The landscape reminded her of a Breughel, and she liked Breughel; she liked the warm car that awaited her and the music she would switch on once she was back inside it; she liked the thought of meeting, around eight o’clock, a man who loved her and whom she loved in return, a man called Jean-Fran?ois. She also liked the thought of getting up, yawning, after their night of love, and gulping down the cup of coffee which he, or she, would have made for ‘the other’; and also the thought of her office tomorrow morning, of discussing advertising ideas with Marc, the good friend with whom she had worked for the past five years. They would agree, laughing, that in the end the best way of promoting a new washing powder was to show that it washed greyer, and that people needed greyness more than whiteness, dullness more than sparkle, obsolescence more than durability.
She liked all that; in fact, she liked her life: plenty of friends, plenty of lovers, an amusing job, a child even, together with a taste for music, books, flowers and log fires. But now this rook had flown over, chased by that frantic rabble, and something was tearing at her heart, something that she couldn’t quite grasp, couldn’t explain, not even (and this was the worst part) to herself.
The path branched to the right. There was a notice board proclaiming ‘Etangs de Hollande ’. The idea of those lakes in the setting sun, with reeds, furze, perhaps some duck, immediately attracted her and she quickened her step. She came upon the first of the promised lakes almost at once. It was a mixture of blues and greys, and although not covered with wildfowl (there wasn’t even a single duck) it was nevertheless strewn with dead leaves which were slowly sinking, one after another, in a dying spiral; and each one seemed to be in need of aid and protection. Each of these dead leaves was an Ophelia. Spotting a dead tree trunk, no doubt abandoned by a careless forester, she sat down on it. Increasingly, she asked herself what she was doing there. She would end up by being late, Jean-Fran?ois would be worried; he would be furious and he would be quite right. When one is happy, when one is doing what one likes to do-and also when other people like one-one has no right to sit about on tree trunks, alone, in the cold, beside a lake no one has ever heard of. It wasn’t as though she was at all ‘neurotic’, as ‘other people’ say when talking of unhappy people (or at any rate, people who couldn’t cope with life).
As though to reassure herself, she took a packet of cigarettes from her coat pocket, was relieved to discover a lighter in the other pocket, and lit up. The smoke was warm and acrid, and the cigarette tasted unfamiliar. And yet it was the same brand that she had been smoking for ten years.
‘Perhaps,’ she said to herself, ‘all I really needed was to be alone for a bit? Perhaps it’s too long since I’ve been alone? Perhaps this lake has an evil spirit? Perhaps it wasn’t chance but fate that led me here? Perhaps there’s a long history of charms and spells surrounding these lakes...’
She put her hand on the tree trunk at the point where her hip rested against it, and felt the contact of the rough wood, worn and mellowed by rain and by solitude (for what could be more solitary or more melancholy than a dead tree, cut down, abandoned, no good for anything; not as firewood, nor as timber, nor as a lovers’ seat?). The contact with the wood aroused a sort of tenderness and affection in her, and to her astonishment she felt the tears well up in her eyes. She contemplated the wood, the veins of the wood, difficult though they were to make out: grey, almost white, in wood that had itself turned grey and white (like old people’s veins, she thought: one can’t see the blood flowing, one knows it’s there but one can’t see it any more than one can hear it). And it was much the same with this tree: the sap had dried up; the sap, the incentive, the fever, the desire to do, to act, to act the fool, make love, create, make things happen...
All these ideas went through her head in a flash; resigned, passive, she hardly knew who she was any longer. She, who never saw herself, who never even wanted to see herself, whose life was full, now suddenly saw herself as a woman in a smart coat, smoking a cigarette, sitting on a dead tree trunk beside a stagnant lake. There was someone inside her who wanted desperately to get away from this place, to go back to the car, to the music in the car, to the road and the thousand and one ways of avoiding death, the thousand and one tricks a clever motorist must know to avoid accidents, someone who longed to be back in Jean- Fran?ois’s arms, or in a Paris café with ‘the gin, the gipsies, the siphons and the garishness’ so dear to the heart of Guillaume Apollinaire. But there was someone else inside her whom she didn’t recognize-at least whom she had never met until now-who wanted to stay until nightfall, watching the darkness settle on the lake and feeling the wood grow cold beneath her hand. And per haps-why not-this someone would later want to walk into that water, aware of the cold at first, then, immersing herself in it, losing herself in it, go down to the deepest depths to rejoin, on the blue and golden sands, the dead leaves which had been sucked down there throughout the day. And there, stretched out on a bed of leaves, surrounded by tender, playful fishes, this someone would be perfectly at peace at last, restored to the cradle, restored to real life, or rather to death.
