The Woman Destroyed

He made no answer. In this kind of research there are necessarily times when one makes no progress: he cannot accept that as readily as he used to do.

I opened the window. Paris, sweltering beneath the crushing summer heat, smelt of asphalt and impending storms. My eyes followed André. Maybe it is during those moments, as I watch him disappear, that he exists for me with the most overwhelming clarity: his tall shape grows smaller, each pace marking out the path of his return; it vanishes and the street seems to be empty; but in fact it is a field of energy that will lead him back to me as to his natural habitat: I find this certainty even more moving than his presence.

I paused on the balcony for a long while. From my sixth floor I see a great stretch of Paris, with pigeons flying over the slate-covered roofs, and those seeming flowerpots that are really chimneys. Red or yellow, the cranes—five, nine, ten: I can count ten of them—hold their iron arms against the sky: away to the right my gaze bumps against a great soaring wall with little holes in it—a new block: I can also see prism-like towers—recently-built tall buildings. Since when have cars been parked in the tree-lined part of the boulevard Edgar-Quinet? I find the newness of the landscape staringly obvious; yet I cannot remember having seen it look otherwise. I should like two photographs to set side by side, Before and After, so that I could be amazed by the differences. No: not really. The world brings itself into being before my eyes in an everlasting present: I grow used to its different aspects so quickly that it does not seem to me to change.

The card-indexes and blank paper on my desk urged me to work; but there were words dancing in my head that prevented me from concentrating. ‘Philippe will be here this evening.’ He had been away almost a month. I went into his room. Books and papers were still lying about—an old grey pull-over, a pair of violet pyjamas—in this room that I cannot make up my mind to change because I have not the time to spare, nor the money; and because I do not want to believe that Philippe has stopped belonging to me. I went back into the library, which was filled with the scent of a bunch of roses, as fresh and simple-minded as so many lettuces. I was astonished that I could ever have thought the flat forlorn and empty. There was nothing lacking. My eyes wandered with pleasure over the cushions scattered on the divans, some softly coloured, some vivid: the Polish dolls, the Slovak bandits and the Portuguese cocks were all in their places, as good as gold. ‘Philippe will be here …’ I was still at a loss for anything to do. Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight—it is not so easy to get rid of that.

I made up my mind to go out and get a breath of the summer heat. A tall negro in an electric blue raincoat and a grey felt hat was listlessly sweeping the pavement: before, it used to be an earth-coloured Algerian. In the boulevard Edgar-Quinet I mingled with the crowd of women. As I almost never go out in the morning any more, the market had an exotic air for me (so many morning markets, beneath so many skies). The little old lady hobbled from one stall to another, her sparse hair carefully combed back, her hand grasping the handle of her empty basket. In earlier days I never used to worry about old people; I looked upon them as the dead whose legs still kept moving. Now I see them—men and women: only a little older than myself. I had noticed this old lady at the butcher’s one day when she asked for scraps for her cats. ‘For her cats!’ he said when she had gone. ‘She hasn’t got a cat. Such a stew she’s going to make for herself!’ The butcher found that amusing. Presently she will be picking up the leavings under the stalls before the tall negro sweeps everything into the gutter. Making ends meet on a hundred and eighty francs a month: there are more than a million in the same plight: three million more scarcely less wretched.

I bought some fruit, some flowers, and sauntered along. Retired: it sounds rather like rejected, tossed on to the scrap-heap. The word used to chill my heart. The great stretch of free time frightened me. I was mistaken. I do find the time a little too broad over the shoulders; but I manage. And how delightful to live with no imperatives, no kind of restraint! Yet still from time to time a bewilderment comes over me. I remember my first appointment, my first class, and the dead leaves that rustled under my feet that autumn in the country. In those days retirement seemed to me as unreal as death itself, for between me and that day there lay a stretch of time almost twice as long as that which I had so far lived. And now it is a year since it came. I have crossed other frontiers, but all of them less distinct. This one was as rigid as an iron curtain.

I came home; I sat at my desk. Without some work I should have found even that delightful morning insipid. When it was getting on for one o’clock I stopped so as to lay the table in the kitchen—just like my grandmother’s kitchen at Milly (I should like to see Milly again)—with its farmhouse table, its benches, its copper pots, the exposed beams: only there is a gas-stove instead of a range, and a refrigerator. (What year was it that refrigerators first came to France? I bought mine ten years ago, but they were already quite usual by then. When did they begin? Before the war? Just after? There’s another of those things I don’t remember any more.)

André came in late; he had told me he would. On leaving the laboratory he had attended a meeting on French nuclear weapons.

‘Did it go well?’ I asked.

‘We settled the wording of a new manifesto. But I have no illusions about it. It will have no more effect than the rest of them. The French don’t give a damn. About the deterrent, the atomic bomb in general—about anything. Sometimes I feel like getting the hell out of here—going to Cuba, to Mali. No, seriously, I do think about it. Out there it might be possible to make oneself useful.’

‘You couldn’t work any more.’

‘That would be no very great disaster.’

I put salad, ham, cheese and fruit on the table. ‘Are you as disheartened as all that? This is not the first time you people have been unable to make headway.’

‘No.’

‘Well, then?’

‘You don’t choose to understand.’

He often tells me that nowadays all the fresh ideas come from his colleagues and that he is too old to make new discoveries: I don’t believe him. ‘Oh, I can see what you are thinking,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘You’re mistaken. It is fifteen years since I had my last idea.’

