The Woman Destroyed (26 page)

“Not at all. It is me I was thinking about. I hoped I should manage somehow with Noëllie and you. And I’m going off my head. I can’t even work anymore.”

“It’s Noëllie who insists on your leaving.”

“She can’t bear the situation any more than you can.”

“If I had stood it better, would you have stayed?”

“But you couldn’t. Even your kindness and your silence tore my heart out.”

“You’re leaving me because the pity you feel for me makes you suffer too much?”

“Oh, I beg you to understand me!” he said in an imploring voice.

“I understand,” I said.

Maybe he was not lying. Perhaps he had not made up his mind this summer: indeed, in cold blood the idea of breaking my heart for me must have seemed to him appalling. But Noëllie has badgered him. Has she perhaps threatened to break? So that at last he is throwing me overboard.

I repeated, “I understand. Noëllie says you must say yes
or no. You leave me or she drops you flat. Well, then, quite candidly she is an odious beast! She might perfectly well have agreed that you should keep a little place for me in your life.”

“But I do keep one for you—a very big one.”

He hesitated: was he going to deny that he was giving in to Noëllie or admit it? I spurred him on. “I should never have believed that you would yield to blackmail.”

“There was no question of an ultimatum, nor of blackmail. I need a little solitude and quiet; I need a place of my own—you’ll see, everything will be better between us.”

He had chosen the version that he thought would hurt me least. Was it true? I shall never know. But on the other hand what I do know is that in a year or two, when I have got used to it, he will live with Noëllie. Where shall I be? In my grave? In an asylum? I don’t care. I don’t care about anything at all.…

He presses me to go and spend two weeks in New York: so do Colette and Isabelle; they have more or less plotted this together, and perhaps they even suggested her invitation to Lucienne—her invitation to spend two weeks in New York. They explain to me that it would be less painful if he were to move while I was away. And in fact if I were to see him emptying his cupboards I should not escape a nervous breakdown. All right. I give way once more. Perhaps Lucienne will help me understand myself, although now that has not the slightest importance.

15 March. New York

I can’t prevent myself from looking out for the telegram, the telephone call, from Maurice that will tell me,
I have
broken with Noëllie
, or just,
I have changed my mind. I am staying at home
. And of course it does not come.

To think that once I should have been so happy to see this city! And here I am, blind.

Maurice and Colette took me to the airport; I was stuffed with tranquilizers: Lucienne would take delivery of me at the other end—a parcel that is trundled about, an invalid, or a half-wit. I slept, I thought about nothing, and I landed in a fog. How elegant Lucienne has grown! Not a girl anymore at all: a woman, very sure of herself. (She who loathed adults. When I used to say to her, “Admit I was right,” she would fly into a rage—“You’re wrong! You’re wrong to have been right!”) She drove me to a pleasant apartment on 50th Street that a friend had lent her for two weeks. And as I unpacked my bags I thought,
I shall force her to explain everything to me. I shall know why I have been condemned. That will be less unbearable than ignorance
.

She said, “It really suits you, being thinner.”

“Was I too fat?”

“A little. You look better now.”

Her steady, collected voice overawed me. Still, that evening I did try to talk to her. (We were drinking martinis in a terribly hot, noisy bar.)

“You saw our life together,” I said. “And indeed you were very critical as far as I was concerned. Don’t be afraid of hurting me. Try to explain why your father has stopped loving me.”

She smiled rather pityingly. “But, Mama, after fifteen years of marriage it is perfectly natural to stop loving one’s wife. It’s the other thing that would be astonishing!”

“There are people who love one another all their lives.”

“They pretend to.”

“Listen, don’t answer me with generalities, like everybody else.
It’s normal, it’s natural:
that doesn’t satisfy me. I’m sure I must have had faults. What were they?”

“Your fault was believing that love could last. I’ve grasped the situation: as soon as I begin to grow fond of a man, I find another.”

“Then you’ll never love anyone.”

“No, of course not.
You
know where that gets you.”

