The Lover (7 page)

Betty Fernandez. My memory of men is never lit up and illuminated like my memory of women. Betty Fernandez. She was a foreigner too. As soon as I say the name there she is, walking along a Paris street, she’s short-sighted, can’t see much, screws up her eyes to recognize you, then greets you with a light handshake. Hello, how are you? Dead a long time ago now. Thirty years, perhaps. I can remember her grace, it’s too late now for me to forget, nothing mars its perfection still, nothing ever will, not the circumstances, nor the time, nor the cold or the hunger or the defeat of Germany, nor the coming to light of the crime. She goes along the street still, above the history of such things however terrible. Here too the eyes are pale. The pink dress is old, the black wide-brimmed hat dusty in the sunlight of the street.

She’s slim, tall, drawn in India ink, an engraving. People stop and look in amazement at the elegance of this foreigner who walks along unseeing. Like a queen. People never know at first where she’s from. And then they think she can only be from somewhere else, from there. Because of this she’s beautiful. She’s dressed in old European clothes, scraps of brocade, out-of-date old suits, old curtains, old oddments, old models, moth-eaten old fox furs, old otterskins, that’s her kind of beauty, tattered, chilly, plaintive and in exile, nothing suits her, everything’s too big, and yet it looks marvelous. Her clothes are loose, she’s too thin, nothing fits, yet it looks marvelous. She’s made in such a way, face and body, that anything that touches her shares immediately and infallibly in her beauty.

She entertained, Betty Fernandez, she had an “at home.” We went sometimes. Once Drieu La Rochelle was there. Clearly suffering from pride, he scarcely deigned to speak, and when he did it was as if his voice was dubbed, his words translated, stiff. Maybe Brasillach was there too, but I don’t remember, unfortunately. Sartre never came. There were poets from Montparnasse, but I don’t remember any names, not one. There were no Germans. We didn’t talk politics. We talked about literature. Ramon Fernandez used to talk about Balzac. We could have listened to him forever and a day. He spoke with a knowledge that’s almost completely forgotten, and of which almost
nothing completely verifiable can survive. He offered opinions rather than information. He spoke about Balzac as he might have done about himself, as if he himself had once tried to be Balzac. He had a sublime courtesy even in knowledge, a way at once profound and clear of handling knowledge without ever making it seem an obligation or a burden. He was sincere. It was always a joy to meet him in the street or in a café, and it was a pleasure to him to greet you. Hallo how are you? he’d say, in the English style, without a comma, laughing. And while he laughed his jest became the war itself, together with all the unavoidable suffering it caused, both resistance and collaboration, hunger and cold, martyrdom and infamy. She, Betty Fernandez, spoke only of people, those she’d seen in the street or those she knew, about how they were, the things still left for sale in the shops, extra rations of milk or fish, good ways of dealing with shortages, with cold and constant hunger, she was always concerned with the practical details of life, she didn’t go beyond that, always a good friend, very loyal and affectionate. Collaborators, the Fernandezes were. And I, two years after the war, I was a member of the French Communist party. The parallel is complete and absolute. The two things are the same, the same pity, the same call for help, the same lack of judgment, the same superstition if you like, that consists in believing in a political solution to the personal problem. She too, Betty Fernandez,
looked out at the empty streets of the German occupation, looked at Paris, at the squares of catalpas in flower, like the other woman, Marie-Claude Carpenter. Was “at home” certain days, like her.

He drives her back to the boarding school in the black limousine. Stops just short of the entrance so that no one sees him. It’s at night. She gets out, runs off, doesn’t turn to look at him. As soon as she’s inside the door she sees the lights are still on in the big playground. As soon as she turns out of the corridor she sees her, waiting for her, worried already, erect, unsmiling. She asks, Where’ve you been? She says, I just didn’t come back here to sleep. She doesn’t say why and Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t ask. She takes the pink hat off and undoes her braids for the night. You didn’t go to class either. No, she didn’t. Hélène says they’ve phoned, that’s how she knows, she’s to go and see the vice-principal. There are lots of girls in the shadowy playground. They’re all in white. There are big lamps in the trees. The lights are still on in some of the classrooms. Some of the pupils are working late, others stay in the classrooms to chat, or play cards, or sing. There’s no fixed time for them to go to bed, it’s so hot during the day they’re allowed to do more or less as they like in the evening, or rather as the young teachers on duty like. We’re the only two white girls in this state boarding school. There are lots of half-castes,
most of them abandoned by their fathers, soldiers or sailors or minor officials in the customs, post, or public works department. Most of them were brought up by the Assistance Board. There are a few quadroons too. Hélène Lagonelle believes the French government raises them to be nurses in hospitals or to work in orphanages, leper colonies, and mental homes. She also thinks they’re sent to isolation hospitals to look after people with cholera or the plague. That’s what Hélène Lagonelle thinks, and she cries because she doesn’t want any of those jobs, she’s always talking about running away.

