The Ravishing of Lol Stein (4 page)

The couple's definitive move back to South Tahla, its stability, its handsome home, its relative wealth, its children, the quiet regularity of Lol's walks, the tasteful sobriety of her gray coat, the fashionable cut of her dark dresses—did not all these things attest to the fact that she had emerged forever from a traumatic experience? I can't say for sure. But one fact is certain: no one went up and tried to talk to her during those weeks when she went wandering happily through the town, no one.

And what about her, did she, Lol, recognize anyone in South Tahla? Aside from the woman—and she was not even sure about her—she had glimpsed that overcast day in front of her house? I doubt it.

When I followed her—from a concealed vantage point across the street—I could see that she sometimes smiled at certain faces, or at least that was the impression one got. But Lol's captive submissive smile, the immutable smugness of her smile, was such that people never did any more than smile in turn. She seemed to be mocking both herself and the other person, a trifle embarrassed but also amused at finding herself on the other side of the wide river which separated her from the people of South Tahla, the side they were not on.

Thus Lol Stein found herself back in South Tahla again, the town where she had been born, that town she knew like the back of her hand, without having anything, no visible sign by which she could tell that she had been recognized in return. She recognized South Tahla, recognized it constantly both from having known it earlier in her life and from having known it the evening before, but without there being any proof reflected by South Tahla to reinforce her own, each time that she recognized something, a bullet whose impact was always the same. All by herself, she began to recognize less, and then, in a different way, she began to return day after day, step by step, toward her non-knowledge of South Tahla.

This one place in the world where, it was thought, she had, in time past, lived through a painful experience, or what they called a painful experience, is by slow degrees erased from the very fiber of her memory. Why these rather than other places? No matter where she is, it is as though Lol is there for the first time. She no longer experiences the invariable distance that memory provides: she is there, in the present. Her presence renders the town pure, unrecognizable. She begins to walk in the sumptuous palace of South Tahla's oblivion.

When she returned home—John Bedford admitted this fact to Tatiana Karl—and resumed her place in the midst of the order she had created, she was happy, as fresh as when she had got up in the morning, was more relaxed with the children and more inclined to let them have their own way, even going so far as to take their side against the servants, in order to make them more independent of her, and to cover up their mistakes; when they were insolent to her, she forgave them, as always; slight delays and deviations from her fixed routine, which in the morning would have irritated her no end, passed virtually unnoticed after she had returned from her walks. Moreover, she began to discuss this order with her husband.

She told him one day that he might be right, that this methodical order was perhaps not what was needed—why she didn't say—and that she might change her ways sometime in the near future. When? Sometime later. Lol left it vague.

She used to say every day, as though she were saying it for the first time, that she had gone for a walk to such and such a place, and mention the section of town, but she never described the slightest incident she might have witnessed. John Bedford found his wife's lack of candor about her walks perfectly natural, especially since she was reserved about everything she did, about all her activities. It was rare for her to offer an opinion, never once did she relate a story or incident. But did not Lol's contentment, which seemed constantly greater, prove that she found nothing bitter or sad about the town of her youth? That was all that mattered, John Bedford must have thought.

Lol never mentioned any purchases she might have made. Nor, in fact, did she ever make any during her walks in South Tahla. Nor did she ever so much as comment on the weather.

When it was raining, those around her knew that Lol would watch from the windows of her room to spot any sign of the weather's clearing. I suspect that it was there, in the monotony of the rain, that she found that "elsewhere," that uniform, insipid, and sublime "elsewhere" which she cherished more than any other moment in her present existence, that "elsewhere" she had been looking for since her return to South Tahla.

She devoted her entire morning to her household, her children, to the observance of that strict order which she alone had the strength and ability to impose, but when it rained too hard for her to go out, she did absolutely nothing. This domestic fervor—she tried to conceal it as best she could—vanished completely when it came time for her to go out, or when she decided to go out even if she had had a particularly difficult morning.

How had she spent these same hours during the ten preceding years? I asked her that question. She really didn't know what to reply. At Uxbridge, had she spent these same hours doing nothing? Nothing. And that was all? She didn't know how to express it: nothing. Behind the windows? Perhaps that too, yes. But then again . . .

Here is my opinion:

Thoughts, a welter of thoughts, all rendered equally sterile the moment her walk was over—none of these thoughts had ever crossed the threshold with her into her house—occur to Lol as she walks. It would seem as though it was the mechanical movement of her body which summoned them forth, all of them together, in a chaotic, confused, and ample surge. Lol receives them with pleasure, and with constant amazement. Some fresh air slips into her house, disturbs her, and drives her from it. Then the thoughts begin to come.

Thoughts born and reborn, daily, always the same thoughts that come crowding in, come to life and breathe, in an accessible, boundless universe, out of which one thought, and only one, eventually manages at long last to make itself heard, become visible, slightly more visible than the others, pressuring Lol, somewhat more insistently than the others, to retain it.

In the distance the ball trembles, ancient, the only wreck on a now-peaceful ocean, in the rain at South Tahla. Tatiana, when I later mentioned this to her, shared my opinion.

"So that was why she took those walks, to have a chance to think more clearly about the ball."

The ball revives, ever so slightly, shimmers, clings to Lol. She gives it warmth, protects it, nourishes it, and it grows, ventures forth from the protective layers, stretches, and one day is ready.

She enters it.

She enters it every day.

