Authors: Madeleine Bourdouxhe
T
HE GARE DU NORD
is dark, dirty, in a state of decay, and new arrivals bring back memories of the depressing landscapes they’ve just passed through. In the third-class trains, the journey from the frontier is unbearable. From time to time a sports team or a group of Catholics will alight from those trains with a flourish – they’ll cross the station with flags unfolded and greet Paris with a tired, noisy rendering of the Belgian national anthem. On the platforms, people waiting for arrivals or departures speak in the heavy tones of Flanders or with a Walloon drawl.
The Maubeuge train was late; Marie was sitting in the station buffet watching the platform. She saw some red lights but no, it wasn’t the train. She got up to look at the board announcing delays – the number of minutes had increased by fifteen. She continued to wait until she saw a
crowd of people pressing through the barrier. She went up to him immediately.
‘You’re not too tired, Jean? Here, give me your case.’
She walked very close to him, slipping an arm through his. How pleased she was that he was back, but how tired he looked, and how lined his brow … She thought his face was dirty but it was stubble darkening his chin and his cheeks. Even though he shaved every day, he always had a dark shadow.
Marie stood opposite Jean in the bus.
‘What did you do in the evenings, darling?’
She replied, off the top of her head: ‘Oh, I read, I prepared my teaching. What was the weather like up there?’
‘Rain as usual. There haven’t been any important letters, then?’
‘No, you’ll see. Do you think your trip went well? Are sales good?’
‘Hardly – the recession goes on and on. At the moment it’s best if I’m on the spot.’
In the early days of their marriage Jean had accepted a job as an engineer with a firm in Maubeuge, his home town, and he feared that they would have to leave the Paris that Marie loved so much, and where he had just spent five years of student life. But the firm had opened an office in Paris, which meant that Jean could live there; he only had to spend short periods in Maubeuge in order to deal with the technical side of his work.
‘I don’t understand,’ Marie said. ‘If sales are down, why does your presence become more and more necessary?’
‘They’re talking about closing the Paris office,’ he replied softly.
Marie said nothing. In her mind’s eye she remembered the few days they had spent at Maubeuge a month after their marriage: the narrow, colourless town, the family circle, the big dark house behind the factory. That would be terrible, she thought. Suddenly, too, she saw the number of kilometres increasing again, changing from five to seven hundred. ‘That would be terrible!’ she said out loud.
‘If it came to that, it would probably only last a few months. And anyway, if it would be too painful for you, I could live there alone and you could stay here.’
‘Oh no,’ she replied without hesitation.
‘Let’s not think about it,’ he said. ‘Nothing is definite yet.’
They went home and sat down to eat. She had prepared a soup that she’d left to cook on the side of the stove, and served it up piping hot. She felt happy to be serving it up to Jean piping hot, happy too that he was sitting at table, in his place, next to her.
‘I am very happy,’ she said, ‘now that you are here with me.’
She looked at him and saw again the beard, the lines on his brow and other lighter ones around his eyes.
‘Have you been working too hard? You look so tired.’
‘I look tired?’
He got up and turned towards the mirror. ‘What do you mean – I look fine!’
He was right: that was just the way he looked. His face was neither tired nor old; it was only thirty-two.
‘Did you see your mother?’ he asked.
‘No, I spent an afternoon with her last week.’
‘Usually you can’t go two days without running over to her to find out whether she has any problems!’
‘I preferred to be alone.’
THERE WAS A KIND OF CONFIDENCE
in Marie’s voice, in her gestures, in the way she held her head. Jean took in the brightness of her gaze, the darkness of her eyes. How beautiful she is, he thought.
‘Have you seen Claudine?’ he asked. ‘She must have got back from holiday several days ago.’
Her sister Claudine. Marie and Claudine shared an intimacy that made them more like friends than sisters. She had last written to her when they were on holiday, three days before her encounter, and in the days that followed she’d scarcely thought about her at all. For the last three days she had forgotten Claudine.
