Five Women (21 page)

As a light rises behind a delicate network of veins, out of the expectant darkness of the years the mortal nostalgia of her love rose up among her thoughts, gradually enveiling her. And then all at once, from a long way off, from some radiant expanse, and as though she had only now understood the implication of the stranger's words, she heard herself say: "I don't know whether he could bear it...."

It was the first time she had spoken of her husband. She was startled: it did not seem part of this reality. But she instantly saw the meaning in the words she had just uttered, and their inevitable consequence.

Seizing upon this, her companion said : "Do you mean to say you love him?"

She did not miss the absurdity of the assurance with which he flung this at her. Trembling but determined, she said: "No, no, I don't love him at all."

When she was upstairs again, in her room, she wondered how she could have uttered such a lie; but she relished the masked, enigmatic fascination of it. She thought of her husband. Now and then in her mind's eye she caught a glimpse of him—it was like standing in the street, looking through a window at someone moving about in a brightly lit room. Only then did she really grasp what she was doing.

He seemed beautiful in that light and she wanted to be there with him, for then she too would partake of the radiance about him.

But she shrank back into her lie again, and once more it was like being outside in the street in darkness. She shivered with cold; it was anguish merely to be alive—anguish to look at things, to breathe. The feeling that bound her to her husband was like a globe of warm light into which she could easily slip back. There she was safe; there the things could not thrust at her like the sharp prows of ships looming up out of the night; there everything was softly padded and the things were warded off. And yet she rejected that.

She remembered that she had lied once before. Not in her earlier life, for then the lie had been simply part of herself. But once in this second life of hers she had told a lie, even though what she had actually said was true enough—that she had been out for a walk, in the evening, for two hours. She suddenly realised that that was the first time she had told a lie. Just as she had sat among the people downstairs tonight, so at that time she had walked about in the streets, forlorn, restless as a stray dog, and had gazed into the windows of the houses. And somewhere somebody opened his front door, letting a woman in, smugly satisfied with his own affability, his gestures, the style of his welcome. And somewhere else a man walked arm in arm with his wife, going out for the evening, filled with dignity from head to toe, smug in the security of wedlock. And everywhere, as in a broad river that placidly shelters multifarious life, there were small whirling eddies, each revolving on its own centre, gazing inwards, blind and windowless, closed to the indifferent world. And within, in everyone, there was the same feeling of being held in balance by one's own echo in a narrow space that catches every word and keeps it ringing until the next is uttered, so that one does not hear the insufferable interval, the chasm between the impact of one action and the next, the chasm between two sounds, where one drops away from the sense of one's own identity, plunging into the silence between two words, which might just as well be the silence between the words of somebody utterly different.

And then she had been assailed by the secret thought: ‘Somewhere among all these people there is someone—not the right one, someone else—but still, one could have adjusted oneself even to him, and then one would never have known anything of the person that one is today. For every feeling exists only in the long chain of other feelings, each supporting the next; and all that matters is that one instant of life should link up with the next without any lacuna, and there are hundreds of different ways in which it can do so.' And for the first time since the beginning of her love the thought had flashed through her mind: ‘It is all chance—by some chance something becomes reality, and then one holds on to it, that's all.'

For the first time she had felt her being, down to its very foundations, as something indeterminate, had apprehended this ultimate faceless experience of herself in love as something that destroyed the very root, the absoluteness, of existence and would always have made her into a person that she called herself and who was nevertheless not different from everyone else. And it was as if she must let go, let herself sink back into the drift of things, into the realm of unfulfilled possibilities, the no-man's-land. And she hurried through the mournful, empty streets, glancing in through windows as she passed, wanting no other company than the clatter of her heels on the cobbles—reduced to that last sign of physical existence, hearing nothing but her own footsteps echoing now in front of her and nOw behind her.

At that time all she had been able to grasp was the dissolution, the ceaselessly shifting background of shadowy unrealised feelings that frustrated any power by which one might have held on to another human being—that, and the devalued, undemonstrable, and incomprehensible nature of her own life. She had almost wept with confusion and fatigue, entering that realm of utter isolation.

But now, in this moment when it all came back to her, it carried her right to the end of whatever possibilities of real love, real union, there were in this transparently thin, glimmeringly vulnerable world of illusion—of illusions without which life could not be maintained: all the dream-dark straits of existing solely by virtue of another human being, all the island solitude of never daring to wake, this insubstantiality of love that was like a gliding between two mirrors behind which nothingness lay. And here in this room, hidden behind her false confession as behind a mask, and waiting for the adventure that she would experience as though she were someone else, she knew the wonderful, dangerous intensification of feeling that came with lying and cheating in love. She felt herself stealthily slipping out of her own being, out into some territory beyond anyone else's reach, the forbidden territory, the dissolution of absolute solitude—entering, for the sake of greater truthfulness, into the void that sometimes gapes for an instant behind all ideals.

And then suddenly she heard a furtive tread, a creaking first of the stairs and then of the floorboards outside her door, a faint creaking under the weight of someone who had stopped there.

Her eyes turned towards the door. How strange that there outside, behind those thin panels, there was another human being, standing motionless.... And on each side of this indifferent, this accidental door tension rose high as behind a dam.

She had already undressed. Her clothes lay on the chair by the bed, where she had just flung them, and from them the vague scent of what had been next to her body rose and mingled with the air of this room that was let one day to this person, the next day to another. She glanced round the room. She noticed a brass lock hanging loose, on a chest of drawers. Her gaze lingered on a small threadbare rug, worn thin by many footsteps, at the side of her bed. Suddenly she could not help thinking of all the bare feet that had stepped on this rug, permeating it with their smell, and how this smell was given off again and entered into other people's being, a familiar, protective smell, somehow associated with childhood and home. It was an odd, flickering, double impression, now alien and abhorrent, now fascinating, as if the self-love of all those strangers were a current flowing into her and all that was left of her own identity were a passive awareness of it.

