Pity for Women Read online

  From then on, whenever she was due to meet Costals later in the day, she systematically took second helpings, which brought a smile to the face of the maid serving at table, a smile to which Solange responded sweetly, not knowing quite whether Suzanne had guessed her secret. She also had two cups of coffee, and could easily have managed two breakfasts. She was to be seen chewing away at peach-stones till they were worn down and cracked, as a dog worries a croquet-ball with its slobbery mouth. And although she was normally a non-smoker, she would now sometimes smoke two strong cigarettes one after the other. Yet Mme Dandillot noticed nothing (and as for her husband!...). Thus the servant saw what the mother didn't. It is said that mother-love is blind. Yes, indeed.

  If Mlle Dandillot had not been such a good little girl, she would have known that a few drops of alcohol would have produced the same factitious vitality she obtained by ever so slightly stuffing herself. But she did not know this, or even guess it. And in any case the world in general does not know it either. Or rather it knows it a little, which is tantamount to not at all. A war-leader knows that, in battle, a good army is an army that is slightly the worse for drink. But he does not generalize from the fact as he should. A man who knew that there is no torment of love that a really good meal cannot dispel, at least for a few hours, a man who knew that physical and moral courage, poetic inspiration, devotion, sacrifice, may all depend on a good meal - that the most sublime flights of the soul may be due to the rotting flesh of dead animals - a man who knew all this could never be fooled by anyone. But the man who is on the brink of knowing all this shrinks from the knowledge. And if he does know it, he behaves as if he didn't. For man must live in the clouds.

  On the other hand, Costals' meals before his meetings with Solange were very light. He was naturally so healthy and eupeptic that a little hotting-up would merely have decreased his lucidity, which he prized above everything. At these meals he even refrained from drinking, and thus weighing himself down, and only drank on the days when he did not love her so much. So that, when Solange was getting ready to leave, the first thing he did was to go to the wash-basin for a drink of water. And if Solange had failed to turn up at the rendezvous he had given her, which was always a few steps away from the house in the avenue de Villiers, his disappointment would have been offset by the fact that, after waiting twenty minutes, he could dive into the nearest wine-shop. He had elevated into a philosophy of life what had at first been no more than a delightful characteristic: to love (and to be capable of doing) in everything its opposite. Thus fate, whether it gave him a yes or a no, satisfied him equally. And he was always on velvet, which was very pleasant for him, and even satisfied his mind, for he held that only dullards and mock philosophers conceive of life as a struggle.

  She had said: 'Come and have tea with me on Sunday. Mummy and Daddy are spending the day with some cousins of ours in Fontainebleau, and it's the servants' day off. We shall be alone in the flat.' The idea of making love to her in her own house, in her own little-girl's bedroom, had set him on fire.

  It was an exquisite sensation to find her alone in the empty house and to see her switch off the front door-bell. But soon he noticed a slight sore on her lip, and dark rings under her eyes which intensified the depth of her gaze. She confirmed what he had guessed; and his feelings took on a new note of solemnity, as when the piano pedal is pressed down. These were the times he always loved best in women, when he knew them to be unwell: this weakness in them fanned his heart as much as his senses. However much they protested that they hardly felt it, he fussed and worried, convinced that they were simply being brave and really needed nursing. He had always had a tendency to pamper women, even sports-women, in spite of the impression they sometimes give of having more stamina than men.

  And now they were in the drawing-room, sitting side by side on a sofa. The cloudy summer day seemed more like autumn. At first they had talked about trivialities (but how touching she was when, gazing straight in front of her, she would swiftly turn her head towards him whenever he said something particularly nice or striking). He had asked her to take him into her bedroom, but she, who usually agreed to anything he asked, had this time firmly refused. He had asked her to show him some photographs of herself, but she had not been photographed since she was fourteen - so lacking in vanity all these people were! Eventually he came to a subject which was very much on his mind. The last time she had been to his house, he had embraced her with an ardour so intense and so frequently renewed that at the end of the evening, while he was getting dressed, he had been overcome with a sort of nervous prostration: he had suddenly gone silent and numb, and heavy with weariness. He had to make a real effort to drag out a few commonplace remarks as he escorted her home. So now he explained that men, after having given too generously of themselves, are subject at times to such temporary diminutions of vitality, that this is a normal and recognized phenomenon, and that, assuming she had noticed it, she should excuse it in him. But had she in fact noticed it?

