The Age of Reason (32 page)

‘Did you mention the drug in your letters?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Boris dismally. Mathieu had the impression that he was playing a part ‘Did you ever take it yourself?’ he asked. He was rather vexed because Boris had never told him.

‘I... well, it did so happen. Once or twice, from curiosity. And I mentioned a fellow who sold it, a fellow from the Boule-Blanche, I bought some from him for Lola on one occasion. I wouldn’t like him to get into trouble on my account.’

‘Boris, you’re crazy,’ said Ivich. ‘How could you have written such things?’

Boris raised his head: ‘I expect you have lapses sometimes!’

‘But perhaps they won’t be found?’ said Mathieu.

‘It’s the first thing they’ll find. The best that can happen is that I shall be called as a witness.’

‘Oh dear — how father will blow up,’ said Ivich.

‘He’s quite equal to fetching me back to Laon and sticking me into a bank.’

‘You’ll be able to keep me company,’ said Ivich darkly.

Mathieu looked at them with pity: ‘This is what they’re really like!’ Ivich had shed her victorious air: clutched in each other’s arms, pallid and stricken, they looked like two little old women. Silence fell, and then Mathieu noticed that Boris was looking at him sidelong, the set of his lips suggested that he had some scheme in mind, some pitifully futile scheme. ‘He’s up to something,’ thought Mathieu with annoyance.

‘You say that the servant comes to wake her up at twelve o’clock?’ he asked.

‘Yes. She knocks until Lola answers.’

‘Well, it’s half past ten. You’ve got time to go back quietly and get your letters. Take a taxi if you like, but you could do it in a bus.’

Boris averted his eyes. ‘I can’t go back.’

‘So that’s how it is,’ thought Mathieu. ‘Don’t you feel up to it?’ he asked.

‘No.’

Mathieu noticed that Ivich was looking at him. ‘Where are your letters?’ he asked.

‘In a small black suitcase under the window. There’s a valise on the suitcase, you’ve only got to push it off. You’ll see — there are a pile of letters. Mine are tied up with yellow ribbon.’ He paused, and then added nonchalantly: ‘There’s also some cash: in small notes.’

Small notes. Mathieu whistled softly, as he thought: ‘The lad has got his wits about him, he has thought of everything, even of the money I need.’

‘Is the suitcase locked?’

‘Yes, the key is in Lola’s bag, on the night-table. You will find a bunch of keys, and then a small flat key. That’s the one.’

‘What’s the number of the room?’

‘21, third floor, second room on the left.’

‘Right,’ said Mathieu. ‘I’ll go.’

He got up. Ivich was still looking at him, Boris wore an air of deliverance, he flung his hair back with a resumption of the familiar charm, and said with a watery smile: ‘If you’re stopped, just say you’re going to see Bolivar, the Negro from the Kamtchatka, I know him. He lives on the third floor too.’

‘You will both wait for me here,’ said Mathieu. He had unconsciously assumed a tone of command: and he added more gently, ‘I shall be back in an hour.’

‘We’ll wait for you,’ said Boris. And he added with an air of admiration and exaggerated gratitude: ‘You’re a grand fellow, Mathieu.’

Mathieu walked out on to the Boulevard Montparnasse, he was glad to be alone. Behind him, Boris and Ivich would soon he whispering together, reconstituting their unbreatheable and precious world. But he did not care. All around him, and in full force, there were his anxieties of the day before, his love for Ivich, Marcelle’s pregnancy, money, and then, in the centre, a blind spot — death. He gasped several times, passing his hands over his face and rubbing his cheeks. ‘Poor Lola,’ he thought, ‘I quite liked her.’ But it was not for him to regret her: this death was unhallowed because it had received no sanction, and it was not for him to sanction it. It had plunged like a stone into a little crazy soul, and was making circles there. On that small soul alone would fall the crushing responsibility of facing and redeeming it. If only Boris had displayed a gleam of grief... But he had felt nothing but disgust. Lola’s death would remain for ever on the margin of the world, despised, like a deed of disrepute. ‘She died like a dog.’ What an awful thought.

‘Taxi!’ cried Mathieu.

When he had sat down in the cab, he felt calmer. He had even a sense of quiet superiority as though he had suddenly achieved forgiveness for no longer being Ivich’s age, or rather as if youth had suddenly lost its value. ‘They depend on me,’ he said to himself with acid pride. It was better that the taxi should not stop outside the hotel.

