The Woman Destroyed (8 page)

I went up to bed early. My room was filled with the good smell of lavender, thyme and pine needles: it seemed to me that I had left it only yesterday. A year already! Each year goes by more quickly than the last. I shall not have so very long to wait before I go to sleep forever. Yet I knew how slowly the hours could drag by. And I still love life too much for the idea of death to be a consolation. In spite of everything I slept, a calming sleep in the silence of the countryside.

“Would you like to go out?” asked André the next morning.

“Indeed I should.”

“I’ll show you a charming little place I have rediscovered. On the banks of the Gard. Bring bathing things.”

“I haven’t brought any.”

“Manette will lend you some. You’ll be tempted, I assure you.”

We drove along narrow dusty lanes through wild country. André talked away at a great pace. He had not made such a long stay here for years and years. He had had time to explore the country all over again, and to see childhood friends: he seemed markedly younger and more cheerful here than in Paris. It was quite clear that he had not missed me at all. How long would he have gone on cheerfully doing without me?

He stopped the car. “You see that green patch down there? It’s the Gard. It makes a kind of basin: it’s perfect for bathing, and the place itself is entrancing.”

“But come, isn’t it rather far? We shall have to climb up again.”

“There’s nothing to it: I have often done it.”

He darted down the slope, surefooted and very fast. I followed far behind, holding back and stumbling a little: a fall or a broken bone would not be at all amusing, at my age. I could climb quickly enough, but I had never been much good at going down.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

“Very pretty.”

I sat down in the shade of a rock. As for bathing—no. I swim badly. And I am very unwilling to display myself in a bathing suit, even in front of André. An old man’s body, I said to myself, watching him splash about in the water, is after all less ghastly than an old woman’s. Green water, blue sky, the smell of the southern hills: I would have been better off here than in Paris. If only he had pressed me I should have come sooner: but that was the very thing he had not wanted.

He sat beside me on the gravel. “You ought to have come in. It’s wonderful!”

“I’m very happy here.”

“What do you think of Mama? She’s astonishing, don’t you find?”

“Astonishing. What does she do all day?”

“She reads a great deal; she listens to the radio. I suggested buying her a television, but she refused. She said, ‘I don’t let just anyone into my house.’ She gardens. She goes to the meetings of her cell. She is never at a loss, as she puts it.”

“All in all, it is the best time of her life.”

“Certainly. It’s one of those cases in which old age is a happy period—old age after a hard life, one that has been more or less eaten up by others.”

When we began to climb up again it was very hot: the way was longer and harder than André had said. He went up with long strides; and I, who used to climb so cheerfully in former days, dragged along far behind: it was intensely irritating. The sun bored into my head; the shrill death agony of the love-sick cicadas shattered my ears; I was gasping and panting. “You’re going too fast,” I said.

“You take your time. I’ll wait for you at the top.”

I stopped, sweating heavily. I set off again. I was no longer in control of my heart or my breathing; my legs would scarcely obey me; the light hurt my eyes; the pertinacious monotony of the love song, the death song, of the cicadas grated on my nerves. I reached the car with my head and my face all afire—I felt as though I were on the very edge of apoplexy.

“I’m destroyed.”

“You should have come up slower.”

“I remember those easy little paths of yours.”

We drove home without speaking. It was wrong of me to grow cross about a trifle. I had always been quick-tempered: was I going to turn into a shrew? I should have to take care. But I could not get over my vexation. And I felt so unwell that I was afraid I might have sunstroke. I ate a couple of tomatoes and went to lie down in the bedroom, where the darkness, the tiles on the floor and the whiteness of the sheets gave a false impression of coolness. I closed my eyes; in the silence I listened to the tick-tock of a pendulum. I had said to André, “I don’t see what one loses in growing old.” Well, I could see now, all right. I had always refused to consider life as Fitzgerald’s “process of dilapidation.” I had thought my relations with André would never deteriorate, that my body of work would grow continually richer, that Philippe would become every day more and more like the man I had wanted to make of him. As for my body, I never worried about it. And I believed that even silence bore its fruit. What an illusion! Sainte-Beuve’s words were truer than Valéry’s. “In some parts one grows woody; in others one goes bad: never does one grow ripe.” My body was letting me down. I was no longer capable of writing: Philippe had betrayed all my hopes, and what grieved me even more bitterly was that the relationship between André and me was going sour. What nonsense, this intoxicating notion of progress, of upward movement, that I had cherished; for now the moment of collapse was at hand! It had already begun. And now it would be very fast and very slow: we were going to turn into really old people.

When I went down again the heat had lessened: Manette was reading at a window that opened onto the garden. Age
had not taken her powers away; but deep inside her, what went on? Did she think of death? With resignation? With dread? I dared not ask.

“André has gone to play boules,” she said. “He’ll be back directly.”

I sat down opposite her. Whatever happened, if I were to reach eighty I should not be like her. I could not see myself calling my solitude freedom and peacefully drawing all the good from each succeeding moment. As far as I was concerned life was gradually going to take back everything it had given me: it had already begun doing so.

“So Philippe has given up teaching,” she said. “It wasn’t good enough for him: he wants to become a bigwig.”

“Yes, alas.”

“The youth of today believes in nothing. And I must say you two don’t believe in much either.”

“André and I? Oh, but we do.”

“André is against everything. That’s what’s wrong with him. That’s why Philippe has turned out badly. One has to be
for
something.”

She has never been able to resign herself to the fact that André will not join the Party. I did not want to argue about it. I told her about our morning’s walk, and I said, “Where have you put the photos?”

It is a rite: every year I look through the old album. But it is never in the same place.