‘I’m going crazy,’ she thought, and a voice whispered to her: ‘I assure you it’s the truth, your truth,’ and it seemed to be the voice of childhood. And another voice, a voice acquired over thirty years of pleasure of one kind or another, said, ‘My dear girl, what you ought to do is to go home and take some Vitamin B or C. There’s something the matter with you.’
Needless to say, it was the second voice which prevailed. Prudence Delvaux stood up, abandoning the tree trunk, the lake, the leaves and life. She returned to Paris, to her divans, her bars, to what is known as existence. She returned to her love, who was known as Jean-Fran?ois.
And she switched on the music in her car and she drove very carefully and she even smiled at her half- hour of aberration. But it took her two months to forget the Etangs de Hollande. At least. And not once did she mention them to Jean-Fran?ois.
In Extremis
He turned over yet again between the enveloping sheets, dangerous as quicksands, sniffing with disgust the smell of his own body, that smell he had once so delighted to find on women’s bodies in the morning. Those mornings in Paris after a white night and a few hours of exhausted sleep beside a strange body, those mornings when he awoke light- headed with fatigue and in a hurry to leave. In a hurry... he had always been a man in a hurry, but now, on this spring afternoon, lying there prostrate, he was taking his time about dying. Dying was a strange word, no longer, it seemed to him, the absurd but inescapable reality which had so often spurred him on, but a sort of accident. Rather like breaking a leg skiing. ‘Why me, why today, why?’
‘Of course I may recover,’ he said out loud. And the shadowy figure silhouetted against the window gave a slight start. He had forgotten her, as indeed he had always forgotten her. He remembered his surprise on learning of her affair with Jean. There was someone for whom she still existed, was still beautiful, for whom she had a body. He gave a faint chuckle which quickened his precious, precarious heart-beat.
He was dying. He knew now that he was dying. Something was tearing at his body. Meanwhile she was leaning over him, supporting him by the shoulders, and he felt his shoulder- blade, ignominiously reduced to skin and bone, flinch beneath his wife’s gentle hand. Ignominy, that was what he was dying of, ignominy. Was there an illness which allowed you to die gracefully? There probably wasn’t, and mankind’s only grace, perhaps, lay in that aspiration towards what lay ahead. But he was calmer now, and as she leant over him to lay him back on his pillow, her face caught the light and he saw her. She had a beautiful face, all said and done, for which he had married her twenty years earlier. But its expression irritated him. It was preoccupied, abstracted. She must be thinking of Jean.
‘I was saying that I might perhaps recover.’
‘Of course you will,’ she said.
It was funny: she really didn’t love him any more. She knew perfectly well that he was lost, done for. But it was such a long time ago that ‘she’ had lost him. ‘One only loses people once.’ Where had he read that? Was it true? At all events, she would never again see him come through the door, read his newspaper, talk. No, she no longer loved him. If she had loved him, she would have taken his hands and said: ‘Yes, my darling, you’re going to die,’ with that smooth, drawn face that comes from the knowledge of the irrevocable, the knowledge that one acquires all of a sudden when faced with somebody one loves who is dying, somebody...
‘You mustn’t get agitated,’ she said.
‘I’m not agitated, I’m just a little restless. Agitation is over as far as I’m concerned.’
He had adopted a playful tone. ‘But after all, I’m going to die,’ he thought, ‘perhaps I ought to talk to her seriously? But what about? About us? But there’s nothing left to talk about, or hardly anything.’ Nevertheless, the mere thought that he could still exert some influence by his words brought back his old impatience.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
And he reached for her hand with a calm deliberate gesture. The last time had been two years ago, in the Bois de Boulogne: he was sitting on a bench with a young and rather silly girl and he had made the same calm gesture, in order not to alarm her. Pointlessly, as it turned out, for she was back at his flat with him an hour later. But he remembered the immense length of time it had taken before his hand reached those slightly reddened fingers... It was moments like those...
‘You have nice hands,’ he said.
She didn’t reply. He could hardly see her. He would have liked her to open the shutters, but it occurred to him that darkness was more appropriate to this final act of the play. Play? What gave him that idea? There was nothing theatrical about his situation. But he was doing his best to remedy that.
