The Age of Reason (10 page)

She turned her head, and was looking at Mathieu’s hair, tilting her mouth towards him with a touch of affectionate coquetry. Ivich was not precisely a flirt, but from time to time she assumed an affectionate air for the pleasure of sensing the heavy, fruit-like sleekness of her face. Mathieu thought it an irritating and rather silly pose.

‘I shall be glad to see Boris and to be with you,’ he said, ‘But what bothers me a little, as you know, is Lola: she can’t stand me.’

‘What does that matter?’

A silence followed. It was as though they had both simultaneously realized that they were a man and a woman, enclosed together in a taxi. ‘It oughtn’t to be so,’ he said to himself with annoyance. And Ivich continued: ‘I don’t myself think that Lola is worth troubling about. She’s good-looking, and she sings well, that’s all.’

‘I find her sympathetic.’

‘Naturally. That’s your attitude, you always must be perfect. The moment people dislike you, you do your best to discover virtues in them. I don’t find her sympathetic,’ she added.

‘She is charming to you.’

‘She can’t behave otherwise: but I don’t like her, she’s always acting a part.’

‘Acting a part?’ said Mathieu, raising his eyebrows: ‘that’s the last thing I should have accused her of doing.’

‘It’s odd you shouldn’t have noticed it: she heaves sighs as large as herself to make people believe she’s in despair, and then orders herself a nice little dinner.’

And she added with sly malice: ‘I should have thought that when people were in despair they didn’t mind dying: I’m always surprised when I see her adding up every penny she spends, and saving money.’

‘That doesn’t prevent her being desperate. It’s just what people do when they’re getting old: when they’re sick of themselves and their life, they think of money and take care of themselves.’

‘Well, one oughtn’t ever to get old,’ said Ivich, dryly.

He looked at her puzzledly and hurriedly added: ‘You’re right, it isn’t nice to be old.’

‘Oh, but you aren’t any age,’ said Ivich. ‘I have the feeling that you have always been as you are now, you’ve got a kind of mineral youthfulness. I sometimes try to imagine what you were like as a boy, but I can’t.’

‘I had curly hair,’ said Mathieu.

‘Well, I picture you just as you are today, except for being a little smaller.’

This time Ivich probably did not know that she was looking affectionate. Mathieu wanted to speak, but there was an odd irritation in his throat, and he was suddenly outside himself. Away behind him were Marcelle, Sarah, and the interminable hospital corridors in which he had been wandering since the morning, he was no longer anywhere at all; he felt free. The dense, warm mass of a summer day came close to him, and he longed to plunge headlong into it. For one more second he seemed suspended in the void, with an agonizing sense of freedom, and then, abruptly, he reached out his arm, took Ivich by the shoulders, and clasped her to him. Ivich yielded stiffly, all of a piece, as though she were losing her balance. She said nothing: and her face was utterly impassive.

The taxi had entered the Rue de Rivoli, the arcades of the Louvre lumbered past the windows, like great doves in flight. It was hot — Mathieu felt a warm body against his side: through the front window he could see trees and a tricolour flag pendant from a mast. He remembered the action of a man he had seen once in the Rue Mouffetard. A decently dressed man with an absolutely grey face. The man had gone up to a provision-shop, he had gazed for a long time at a slice of cold meat on a plate in the open window, then he had reached out a hand and taken the piece of meat: he did so with apparent ease, he too must have felt free. The shop keeper had yelled, a policeman had appeared and removed the man, who seemed surprised. Ivich was still silent.

‘She’s criticizing me,’ thought Mathieu irritably.

He leaned towards her: and to punish her, he laid his lips lightly against a cold, closed mouth: he was feeling defiant: Ivich was silent. Lifting his head he saw her eyes, and his passionate joy vanished. He thought: ‘A married man messing about with a young girl in a taxi,’ and his arm dropped, dead and flaccid: Ivich’s body straightened with a mechanical jerk, like a pendulum swinging back to equilibrium. ‘Now I’ve done it,’ said Mathieu, ‘she’ll never forgive me.’ He sat huddled in his seat wishing he might disintegrate. A policeman raised his baton, the taxi stopped. Mathieu looked straight in front of him, but he could not see the trees: he was looking at his love.

