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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
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.
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.
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.”
[...] "Yet to a certain extent you were right in saying that I was putting it on,” said André. “I overdid it. When I saw all those fellows so very much more decrepit than I am and yet still taking things just as they come, without moaning about it at all, I told myself that it really would not do. I decided to pull myself together.”
“Oh, that’s it, then! I thought it was my not being here that had made you so good-tempered again.”
“What a notion! Far from it: it was largely on your account that I determined to take myself in hand. I don’t want to be an old bore. Old is quite enough: bore, no.”
I took his arm: I squeezed it. I had recovered the André I had never lost and that I never should lose. We walked into the garden and sat on a bench at the foot of a cypress. The moon and its little star were shining over the house.
<3
We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life? We sat there side by side beneath the stars, with the sharp scent of the cypress wafting by us; our hands touched. For a moment time stopped still. It would soon start flowing again. What then? Should I be able to work or not? Would my bitterness against Philippe die away? Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.
<3 <3
[...] I need to have a man I want Tristan to come back lousy dunghill of a world they are shouting they are laughing and here I am withering on the shelf: forty-three it’s too soon it’s unfair I want to live. Big-time life that’s me: the convertible the apartment the dresses everything. Florent shelled out and no horsing around—except a little in bed right’s right—all he wanted to do was to go to bed with me and show me off in smart joints I was lovely my loveliest time all my girlfriends were dying with envy. It makes me sick to think of those days nobody takes me out anymore I just stay here stewing in my own shit. I’m sick of it I’m sick of it sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick.
this story is hard to read and sort of excessive but this bit did move me