“What’s the point of living if you don’t love anyone?”

I am incapable of wishing that I had not loved Maurice or even of wishing that I did not love him now: I just want him to love me.

I persisted during the days that followed. “Still, look at Isabelle; look at Diana; and the Couturiers: there are marriages that stick.”

“It’s a matter of statistics. When you put your money on married love you take the risk of being left flat at forty, empty-handed. You drew a losing ticket: you’re not the only one.”

“I haven’t crossed the Atlantic to hear you utter commonplaces.”

“It is so far from being a commonplace that you had never thought of it and that you don’t even want to believe it now.”

“Statistics don’t explain why it should happen to me personally!”

She shrugs; she changes the conversation; she takes me to the theater, to the cinema; she shows me the town. But I go relentlessly on. “Did you have the feeling that I did
not understand your father? That I was just not up to it?”

“When I was fifteen, of course I did, like all girls who are in love with their fathers.”

“What exactly did you think?”

“That you didn’t admire him enough: for me he was a kind of superman.”

“I was certainly wrong in not taking a greater interest in his work. Do you think he turned against me?”

“Because of that?”

“That or anything else.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did we quarrel a lot?”

“No. Not when I was there.”

“Still, in fifty-five, Colette remembers.…”

“Because she was always clinging to your apron strings. And she was older than me.”

“Then why do you imagine your father is leaving me?”

“At about that age men often feel like starting a new life. They suppose it will go on being new for the rest of their lives.”

Really I can get nothing out of Lucienne. Does she think so badly of me that she finds it impossible to tell me?

16 March
.

“You just won’t talk to me about myself: do you think so very badly of me then?”

“What a notion!”

“I know I am being a bore. But I do want to see clearly into my past.”

“It’s the future that counts. Find yourself some men. Or take a job.”

“No. I need your father.”

“Maybe he’ll come back to you.”

“You know perfectly well he won’t.”

We have had this conversation ten times over. I bore her too; I exasperate her. Perhaps if I were to push her far enough she would end up by breaking out and telling me. But she has such patience that I lose heart. Who knows but they may have written to her to tell her about my case and beg her to bear with me?

Dear God! How smooth life is, how clear—it runs so naturally, when everything is going well. And all that’s needed is just one hitch. Then you discover that it’s thick and dark, that you know nothing whatever about anybody, either yourself or anyone else—what they are, what they think, what they do, how they look upon you.

I asked her what she thought of her father.

“Oh, for my part, I don’t sit in judgment on anyone.”

“You don’t think he has behaved like a swine?”

“Frankly, no. He is certainly kidding himself about this woman. He’s a simpleminded soul. But not a swine.”

“You think he has the right to sacrifice me?”

“Obviously it’s tough on you. But why should
he
sacrifice himself? I know very well
I
should not sacrifice myself for anyone on earth.”

She said that with a kind of boasting air. Is she really as hard as she likes to make out? I wonder. She seems much less sure of herself than I had thought at first. Yesterday I questioned her about herself. “Listen, I want you to be straight with me: I need it—your father has lied to me so much. Was it because of me that you went off to America?”

“What a notion!”

“Your father is sure of it. And he holds it against me terribly. I know very well that I was burdensome to you. I always was, from the very beginning.”

“Let’s put it that I had no talent for family life.”

“It was my presence you couldn’t bear. You left to get away from me.”

“Don’t let’s exaggerate anything. You didn’t crush me. No. I only wanted to know whether I could stand on my own feet.”

“Now you know.”

“Yes; I know that I can.”

“Are you happy?”

“There you are, that’s one of your words. It really has no meaning as far as I am concerned.”

“Then that is to say you’re not happy.”

Aggressively she replied, “My life suits me splendidly.”

Work, going out, brief encounters: it seems an arid sort of an existence to me. She has rough ways, spurts of impatience—not only with me—that seem to betray a conflict. This is certainly my fault too, this refusal of love: my sentimentality sickened her, and she has warped herself in trying not to be like me. There is something stiff, almost unpleasing, about her ways. She has introduced some of the men she knows and I have been struck by her attitude with them—always on the watch, remote, hard; there is no mirth in her laughter.

