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'Too old!' Paula said to me, sounding annoyed. 'What an idea! I've never felt younger.'
'One feels the way one feels,' I said.
That little spark of youth which had dazzled me for a moment fizzled out all too quickly. Glass mirrors are too indulgent; the faces of these women of my own age, that flabby skin, those blurred features, those drooping mouths, those bodies so obviously bulging under their corsets - these were the true mirrors. 'They're old, worn-out hags,' I thought, 'and I'm the same age as they.'
[...] A few, more ingenuous or more cynical, asked me for advice: what must one do to win a prize, and, in a general way, to succeed? It was their belief that I must know all sorts of tricks! I had my doubts about their futures; you can't tell at first sight whether someone has or hasn't any talent, but you can tell quickly enough whether he has real reasons for wanting to be a writer. All these salon-haunters wrote only because it's difficult to do otherwise when you're bent on leading a literary life. But none of them really enjoyed the tete-a-tete with blank paper; they wanted success in its most abstract form, and, after all, that isn't the best way of achieving it. I found them as disagreeable as their ambition. One of them practically said to me, ‘I’m prepared to pay.' [...]
lol
'I'm sure he'd be very interested,' I said.
'But his interest has to be active,' he said vehemently.'They 'all tell me it's remarkable, it's fascinating! But when it comes to publishing it, they get frightened. If Robert Dubreuilh understands the importance of this work, to which I have - and I can say it without exaggerating - consecrated many years of my life, he owes it to himself to lend it his support. A preface by him would suffice.'
‘I’ll speak to him about it,' I said.
He was getting on my nerves, that old man, but I felt sorry for him. When you succeed, you have a lot of problems, but you have them too when you don't succeed. It must be dismal to speak and speak without ever awakening an echo. He had previously published two or three obscure books; this one represented his last chance, and I was afraid it wasn't any better than the others. I was suspicious of every person in that room.
devastating
I closed my eyes; yes, I would surely sleep. I felt even more exhausted than after a fever-ridden night. 'Well, that's it,' I thought coldly. 'Nothing has happened, and that's normal. The abnormal thing was that one day something had happened. What? Why?' Actually, I had never understood that love is always undeserved. Lewis had loved me without any valid reason; it hadn't surprised me. Now, he no longer loved me; neither was that surprising, it was even very natural. Suddenly, the words exploded in my head: 'He doesn't love me any more.' It was I he didn't love; I wanted to howl until I died. I began to weep. Each morning he used to ask, 'Why are you laughing? What makes you so rosy and warm?' I would no longer laugh. 'Anne!' he used to say. Never again would he say it in that way. Never again would I see that loving, delighted look on his face.
We were speaking intimately of others, the black water isolated us from the world, Lewis's voice was affectionate, his smile the smile of an accomplice. I asked myself suddenly, 'Is everything really all over?' I had given in immediately to despair, out of pride, so as not to be like all those women who lie to themselves, and out of caution, so as to spare myself the anguish of doubt, of waiting, of disappointment. Perhaps I had been too hasty. Lewis's nonchalance, his excessive frankness, weren't natural; in reality, he's neither thoughtless nor brutal, wouldn't crudely parade his indifference if it weren't the result of a considered decision. He had decided to stop loving me. All right. But making a decision and holding to it are two different things.
maybe it's okay to have a little bit of anguish tbh. maybe there's something to be gained through that
I pressed my cheek to his bare shoulder; he was gently stroking my arm, and I held myself tight against him. It was his hand on my arm, it was his warmth, his smell, and I no longer had either pride or caution. I found his mouth again, and as my hand crept over his warm belly my body burned with desire. He, too, desired me, and between us desire had always been love. Something was beginning again that night. I was sure of it. It all happened so fast that I remained dumbfounded.
I spoke first. 'Good-night,' I said.
'Good-night,' said Lewis, turning towards the wall.