‘It’s Thursday today,’ he said plaintively, ‘ half-holiday.
When I was a small boy, I always hoped that a week with four Thursdays in a row would turn up one day. I do now: then I’d have three days longer to live.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she said with an impatient shrug.
‘Oh no you don’t!’ he said, suddenly furious, trying to raise himself on his elbows. ‘You’re not going to do me out of my death! You know perfectly well that I’m going to die.’
She looked at him with a slight smile.
‘Why are you smiling?’ he asked in a gentle voice.
‘That reminded me of a remark you made-you probably won’t remember it-about fifteen years ago. We were at the Faltoneys. I didn’t know that you were being unfaithful to me at the time, or at any rate I only had a faint suspicion...’
He felt the stirrings of an old complacency that he quickly suppressed. What extraordinary situations he had got himself into, what unbelievable adventures he had had!
‘Well, go on.’
‘That evening I realized that you were Nicole Faltoney’s lover. Her husband wasn’t there, and when you brought me home, you said you had to drop in at your office to finish something or other...’
She spoke slowly, pausing after every other word. His thoughts had turned to Nicole. She was blonde, gentle, a little querulous.
‘So then I said that I’d like you to come home with me, that I’d prefer it if you did. I didn’t dare tell you that I knew: you were always talking about the stupidity of jealous women, and I was afraid...’
She spoke more and more softly, dreamily, almost like someone tenderly recalling an unhappy childhood. It got on his nerves.
‘You mean I told you I was going to die?’
‘No, but you used much the same formula: you said... Oh, no!’ she said, and she burst out laughing, ‘it’s too preposterous...’
He began to laugh too, but half- heartedly. It scarcely seemed the moment for laughter, especially not for her-only he could be allowed such heroic gaiety.
‘Well? Go on.’
‘You said: “You’re not going to deprive me of that woman, you know perfectly well that I want her.” ’
‘Oh,’ he said. (He was disappointed, having vaguely expected some witticism.) ‘There’s nothing very funny about that.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But to say that to me, as though it was self- evident!...’
She laughed again, but with a touch of constraint, as though she sensed that he was annoyed.
But now he was busy listening to his heart. Its beat was muffled, pitifully faint. ‘How frail we are,’ he thought with a touch of bitterness. He was tired of seeing clichés he had despised at the age of twenty being borne out time and again. Death was going to resemble death just as much as love resembled love.
‘Ah, well,’ he said, closing his eyes, ‘it’s been a very accommodating heart.’
‘What?’ she said.
He looked at her. It was strange to be leaving behind one a person primed with such anecdotes, stories against one, against what would be one’s ghost. Someone who had been so gentle at twenty, so defenceless, and whom he now found so changed-whom he would never find again. Marthe... Whatever had become of her?
‘Do you love this man Jean?’ he asked.
She answered him, but he wasn’t listening. He was trying for the umpteenth time to count the sun-beams on the ceiling. The wavering, feathery reflections of the sun. Would the Mediterranean still be as blue, afterwards? Someone was singing in the courtyard. He had loved a handful of songs in his life so passionately that, in the end, he could no longer bear to listen to music. Marthe, on the other hand, used to play the piano. But pretty pianos were hard to find and he had been very particular when it came to furniture. So they hadn’t had a piano.
‘Don’t you play the piano any longer?’ he asked plaintively.
‘The piano?’ she said wonderingly.
She was surprised; she herself couldn’t remember any more: she had forgotten her youth. He alone retained the fond memory of Marthe’s blonde hair and straight young neck against the black background of the piano. He turned his head away.
‘Why do you ask me about the piano?’ she asked again.
He didn’t reply, but he squeezed her hand. His heart frightened him; he recognized the old pain. He longed for a moment’s reassurance, the comfort of Daphne’s shoulder, the taste of alcohol.
But Daphne was living with that young idiot Guy and alcohol would only hasten the end. He was afraid, that was all, simply afraid . . . It was that blankness in his head and that shrinking of his muscles. It was horrible. The thought of his death filled him with such horror that it made him smile.
‘I’m afraid,’ he said to Marthe. Then he repeated the words, stressing each syllable. They were harsh, rough words, manly words. All the words in his life had been so easy to say, tripping off the tongue: ‘my darling, my sweet, whenever you like, soon, tomorrow.’ Marthe wasn’t a very soft name and it hadn’t come often to his lips.