20 March
.

Something is out of beat in Lucienne. There is evil in her—the word horrifies me, and I hesitate to write it; but
it is the only one that fits. I have always seen her critical, scornful and fleering; but now it is with genuine ill nature that she tears those she calls her friends to pieces. She delights in telling them unpleasant truths. In fact they are no more than common acquaintances. She has made an effort to display people for my benefit; but usually she lives very much alone. Ill nature. It is a defense: against what? At all events she is not the capable, brilliant, well-balanced girl I had imagined in Paris. Have I failed with both of them? No; oh, no!

I asked her, “Do you agree with your father that Colette has made a dreadfully silly marriage?”

“She made just the marriage anyone would have expected her to make. Love was the only thing she ever thought about, so it was inevitable that she should lose her head over the first fellow she came into contact with.”

“Was it my fault, if she was like that?”

She laughed her mirthless laugh. “You’ve always had a very exaggerated notion of your own responsibilities.”

I persisted. According to her it is the psychoanalytical situation that really matters in a childhood—the situation that exists outside the parents’ range of knowledge and almost in spite of them. The bringing up, in its deliberate, conscious aspect, comes very far behind. My responsibility is nil. Cold comfort. I had never imagined I should ever have to deny guilt—my daughters were my pride.

I also asked her, “What do you see me as?” She stared at me, amazed. “I mean how would you describe me?”

“You’re very French, very
soft
, as they say here. Very idealistic, too. You have no defenses, that’s your only fault.”

“The only one?”

“Yes, of course. Apart from that you are full of life, gay and charming.”

It was pretty concise, her description. I repeated, “Full of life, gay and charming.…”

She seemed embarrassed. “And what about you—how do you see yourself?”

“As a marshland. Everything is buried in the mud.”

“You’ll find yourself again.”

No: and perhaps that is the worst side of it all. It is only now that I realize how much value I had for myself, fundamentally. But Maurice has murdered all the words by which I might try to justify it: he has repudiated the standards by which I measured others and myself; I had never dreamed of challenging them—that is to say of challenging myself. And now what I wonder is this: what right had I to say that the inner life was preferable to a merely social life, contemplation to trifling amusements, and self-sacrifice to ambition? My only life had been to create happiness around me. I have not made Maurice happy. And my daughters are not happy either. So what then? I no longer know anything. Not only do I not know what kind of a person I am, but also I do not know what kind of a person I ought to be. Black and white merge into one another, the world is an amorphous mass, and I no longer have any clear outlines. How is it possible to live without believing in anything or in myself?

It shocks Lucienne that New York should interest me so little. Before, I used not to come out of my burrow very often, but when I did I was interested in everything—the countryside, people, museums, the streets. Now I am
a dead woman. A dead woman who still has years to drag out—how many? Even a single day, when I open my eyes in the morning, seems to me something whose end I can never possibly reach. In my bath yesterday the mere act of lifting my arm faced me with a problem—why lift an arm: why put one foot in front of another? When I am by myself I stand there motionless for minutes on end at the edge of the pavement, utterly paralyzed.

23 March
.

I leave tomorrow. The night all around me is as dark as ever. I cabled to ask that Maurice should not come to Orly. I haven’t the moral strength to face him. He will be gone. I am going back and he will be gone.

24 March
.

There. Colette and Jean-Pierre were waiting for me. I had dinner at their apartment. They brought me here. The window was dark: it always will be dark. We climbed the stairs; they put my bags down in the sitting room. I would not let Colette stay and sleep here: I just have to get used to it. I sat down at the table. I am sitting there now. And I look at those two doors—Maurice’s study, our bedroom. Closed. A closed door: something that is watching behind it. It will not open if I do not stir. Do not stir: ever. Stop the flow of time and of life.