  He had put the question almost casually, and was surprised and a little worried when she said 'Yes'. Did she notice everything, then?

  'What about the other occasions?'

  'Then, too.'

  His surprise increased. On other occasions, either this collapse did not occur, or if it did, it was so slight and fleeting that he thought he had managed to conceal it under a renewed outburst of caresses. 'Goodness! The girl sees everything!'

  'But how astonishing! You really did find me distant, those other times, when I was taking you home?'

  'Yes. I wondered why. Whether I'd disappointed you.... '

  He started explaining afresh, citing the Omne animal post ..., offering to show her medical textbooks. Meanwhile he kept gently tugging at the little hairs above her elbow (a detail worth mentioning, after all). Suddenly he fell silent. It seemed to him as though his eyes were being opened at last.

  'But then, when you said to me: "Afterwards you seem further away from me", is that what you meant?'

  'Yes.'

  He repeated the words to himself: 'Afterwards, you seem further away from me.' For the first time he realized it could be interpreted in two different ways: either that, after their love-making was over, Solange felt colder towards him, or else that she felt that he was colder towards her. An abyss separated the two meanings. How had he managed to see only the first and not the second?

  'Look here, Solange, this is extremely important: did you feel you were further away from me after we'd made love, or did you, on the other hand, find that I was further away from you, colder towards you?'

  'I found you colder towards me. I could sense in you the reactions which you've just described, as a blind man feels a Braille text with his fingertips. But I didn't know there was a purely physical reason for it.'

  'What an incredible misunderstanding! I understood just the opposite. But why on earth didn't you explain? You let me sulk for hours and make a frightful scene, and all the time you say nothing, you just stand there gaping at me like a sick calf.... When all you had to say was: "It's you I find so cold, afterwards.... " '

  She made a slightly impatient, rueful gesture.

  'You know how hopeless I am at explaining. I've told you often enough. The more I saw you going off on the wrong tack, the more paralysed I became. Often when I'm with you, I feel stupefied.... The first time, in the Bois ... if you had told me to jump into the water, I would have done it.'

  'Yes, I know. And may I point out to you that I did not do so. But still, I've never known such an incredible misunderstanding. You could never put anything like it into a novel. Nobody would believe that a twenty-one-year-old Parisienne, in the year 1927, could allow herself to be upbraided for hours by her lover for having said something which merely expressed her fear of seeing him grow cooler towards her, in other words for expressing nothing but affection, and all because she's hopeless at explaining? But you're crazy, my dear girl, absolutely crazy! A real little artichoke, on a railway embankment!'<
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  'Why a railway embankment?'

  'Because that's much nicer, of course!'

  With a feeling of deep tenderness he took her in his arms. Never, no, never had she seemed to him so like a child, so defenceless, so vulnerable, so susceptible to the suffering which everything in life, and especially he, would ultimately inflict on her. He remembered the gesture she had made when, not knowing how to break down his moody silence, she had - for the first time - slipped her arm through his, as a scolded dog puts out a paw to obtain forgiveness. In that instant, a complete upheaval occurred inside him: he saw that she was infinitely weaker than he had imagined, and he realized too that he loved her far more than he had imagined - while at the same time the only complaint he had ever been able to make against her had lost its justification. In that short moment she came really close to him, to what was essential in him. What joy he would have felt in killing anyone who harmed her now! Then he bent down and kissed, not the top of her shoulder, which was bare (for this might have seemed like sensuality), but that part of her shoulder which was covered by her clothes.

  Then the conversation drifted. With the same kind of feeling that had caused him to kiss her blouse and not her skin, he was now holding the edge of her dress. Eventually, prompted by their surroundings, the talk settled on Solange's family.