‘The corner of the Rue Navarin and the Rue des Martyrs.’

Mathieu watched the procession of the tall, gloomy buildings in the Boulevard Raspail. Again he said to himself: ‘They depend on me.’ He felt solid and even a trifle weighty. Then the windows of the cab darkened as it swung into the narrow gulley of the Rue du Bac, and, suddenly, Mathieu realized that Lola was dead, that he was going to enter her room, see her large open eyes, and her white body. ‘I shan’t look at her,’ he added. She was dead. Her consciousness was destroyed. But not her life. Abandoned by the soft affectionate creature that had for so long inhabited it, that derelict life had merely stopped, it floated, filled with unechoed cries and ineffectual hopes, with sombre splendours, antiquated faces and perfumes, it floated at the outer edge of the world, between parentheses, unforgettable and self-subsistent, more indestructible than a mineral, and nothing could prevent it from having
been
, it had just undergone its ultimate metamorphosis: its future was determined. ‘A life,’ thought Mathieu, ‘is formed from the future just as bodies are compounded from the void.’ He bent his head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he had said: ‘I will be free’: the day when he had said — ‘I will be famous’: appeared to him even now with their individual future, like a small, circled individual sky above them all, and that future was himself, himself just as he was at present, weary and a little over-ripe, they had claims upon him across the passage of time past, they maintained their insistencies, and he was often visited by attacks of devastating remorse, because his casual, cynical present was the original future of those past days. It was he whom they had awaited for twenty years, it was he, this tired man, who was pestered by a remorseless child to realize his hopes; on him it depended whether these childish pledges should remain for ever childish, or whether they should become the first announcements of a destiny. His past was in continual process of retouching by the present: every day belied yet further those old dreams of fame, and every day had a fresh future: from one period of waiting to the next, future to future, Mathieu’s life was gliding — towards what?

Towards nothing. He thought of Lola: she was dead, and her life, like Mathieu’s, had been no more than a time of waiting. In some long past summer there had surely been a little girl with russet curls who had sworn to be a great singer, and about 1923 a young singer eager to appear first on the concert bill. And her love for Boris, the great love of an ageing woman, which had caused her so much suffering, had potentially existed since the first day. Even yesterday, on his now obscure and unsteady course, he awaited his sense of the future, even yesterday she thought that she would live, and that Boris would love her one day: the fullest, the most loaded moments, the nights of love that had seemed the most eternal, were but periods of waiting.

There had been nothing to wait for: death had moved backwards into all those periods of waiting and brought them to a halt, they remained motionless and mute, aimless and absurd. There had been nothing to wait for: no one would ever know whether Lola would have made Boris love her, the question was now meaningless. Lola was dead — gestures, caresses, prayers, all were now in vain: nothing remained but periods of waiting, each waiting for the next, nothing but a life devitalized, blurred, and sinking back upon itself. ‘If I died today,’ thought Mathieu abruptly, ‘no one would ever know whether I was a wash-out, or whether I still had a chance of self-salvation.’

The taxi stopped, and Mathieu got out. ‘Wait for me,’ he said to the driver. He crossed the street at an angle, pushed open the hotel door, and entered a dark and heavily scented hall. Over a glass door on his left there was an enamelled rectangle bearing the legend: ‘Management’. Mathieu glanced through the door: the room seemed to be empty, nothing was audible but the ticking of a clock. The ordinary clientele — singers, dancers, jazz-band Negroes, came in late and got up late; the place was still asleep. ‘I mustn’t be in too much of a hurry,’ thought Mathieu. His heart began to throb, and his legs felt limp. He stopped on the third floor landing and looked about him. The key was in the door. ‘Suppose there were someone inside?’ He listened for a moment and knocked. No one answered. On the fourth floor someone pulled a plug, Mathieu heard the rush of water, followed by a little fluted trickle. He opened the door and went in.