Although Claudine was the elder sister she had always seemed the more childish. When they were little it was Claudine who smeared her exercise books with ink and chocolate. She was smaller than Marie, with small features and light, mousy hair. Their mother used to call them, jokingly, ‘my little brunette and my big redhead’ – it used slightly to annoy Marie that she should exaggerate the colour of her hair in this way. As an adolescent Claudine liked the same books as Marie, quoted the same passages, had the same desires, the same enthusiasms, the same dislikes. And Marie
admired her sister, thought her destined for a full, dramatic life. She didn’t know then that whereas all those things were deeply rooted in her, for Claudine they were only superficial passions, as if she were acting. When Claudine talked, she dazzled their friends, but she was only parroting the words of Marie – who was taciturn and inscrutable, confiding in no one but her sister. Marie thought Claudine was the only person who could understand her; she spoke to her without realising that she was speaking to her own image.
At the age of eighteen Claudine gave herself to a student, just because he was the first man to make a pass at her. Afterwards, in a state of shock after a visit to an obliging doctor, she had taken refuge in her sister’s arms. Marie could still see the bedroom they shared as girls: the lamp they had to cover so that no one would see it was still on, and Claudine’s childish fears, which she continually tried to allay. She had put her hand rather firmly on Claudine’s mouth to stop her calling out to their mother; later she’d hidden the blood-soaked sheets.
Claudine blocks out the episode and begins to play around again, carelessly abandoning herself to fortune. She knows nothing of love, of joy or of sorrow, but she speaks of them in big, extravagant words that lose meaning on her lips. At twenty-three, she marries a man of forty, because ‘everything is hopeless anyway’, because ‘I’m fed up’ and because she wants to be free. Free to do what, for God’s sake? ‘Hopeless’, ‘fed up’: Marie has a horror of such words. Can Claudine really be the kind of person who uses them,
one of those desperate little people who says that ‘nothing is worth the effort’? Marie agonises over this: how she would like to save her!
Claudine travels a lot, usually without her husband. Her nights are spent without love, joy or danger: she goes no further than bold embraces, not performing any act that might commit her: ‘It’s much easier that way.’ She tells Marie everything, not knowing whether she should laugh or cry at her own behaviour. Finally, laughing and with a great declamatory gesture, she announces, by way of explanation: ‘Whenever I sleep alone, I’m afraid I will die.’
It had been a long time since Marie stopped admiring Claudine, but she never stopped loving her – with a deep, almost painful love. She went on talking to her intimately, involving her in the smallest details of her life, not because she needed to confide in her, but as if in homage to someone she had once admired, to an odd kind of love which persisted in spite of everything, which nothing would ever diminish.
And now there is this completely new, beautiful love inside her, this secret, so full of light, that she does not want to share with Claudine. For the first time, her love for Claudine is an embarrassment.
MARIE HADN’T ANSWERED
Jean’s question. It didn’t surprise him: he knew that Claudine was a disappointment to Marie, that this grieved her, and that she often preferred not to talk about it.
They went into their bedroom. Marie got into bed first and as she watched him take off his clothes she had an inkling that his body would smell slightly of sweat. ‘You ought to wash,’ she said, ‘after that train journey.’
‘Wash?’ he said, annoyed. ‘OK, if you want.’
But what Marie had feared did not take place. Almost as soon as he was in bed Jean went to sleep. Without waking him, she slipped her arms around him, rediscovering his heat, his panting chest, his heavy shoulders. She was sorry now that she could smell only soap and water on his skin; she had feared the smell of him not because it was unpleasant, but because it was his. And now she craved that smell, because she would have loved it as a mother loves the smell of her child.
‘Y
ES, CLAUDINE, OF COURSE
…’
Thinking about her sister the next morning Marie was almost happy to feel herself moved: she still loved her after all. Germaine was coming in today so she could leave the housekeeping to her until midday. She would go and see her sister.