  'My brother wasn't very clever: the only thing he was capable of was making money ... I don't love Mummy and Daddy in the same way. I love Mummy in an indulgent way: she's so superficial! Daddy has much more finesse. Besides, he's so ill...." (M. Dandillot was suffering from cancer of the prostate and his days were numbered.) 'The point about men like my uncle Louis is to get the maximum of approbation for the minimum of risk.' ('What a splendid definition of the bourgeoisie!' thought Costals.) 'My religion? I'm not a believer, but when I see a paper like' (there followed the name of a weekly with a particularly 'Parisian' tone) 'it makes me almost want to be a Christian again. I tell myself there must be more to things than that.'

  And finally, this scrap of dialogue:

  'None of the young men of my generation seem to have a sense of duty. Whereas a man like you ... '

  'Seriously, do I look like a man with a sense of duty?'

  'No. But you are.'

  'You're a sly one! Yes, of course, as soon as one's in love, one can't help having a sense of duty.'

  At first, Costals had seen Solange as a doll. He had taken her as one takes a woman for a waltz and then brings her back to her chair. Later, when he knew her better, she seemed the product of the kind of upbringing which teaches that it is impolite to express one's own opinion, and that one should always agree with the other person. He had snubbed her when she said, as girls so often do: 'I'm a bit of a freak.' 'You're not in the least a freak. You're exactly like any other girl.' He had snubbed her again when she said she was 'misunderstood': 'That's what all women say when there's nothing in them to understand.' He had regretted not being able to tease her to his heart's content, because she wasn't witty enough to answer back: 'She would only feel offended and hurt.' He had once paid her this compliment - a considerable one, though its limits are obvious: 'I have never heard her say anything either stupid or vulgar.' He had seen her as soft and self-effacing, in fact an ideal heroine for a French novel. And yet, confirming from his own observations in society that she was telling the truth when she said she had no friends, he was inclined to infer that she must be worth something, since solitude and worth are synonymous. This worth did not, however, go further than 'magnificent negative qualities', and he still thought of her what St Teresa says of herself: 'Thou art she who is not.' His predominant feeling towards her was admiration for her beauty.

  But now it was as though he were watching a photographic plate in a bath of developer: gradually, as on the plate, new details of Solange's personality emerged; gradually her complete image was taking shape, and this image reflected great credit on her. Her qualities of perception and judgement, so shrewd and so sensible, were not in themselves so very unusual. But he did not expect to find them in her. He discovered how little he knew about her, and in particular how much better she was than he. Even her voice was a new discovery. Until then, he had known three voices of hers. Her society voice, rather affected, which she adopted not as a pose but on the contrary because she was shy. The voice she used when she talked to him, about which there was little to be said. Her 'night voice', full of pathos, a voice from another world, with its childish words springing from the depths of her past like birds from the bottom of a well. And now there was this new voice, calm, utterly simple and serious, with its soothing quality, its indefinable intonations which made him think: 'Exactly the way girls of the aristocracy speak.' He said to her:

  'I'm talking to you as if I'd known you for years, and I'm glad. I'm ashamed of the coarse way I treated you at first. As though you were a tart. Forgive me....'

  'It doesn't matter. I would have overlooked everything, since I love you. As a matter of fact I did overlook everything.

  'Overlook what, for God's sake?' he wondered. 'Bah! the fact of having given herself, no doubt.' It was clear that she had judged him - perhaps with the same 'indulgence' with which she judged her mother. At other times he would have found this rather irritating. Now it only raised her in his estimation.

  'You're in a lower key today. What's happened?'

  'Only that I feel more at ease with you now our misunderstanding has been cleared up. Before I knew you, I was afraid of the future. Then, when I was with you, I wasn't afraid any more. And then that misunderstanding occurred and, ever since, I've felt like a bunch of flowers tied too tight. Now you've loosened the string and the flowers can breathe again.'

  'Oh! we're in full poetic flight, I see ... I'm sorry! Even when I'm very serious, moved in fact, I can't help joking. Besides, I love teasing you.'

  'I know. I'm beginning to know you.'

