Pity for Women Read online

  'Of course not, you know very well.'

  'To hell with girls - especially winsome, frigid little French girls who never know what pleasure is before they're twenty- six! After all, nobody has yet found any other way for a man to show his affection for a woman. No, there's no way out of it. I can't make love to you any more now. And as for playing at brother and sister, frankly it's impossible; I'm not that kind of man. You gave yourself, and now you've taken yourself back; but you did give yourself, and the taste of it will always remain. You opened the door on to a room filled with music, and now you have shut it again.'

  She said nothing. They went on walking, going round the block for the third time.

  'And then, how can I dare talk to you again? What value can you ever again attach to what I say? I told you a dozen times: "Above all, you must be frank with me." And it's by being frank that you've destroyed everything. You're being punished for being what I asked you to be. And so from now on I can neither talk nor act with you. It isn't your fault. It's simply that our temperaments are incompatible. But I repeat, there's no way out of it.'

  Once again they reached her door. She would have gone on; it was he who stopped. He held out his hand:

  'Since we're seeing each other at the d'Hautecourts' tomorrow, we're bound to talk to each other again. But in fact everything is over between us.'

  He saw her raise her beautiful eyes towards him, full of surprise, sadness and reproach, as a bitch gazes at the brute of a master who has struck her for no reason. A taxi passed, and he hailed it. His voice was so strangled that he had to repeat his address several times before the driver understood it.

  At home he found the bed prepared, and the armfuls of flowers he had arranged for her. He threw himself on the bed in an agony of suffering. Suffering from having made her suffer. Suffering from having made her suffer although he loved her. Suffering from having made her suffer for being honest with him. Suffering from having deprived himself of her body. Suffering because he suffered from having deprived himself of her body, although her body gave him so little pleasure. Suffering because he suffered only in the basest part of his male self (his sexual vanity) and because this male suffering was so very puerile. Suffering, not least, because the room was so hot (eighty degrees Fahrenheit). At intervals, a petal fell from a vase like the chime of the half-hour. The intimate odour of the girl's body came back to him obsessively, exacerbating his resentment, a wisp of fragrance that seemed to float about the room like seeds borne on the summer air. Finally he thought of going to the larder for a cold chicken which he knew was there. He ate it, and his anguish died away. He even felt glad that he had suffered a little. One must try everything once.

  That night he had a dream. He dreamed of the old English governess he had had as a boy. Never in his life had he dreamed of her before. And try as he might, he could find no clue to what the dream meant.

  He began to think about the woman, and a strange memory came back to him. He remembered his terror when, waking up in the early morning, he used to imagine that perhaps, during the night, she had gone away for ever. Then he would get up and go barefooted to the governess's room. Objects, clothes, everything would be in place: the Englishwoman had simply gone to Mass, as she did every day. But such irrefutable evidence was not enough to reassure him. He would tiptoe on to the landing and wait there with beating heart for the rattle of the returning governess's key in the front door (for, after all, he must have realized that she was at Mass). Then as soon as he heard the noise of the key, he would rush back to bed and pretend to be asleep ...

  All this would have been easy to understand if he had had some sort of childish crush on his governess (he was then seven or eight years old). But nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he rather disliked her. She rapped his knuckles with a ruler when he made mistakes in his piano lessons, she left him - without a word - crying for half an hour at a time because he could not make head or tail of his arithmetic, she took the currants out of his fruit cake at tea-time, pretending they were bad for him when really she wanted them herself... He liked her so little that when she retired, although she settled in Paris, he had never once been to see her. No, however carefully he ransacked his memory, he could find nothing in his feelings for her except indifference tinged with resentment - nothing but indifference, with here and there those wild uprushes of passionate feeling, those torments of the tiny lover, at half past six in the morning, in the great, slumbering house.... Costals began to wonder whether he did not love Solange.

  The next day, a hop at the d'Hautecourts'. A few women's bodies would make it bearable. What would society be without bodies? One could see it wiped out without a murmur.

  Arriving after her, he followed her with his eyes without letting her see him. He would have liked her discreetly to show her contempt for all these people; but no, she seemed at ease among them; was she, perhaps, one of them? She danced three times with a young buck. 'If they go and sit behind the buffet, or on the stairs, I feel - yes, I feel it as if it were happening at this very moment - that all the blood will drain from my face, will drain from my legs as if it were flowing away under the ballroom floor.'

  He came towards her with an ugly expression on his face - an unwonted ugliness, a husband's ugliness. She greeted him, suddenly transformed, her face open, her eyes radiant with tenderness, as though nothing had happened the day before. He was touched by her unquestioning trust.

  They danced. He was thinking: 'Am I going to be the ignoble male to the bitter end? Yesterday I was cruel and unjust because my petty sexual pride had been hurt. Tomorrow I shall debase myself by resuming my love-making, knowing that she merely tolerates it. This body in my arms in front of two hundred people - I have laid my head on its naked belly (an exquisite sensation); with my cheek against that belly, I have heard the rumbling of her intestines, like the faint sound of thawing snow.... In fact, by God, she's mine!'