I go to see the teacher on duty, a young half-caste herself who spends a lot of time looking at Hélène and me. She says, You didn’t go to class and you didn’t sleep here last night, we’re going to have to inform your mother. I say I couldn’t help it, but from now on I’ll try to come back and sleep here every night, there’s no need to tell my mother. The young woman looks at me and smiles.

I’ll do it again. My mother will be informed. She’ll come and see the head of the boarding school and ask her to let me do as I like in the evenings, not to check the time I come in, not to force me to go out with the other girls on Sunday excursions. She says, She’s a child who’s always been free, otherwise she’d run
away, even I, her own mother, can’t do anything about it, if I want to keep her I have to let her be free. The head agrees because I’m white and the place needs a few whites among all the half-castes for the sake of its reputation. My mother also said I was working hard in high school even though I had my freedom, and that what had happened with her sons was so awful, such a disaster, that her daughter’s education was the only hope left to her.

The head let me live in the boarding school as if it were a hotel.

Soon I’ll have a diamond on my engagement finger. Then the teachers will stop making remarks. People will guess I’m not engaged, but the diamond’s very valuable, no one will doubt that it’s genuine, and no one will say anything any more, because of the value of the diamond that’s been given to this very young girl.

I come back to Hélène Lagonelle. She’s lying on a bench, crying because she thinks I’m going to leave. I sit on the bench. I’m worn out by the beauty of Hélène Lagonelle’s body lying against mine. Her body is sublime, naked under the dress, within arm’s reach. Her breasts are such as I’ve never seen. I’ve never touched
them. She’s immodest, Hélène Lagonelle, she doesn’t realize, she walks around the dormitories without any clothes on. The most beautiful of all the things given by God is this body of Hélène Lagonelle’s, peerless, the balance between her figure and the way the body bears the breasts, outside itself, as if they were separate. Nothing could be more extraordinary than the outer roundness of these breasts proffered to the hands, this outwardness held out toward them. Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendor. The shapes of men’s bodies are miserly, internalized. Nor do they get spoiled like those of such girls as Hélène Lagonelle, which never last, a summer or so perhaps, that’s all. She comes from the high plateaus of Da Lat. Her father works for the post office. She came quite recently, right in the middle of the school year. She’s frightened, she comes up and sits beside you and stays there without speaking, crying sometimes. She has the pink-and-brown complexion of the mountains, you can always recognize it here where all the other children are pale green with anemia and the torrid heat. Hélène Lagonelle doesn’t go to high school. She’s not capable of it, Hélène L. She can’t learn, can’t remember things. She goes to the primary classes at the boarding school, but it’s no use. She weeps up against me, and I stroke her hair, her hands, tell her I’m going to stay here with her. She doesn’t know she’s very beautiful, Hélène
Lagonelle. Her parents don’t know what to do with her, they want to marry her off as soon as possible. She could have all the fiancés she likes, Hélène Lagonelle, but she doesn’t like, she doesn’t want to get married, she wants to go back to her mother. She, Hélène L. Hélène Lagonelle. In the end she’ll do what her mother wants. She’s much more beautiful than I am, the girl in the clown’s hat and lamé shoes, infinitely more marriageable, she can be married off, set up in matrimony, you can frighten her, explain it to her, what frightens her and what she doesn’t understand, tell her to stay where she is, wait.

Hélène Lagonelle is seventeen, seventeen, yet she still doesn’t know what I know. It’s as if I guessed she never will.