It was love.
This time
, it was love. And Mathieu thought: ‘What have I done?’ Five minutes ago this love didn’t exist; there was between them a rare and precious feeling, without a name and not expressible in gestures. And he had, in fact, made a gesture, the only one that ought not to have been made, it had come spontaneously. A gesture, and this love had appeared before Mathieu, like some insistent and already commonplace entity. Ivich would from now on think that he loved her, she would think him like the rest: from now on, Mathieu would love Ivich, like the other women he had loved. ‘What is she thinking?’ She sat by his side, stiff and silent, and there was this gesture between them — ‘I hate being touched’ — this clumsy, affectionate gesture, already marked with the impalpable insistence of things past. She was furious, she despised him, she thought him like the rest. ‘That wasn’t what I wanted of her,’ he thought with despair. But even by this time he could no longer recall what he had wanted
before
. Love was there, compact and comfortable, with its simple desires and all its commonplace contrivings, and it was Mathieu who had brought it into being, in absolute freedom. ‘It isn’t true,’ he reflected vehemently: ‘I don’t desire her, I never have desired her.’ But he already knew that he was going to desire her. It always finishes like that, he would look at her legs and her breasts, and then, one fine day... In a flash he saw Marcelle outstretched on the bed, naked, with her eyes closed: he hated Marcelle.

The taxi had stopped: Ivich opened the door and stepped out into the street. Mathieu did not follow her at once: he was absorbed in wide-eyed contemplation of this love of his, so new and yet already old, a married man’s love, sly, and shameful, humiliating for her, and, himself humiliated in advance, he already accepted it as a fatality. He got out at last, paid the fare and rejoined Ivich, who was waiting in the entrance. ‘If only she could forget.’ He threw a furtive glance at her, and caught a hard look on her face: ‘At the best, there is something between us that is ended,’ he thought. But he had no wish to stop loving her. They went into the Exhibition without exchanging a word.

‘T
HE
archangel,’ Marcelle yawned, sat up, shook her head, and this was her first thought: ‘The archangel is coming this evening.’ She liked his mysterious visits, but that day she thought of them without much pleasure. There was a fixed horror in the air about her, a midday horror. The room was filled with stale heat which had spent its force outside, and left its radiance in the folds of the curtain, and was stagnating there, inert and ominous like a human destiny. ‘If he knew, he is so austere that he would hate me.’ She had sat down on the edge of the bed, just like yesterday, when Mathieu was sitting naked at her side; she eyed her toes with distaste, and the previous evening lingered, impalpable, with its dead pink light, like the faded fragrance of a scent. ‘I couldn’t — I just couldn’t tell him.’ He would have said: ‘Right: very well, we’ll fix it’ — with a brisk and cheerful air, as though in the act of swallowing a dose of medicine. She knew that she could not have endured that face: it had stuck in her throat. She thought: ‘Midday!’ The ceiling was grey like the sky at dawn, but the heat was of midday. Marcelle went to bed late and was no longer acquainted with the morning hours; she sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose. Outside — broad daylight, and bright-coloured frocks. Mathieu was on the move outside in the gay and dusty whirl of a day which had begun without her, and already had a past. ‘He’s thinking about me, he’s doing all he can,’ she thought without affection. She was annoyed because she could imagine that robust, sunlit pity, the bustling, clumsy pity of a healthy man. She felt languid and clammy, still quite dishevelled from sleep: the familiar steel helmet gripped her head, there was a taste of blotting-paper in her mouth, a lukewarm feeling down her sides, and, beneath her arms, tipping the black hairs, beads of sweat. She felt sick, but restrained herself: her day had not yet begun, it was there, propped precariously against Marcelle, the least movement would bring it crashing down like an avalanche. She laughed sardonically and muttered: ‘Freedom!’

A human being who wakened in the morning with a queasy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bed-time, had not much use for freedom. Freedom didn’t help a person to live. Delicate little feathers dipped in aloes tickled the back of her throat, and then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue and drew her lips back. ‘I’m lucky, apparently some women are sick all day. At the second month: I bring up a little in the morning, and feel rather tired in the afternoon, but I keep going. Mother knew women who couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco, and that would be the last straw.’ She got up abruptly and ran to the basin: she vomited a foamy, turbid liquid, which looked rather like the slightly beaten white of an egg. Marcelle clutched the porcelain rim, and gazed at the frothing water. She smiled wryly, and murmured: ‘A memento of love.’ Then a vast metallic silence took possession of her head, and her day began. She was no longer thinking of anything. She ran her hand through her hair and waited: ‘I’m always sick twice in the morning.’ And then, quite suddenly, she had a vision of Mathieu’s face, his frank, determined look, when he had said: ‘Well, I suppose one gets rid of it, eh?’ and a flash of hate shot through her.

