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[...] The letter was typewritten, cheerful, pleasant, and empty, and for a long moment I stared in stupefaction at the signature which sealed it closed as implacably as a tombstone. I could have re-read that page a hundred times, could have twisted and turned it every way, and still I would not have been able to squeeze out a single new word, a single smile, a single kiss. And it would not help much to begin waiting again: at the end of my waiting, I would meet only another sheet of paper. Lewis had stayed in Chicago, he continued to live, he lived without me. I walked over to the window, looked at the summer sky, at the happy trees, and I realized that I was only beginning to suffer. The same silence: only there was no longer any hope in it; there would always be that same silence. When our bodies were no longer touching, when our eyes no longer looked at each other, what did we have in common? Our pasts had nothing in common, our futures receded from each other, we did not hear the same language spoken around us, and even the clocks laughed at us. Here the morning was gleaming brightly, and it was night in that room in Chicago. We couldn't even meet in the sky. No, there was no path between us — except those sobs in my throat, those sobs I repressed.
'Don't be afraid of them,' I said. 'You'll always be the most beautiful.'
'Oh, not any more,' she said. 'No, not any more!" She was looking at herself with an unfriendly eye, and suddenly, for the first time in a good many years, I, too, saw her with the eyes of a stranger. She looked tired, her cheeks had taken on a purplish tinge, and her chin was starting to sag; the two deep gashes at the sides of her mouth pointed up the strength of her features. There was a time when Paula's creamy skin, her velvety look, the black shock of her hair softened her beauty. Deprived of that banal charm, her face became strange; it was shaped too definitely to excuse the indecision of a curve, the faltering of a colour. Instead of artfully engraving itself, time had brutally marked that noble, baroque mask which still well deserved admiration, but which would have been more in place in a museum than a salon.
'Yes, I saw a picture of her ...'
'Of her with Henri at the Iles Borromees!' She shrugged her shoulders. 'It's sad. He isn't proud of it, you know. It's even strange: he suggested that we stop sleeping together, as if he no longer felt worthy of me,' she concluded slowly.
I felt like saying to her, 'Stop lying to yourself!' But what right did I have? And in a way, I even admired her obstinacy.
girl!
I didn't protest. I let them explain to me with well-worn slogans that country from which I had just returned. Overgrown children ... A woman's paradise . . . Abominable lovers ... A feverish and giddy life ... Dudule boldly even used the word 'phallus' in connection with the skyscrapers. Listening to them, I said to myself that people really had no right to endow intellectuals with sophisticated feelings. It was these men and women here — the worldly and pseudo-worldly - who went through life blinded by bad cliches, their hearts filled with banalities. Robert, Henri let themselves nonchalantly like what they liked, be bored with what bored them, and if a king were to go naked through the streets they wouldn't admire the fine embroidery of his cloak. They were well aware that they created the models that would be zealously copied by the snobs who affected elegant refinement, but their pride permitted them all manner of naivete. On the other hand, neither Dudule nor Lucie nor the young, slender, glittering women who flocked around her ever allowed themselves a moment of sincerity. I felt a frightened pity for them. Their whole existences were made up of empty ambitions, burning jealousies, abstract victories and defeats. And yet, there were so many things on earth to love and hate solidly! Suddenly, I thought, 'Robert is right. Indifference doesn't exist.' Even here, where it was hardly worth the trouble, I plunged immediately into indignation or disgust, stated firmly that the world was filled with things to love and to hate, and knew clearly that nothing could drive that conviction from me. Yes, it was out of weariness, laziness, or shame of my ignorance that I had idiotically pretended the contrary.
Lucie examined me with definite hostility. There was an almost worried curiosity in that inspection, as if she were wondering, 'Is there another way than mine to be a woman and to profit from being a woman? Has something escaped me?' Her eyes shifted back to Paula. 'One of these days, you really ought to come and see me at Amaryllis. I'd dress you up a bit. Being dressed well changes a woman so much.'
Nadine believed herself ugly, and it was out of spite, more than anything, that she disdained looking feminine. You would hardly suspect from her surly carelessness how sensitive she was to any remarks concerning her physical appearance. Her face suddenly hardened. 'If you want a woman who primps herself from morning to night, you'd better go to another counter.'
poor girl. but, fixable
'I wonder what was going on in his head?' I asked.
'Oh, he builds himself little dreams,' Nadine replied scornfully. 'Only when he wants to bring me into them - excuse me, please!'
'I must say you don't encourage him much.'
'No. In fact, it's even funny, because when I feel he wants me to say one thing, I immediately say the opposite. Can you understand that?'
'A little.'
I could understand that very well; with Nadine, especially, I knew that sort of resistance.
'He always wants to get someone's permission. Why can't he just take it?'
nadine's right about him and she's wrong about herself lol
Lambert hesitated. 'But on that score, too, she's difficult. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but I just don't understand it; I'm completely at a loss. If a single evening goes by without anything happening between us, she feels insulted. But practically every amorous advance shocks her, so naturally she remains cold, and she hates me for it.'
I remembered Nadine's surly confidences. 'Are you sure it's she who doesn't want to let a single night go by ... ?'
'Absolutely sure,' he replied sullenly.
This contradiction didn't surprise me very much; I had come across any number of similar cases. It always indicated that neither of the lovers was satisfied with the other.
'Nadine feels mutilated when she accepts her femininity and also when she rejects it,' I said. 'That's what makes the relationship so difficult for you. But if you have enough patience, I'm sure things will work out.'
I walked to the door and left the room. I could hear Lambert saying, 'Come on, let's not argue!'
'I'm not arguing!' Nadine said.
I assumed they were going to argue all evening.
lol
He went off and I thought sadly, 'What a mess!' Nadine was speeding along roads, her hands clenching the handlebars, crying to the wind, 'Lambert doesn't love me. No one ever loved me except Diego, and he's dead.' And meanwhile, Lambert was pacing in his room, his heart full of doubts. It's difficult to become a man at a time when that word is so heavily weighted with meaning: too many of the dead, tortured, decorated, famous seniors offered themselves as examples to a boy of twenty-five who's still dreaming of a mother's tenderness and a father's protection. I thought of those primitive peoples who teach their five-year-old boys to stick poisoned thorns into the flesh of living animals. With us as well, a male, to win to the dignity of adulthood, must know how to kill, must make others suffer, must suffer himself. Girls are weighed down with restrictions, boys with demands — two equally harmful disciplines. If they had really wanted to help each other, perhaps Nadine and Lambert would have succeeded together in accepting their age, their sex, their real place on earth. Would they ever decide to want to help each other?
<3