  And he let them see it all right. The dance over, an astonishing thing occurred. No sooner had they sat down beside each other than he put his hand on the girl's thigh (over her dress), and then let it rest on her midriff, as a lion spreads out its paw over the chunk of meat it has conquered.

  Not in some secluded corner, but right in the middle of the room, surrounded by two hundred people. Not for a brief instant, but for a good half-minute, perhaps. Not in any dubious or 'advanced' company, but among well-bred, respectable people. That's what comes of inviting poets to your house!

  He was deeply aware of the element of the grandiose in his gesture. Nothing licentious. The gesture of the couple. The primitive gesture of the lord and master, that of the ape with its mate: the essence of the couple. And he was also aware of the grandeur there was in the fact that she accepted it, that this reserved and modest girl did not flinch under his gesture, did not offer the least resistance, in the heart of that crowd, as though she did not care in the least, as though she were pleased even, that it should be demonstrated in this extraordinary manner, in front of everybody, what she was to the man she had chosen.

  When he drew his hand away, yet another link had been forged between them. Invisibly, his hand was still upon her. That same evening she came to his house at the accustomed hour.

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard

  15 June 1927

  Please read the whole of this letter.

  Dear Costals,

  I am far away, defenceless, sick with loneliness, crushed by such heat that it reminds me of that line of yours:

  'The heat of the day sits, man-like, upon the earth.'

  There was a big thunderstorm last night, and I was glad it woke me up since it gave me the chance to think about you. What was I saying in my last letter? I don't make a rough draft of my letters to you, and I'm afraid they must contradict one another terribly. I think I was telling you I had found a kind of peace ... Yes, I wanted, with genuine good-will, to safeguard our friendship
through this ghastly business, although I know only too well how little a man cares for a woman's friendship when he cares nothing for her love. When you refused me, I thought: 'For him, of course, the woman who refuses herself is desirable, and the woman who offers herself is disdained. How childish!' But it has to be admitted: a disappointment, a refusal, makes what was desirable a thousand times more desirable. I can see it now with you.

  Besides, how could I forget you? The fact that you are now a public figure (the same word for a 'public figure' and a 'public woman'! How appropriate ... ) makes it physically impossible.

  In order to-be free of you completely, I ought never to open a newspaper or a magazine. And by the way, there's something I'd like to know.... Yesterday's Nouvelles littéraires (which I read - horror of horrors - in the deserted church, because it's the only cool place here) brought me your poem:

  'Since you love me, I you ... '

  and I should like to know whether, when you wrote it, you did not have me partly in mind. I very much doubt it, and yet.... But no, of course not, it's addressed to someone else, and I can just see you sneer: 'How naïve the girl is!' Naïve! You have only yourself to blame: you could have made me a woman, but you did not choose to. These amorous confidences you spread around in the weeklies (isn't it nice to be able to indulge one's exhibitionism in the sacred name of Art?) twist the dagger in my wound, filling me with jealousy and desire. It's too obvious: my love for you fills you with horror. But what am I supposed to do about it? I think of you from morning till night. It oozes out of me. I was about to say like an emanation, but the word is too pretentious; like sweat, rather. You passed too close to me, you swept me, lonely little star that I am, into your orbit, and you scorched me with your fires. In all good faith, I still want to believe it is so. Manslaughter, not murder. You have annihilated me; I'm not humiliated, I'm not torn apart, I'm stunned. You have made me unfit for everyday life. I am like one of those antiques about which dealers say to one: 'Yes, it's beautiful. It's worth a lot. I can't buy it from you, though; they're not in demand just now. But it's lovely, hang on to it.' I know I'm worth something, but no one has a use for me. And I shall end up by hating myself, by destroying myself perhaps, as one ends by hating and sometimes destroying those objects which antique dealers find so beautiful but which nothing on earth would make them buy. Yes, unusable. Because of you, I have nothing to offer the man who might now come along expecting and desiring someone intact; I would be giving him an empty husk. It's exactly as if I had had a lover or a husband; my moral virginity no longer exists. How can you not feel that all this gives you a responsibility towards me, that you must make amends? And by making amends I mean giving me the satisfactions of the flesh to which I am entitled.

  Your disinterestedness is a subtle form of perversion. You told me once, parodying the motto of l'Action Française: 'We stand for everything natural.' Oh, no! you are not close to nature; that is perhaps your greatest illusion. It is saintliness you stand nearest to, but a sort of inverted saintliness, a diabolical saintliness. Ceaselessly preoccupied with you as I am, I learn a little more about you each day, in spite of your silence. I learn more about myself too. You once admitted to a certain 'curiosity' about me (and I have come to believe that it is the only feeling - a professional one at that! - you have ever had towards me). You might perhaps have desired me if I had not revealed so much of myself in my letters: it is the great misfortune of my life that, owing to my loneliness, nearly everything between us has happened by way of letters. But are you sure you really know me? Do you know whether, even professionally, a more intimate relationship between us might not reveal much more? Are you sure you don't actually need me?