That summer, Lol fails to see the light of the afternoon. No, she is making her way into the wondrous, artificial light of the Town Beach ball. And in this enclosure, that opens wide to her eyes alone, she begins again to live in the past, she arranges it, puts order into the dwelling place that is truly hers.

"A real masochist," says Tatiana, "she must constantly be thinking about the same thing."

I agree with Tatiana.

I know Lol Stein in the only way I can; through love. It is because of this knowledge that I have come to this conclusion: among the many aspects of the Town Beach ball, what fascinates Lol is the end. It is the precise moment when it comes to an end, when dawn arrives with incredible cruelty and separates her from the couple formed by Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter, forever, forever. Each day Lol goes ahead with the task of reconstructing that moment. She even manages to seize a little of its lightninglike rapidity, to spread it out and pinpoint each second, arrest its movement, an immobility which is extremely precarious but, for her, infinitely graceful.

Again she goes out walking. She sees more and more clearly, precisely, what she wants to see. What she is reconstructing is the end of the world.

She sees herself—and this is what she really believes —in the same place, at the end, always, in the center of a triangular construction of which dawn, and the two of them, are the eternal sides: it is the moment when she has just become aware of that dawn, while they have not yet noticed it. She knows; they still do not. She is powerless to prevent them from knowing. And it begins all over again:

At that precise moment, some attempt—but what?— should have been made which was not. At that precise moment Lol is standing, completely undone, with no voice to cry out for help, with no convincing argument, with no proof of how unimportant the coming day was compared to that night, uprooted and borne from dawn toward that couple, her whole being filled with a chronic, hopeless feeling of panic. She is not God, she is no one.

She smiles, yes, she smiles at that remembered minute of her life. The naiveté of some eventual suffering, or even of some commonplace sadness, no longer plays a part in it. All that remains of that minute is time in all its purity, bone-white time.

And again it begins: the windows closed, sealed, the ball immured in its nocturnal light, would have contained all three of them, and they alone. Lol is positive of that: together they would have been saved from the advent of another day, of one more day at least.

What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. She has no memory, not even an imaginary one, she has not the faintest notion of this unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her—that if Lol is silent in her daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter it, but it would have been made to reverberate. Enormous, endless, an empty gong, it would have held back anyone who had wanted to leave, it would have convinced them of the impossible, it would have made them deaf to any other word save that one, in one fell swoop it would have defined the future and the moment themselves. By its absence, this word ruins all the others, it contaminates them, it is also the dead dog on the beach at high noon, this hole of flesh. How were other words found? Hand-me-downs from God knows how many love affairs like Lol Stein's, affairs nipped in the bud, trampled upon, and from massacres, oh! you've no idea how many there are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along the horizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does not exist, is none the less there: it awaits you just around the corner of language, it defies you—never having been used—to raise it, to make it arise from its kingdom, which is pierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.

They had watched the violinists file past, and been surprised.

What Lol would have liked would have been to have the ball immured, to make of it this ship of light upon which, each afternoon, she embarks, but which remains there, in this impossible port, forever anchored and yet ready to sail away with its three passengers from this entire future in which Lol Stein now takes her place. There are times when it has, in Lol's eyes, the same momentum as on the first day, the same fabulous force.

But Lol is not yet God, nor anyone.

He would have divested her slowly of her black dress, and by the time he had done it a good part of the voyage would have been over.

I saw Lol undress herself, still inconsolable, inconsolable.

For Lol, it is unthinkable that she not be present at the place where this gesture occurred. This gesture would not have occurred without her: she is with it flesh to flesh, form to form, her eyes riveted on its corpse. She was born to witness it. Others are born to die. Without her to witness it, this gesture will die of thirst, will disintegrate, fall, Lol is in ashes.

The tall, thin body of the other woman would have appeared little by little. And, in a strictly parallel and reverse progression, Lol would have been replaced by her in the affection of the man from Town Beach. Replaced by that woman, unto her very breath. Lol holds her breath as this woman's body appears to this man, her own fades, fades, voluptuous pleasure, from the world.

"You. You alone."

Lol had never been able to carry this divesting of Anne-Marie Stretter's dress in slow-motion, this velvet annihilation of her own person, to its conclusion.

I am of the opinion that Lol never thinks about what happened between them after the ball, when she was no longer there. The fact that he left forever, after their separation, if she were to think about it, in spite of herself, would remain a mark in his favor, would only confirm the opinion that she had always had about him that he could find true happiness only in some short-lived and hopeless love, with courage, and nothing more. Michael Richardson, in his time, had been loved too deeply and completely; it was as simple as that.

Lol no longer thinks of that love. It is dead, even has the odor of dead love.

The man from Town Beach has only one task left to accomplish, which is always the same in Lol's universe: every afternoon, Michael Richardson begins to undress a woman other than Lol, and when other breasts appear, white beneath the black sheath, he remains there transfixed, a God wearied by this divesting, his only task, and in vain Lol waits for him to take her again, with her body rendered infirm by the other she cries out, she waits in vain, she cries out in vain.

Then one day this infirm body stirs in the womb of God.

T
HE
MOMENT
L
OL
saw him she recognized him. It was the man who had passed her house a few weeks before.

That day he was alone.

He was coming out of a cinema in the center of town. While the rest of the crowd hurried down the aisle, he took his time coming out. When he reached the sidewalk he blinked his eyes in the light, paused to look around, did not see Lol Stein, he was carrying his suitcoat with one hand, the coat slung over his shoulder, and with a movement of his arm he swung it back around in front, tossed it lightly into the air, then slipped it on, still taking his time.