  'You said something a moment ago.... What was it that you "overlooked" out of affection for me?'

  'Don't you know?'

  'I can guess. It's true: you, such a good girl, to give yourself to me like that, like a falling leaf ... When I think of the moving speech I had prepared to make you give in! And lo and behold! Like a falling leaf.... It must have been written in the stars. You have every virtue, including the principal one of having given yourself without any nonsense. For a woman who isn't easy isn't a real woman as far as I'm concerned. And I ask you, what would all those virtues have been to me if you hadn't given yourself with such dazzling promptitude?'

  'When I gave myself to you, I had already given you everything.'

  'Cosi fan tutte.'

  'To tell you the truth, it wasn't the act itself I "overlooked". But... all the secrecy ... that hotel, the first time ... '

  'Like a falling leaf,' he said again. 'Like a little artichoke one picks.... And yet there are women who put up a show of resistance even when they've made up their minds to surrender. The last stand ... '

  'I loved you too much to resist you. That at least is not a cosi fan tutte.'

  'It's very extraordinary indeed,' he said gravely.

  Languidly, with the sickness of the lunar cycle upon her, she was half reclining in the crook of her lover's arm, like a small strip of moss in the damp hollow of a rock. When Costals had entered, two cats had fled: not all cats are heroes. Now they kept coming back, walking across the room, going out again, coming and going as silently as ghosts. At moments their presence could be guessed by the sound of a creaking floorboard, now here, now there.

  'You really ought to be taken in hand; you'd be well worth moulding,' he said, after a silence. 'That's quite clear to me now.'

  'That's always the way. The man shapes the woman as he wants her to be, and she acquiesces.'

  'Except that the man doesn't know what he wants. Is there anything more foolish than the male? And besides, he may not be interested. I love you, I want your happiness, and yet I don't feel like moulding you. Do you know why?'


  'Yes.'

  'What do you mean, "yes"? I bet you haven't the slightest idea.'

  'You're not interested in moulding me because you have enough to do moulding your books.'

  'Really, you are fantastic! You've hit the nail on the head. I have better things to do than to create individuals. The reason why Rousseau put his kids in an orphanage was that he wanted to write Emile. All the same, it's rather horrible. You've backed the wrong horse, old girl.'

  'Oh! no, I haven't.' (She put her hand on his.)

  'Yes, you say that now! We'll talk about it again in two years' time.

  'But shouldn't love go on increasing all the time? That's the only way I can imagine it.'

  'That sort of love isn't my line at all. Mine is more like a waterchute.'

  He smiled as he said this, so she smiled, too. And they ended up in one another's arms.

  'She lacks inspiration,' he thought to himself. 'Yes, I've put my finger on it. But she's a fine girl all the same.' How openly she had always behaved towards him! Trying to please him (changing her way of dressing, for instance, in accordance with chance remarks he made) but without a trace of coquetry; giving herself without affectation or artifice or pretended flight; so discreet (never asking him anything about his life or telephoning him first, or, on the telephone, saying more than was strictly necessary); not obtrusive or 'interfering' in the least, when there are so many women one eventually has to push away with practically the same gesture one made to pull them towards one; completely devoid of 'pose'; so far removed from the easy tricks used by others to captivate him, in an age when it is the men who are pursued by the girls; and even going to the unbelievable lengths of never - not once - making the slightest allusion to his literary work, whereas all the women who tried to worm their way into his life first tried to unlock the door with the key of admiration. He was grateful to her, too, for knowing nothing about the mediocre literature of the day and, knowing nothing, keeping quiet about it rather than trotting out the usual clichés, grateful to her for being so innocent of all snobbery, of all unhealthy - or even healthy - curiosity, of any wish to play a part or push herself forward, of any admiration for false values or false riches, for being so different, in a word - and apparently to her detriment, although she was infinitely superior to them - from all those bogus, snobbish, loud-mouthed, empty-headed bitches who were the flashy partners of so many prominent men in Parisian society. He was grateful to her for all this, and his spirit soared in an uprush of simplicity and trust.