It came. She first thought of butter, and was revolted; she seemed to be chewing a bit of yellow, rancid butter, then she felt something like an insistent laugh at the back of her throat, and leaned over the basin. A long filament hung from her lips, she had to cough it away. It did not disgust her, though she had been very ready to be disgusted with herself: last winter, when she was suffering from diarrhoea, she would not let Mathieu touch her, she was sure she smelt unpleasantly. She watched the dabs of mucus sliding slowly towards the drain-hole, leaving glossy, viscous tracks behind them, like snails. And she muttered: ‘It’s fantastic!’ She was not revolted; this was
life
, like the slimy efflorescences of spring, it was no more repulsive than the little dab of russet, odorous gum that tipped the buds. ‘It isn’t that that’s repulsive.’ She turned on a tap to sluice the basin, and slowly slipped out of her vest. ‘If I were an animal, I should be left alone.’ She could sink into that living languor, as into the embrace of a glorious, enveloping fatigue. She was not a fool. ‘One gets rid of it, eh?’ Since yesterday evening, she felt like a hunted quarry.

The mirror reflected her image encircled by leaden gleams. She walked up to it. She looked neither at her shoulders, nor her breasts: she disliked her body. She looked at her belly — a capacious, fecund vessel. Seven years ago, — Mathieu had spent the night with her, for the first time — she had looked in the mirror one morning with the same hesitant astonishment, and she had then thought: ‘So it’s true that someone loves me,’ and she contemplated her polished, silken skin, almost like a fabric, and her body just a surface made to reflect the sterile play of light, and to ripple beneath caresses like water beneath the wind. Today this flesh was no longer the same flesh: she looked at her belly, and the placid abundance of those rich pastures revived her girlish impressions at the sight of women suckling their babies in the Luxemburg: a feeling beyond fear and disgust, a kind of hope. And she thought: ‘It’s there.’ In that belly a little strawberry of blood was making haste to live, with a sort of guileless urgency, a besotted little strawberry, not even yet an animal, soon to be scraped out of existence by a knife. ‘There are others, at this very hour, who are looking at their bellies and also thinking, “It’s there.” But they, on the other hand, are glad. ’ She shrugged her shoulders; yes, that foolish, burgeoning body was indeed created for maternity. But men had decided otherwise. She would go to the old woman; she need only imagine it was a tumour. ‘Indeed, at that moment, it
is just a tumour
.’ And then, the affair would not again be mentioned, it would be no more than a sordid memory, such as plays a part in everybody’s lives. She would return to her pink room, she would continue to read, and feel rather uncomfortable inside, Mathieu would see her four nights a week, and would treat her, for some time still, with affectionate forbearance, as though she were a young mother, and when he made love to her he would redouble his precautions, and Daniel, Daniel the archangel, would also come from time to time... An opportunity missed, what! She caught sight of her eyes in the glass, and turned abruptly away: she did not want to hate Mathieu. And she thought: ‘I must begin dressing all the same.’

Her courage failed her. She sat down again on the bed, laid her hand lightly on her belly, just above the black hairs, and pressed it very gently, reflecting, almost with affection: ‘It’s there.’ But her hatred was not thereby disarmed. She said to herself with emphasis, ‘I won’t hate him. He is within his rights, we always said that in case of accident... He couldn’t know, it’s my fault, I never told him anything.’ For an instant she was able to believe that her tense mood would relax, she dreaded having to despise him. But then she quivered as she thought: ‘How could I have told him? He never asks me anything.’ They had indeed agreed, once for all, that they would tell each other everything, but that worked out mainly in his favour. He was very fond of talking about himself, of dilating on his little cases of conscience, his moral scruples. As for Marcelle, he confided in her: but in lethargy of mind. He never worried about her, he said to himself: ‘If there was anything the matter with her, she would tell me.’ But she could not speak; it wouldn’t come out. ‘And yet he ought to know that I can’t talk about myself, that I don’t like myself enough for that.’ Except with Daniel, he knew how to interest her in herself: he had such a charming way of questioning her, as he gazed at her with his fine, caressing eyes, and besides they had a mutual secret. Daniel was so mysterious; he saw her secretly and Mathieu was quite unaware of their intimacy: they did nothing wrong, it was a sort of little comedy, but that complicity established a light and charming bond between them: and besides Marcelle was not sorry to have a little personal life, something that was really hers, and she was not obliged to share. ‘He had only to behave like Daniel,’ she thought. ‘Why is there no one but Daniel who knows how to make me talk? If he had helped me a little...’ All yesterday the words had stuck in her throat, she would have liked to say: ‘What about having it?’ If he had hesitated, if only for a second, I would have said it. But he had come, he had assumed his frank expression — ‘One gets rid of it, eh?’ And the words wouldn’t come out. He was worried when he went away: he didn’t want that old woman to do me in. Oh yes! he’ll inquire for addresses, it will occupy his time now term is finished, and that’s much better than trailing about with Ivich. Besides, he really feels as angry as if he had broken a vase. But his conscience is, in fact, completely at ease. No doubt he has made up his mind to treat me with the utmost affection. She laughed curtly. ‘Well, well. Only he’d better hurry up. I shall soon have passed the age for love.’