Winter of artifice; three novelettes (11 page)

As soon as she left her father she heard music again. It was falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinklincr from the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was her faith in the world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles which made every misery sound like part of a symphony.

Not separateness but oneness was music.

Father, let me ivalk alone into the music of my faith. When I am with you the world is still and silent.

You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid forms, and what you extract frojn the chaos is already crystallized.

As soon as I leave you everything fixed falls into waves, tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart beating again with disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory.

I coidd never dance around you, my father, I could never dance around you!

You held the conductors baton, but no music could come from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing. * * * *

Walking down the Rue Saturne she heard the students of the Conservatoire playing the "Sonate en Re Minetir" of Bach. She also heard her mother's beautiful voice singing Schumann's "J'ai pardonne.". .. Strange how her mother, who had never forgiven her father, could sing that song more movingly than anything else she sang.

Walking down the Rue Saturne she was singing "Pai pardonne" under her breath and thinking at the same time how she hated this street because it was the one she always walked through on her way to her father's house. On winter evenings his luxurious home was heated like a hothouse, and she found 100

him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which he took very seriously. Or rehearsing, or else just coming down from his siesta.

This siesta he always took with religious care, as if the preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. To love too deeply, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too much, was a wasting of one's energy. Life was an enemy to him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, a stairway worn threadbare, a faded spot on the wallpaper. Since he never Hved wholly in the moment a part of him was already preparing for the morrow.

When she saw her father coming out of his room after his siesta she always had the feeling that he was making artificial efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, disintegration, which is organic and inevitable. (^ He believed he was delaying death by preserving himself from life, when on the contrary, it was the fear of life and the efforts he made to avoid it which used up his strength. Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live, she believed, and only if one lived fully and freely one also rested fully and deeply?) Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning himself, he coTlla not sink into deep sleep at night without fear of death. . . . She always left his house with a feehng of having come near to death because everything there was so clearly a fight against death.

She left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in small, still front gardens; where butlers were occupied in polishing door knobs; where low cars rolled up silently and caught one by surprise; where stone lions

watched fur-trimmed women kissing little dogs—everything that she had rejected—. .. .

The light was very strong on the newly painted street sign. And then she saw that the name of the street was being changed. Already it said: "Anciennement Rue Saturne... now changed to ..."

Now changed. As she was changed and beginning to move away from the past. She wanted to change with the city, that all the houses of the past may be finally torn down, that the whole city of the past may disappear. That all she had seen, heard, experienced would cease to walk with her down streets with changed names, through the labyrinth of loss and change where all is forgotten....

Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million steps she had taken away from her father. In the same city in which he lived a thousand steps took her to a different milieu, different ideas, different people.

Walking in the rain to pass before his house, looking up at the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at least eluded you. Where it is I have my deeper life, you do not know. The deepest part of my being you never penetrated. The woman who stands here is not your daughter. It is the woman who has escaped the stigmata of parental love.

To escape him she had run away to the end of the world. To be free of him she had run away to places where he never went. She had lost him, by living in the opposite direction from him. She sought out the failures because he didn't like those who stuttered, those who stumbled; she sought out the ugly because he turned his face away; she sought out the weak because they irritated him. She sought out chaos because he insisted on logic. She traveled to the other end of life, to the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy, 102

in whom she was sure not to find the least trace of him. No trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard Clichy where the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace of him at two in the morning in the little cafe opposite La Trinite; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the Boulevard Jcan-Jaurcs; no trace of him in the cineyna dii quar-tier, in the Bal Alusctre, in the burlesque theatre. Never anyone who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like him. Never a voice like his.

It was her father who thrust her out into the black, soiled corners of the world. Everything she loved she turned her back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its serpentine of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, everything that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have reminded her of him. To efface such a love took her years of walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of traversing the unknown. She was happy only when she finally succeeded in losing him.

I ler father and she were walking through the Bois. On his lips she could still see the traces of a mordant kiss.

"We met at Notre Dame," he was saying. "She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analy.sis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of r\vo years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially

detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not in it. I answered that I didn't know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an overht city."

"Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?" she asked.

"It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes."

(He had forgotten that he had come to tell her that he did not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was that she had only been able to escape her husband's surveillance for twenty minutes.)

"She was so hurt," he added, "that I didn't even kiss her."

As they walked along she again looked carefully at his lip. It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten most fiercely. But she did not say anything. She was reconstructing the scene more accurately in her own head. Probably the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre Dame, looking very earnest, very exalted. Probably her father had been touched. She did not believe that her father had been annoyed by the countess's jealousy and worship, but that it had touched his vanity. He was disguising his pleasure under an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a cynical Don Juan, the despair of women.

He repeated a story which he had told her before, of how the countess had slashed her face in order to justify her tardiness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly improbable to her, because a woman in love is not likely to endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been simpler than this farfetched tale of an automobile accident.

But why did he have this need of falsifying all that happened to him? She had long before asked him to cease creating

this illusion of an exclusive love, to be truthful vi^ith her. She had offered to be his confidante. He had promised . . . and now he was inventing again.

When she arrived the next day he had not slept at all, thinking: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot hve any more. You are everything to me. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway.

He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking through a desert.

"You make me realize," he said, "how empty my activity is. In not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital reason for living."

He was again the man she had known in the south. His tone rang true. But he could not let her be. If she preferred Dostoievsky to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked and endangered. He was offended if she did not smoke his cigarettes, if she did not go to all his concerts, if she did not admire all his friends.

And she—she wanted him to abandon his superficialities and vanities and deceptions. They could not accept each other.

Realizing more and more that she did not love him she felt a strange joy, as if she were witnessing a just punishment for his coldness as a father when she was a child. And this suffering, which in reality she made no effort to inflict since she kept her secret, gave her joy. It made her feel that she was balancing in herself all the injustice of life, that she was restoring in her own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life.

It was the fulfillment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, adandon today.

Betrayal today, betrayal tomorrow. Two equally poised columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin colonnades: a love for today, a love for tomorrow; a punishment to him, a punishment to the other. .. and one for herself .... Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled this balancing of events.

She felt like laughing whenever her father repeated that he was lucid, simple, logical. She knew that this order and precision were only apparent. He had chosen to live on the surface, and she to descend deeper and deeper. His fundamental desire was to escape pain, hers to face all of life. Instead of coming out of his shell to face the disintegration of their relationship he eluded the truth. He had not discovered as she had that by meeting the person she feared to meet, by reading the letter she feared to read, by giving life a chance to strike at her she had discovered that it struck less cruelly than her imagination. To imagine was far more terrible than reality, because it took place in a void, it was untestable. There were no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner chamber of ghostly tortures. But in living the realization summoned energies, forces, courage, arms and legs to fight with so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It knows the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.

He told her that he had stayed awake all night wondering 106

how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no voice at all.

"There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I would not have an affair with her (at another period of my life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have other things to live for) she began to sob violently and the rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handkerchiefs. After the first fits of tears she began to calmly make up her face, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by the tears. \\'hen she left I threw the handkerchiefs into the laundry. The fey/nne de chainbre picked them up and left all the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was cleaning it. Laura passed by, saw them and immediately thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to her; I told her I had not told her about this woman because I did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women pursuing me."

She did not mind his philandering, but she was eager for the truth. She knew that he was telling a lie, because when a woman weeps the rimmel comes off, but not the lipstick, and besides, all elegant women have acquired a technique of weeping which has no such fatal effect on the make-up. You wept just enough to fill the eves with tears and no more. No overflow. The tears stay inside the cups of the eyes, the rimmel is preserved, and yet the sadness is sufficiently expressive. After a