The room was dark, the moist odour of sleep still hung about it. Mathieu surveyed the semi-darkness, he was eager to read death in Lola’s features, as though it had been a human emotion. The bed was on the right at the far end of the room. Mathieu saw Lola, an all-white figure, looking at him. ‘Lola!’ he said in a low voice. Lola did not answer: she had a marvellously expressive but impenetrable face: her breasts were bare, one of her lovely arms lay stiff across the bed — the other was under the bed-clothes. ‘Lola!’ repeated Mathieu, advancing towards the bed. He could not take his eyes off that proud bosom — he longed to touch it. He stood for a few instants beside the bed, hesitant, uneasy, his body poisoned by a sour desire, then he turned and hurriedly picked up Lola’s bag from the night-table. The flat key was in the bag: Mathieu took it and walked to the window. A grey day was filtering through the curtains, the room was filled with a motionless presence: Mathieu knelt down beside the suitcase, the inexorable presence was there, it weighed upon his back, like watching eyes. He inserted the key in the lock. He lifted the lid, slipped both hands into the trunk, and a mass of paper crackled under his fingers. The paper was banknotes — a quantity of them. Thousand-franc notes. Under a pile of receipts and notes, Lola had hidden a packet of letters tied with yellow ribbon. Mathieu raised the packet to the light, examined the handwriting and whispered to himself, ‘These are they,’ and put the packet into his pocket. But he could not go away, he remained kneeling, his eyes fixed on the bank-notes. After a moment or two, he rummaged nervously among the papers, sorting them by touch with eyes averted. ‘I’ve got the money,’ he thought. Behind him lay that long, white woman with the astonished face, whose arms seemed still able to reach out, and her red nails still to scratch. He got up, and brushed his knees with the flat of his right hand. In his left hand was a bundle of banknotes. And he thought, ‘Now we’re all right,’ dubiously eyeing the notes. ‘Now we’re all right...’ Despite himself, he stood on the alert, he listened to Lola’s silent body, and felt clamped to the floor. ‘Very well,’ he murmured with resignation. Fingers opened and the bank-notes fluttered down into the suitcase. Mathieu closed the lid, turned the key, put the key in his pocket, and padded out of the room.

The light dazzled him. ‘I haven’t taken the money,’ he said to himself in amazement He stood motionless, his hand on the banisters, and he thought: ‘What a feeble fool I am!’ He did his best to tremble with rage, but one can never be really angry with oneself. Suddenly he thought of Marcelle, the vile old woman with the strangler’s hands, and a real fear gripped him: ‘Nothing — nothing was needed but a motion of the hands, to save her pain, and preserve her from a sordid business that would leave her marked for life. And I couldn’t do it: I am too fastidious. What a fine fellow I must be! After this,’ he thought, looking at his bandaged hand, ‘it won’t be much use my shoving a knife through my hand, to impress my dark and fateful personality upon young ladies; I shall never be able to take myself seriously again.’ She must go to the old woman, there was no help for it: she must now show her courage, contend with anguish and horror, while he spent his time cheering himself up by drinking rum in a tavern. ‘No,’ he thought, as fear laid hold of him, ‘she shan’t go. I’ll marry her, since that’s all I’m good for.’ He thought: ‘I’ll marry her,’ and, as he pressed his wounded hand heavily against the banister, he felt like a drowning man. ‘No, no!’ he muttered, flung his head back, then he took a deep breath, swung round, crossed the corridor, and re-entered the room. He stood with his back to the door as on the first occasion, and tried to accustom his eyes to the half-light.

He was not even sure whether he had the courage to steal. He took two or three faltering steps into the room, and finally made out Lola’s grey face, and her wide eyes looking at him.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Lola.

It was a weak but angry voice. Mathieu shuddered from head to foot. ‘The little idiot!’ he thought.

‘It’s Mathieu.’

There was a long silence, and then Lola said: ‘What’s the time?’

‘A quarter to eleven.’

‘I’ve got a headache,’ she said. She pulled the bed-clothes up to her chin and lay motionless, her eyes fixed on Mathieu. She looked as though she were still dead.

‘Where is Boris?’ she asked. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You’ve been ill,’ explained Mathieu hurriedly.

‘What was the matter with me?’

‘You were quite stiff, and your eyes were wide open. When Boris spoke to you, you didn’t answer, and he got frightened.’

Lola looked as though she did not hear. Then suddenly she burst into a curt, harsh laugh, and said with an effort: ‘So he thought I was dead?’

Mathieu did not answer.

‘Well? That was it, I suppose? He thought I was dead?’

‘He was frightened,’ said Mathieu, evasively.

‘Pah!’ said Lola.

There was a fresh silence. She had shut her eyes, her jaws were quivering. She seemed to be making a violent effort to recover herself. Then she said, with eyes still closed: ‘Give me my bag, it’s on the night-table.’