SHE RANG THE BELL
, waited a long time. She heard slippers shuffling along the floor of the corridor, then saw her: she looked thinner, in spite of her tan.
Claudine had only just got out of bed and was feeling cold: it was a shame, she said, that they hadn’t yet turned on the central heating. She’d make an instant fire in the grate that lined the fireplace. She went to the kitchen to look for wood and coal.
She scattered the wood clumsily as she returned, and dropped some of the coal. When the fire failed to take because she didn’t wait for the wood to light, she gave up completely and sat down, sighing.
‘Are you really cold?’ Marie asked.
‘Yes, but it’s too boring to light the fire,’ she replied, with a child’s temper.
‘It’s too boring because you don’t know how to do it,’ Marie said.
She laid out a newspaper on the floor, emptied the contents of the grate and started all over again. She thought to herself: Or perhaps it’s more that she doesn’t know how to do it because she finds it so boring …
Yes, that’s it: Claudine is bad at lighting fires because Claudine doesn’t like wood, or coal, or the smell of the fire which is beginning to take. For Claudine, it is the same for all work of this kind: whether she’s scrubbing a floor, or cleaning a pan, or polishing an object, she does it clumsily.
By contrast, Marie accomplishes such tasks neatly: in her apartment the coal drawers are always full and everything sparkles. And yet, Marie reflects, there’s no value whatsoever in this – it’s simply that she likes undertaking this kind of task. When she comes up from the cellar, she enjoys the weight of the full coal-buckets, even though they seem heavier with every step. She has always felt affection for simple things that have their own particular smell, their own particular roughness, and she’s always known how to handle them. Without fear or hesitation her hands plunge into
dead fires or into soapy water, they rub the rust off a piece of metal and grease it, spread polish, and, after a meal, sweep the scraps from a table in one great circular movement. It’s a perfect harmony, a mutual understanding between the palms of her hands and the objects they touch. She reflects that however completely people might fulfil themselves in other spheres, if they don’t possess this understanding between their hands and material objects, they can never have more than an incomplete understanding of the world. It is this mutual understanding that makes movements succeed.
She likes hands that understand what inanimate objects are saying, and that know how to speak to living things, too. She likes hands that rest on a shoulder and grasp it, hands that suggest all the richness of the heart more effectively than any verbal expressions of love, simply by holding them around a face.
CLAUDINE HAD BEEN WATCHING
Marie as she worked away. When her sister had rung the bell, she hadn’t been able to find her dressing gown and had thrown on a beige canvas apron instead, attaching it at the waist with a piece of cord. She hadn’t used a comb, and with her short, dull brown hair all over her forehead, her thin face and her dark unmade-up skin, she looked like a sickly little peasant.
She talked of holidays that had gone wrong, she yawned, she complained. Marie wished she’d stop: with every word something in her wavered, with every word her love for Claudine was in danger of dying. And when she
herself wanted to talk, she lied a little with each sentence she uttered, because there was this great new thing that she was concealing like a treasure, and which meant that nothing else she might say had any reality. She wanted to leave; and at other moments she wanted to take this grubby little body into her arms and say: ‘Come on, get dressed quickly, and come with me to look at things.’ Look at what? She could only have said the streets, the Seine, the sun, men, women, the buses. And to Claudine, that answer would have seemed stupid.
As she left, she embraced her sister a little too tightly and told her that she would phone soon.
CLAUDINE LIVED FAR FROM
the Right Bank, and the bus that took Marie towards the centre of town travelled the length of the rue de Rennes, crossed the boulevard St Germain and then stopped. A public clock was showing only a quarter to twelve, and since it was warm Marie left the bus and went to sit on one of the benches in front of the church. A fine end of September sun was flooding the terrace of the celebrated café and almost the whole width of the street, lighting up the blue awning of a bookshop. Marie thought of Claudine and how she had left her, with her skinny face, her worn-out old slippers, her makeshift apron. She’d probably be wandering about the apartment now, not doing anything at all; or she might have gone back to bed after her sister had left. Marie’s heart sank. She ought to have taken her by force, made her call her husband and suggest they both come to lunch.