And all the while that man was there, standing on the other side of her door, his presence known to her only through the faint, hardly detectable sounds that he could not help making.

Then she was seized by a wild urge to throw herself down on this rug and kiss the repulsive traces of all those feet, exciting herself with their smell like a bitch on heat. But this was no longer sexual desire; it was something crying within her like a small child, howling like a high wind.

Suddenly she knelt down on the rug. The stiff flowers of the pattern loomed larger, spreading and intertwining senselessly before her eyes, and over them she saw her own heavy thighs, a mature woman's thighs, hideously arched and without meaning, yet tense with an incomprehensible gravity. And her hands lay there before her on the floor, two five-limbed animals staring at each other.

All at once she remembered the lamp in the passage there outside and the horribly silent moving circles it cast upon the ceiling, and the walls, the bare walls, remembered the emptiness out there and then again the man who was standing there, faintly creaking sometimes as a tree creaks in its bark, his urgent blood in his head like the thicket of the leaves. And here she was on her hands and knees, only a door between her and him. And still she felt the full sweetness of her ripe body, felt it with that imperishable remnant of the soul that stands quietly, unmoved, beside the ravaged body even when it is broken open and disfigured by the infliction of devastating injuries—that stands beside it, in grave and constant awareness and yet averted from it, as beside the body of a stricken beast.

Then she heard the man outside walking cautiously away. And even through the turmoil in her rapt senses she realised : all this was betrayal itself, greater and weightier than the mere lie.

Slowly she began to rise on her knees, spellbound by the baffling thought that by now it might all have really happened, and she trembled like someone who has escaped from danger by mere chance, not by any effort of his own. She tried to picture it. She saw her body lying underneath that stranger's body, saw it with a lucidity that branches out into every smallest detail, like spilt water seeping into every cranny. She felt her own pallor and heard the shameful words of abandonment and saw above her the man's eyes, holding her down, hovering over her, like the outspread wings of a bird of prey. And all the time she was thinking:
‘This
is betrayal!' And now she pictured herself at home again after all this and how he would say: ‘I can't feel you from inside....' And she had no answer but a helpless smile, a smile that tried to say: ‘Believe me, it was not meant against us....'

And yet there was one knee still pressed against the floor —a senseless, alien thing—and she felt her very existence in it, inaccessible, with all the forlorn, defenceless frailty there is in the ultimate human potentialities that no word can hold fast and no return can ever weave into the pattern of life as it once has been.

She was empty of thought. She did not know if she was doing wrong. Everything turned into strange and lonely grief—and the grief itself was like another room around her, enclosing a gentle darkness, a diffuse, floating room, softly rising in the air. And then gradually she perceived a strong, clear, indifferent light shining from above. In it she saw everything she did, her own gestures of surrender, and the abandonment of her innermost being, torn out of her in ecstasy, all that in its enormity seemed so real and yet was mere appearance.... There it lay, crumpled, small, and cold, all its relevance lost, far, far below her... .

And after a long time it seemed to her as if a cautious hand were again trying the door, and she knew he was there outside, listening intently. A whirling dizziness took hold of her, almost forcing her to creep to the door on all fours and draw back the bolt.

But she remained crouching on the floor in the middle of the room. Once again something held her back—a sense of her own sordidness, the atmosphere of the past. Like a single, violent thrust cutting her sinews, there was the thought that perhaps it was all nothing but a relapse into her past. She raised her hands above her head. ‘Oh my beloved, help me, help me!' she cried out in her thoughts, and felt the cry was true. And yet it was only a soft, caressing thought: ‘We moved towards each other, mysteriously drawn through space, through all the years ... and now, by sad and hurtful ways, I enter into you.'

And then there was stillness, a great expanse: strength that had been painfully dammed up now pouring in through the breaches in the walls. Like a quiet, mirroring pool of water her life lay there before her, past and future united in the present moment. There are things one can never do—one does not know why. Perhaps those are the most important things? Indeed one knows they are the most important things. And one knows: a deadly languor lies upon life, one feels the stiffness and numbness of it as in frozen fingers. And sometimes again it loosens its hold, dissolves like snow and ice on meadows—one marvels, one is a sombre brightness expanding far, far away. But life, one's own hard and bony life, one's irrevocable life, resumes its callous grip—somewhere the links close—one does nothing at all.

Suddenly she rose to her feet, and the thought that now she must do this drove her soundlessly forward. Her hands drew the bolt back. There was no sound. The door did not move. And then she opened the door and looked out into the passage: there was no one there. In the dim light from the lamp the bare walls stared at each other through empty space. He had gone without her hearing it.

She went to bed, her mind full of self-reproaches. And, already on the borders of sleep, she thought : ‘I am hurting you.' But at the same time she had the strange feeling: ‘It is you who do whatever I am doing.' And sinking towards oblivion she knew: ‘We are casting away everything that can be cast away, to hold on to each other all the more tightly, to wrap around us closely what no one can touch.' Then for an instant, thrown up into wakefulness, she thought: ‘This man will triumph over us. But what is triumph?'

Sinking back into sleep, her thoughts slid down along that question into the depths and her bad conscience accompanied her like a last caress. A vast egoism, deepening and darkening the world, rose over her as over someone dying. Behind closed eyes she saw bushes and clouds and birds, and she became quite small among them, and yet it all seemed to be there only for her sake. And then there was the moment of closing up, of shutting out everything alien; and on the threshold of dream there was perfection, a great and pure love mantling her in a trembling light, dissolution of all apparent contradictions.