She put it down on the table, together with a cardboard box. There are not many very old photographs. Manette on her wedding day, in a long, severe dress. A group: she and her husband, their brothers, their sisters: a whole generation of which she is the only survivor. André as a child, looking stubborn and determined. Renée at twenty,
between her two brothers. We thought we should never get over her death—twenty-four, and she looked forward to so much from life. What would she have got out of it in fact? How would she have put up with growing older? My first meeting with death: how I wept. After that I wept less and less—my parents, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law, our friends. That’s something else that aging means. So many deaths behind one, wept for, forgotten. Often, reading the paper, I see that someone else has died—a writer I liked, a colleague, one of André’s former associates, a political fellow worker, a friend we had lost touch with. It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.

“You’re looking at the photos?” André leaned over my shoulder. He leafed through the album and pointed out a picture that showed him at the age of eleven with other boys in his form. “More than half of them are dead,” he said. “Pierre, the one here—I saw him again. And this one too. And Paul, who is not in the photo. It’s a good twenty years since we met. I scarcely recognized them. You would never imagine they were exactly my age. They have turned into really old men. Much more worn out than Manette. It gave me a jar.”

“Because of the life they’ve led?”

“Yes. Being a peasant in these parts destroys a man.”

“You must have felt young in comparison with them.”

“Not young. But odiously privileged.” He closed the album. “I’ll take you to Villeneuve for a drink before dinner.”

“All right.”

In the car he told me about the games of boules he had just won; he was making great progress since he had come
down. His mood seemed to be at set fair; my reverses had not affected it, I observed, rather bitterly. He stopped the car at the edge of a terrace covered with blue and orange sunshades with people drinking pastis under them; the smell of aniseed wafted on the air. He ordered some for us. There was a long silence.

“This is a cheerful little square.”

“Very cheerful.”

“You say that in a funereal voice. Are you sorry not to be in Paris?”

“Oh, no. I don’t give a damn about places, just at present.”

“Nor about people, either, I take it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re not very talkative.”

“I’m sorry. I feel rotten. I had too much sun this morning.”

“Usually you’re so tough.”

“I’m getting old.”

There was no friendliness in my voice. What had I expected from André? A miracle? That he should wave a wand and my book would become a good one and the reviews all favorable? Or that my failure should mean nothing anymore once I was with him? He had worked plenty of little miracles for me: in the days when he lived tensely reaching out toward his future his eagerness had given life to mine. He gave me confidence, restored my belief in myself. He had lost that power. Even if he had gone on believing in his own future, that would not have been enough to comfort me about mine. He took a letter out of his pocket.

“Philippe has written to me.”

“How did he know where you were?”

“I telephoned him the day I left to say goodbye. He tells me you threw him out.”

“Yes. I don’t regret it. I cannot love anyone I do not respect.”

André looked at me hard. “I don’t know that you are being altogether honest.”

“How do you mean?”

“You are setting it all on a moral plane, whereas it is primarily on the emotional plane that you feel you have been betrayed.”

“Both are there.”

Betrayed, abandoned: yes. Too painful a wound for me to be able to talk about it. We relapsed into silence. Was it going to settle there between us for good? A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? Were we going to spend another fifteen, twenty, years without any particular grievance or enmity but each enclosed in his own world, wholly bent on his own problem, brooding over his own private failure, words grown wholly useless? We had taken to living out of step. In Paris I was cheerful and he was gloomy. I resented his gaiety now that I had become low-spirited. I made an effort. “In three days we shall be in Italy. Do you like the idea?”

“I like it if you do.”

“I like it if you like it.”

“Because you really don’t give a damn about places?”

“It’s the same with you, often enough.”

He made no reply. Something had gone wrong with our communication: each was taking what the other said amiss.
Should we ever get out of it? Why tomorrow rather than today: why in Rome rather than here?

“Well, let’s go back,” I said, after a pause.

We killed the evening playing cards with Manette.

The next day I refused to face the sun and the strident shrieking of the cicadas. What was the point? I knew that confronted with the palace of the popes, or the Pont du Gard, I should remain as unmoved as I had been at Champeaux. I invented a headache so as to stay at home. André had brought a dozen new books, and he plunged deep into one of them. I keep up to date and I knew them all. I looked through Manette’s library. The Garnier classics; some of the Pléiade collection we had given her as presents. There were many books there that I had not had an opportunity of going back to for ages and ages: I had forgotten them. And yet a feeling of weariness came over me at the idea of reading them again. As you read so you remember; or at least you have the illusion of remembering. The first freshness is lost. What had they to offer me, these writers who had made me what I was and should remain? I opened some volumes and turned a few pages: they all of them had a taste almost as sickening as that of my own books—a taste of decay.

Manette looked up from her paper. “I’m beginning to think that I’ll see men on the moon with my own eyes.”

“Your own eyes? You’ll make the journey?” asked André, with laughter in his voice.

“You know very well what I mean. I shall know they are there. And it’ll be the Russians, my boy. The Yankees missed by a mile, with their pure oxygen.”

“Yes, Mama, you’ll see the Russians on the moon,” said André affectionately.

“And to think we began in caves,” went on Manette meditatively, “with no more than our ten fingers to help us. And we’ve reached this point: you must admit it’s heartening.”

“The history of mankind is very fine, true enough,” said André. “It’s a pity that that of men should be so sad.”

“It won’t always be sad. If your Chinese don’t blow the world to pieces, our grandchildren will know socialism. I’d happily live another fifty years to see that.”

“What a woman! Do you hear that?” he said to me. “She would sign on again for another fifty years.”

“You wouldn’t, André?”

“No, Mama: frankly I wouldn’t. History follows such very curious paths that I scarcely feel it has anything to do with me at all. I have the impression of being on the sideline. So in fifty years’ time.…”

“I know: you no longer believe in anything,” said Manette disapprovingly.

“That’s not quite true.”

“What do you believe in?”