slip through his fingers in the last four years, he was determined to make up for them during the next thirty. You can’t say everything, that’s true enough. But nevertheless you can try to get across the real flavour of your life. Every life has a flavour, a flavour all its own, and if you can’t describe it, there’s no point in writing. ‘I’ve got to tell about what I liked, what I like, what I am,’ he said to himself as he finished sketching a cluster of flowers on a scrap of paper. Who was he? What manner of man would he discover after that long absence? It’s difficult, working from within, for a person to define himself, to set limits on himself. He wasn’t a political fanatic, nor a literary aesthete, nor a dedicated man in any sense. Rather, he felt quite ordinary, and the feeling didn’t upset him in the least. A man like everyone else, who spoke sincerely of himself, would speak in the name of everyone, for everyone. Complete sincerity: that was the only distinctive thing he felt he had to aim for, the only restriction he would have to impose upon himself. He added another flower to the cluster. But it isn’t easy to be sincere. First of all, he had no intention of making an open confession. And secondly, whosoever says novel, says lie. Well, he would think about that later. For the moment, he had above all else to keep himself from becoming burdened with too many problems. Say anything, begin anywhere – beneath the moon in the gardens of El Oued. The paper was bare; he had to take advantage of it.

‘Did you start your light novel?’ Paula asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you know what you’re writing?’

‘I’m planning to surprise myself,’ he said with a laugh.

Paula shrugged her shoulders. As a matter of fact, what he said was quite true; he really didn’t want to know. Without any semblance of order, any basic plan, he jotted down odds and ends of his life, and it amused and pleased him, and he could ask for nothing more.

The evening he went to meet Nadine, he left his writing regretfully. He had told Paula he was going out with Scriassine; during the last year he had learned to be more discreet. To have said ‘I’m going out with Nadine’ would have brought on so many questions, so many misinterpretations, that he chose not to say it. But it was really absurd to hide the fact that he was meeting that awkward girl whom he had always looked upon as a sort of niece. It was even more absurd to have made the appointment in the first place. He pushed open the door to the Bar Rouge and walked over to her table. She was sitting between Lachaume and Vincent.

‘No fights tonight?’

‘No,’ Vincent said peevishly.

Young men and women crowded into that red cellar not primarily to be among friends, but rather to confront adversaries. Every conceivable shade of political opinion was represented there, and Henri often came there to spend a few pleasant moments talking with his friends. He would have liked to sit down now and chat casually with Lachaume and Vincent while he watched the crowd in the room. But Nadine got up at once.

‘Are you taking me to dinner?’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

Outside, it was dark; the sidewalk was covered with dirty slush. What in the world, he wondered, would he be able to do with Nadine?

‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked. ‘To the Italian place?’

‘To the Italian place.’

She wasn’t difficult to please. She let him choose the table and ordered the same things as he – peperoni and osso bucco. She approved of everything he said with a delighted air which somehow seemed rather suspect to Henri. The truth was that she wasn’t listening to him; she was eating greedily and quietly, smiling into her plate. He let the conversation lapse and Nadine appeared not to notice it. Having swallowed the last mouthful, she wiped her lips with a broad gesture.

‘And now where do you plan to take me?’

‘You don’t like jazz and you don’t like dancing?’

‘No.’

‘Well, we can try the Tropic of Cancer.’

‘Can we have any fun there?’

‘Why? Do you know some place we can have some fun? The Tropic isn’t a bad place for a quiet talk.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Public benches are all right, too, for talking.’ Her face lit up. ‘As a matter of fart, there are some places I do like – the ones where you see those naked women.’

‘Really? That sort of thing amuses you?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course, the Turkish baths are better, but the cabarets aren’t bad.’

‘You wouldn’t by any chance be just a little bit perverted, would you?’ Henri asked, laughing.

‘It’s possible,’ she said dryly. ‘Have you anything better to suggest?’

It was impossible to imagine anything more incongruous than going to see naked women with this tall, awkward girl who was neither a virgin nor yet a woman. But Henri had taken it upon himself to entertain her and he had no idea of how to go about it. They went to Chez Astarte and sat down at a table in front of a champagne bucket. The room was still empty; at the bar, the house girls were chattering to each other. Nadine studied them carefully.

‘If I were a man,’ she said, ‘I’d take a different woman home with me every night.’

‘If you had a different woman every night, they’d all seem the same after a while.’

‘You’re wrong. Take that little brunette over there, and the redhead with those pretty falsies, for example. You wouldn’t find the same thing at all under their dresses.’ She rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked steadily at Henri. ‘Aren’t you interested in women?’

‘Not in that way.’

‘How then?’

‘Well, I like looking at them when they’re pretty, dancing with them when they’re grateful, or talking to them when they’re intelligent.’

‘For talk men are better,’ Nadine said. She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘why did you ask me to go out with you? I’m not pretty, I dance badly, and I’m a poor conversationalist.’

Henri smiled. ‘Don’t you remember? You were reproaching me for not asking you?’

‘And I suppose every time someone reproaches you for not doing something, you immediately do it?’

‘All right,’ Henri asked, ‘why did you accept my invitation?’