The Woman Destroyed

‘But you don’t realize. Papa has worked a miracle for him: a post like this, at his age, is something absolutely extraordinary. You can’t ask him to sacrifice his future for you.’

‘He had a future, a dean one, true to his own ideas.’

‘I beg your pardon—true to your ideas. He has developed.’

‘He will go on developing: it’s a tune we all know. He will make his opinions chime with his interests. For the moment he is up to his middle in bad faith—his only idea is to succeed. He is betraying himself and he knows it; that is what is so tenth-rate,’ I said passionately.

Irène gave me a dirty look. ‘I imagine your own life has always been perfect, and so that allows you to judge everybody else from a great height.’

I stiffened. ‘I have always tried to be honest. I wanted Philippe to be the same. I am sorry that you should have turned him from that course.’

She burst out laughing. ‘Anyone would think he had become a burglar, or a coiner.’

‘For a man of his convictions, I do not consider his an honourable choice.’

Irène stood up. ‘But after all it is strange, this high moral stand of yours,’ she said slowly. ‘His father is more committed, politically, than you; and he has not broken with Philippe. Whereas you …’

I interrupted her. ‘He has not broken … You mean they’ve seen one another?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied quickly. ‘I know he never spoke of breaking when Philippe told him about his decision.’

‘That was before the phone call. What about since?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know who Philippe sees and who he doesn’t?’

Looking stubborn she said, ‘No.’

‘All right. It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

I saw her as far as the door. I turned our last exchanges over in my mind. Had she cut herself short on purpose—a cunning stroke—or was it a blunder? At all events my mind was made up. Almost made up. Not quite enough for it to find an outlet in rage. Just enough for me to be choked with distress and anxiety.

As soon as André came in I went for him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had seen Philippe again?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Irène. She came to ask me why I didn’t see him, since you did.’

‘I warned you I should see him again.’

‘I warned you that I should resent it most bitterly. It was you who persuaded him to write to me.’

‘No: not really.’

‘It certainly was. Oh, you had fun with me, all right: “You know how hard it is for him to make the first step.” And it was you who had made it! Secretly.’

‘With regard to you, he did make the first step.’

‘Urged on by you. You plotted together behind my back. You treated me like a child—an invalid. You had no right to do so.’

Suddenly there was red smoke in my brain, a red mist in front of my eyes, something red shouting out in my throat. I am used to my rages against Philippe; I know myself when I am in one of them. But when it happens (and it is rare, very rare) that I grow furious with André, it is a hurricane that carries me away thousands of miles from him and from myself, into a desert that is both scorching and freezing cold.

‘You have never lied to me before! This is the first time.’

‘Let us agree that I was in the wrong.’

‘Wrong to see Philippe again, wrong to plot against me with him and Irène, wrong to make a fool of me, to lie to me. That’s very far in the wrong.’

‘Listen … will you listen to me quietly?’

‘No. I don’t want to talk to you any more; I don’t want to see you any more. I must be by myself: I am going out for a walk.’

‘Go for a walk then, and try to calm yourself down,’ he said curtly.

I set off through the streets and I walked as I often used to do when I wanted to calm my fears or rages or to get rid of mental images. Only I am not twenty any more, nor even fifty, and weariness came over me very soon. I went into a café and drank a glass of wine, my eyes hinting in the cruel glare of the neon. Philippe: it was all over. Married, a deserter to the other side. André was all I had left and there it was—I did not have him either. I had supposed that each of us could see right into the other, that we were united, linked to one another like Siamese twins. He had cast himself off from me, lied to me; and here I was on this café bench, alone. I continually called his face, his voice to mind, and I blew on the fire of the furious resentment that was burning me up. It was like one of those illnesses in which you manufacture your own suffering—every breath tears your lungs to pieces, and yet you are forced to breathe.

I left, and I set off again, walking. So what now? I asked myself in a daze. We were not going to part. Each of us alone, we should go on living side by side. I should bury my grievances, then, these grievances that I did not want to forget. The notion that one day my anger would have left me made it far worse.

When I got home I found a note on the table: ‘I have gone to the cinema.’ I opened our bedroom door. There were André’s pyjamas on the bed, a packet of tobacco and his blood-pressure medicines on the bedside table. For a moment he existed—a heart-piercing existence—as though he had been taken far from me by illness or exile and I were seeing him again in these forgotten, scattered objects. Tears came into my eyes. I took a sleeping-pill; I went to bed.

When I woke up in the morning he was asleep, curled in that odd position with one hand against the wall. I looked away. No impulse towards him at all. My heart was as dreary and frigid as a deconsecrated church in which there is no longer the least warm flicker of a lamp. The slippers and the pipe no longer moved me; they no longer called to mind a beloved person far away; they were merely an extension of that stranger who lived under the same roof as myself. Dreadful anomaly of the anger that is born of love and that murders love.

I did not speak to him. While he was drinking his tea in the library I stayed in my room. Before leaving he called, ‘You don’t want to have it out?’

‘No.’

There was nothing to ‘have out’. Words would shatter against this anger and pain, this hardness in my heart.

All day long I thought of André, and from time to time there was something that flickered in my brain. Like having been hit on the head, when one’s sight is disordered and one sees two different images of the world at different weights, without being able to make out which is above and which below. The two pictures I had, of the past André and the present André, did not coincide. There was an error somewhere. This present moment was a lie: it was not we who were concerned—not André, nor I: the whole thing was happening in another place. Or else the past was an illusion, and I had been completely wrong about André. Neither the one nor the other, I said to myself when I could see clearly again. The truth was that he had changed. Aged. He no longer attributed the same importance to things. Formerly he would have found Philippe’s behaviour utterly revolting: now he did no more than disapprove. He would not have plotted behind my back; he would not have lied to me. His sensitivity and his moral values had lost their fine edge. Will he follow this tendency? More and more indifferent … I can’t bear it. This sluggishness of the heart is called indulgence and wisdom: in fact it is death settling down within you. Not yet: not now.

That day the first criticism of my book appealed. Lantier accused me of going over the same ground again and again. He’s an old fool and he loathes me; I ought never to have let myself feel it But in my exacerbated mood I did grow vexed. I should have liked to talk to André about it, but that would have meant making peace with him: I did not want to.

‘I’ve shut up the laboratory,’ he said that evening, with a pleasant smile. ‘We can leave for Villeneuve and Italy whatever day you like.’

‘We had decided to spend this month in Paris,’ I answered shortly.

‘You might have changed your mind.’

‘I have not done so.’

André’s face darkened. ‘Are you going to go on sulking for long?’

‘I’m afraid I am.’

‘Well, you’re in the wrong. It is out of proportion to what has happened.’

‘Everyone has his own standards.’