A desperate anger gripped my throat. 'He has no right to do this,' I murmured. Not for an instant had he given me his presence; he had treated me as a pleasure machine. Even if he didn't love me any more, he shouldn't have done that. I got out of bed; I hated his warmth. I went into the living-room, sat down, and cried myself out. I simply couldn't understand it. How could our bodies, those bodies which had loved each other so well, how could they have become such total strangers? He said, 'I'm so happy, I'm so proud.' He said, 'Anne!' He gave me his heart. With his hands, his lips, with his whole body. That was yesterday. All those nights the memories of which were still burning inside me - under the Mexican blanket, in our berth rocked by the Mississippi, in the shadow of mosquito netting, in front of a fire which smelled of resin - all those nights. Would they never come to life again?
devastating
There was no hostility in his voice, only indifference. His calmness upset me. I lay on my back, staring blankly at the ceiling; in the distance, the lake was pounding the shore with the throb of an engine. Was Lewis speaking the truth? Was I the guilty one? Yes, without any doubt, I was guilty - not so much for having begged his caresses but rather for having deluded myself with false hopes. Certainly, Lewis's conscience wasn't perfectly clear, which accounted for his temperamental behaviour. But for a man such as he, there's very little distance between a refusal to love and an absence of love. He had deliberately decided to stop loving me. The result was that he no longer loved me. The past was unmistakably dead - a death without a corpse, like Diego's. That's what made it so difficult to believe. It would really have helped if I'd had a tombstone to weep over.
Lewis watched me sardonically. 'It's incredible how seriously you can take things!' he said. 'It's almost as if you were playing for your life!'
Should I have read hidden meanings into his smile? Was he thinking I had brought to love the same futile seriousness, the same false ardour? Dorothy retorted spirtedly, 'It's a lot better than putting on big, blase airs all the time.' She took my arm firmly. As we passed in front of a photographer's stand, she smoothed my silk dress with her rough hand. 'Anne, have your picture taken with Lewis! Your dress is so pretty, and that hairdo suits you so well.'
I let that pass and became absorbed in the contemplation of murderers frozen in the act of murder standing over their victims frozen in their deaths. Sitting in her hospital bed, a little five-year-old Peruvian was cradling a newborn baby in her arms; Goering was lying in agony on a stretcher, and bodies dressed in German uniforms were swinging from gallows. Behind a barbed wire fence, wax corpses were piled one on top of the other in a huge charnel heap. I looked at them, stupefied. There were Buchenwald and Dachau withdrawing into the murky depths of history, as distant as the Christians being thrown to the lions in the Musee Grevin. When I found myself outside again in the sun's dazzling light, the whole of Europe had vanished somewhere in the outer limits of space. I looked at the women with their bare shoulders, at the men in their bright spores shirts, biting into hot dogs or licking ice-cream cones. No one spoke my language, and I myself had forgotten it. I had lost all my memories, even the memory of my own face: there was no mirror in Lewis's house which I could look into at eye-level, and I had to apply my make-up gropingly in a little hand mirror. I hardly remembered who I was, and I wondered if Paris still existed.
The faces of the three warriors were glowing with animation; they were talking volubly, interrupting each other constantly. There was no doubting their sympathy for France, they were not the least bit complacent about their own country; and yet, listening to them, I felt uncomfortable. It was their war they were talking about, a war in which we had been only the somewhat pitiful excuse. Their scruples concerning us were like those a man could feel towards a weak woman or a passive animal. And already they were making wax legends out of our history.
When finally they stopped talking, Evelyn asked me languidly, 'And how is Paris now?'
'Invaded by Americans,' I replied.
'That doesn't seem to please you,' Lewis said. 'What a thankless people! We gorge them with powdered milk, we're going to flood them with Coca-Cola and tanks - and they don't fall on their knees before us!' He began to laugh. 'Greece, China, France; we aid, we aid, it's crazy. We're a nation of Boy Scouts!' 'You think that's funny, do you?' Dorothy said aggressively. 'It's great to have a sense of humour!' She shrugged her shoulders. 'After we've dropped atom bombs on the whole world, Lewis will amuse us again with a few good morbid jokes.'