  You will never find me again unless, some day, you feel that need - but it must be total. I shall be your mistress or your wife, never again your friend. You will come back to me, if you do, knowing that I love you, that I adore you, that I have never wanted and do not want anything but your kisses and your arms around me. Are you satisfied? Is that clear enough? I feel a kind of wild relief in reaching these depths of self-abasement, in renewing the written proof of it, in giving you these weapons you will always be able to use against me.

  Andrée

  This letter remained unanswered.

  'Just her legs alone, and I go mad!' he exclaimed, heedless of syntax. 'Look at that lovely little creature, old thing. Extraordinary how a pretty face can make you sit up. Suddenly, when you were sated to the point of not caring if you died, you want to go on living. Suddenly, if you had to write, you'd have forgotten how to spell. Eighteen, think of it! And arms even prettier than yours. And those vaccination marks! Enough to drive the archangel Gabriel to perdition. Quite frankly, my dear, I could gobble her up. She blows her little nose behind her newspaper (rather conservative in tone) so that I shan't see her do anything so unbecoming. Then with her rosy fingers she stuffs the handkerchief back into her bag. Every time she catches me eyeing her, she moistens her lips with the tip of her tongue. And the way her shoulders shake when she laughs! And the parting in her hair, meandering all over the place! And her ears - I bet they've never known earache! And there's a hint of poverty in the cloth of her dress, in her little wrist-watch, that makes me swoon with desire. What power on earth could prevent me from desiring her? I'd like to know what her hair would taste like if I chewed it. I'd like.... She's worthy of desire, and so I desire her: it's only nature, after all, damn it! Oh, only desire her, you understand: I'm not breaking things up. But when I see those rather heavy veins on her pulpy feet in those sandals, then I tell you, old girl, I begin to feel like a man. Am I being wounding? Yes, I see I am.... I'm so sorry.... But what can I do, old girl? I belong to a sex which is the complete opposite of yours; I belong to the lecherous breed of men. What I enjoy is seeing what women are like when they surrender, and then comparing ... What is happiness, for those of my race? Happiness is the moment when someone surrenders. And incidentally, mystics often change their women, because attachment to one person is what is most contrary to the spiritual life. You too are a tiny star among thousands of others. And at dawn you'll fade away.... Ah! so I have wounded you? I recognize that way you have of smiling when something's gone wrong.... I haven't said anything unpleasant, though, have I?'

  'Oh, no! Nothing at all!'

  'And anyway, what I've been telling you was set to dance music, so to speak. You're not much of a sport, are you?'

  'What's the good of explaining? You refuse to understand what you mean to me.'

  'Yes, I do refuse. Because I ought not to mean too much to you.'

  She turned her face towards him sharply, with a look of reproach. Then he said:

  'I'm glad you love me, but I don't want you to love me too much. I'm glad my desire pleases you, but I don't want it to please you too much. For that would force me to exaggerate, to go beyond what comes to me naturally; in both spheres it would saddle me with a duty to reciprocate exactly; and this I dread, not only because it's duty (and duty doesn't suit me) but because it would drive me to artifice, which for the moment I'm entirely devoid of. What I want is for you to love me and to welcome my desire precisely to the extent that I love and desire you. And believe me, that's a great deal.'

  Written the next day by Costals in the Bois, on the blank page of l'Education des Filles, which he was reading:

  Two ravishing little things, fifteen and sixteen, straight out of Meleager, sitting on a bench with their mother who obviously. ... Well, with their mother who knows a thing or two. (They were each swinging one leg, like two little donkeys swinging their tails in unison. Oh, to spend a night with one of those feet in my hands!) And it seems to me that merely by looking at them as I do, over there in the avenue de Villiers, suddenly, without knowing why, while she is sewing, her heart is pierced and it bleeds. O Nature, spare me from desiring others as long as I love her!

  Mlle Dandillot's predominant feeling now she was in love was the fear that Costals might not love her enough and might abandon h
er. Faced with her first man, she was like a bas-relief changed into a statue - deprived of its support, suddenly alone and threatened on all sides. Before she loved, her nights had been uneventful. Now each night brought its dreams, always unpleasant dreams, though they never developed into nightmares. For instance, she dreamed that, cycling down a slope, she lost control of her bicycle; but that was all: there was no fall, no precipice. Or she dreamed that a cow broke away from the herd and approached until it was almost touching her, but did not attack her. Costals, the cause of all these dreams, never appeared in them: he was the hidden demon behind them. Sometimes, however, she dreamed, not about him, but that she was thinking about him.

  There are women who are invigorated by love, particularly a first love. Mlle Dandillot, on the contrary, ever since she had been in love, had physically declined. And it was fear of losing Costals that had weakened her. Often she felt below par, tired out, needing to sit down; when she had been standing for a while, her thighs ached.

  At meals, the need to find an outlet for her nervous energy made her chew rapidly and vigorously. Having thus finished each course before her mother, she took second helpings to fill the gaps, and found herself eating appreciably more than usual. Then she noticed that she felt stronger after these large meals, and that as soon as she started over-eating, it was again in her thighs that she first felt better.