Fifteen years. None of the sterile periods he has been through before have lasted that long. But having reached the point he has reached, no doubt he needs a break of this kind to come by fresh inspiration. I thought of Valéry’s lines

Chaque atome de silence Est la chance d’un fruit mûr.

Unlooked-for fruit will come from this slow gestation. The adventure in which I have shared so passionately is not over—this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success. I do not understand much about André’s work, but my obstinate confidence used to reinforce his. My confidence is still unshaken. Why can I no longer convey it to him? I will not believe that I am never again to see the feverish joy of discovery blazing in his eyes. I said, ‘There is nothing to prove that you will not get your second wind.’

‘No. At my age one has habits of mind that hamper inventiveness. And I grow more ignorant year by year.’

‘I will remind you of that ten years from now. Maybe you will make your greatest discovery at seventy.’

‘You and your optimism; I promise you I shan’t.’

‘You and your pessimism!’

We laughed. Yet there was nothing to laugh about. André’s defeatism has no valid basis: for once he is lacking in logical severity. To be sure, in his letters Freud did say that at a given age one no longer discovers anything new, and that it is terribly sad. But at that time he was much older than André. Nevertheless this extreme gloominess still saddens me just as much, although it is unjustified. And the reason why André gives way to it is that he is in a state of general crisis. It surprises me, but the truth of the matter is that he cannot bring himself to accept the fact that he is over sixty. For my own part I still find countless things amusing: he does not. Formerly he was interested in everything: now it is a tremendous business to drag him as far as a cinema or an exhibition, or to see friends.

‘What a pity it is that you no longer like walking,’ I said. ‘These days are so lovely! I was thinking just now how I should have liked to go back to Milly, and into the forest at Fontainebleau.’

‘You are an amazing woman,’ he said with a smile. ‘You know the whole of Europe, and yet what you want to see again is the outskirts of Paris!’

‘Why not? The church at Champeaux is no less beautiful because I have climbed the Acropolis.’

‘All right. As soon as the laboratory closes in four or five days’ time, I promise you a long run in the car.’

We should have time to go for more than one, since we are staying in Paris until the beginning of August. But would he want to? I said, ‘Tomorrow is Sunday. You’re not free?’

‘No, alas. As you know there’s this press-conference on apartheid in the evening. They’ve brought me a whole pile of papers I have not looked at yet.’

Spanish political prisoners; Portuguese detainees; persecuted Persians; Congolese, Angolan, Cameroonian rebels; Venezuelan, Peruvian and Colombian resistance fighters; he is always ready to help them as much as ever he can. Meetings, manifestoes, public gatherings, tracts, delegations—he jibs at nothing.

‘You do too much.’

What is there to do when the world has lost its savour? All that is left is the killing of time. I went through a wretched period myself, ten years ago. I was disgusted with my body; Philippe had grown up; and after the success of my book on Rousseau I felt completely hollow inside. Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu, I got Phillipe through his agrégation

(#litres_trial_promo) and managed to make him start on a thesis. I was given a lectureship at the Sorbonne and I found my teaching there even more interesting than my university-scholarship classes. I became resigned to my body. It seemed to me that I came to life again. And now, if André were not so very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether.

He went out again, and again I stayed a long while on the balcony. I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson; it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement. When he was sixty André was astonished at being able to cross. Sweden in less than twenty-four hours, whereas in his youth the journey had taken a week. I have experienced wonders like that. Moscow in three and a half hours from Paris!

A cab took me to the Parc Montsouris, where I had an appointment with Martine. As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the high Alpine pastures where I used to walk with André with a sack on my shoulders, a smell so moving because it was that of the meadows of childhood. Reflexions, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives its colour and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.

‘Hallo!’

Martine was drinking lemon juice on the café terrace. Thick blade hair, blue eyes, a short dress with orange and yellow stripes and a hint of violet: a lovely young woman. Forty. When I was thirty I smiled to hear André’s father describe a forty-year-old as a ‘lovely young woman’; and here were the same words on my own lips, as I thought of Martine. Almost everybody seems to me to be young, now. She smiled at me. ‘You have brought me your book?’

‘Of course.’

She looked at what I had written in it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, with some emotion. She added, ‘I so long to read it. But one is so busy at the end of the school year. I shall have to wait for July 14.’

‘I should very much like to know what you think.’

I have great trust in her judgment: that is to say we are almost always in agreement. I should feel on a completely equal footing with her if she had not retained a little of that old pupil-teacher deference towards me, although she is a teacher herself, married and the mother of a family.

‘It is hard to teach literature nowadays. Without your books I really should not know how to set about it.’ Shyly she asked, ‘Are you pleased with this one?’

I smiled at her. ‘Frankly, yes.’

There was still a question in her eyes—one that she did not like to put into words. I made the first move. ‘You know what I wanted to do—to start off with a consideration of the critical works published since the war and then to go on to suggest a new method by which it is possible to make one’s way into a writer’s work, to see it in depth, more accurately than has ever been done before. I hope I have succeeded.’

It was more than a hope: it was a conviction. It filled my heart with sunlight. A lovely day: and I was enchanted with these trees, lawns, walks where I had so often wandered with friends and fellow-students. Some are dead, or life has separated us. Happily—unlike André, who no longer sees anyone—I have made friends with some of my pupils and younger colleagues: I like them better than women of my own age. Their curiosity spurs mine into life: they draw me into their future, on the far side of my own grave.

Martine stroked the book with her open hand. ‘Still, I shall dip into it this very evening. Has anyone read it?’

‘Only André. But literature does not mean a very great deal to him.’