Hélène Lagonelle’s body is heavy, innocent still, her skin’s as soft as that of certain fruits, you almost can’t grasp her, she’s almost illusory, it’s too much. She makes you want to kill her, she conjures up a marvelous dream of putting her to death with your own hands. Those flour-white shapes, she bears them unknowingly, and offers them for hands to knead, for lips to eat, without holding them back, without any knowledge of them and without any knowledge of
their fabulous power. I’d like to eat Hélène Lagonelle’s breasts as he eats mine in the room in the Chinese town where I go every night to increase my knowledge of God. I’d like to devour and be devoured by those flour-white breasts of hers.

I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle.

I am worn out with desire.

I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.

A pleasure unto death.

I see her as being of one flesh with the man from Cholon, but in a shining, solar, innocent present, in a continual self-flowering which springs out of each action, each tear, each of her faults, each of her ignorances. Hélène Lagonelle is the mate of the bondsman who gives me such abstract, such harsh pleasure, the obscure man from Cholon, from China. Hélène Lagonelle is from China.

I haven’t forgotten Hélène Lagonelle. I haven’t forgotten the bondsman. When I went away, when I left him, I didn’t go near another man for two years. But that mysterious fidelity must have been to myself.

I’m still part of the family, it’s there I live, to the exclusion of everywhere else. It’s in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I’m most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that later on I’ll be a writer.

That’s the place where later on, once the present is left behind, I must stay, to the exclusion of everywhere else. The hours I spend in the apartment show it in a new light. It’s a place that’s intolerable, bordering on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, dishonor. And so is Cholon. On the other bank of the river. As soon as you’ve crossed to the other side.

I don’t know what became of Hélène Lagonelle, I don’t even know if she’s dead. It was she who left the boarding school first, a long while before I went to France. She went back to Da Lat. Her mother sent for her, I believe to arrange a match for her, I believe she was to meet someone just out from France. But I may be wrong, I may be projecting what I thought would
happen to Hélène Lagonelle onto her prompt departure at her mother’s request.

Let me tell you what he did, too, what it was like. Well—he stole from the houseboys in order to go and smoke opium. He stole from our mother. He rummaged in closets. He stole. He gambled. My father bought a house in Entre-Deux-Mers before he died. It was the only thing we owned. He gambles. My mother sells the house to pay his debts. But it isn’t enough, it’s never enough. When he’s young he tries to sell me to customers at the Coupole. It’s for him my mother wants to go on living, so he can go on eating, so he can have a roof over his head, so he can still hear someone call him by his name. Then there’s the place she bought for him near Amboise, ten years’ savings. Mortgaged in one night. She pays the interest. And all the profit from the cutting down of the woods I told you about. In one night. He stole from my mother when she was dying. He was the sort of person who rummaged in closets, who had a gift for it, knew where to look, could find the right piles of sheets, the hiding places. He stole wedding rings, that sort of thing, lots of them, jewelry, food. He stole from Dô, the houseboys, my younger brother. From me. Plenty. He’d have sold her, his own mother. When she dies he sends for the lawyer right away, in the midst of all the emotion. He takes
advantage of it. The lawyer says the will is not valid. It favors the elder son too much at my expense. The difference is enormous, laughable. I have to refuse or accept, in full knowledge of the facts. I say I’ll accept: I’ll sign. I’ve accepted. My brother lowers his eyes. Thanks. He weeps. In the midst of all the emotion of our mother’s death. He’s quite sincere. At the liberation of Paris, probably on the run for having been a collaborator in the South, he has nowhere to go. He comes to me. He’s running away from some danger, I never quite knew what. Perhaps he informed on people, Jews perhaps, anything is possible. He’s very mild and affectionate, as always after he’s committed murders or when he needs your help. My husband has been deported. He sympathizes. He stays three days. I’ve forgotten, and when I go out I don’t lock anything up. He rummages around. I’ve been keeping my rice and sugar rations for when my husband comes back. He rummages around and takes them. He also rummages around in a little closet in my bedroom. He finds what he’s looking for and takes all my savings, fifty thousand francs. He doesn’t leave a single note. He quits the apartment with the spoils. When I see him again I won’t mention it, it’s too shaming for him, I couldn’t. After the fake will, the fake Louis XIV chateau is sold for a song. The sale was a put-up job, like the will.