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[...] “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life—in short, succeed on every level. And they don’t really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold.
I argued a little longer, as mildly as possible, trying to persuade him of the value of his thesis and reminding him of earlier plans for papers and research. He answered politely, but my words had no hold on him. No, he did not belong to me anymore; not anymore at all. Even his physical appearance had changed: another kind of haircut; more up-to-date clothes—the clothes of the fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. It was I who molded his life. Now I am watching it from outside, a remote spectator. It is the fate common to all mothers; but who has ever found comfort in saying that hers is the common fate?
[...] I went on, “Do you think that making money is an adequate goal in life?”
“I really scarcely know what our goals were, nor whether they were adequate.”
Did he really believe what he was saying, or was he amusing himself by teasing me? He does that sometimes, when he thinks me too set in my convictions and my principles. Usually I put up with it very well—I join in the game. But this time I was in no mood for trifling. My voice rose. “Why have we led the kind of life we have led if you think other ways of life just as good?”
“Because we could not have done otherwise.”
“We could not have done otherwise because it was our way of life that seemed to us valid.”
“No. As far as I was concerned knowing, discovering, was a mania, a passion, or even a kind of neurosis, without the slightest moral justification. I never thought everybody else should do the same.”
Deep down I do think that everybody else should do the same, but I did not choose to argue the point. I said, “It is not a question of everybody, but of Philippe. He is going to turn into a fellow concerned with dubious money-making deals. That was not what I brought him up for.”
Last year he used to take his pulse every ten minutes. It is true his blood pressure was a little high, but a course of treatment steadied it at seventeen, which is perfect for our age. He kept his fingers pressed against his cheek; his eyes were vacant; he was playing at being an old man, and he would end by persuading me that he was one. For a horrified moment I thought, Philippe has gone, and I am to spend the rest of my life with an old man! I felt like shouting, “Stop. I can’t bear it.” As though he had heard me, he smiled, became himself again, and we went to bed.
It was impossible. He shared our ideas. He had taken great risks during the Algerian war—that war which had torn our hearts and which now seems never to have taken place at all—he had got himself beaten up in anti-Gaullist demonstrations; he had voted as we voted during the last elections.…
“He says he has developed. He has come to understand that the French left wing’s negativism has led it nowhere, that it is done for, finished, and he wants to be in the swim, to have a grip on the world, accomplish something, construct, build.”
i do get it tbh
“I’m not ashamed at all. One has the right to reconsider one’s opinions.”
“Reconsider! Only six months ago and you were utterly condemning the regime’s entire cultural policy.”
“There you are, then! I’m going to try to change it.”
“Come, come, you aren’t of that caliber and you know it. You’ll play their little game as good as gold and you’ll carve yourself out a charming little career. Your motive is mere ambition, nothing more.…” I don’t know what else I said to him. He shouted, “Shut up, shut up.” I went on: he interrupted, his voice filled with hatred, and in the end he shouted furiously, “I’m not a swine just because I won’t share in your senile obstinacy.”
rough
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 counterfeiter.”
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 anymore, or even fifty, and weariness came over me very soon. I went into a café and drank a glass of wine, my eyes hurting 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.
Do not make up your mind about the future in advance. Easy enough to say. I could see the future. It stretched away in front of me, flat, bare, running on out of sight. Never a plan, never a wish. I should write no more. Then what should I do? What an emptiness within me—all around me. Useless. The Greeks called their old people hornets. “Useless hornet,” Hecuba called herself in The Trojan Women. That was my case. I was shattered. I wondered how people managed to go on living when there was nothing to be hoped from within.
jesus
So I stayed at home, brooding. It was very hot, and even if I lowered the sun blinds I stifled. Time stopped flowing. It is dreadful—I feel like saying it is unfair—that it should be able to go by both so quickly and so slowly. I was walking through the gates of the lycée at Bourg, almost as young as my own pupils, gazing with pity at the old gray-haired teachers. Flash, and I was an old teacher myself; and then the lycée gates closed behind me. For years and years my pupils gave me the illusion that my age did not alter: at the beginning of each school year I found them there again, as young as ever; and I adapted myself to this unchanging state. In the great sea of time I was a rock beaten by waves that were continually renewed—a rock that neither moved nor crumbled. And all at once the tide was carrying me away, and would go on carrying me until I ran aground in death. My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away. Strange anomaly of these two rhythms. My days fly galloping from me; yet the long dragging out of each one makes me weary, weary.
jesus