If she’d done that Claudine would be with her; Claudine would be talking. And Marie would no longer be alone: she would not be looking at the buses shining in the sun before making their darker passage into the rue Bonaparte. This notion quickly put paid to her remorse. She declared: ‘I am going through a period of self-absorption; it will pass.’
Self-absorption, yes, that was it, but self-absorption of a rather particular kind. It seemed to her that in the last few years she had held in her hands a series of reins, each of which was tied only to the people who inhabited her own life. ‘Jean, our love will last forever …’ ‘I tell you, it is rare indeed that people love each other as much as Marie and I do …’ ‘Jean, about our love …’ ‘Yes, darling, about our love …’ ‘Jean, you’re not going out all alone to this party after all, are you, without me?’ ‘But no, my sweet, it would never have entered my head to go without you.’ ‘Claudine, I’ve just discovered a little poem by Louise Labé, as I was thumbing through a rare edition in a bookshop … I’ve learnt it by heart, it’s wonderful – listen!’ ‘Wonderful …’ ‘And straight away, Claudine, I looked forward to telling you about it – I’m going to dictate it to you.’ ‘Oh yes, Marie, please let me hear it!’
So it was that whole minutes, hours, years passed by – all full, fine and perfect in their way, but essentially artificial, for if Marie were not in charge of them, these moments would not exist; she alone constructs them, with her heart, her flesh, her personal desires. This was her only faith, and it shone as brightly as the reins she held in her hands.
One summer morning, Marie turned her head and looked behind her. She let go of the reins, and her newly liberated hands began to search for something in the past.
Sitting on a bench in front of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she stared without seeing it at the corner of the rue de Rennes and the rue de l’Abbaye. Again an image haunted her: of a tall girl with reddish hair adjusting a lampshade so that the light did not disturb Claudine’s sleep, then sitting down at a table with her hands on her forehead, heart pounding in great regular beats, and reading Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil.
She recalled the starched cotton collar that she sometimes wore on top of her dress: the neck was fastened with a false-stitched linen border that kept coming apart, so you had to push it back against the material with your thumb or index finger. Fully recapturing the irritation she had felt in her fingers filled her with a sense of joy and triumph.
Marie re-awoke to the objects, the sounds and the place where she was sitting to see a man on the pavement terrace opposite; he was turning towards her and waving hello. Recognising him as Marius Denis, she didn’t move. He called to her again and finally got up and joined her.
‘What are you doing sitting on that bench, Marie?’
‘I’m rushing home,’ she replied, laughing.
‘You’d do better to come and have a drink with me. Will you?’
‘It’s just as nice here as it is opposite.’
A little put out, he sat by her on the bench. Marius Denis had desired Marie because he desired women. Perhaps he
desired them quickly and briefly because, as a good psychologist, he always managed to find the particular language that would make them yield to him. In this context, every time he had spoken to Marie she had heard him with good grace and an attentive air; it was he who awaited a reaction that did not come. An intelligent man, he had understood that Marie was not really listening to him, that she remained distant, as if enclosed in some private world. She rarely responded to what he said, and even then never with a complete sentence. Sometimes she would wake up at a word that he had just said, bestowing upon him a sharp look as if she were following a definite path, but then, as if satisfied, her eyes would soften and she would retreat to her distance. He found these brief awakenings of her gaze even more disconcerting than the long periods of dormancy: when her eyes were sleepy there was just a chance she would give in, but when they were clear and bright she would not. A woman who was faithful to her husband and who would not give herself to anyone was rare enough; a woman who would not give herself to him, that was unthinkable. It followed that Marius’s desire for Marie grew ever more acute, but he spoke to her only of generalities.
