Tete-a-Tete (39 page)

Zonina and Sartre had no illusions that the authorities did not know about their affair.
¹⁴
Lena was no doubt questioned about it. She would have had to act as if Sartre did not know that the authorities knew. Sartre himself had to act as if he did not know that they knew. For Sartre, who was always fascinated by the masks people wear and the roles they play, this intricate spying game would have been intriguing.

A handful of Zonina's reports to the Writers Union have been published in the French journal
Commentaire.
They are thoroughly
innocuous. She wrote, for example, that Sartre's first trip had been difficult to organize, as they had to take into account his “extreme impatience towards any sign of what he calls ‘propaganda.'” She explained that Sartre and Beauvoir had wanted to spend the day sightseeing in Rostov with the writer Yefim Dorosh; the authorities did not allow this, and in a fury Sartre insisted on being driven back to Moscow. For Sartre's future visits, Zonina had this advice: “His program has to be planned in such a way that he has the impression of meeting only those people whom he wants to meet…. In short, he needs to be given the impression that it is he who has determined his program.” One could imagine Sartre dictating this to Zonina with a grin on his face.

Alone with Sartre and Beauvoir, Lena would often express impatience with Sartre's rose-colored view of communism. To her, he was an idealistic Western intellectual, full of illusions. “He doesn't
want
to understand,” she would say to friends after he left.
¹⁵

 

Sartre and Beauvoir were in Rome in mid-August 1962 when the Italian writer Carlo Levi, just back from Moscow, handed Sartre a letter from Zonina. Sartre told Zonina that he took the letter with a show of indifference and put it in the lower pocket of his jacket, where he stroked it voluptuously with his finger.

It was reassuring to know that she loved him on July 17 and 19, he wrote back, but could he be sure she loved him
now?
A whole month had elapsed since she had written that letter. He worried that she might not be missing him enough, or that she might be missing him too much. He could not bear it if she decided their love was too difficult.

He and Beauvoir were staying on the outskirts of Rome, in a modern district on a hill, he wrote. They much preferred old Rome, but they wanted to avoid the heat and pollution. Beauvoir had almost finished
Force of Circumstance,
the third volume of her memoirs, and he was reading it in the evenings. He thought it very good—even better than the second volume, which, in turn, had been better than the first. The stumbling point was the politics, which bored Beauvoir almost as much as it bored him. She had some revision to do. They
estimated it would take her another six months. Beauvoir did not mind. She loved writing her memoirs. In the evenings, over drinks, they talked until late into the night. Sartre liked it best when they talked about Zonina.

“The Beaver…is the Truth,” he explained. “That's useful to me for she tells me you love me.” She had also declared that Zonina was the only one of Sartre's women to be worthy of him, and that if anything ever happened to
her,
Beauvoir, he should dump the others and put himself in Zonina's hands.

He had changed in the Soviet Union, Sartre told Zonina. She had changed him. Through her, he had recovered his tenderness. Through her, he had recovered his youth. She had given him back his old fire.

 

Was she eating at the Writers Club that night? Was she making eyes at other men? Remember, she had promised to tell him if she was ever unfaithful to him. He worried that her diabetes might be worse and that he would not even know about it. He could not wait to see her. He loved her. In letters he would tell her as much as possible about his daily existence. He wanted her to be able to picture the people in his life.

Bost was also in Rome that summer, Sartre wrote. They were working together on the Freud scenario for a John Huston film.
¹⁶
Olga had just joined Bost, and already they were arguing. They were both good people and yet as a couple they broke each other's hearts. Olga was deeply unhappy, and that made Bost feel guilty. Olga looked far older than her years. No doubt it was the vestiges of her tuberculosis, as well as her lifelong obsession with slimming. Her pale eyes made no impression on her face anymore. Her hair, formerly full and blond, was dyed auburn and dried out from too much washing. Since her tuberculosis, she and Bost had lived together like sister and brother. These days Bost was in love with another woman, an American who lived in Paris.
¹⁷
Olga guessed but did not know who it was. She had always been horribly jealous.

 

Sartre was back in Paris, writing to Zonina from his tenth-floor apartment. Her photo was on the wall in front of his desk. He had taken up his essay on Flaubert again, which he had put aside for the last seven years. He was horrified by it, he told her. Under the effect of corydrane, he had written page after page and had thought himself a genius. Now it read like the writings of a madman. But he wanted to finish this book. Flaubert still fascinated him.

Apart from work, he was engaged in his usual “medical round,” he told Zonina. This was how he referred to the women in his life. Wanda was forty-four and had become a recluse. She was “drunk with unhappiness and hatred.” She had acted in his plays without the least success. He did not think she acted badly—nor well, either—but nobody other than he had ever employed her. The problem was, she liked to act but she did not like the public, and they felt it. He saw her for two hours, three times a week. To pass the time, he helped her make sense of her gas bill and her taxes and so on. But she hated explanations. “Shut up, shut up!” she would shout at him. “Let me speak!”

Evelyne, too, was an actress with no engagements, he told Zonina. He wrote a part for her in
The Condemned of Altona,
but she was bad, and the critics said so. In the end, Sartre realized he had not done her a favor. Evelyne was very intelligent but had no self-esteem, and she was always seeking validation in violent passions that never lasted. Each time there was a rupture there would be another deluge of tears from her, on Sartre's divan. When her last man left her, she attempted suicide. Sartre saw her three times a week, an hour and a half each time.

Arlette Elkaïm was also intelligent, but she was lazy and constantly sick. She had a boyfriend, André Puig, an aspiring writer, who was seeing another woman, and this made her unhappy.
¹⁸

But it was Michelle Vian who worried him most at the moment. She had suffered a terrible blow. For years she had lived with the jazz clarinetist André Reweliotty. That summer, at the end of July, they had been heading off on vacation in his burgundy-colored convertible. Reweliotty was driving too fast, and the car skidded off the highway. Michelle was ejected onto the grass bank and was scarcely hurt at all. Reweliotty was trapped by the steering wheel. For two hours, until the ambulance came, Michelle sat cradling his head, try
ing to stop the blood coming out of his mouth. After two days in a coma, he died.

Michelle had spent the rest of the summer alone in her apartment in Paris. She was an insomniac at the best of times; now she dreaded the nights more than ever. In her nightmares she kept seeing herself back on that highway. She and Reweliotty had loved each other. She had been the manager of his jazz group. Her life was going to be very empty now. Sartre would try to see her more often in the next few months.

He assured Zonina that he no longer had a shadow of a feeling for Michelle. They had an old, old friendship, that was all. He respected the way she struggled against her madness. And at the moment he felt deep sympathy for her.

 

Zonina wrote a morose letter back. Sartre and Beauvoir seemed to have had such a sociable time in Rome. And these stories about Sartre's other women unsettled Zonina. It seemed to her it would not take him long to find a new one.

They had not had a particularly sociable time in Rome, Sartre replied. His head had been full of thoughts of her. There was no reason in the world for her to be envious of any of his women. As for any new woman, there wouldn't be one. If he courted someone else, it would mean he did not love her anymore. And that was out of the question.

 

In December 1962, Sartre and Beauvoir flew to Moscow to spend Christmas with Zonina. Since Sartre's relationship with Lena was officially a secret, it was Beauvoir's presence as his traveling companion that made it possible for him to be alone with Lena. Over the next four years, Sartre would make nine trips to the USSR, with Beauvoir as his ever-obliging chaperone.

This time they were experiencing the Russian winter. Before leaving Paris, they bought boots and fur hats for themselves, and books, medicine, woolens, stockings, blouses, and perfume for Zonina. Sartre also gave her a ring.

Moscow was freezing but sunny. Some people made their way around the city on skis. In the evenings, the trees in the city squares sparkled with Christmas lights. On Christmas Eve, Beauvoir writes, they were invited to a party in the foyer of a theater near Mayakovsky Square:

They returned to Leningrad. In the summer Beauvoir had found that city quite magical. This time, in the depth of winter, she thought it dreary. The sun did not rise until ten, then it cast a faint light on the gray streets before vanishing at three in the afternoon. She spent a great deal of time alone in her room.

When he got back to Paris, Sartre wrote to Zonina: “Leningrad, you know, is the strongest and most beautiful memory in my life.” He had loved the brief hours of light between dawn and dusk, and their room, which they had almost never left. He had not been so happy since his twenties. He noticed that she had not cried in the car on the way to the airport, as he had. But she had looked very sad.

 

“There has been one undoubted success in my life: my relationship with Sartre,” Beauvoir wrote in
Force of Circumstance.
“In more than thirty years, we have only once gone to sleep at night disunited.”

In the epilogue to the third volume of her memoirs. Beauvoir attempted to sum up her life. She also wanted to dispel some “stupid misconceptions.” Sartre had not written her books, as some people suggested. It was not true that all her convictions were put into her head by Sartre. If she had chosen Sartre—and she
had
chosen him—it was because he led her along paths she wanted to take. Yes, Sartre had helped her, a great deal. She had also helped him.

Beauvoir was in a defiant mood when she wrote that epilogue in March 1963. And she was sad. She was fifty-five, and felt she had crossed a frontier.

She had written about her trip with Sartre to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1962. She mentioned their friendship with Lena Zonina. She did not say—she could not, for obvious reasons—that while she herself was trying to come to terms with the celibacy imposed on her by aging, Sartre was courting the beautiful Lena in front of her eyes. But she did not hide the piercing sense of loss she felt when she contemplated her future:

She ended her epilogue with some of the most beautiful moments in her life: “the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence,…Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans,…the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken.” She thought of the young girl she once was, who anticipated her future with a beating heart. In the meantime, she had learned the
truth about the human condition—the hunger, oppression, violence, and injustice. Not so far ahead of her was death and the abyss. “The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.”

The rhetorical flourish of her conclusion would be widely misunderstood. Her readers seemed to feel personally invested in Beauvoir's happiness and success. They did not see that she meant this both as a political statement and as a comment on the inevitable anguish of the existential void. To them, it was an admission of personal failure, something they could not bear from the writer who had become, for them, the very symbol of a fulfilled, independent woman.