They had been at the Sorbonne together: he was involved in many kinds of literary activity so they had several areas of mutual interest. From time to time he slipped in to their conversation an ambiguous, almost bitter phrase, as if to convey to her that if he no longer insisted, everything would continue to depend upon her alone.
‘Did you have a good holiday?’ he asked tritely.
‘Not bad.’
After a while, as if realising she had forgotten something, she added: ‘What about you, Denis?’
She called him Denis. She’d said to him one day: ‘I don’t like calling people by their surname, apart from you: “Marius” is rather ridiculous, whereas your surname makes a good first name.’ He’d recalled exactly what she said; it was unusual for Marie to utter a sentence like that, one of the rare occasions when she’d said something that related directly to him.
He replied: ‘I couldn’t afford a big trip so I just went to the Touraine. I’ve been back in Paris three weeks, I’m working on my new magazine.’
After a few moments he added: ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot.’
‘How can I be of use to you?’ she asked coolly.
He had a sudden urge to hit her. Instead, he decided to respond as if his last sentence bore some relation to the one before it.
‘You might be of use to me at the magazine. I thought you might be interested in collaborating with me on it some time. You’d need to know what it’s all about, you’d have to come to the office so that we could discuss it. If I asked you to come to my place you would refuse, as you always have done.’
‘That’s because you’ve always asked me to come for no particular reason, the very day after we’ve just met and chatted away for as long as we’ve wanted … And then I probably had other things to do, other people to see.’
Why not call her bluff, he thought? ‘You’ll come, then? Today at half-past two?’
‘I’ll be at your place at half-past two.’
She got up and stretched out her hand. He watched her as she walked away, admiring her easy stride and her hair shining in the sun – hair that no hat concealed and no hairstyle kept in check.
Was it possible that today was his lucky day, when he would find an intelligent collaborator as well as the woman he had desired for so long?
Marie, meanwhile, had gone into a bookshop to browse through his magazine. She’d found it to be feminine and fashionable, and wondered what kind of collaboration Denis could possibly have in mind for her.
AT HALF-PAST TWO MARIE
entered a building in the rue Marguerin, pushed open the door of the office and asked for Marius Denis. As she waited, she breathed in the exciting smell of ink and new paper. She imagined the back rooms where the magazine was printed, where the smell must be even stronger; she’d have liked to visit them.
But Denis arrived, and said: ‘Let’s go up to my apartment, it’s more comfortable there.’
Not wanting to annoy him she followed, somewhat reluctantly, towards the elevator.
The apartment was small, with only one room; the door opened directly on to a kind of studio furnished with couches, armchairs and shelves full of books. Marie took
everything in – the closed curtains, the dim light from a single small lampstand, and the table adorned by two glasses, a cocktail shaker and a plate of biscuits – and grasped the situation immediately.
Feeling distinctly uneasy, she sat down on the sofa in the place indicated by Denis. Her unease was born not of fear – she wasn’t at all apprehensive – but of repulsion. He does all these preparations to make women feel more relaxed, she said to herself. It was a kind of trap. And women fell into it because they were giving themselves not to the man who was there with them, to that man rather than to another, but to someone who was so effaced by the darkness of the room that he became almost anonymous; they were yielding not to a man but to an ambience – the dim light, the cushions, the closed curtains, the smell of the wine. The next day they could appease their consciences by saying quietly: ‘It was all because of the ambience.’
Marie remained seated, knees together, hands clasped, her whole body filled with physical repugnance. Denis was talking banalities, such as things that had happened to him on holiday. This went on for several minutes whilst he moved closer and closer. Finally he leaned over her handbag, as if to admire it. Marie realised he thought that when he raised his head he could kiss her. She said nothing, but began to laugh without letting him see. She allowed him to place the bag on her lap but immediately took hold of her glass and raised it to her lips, concealing her smile and protecting her mouth at the same time. He stayed where he was, silent, his hand on her knee.