The Lepers Read online

  And how was he to break it to him, how was he to foist this 'mother' on him? To Solange, Costals would say bluntly: 'I warn you, I have a son.' If she didn't like it, she had only to give up the marriage. But to him? Write to him and say: 'I'm getting married. She's this, that or the other. You'll be delighted, etc.'? Monstrous and impossible. So he would have to go and see him. With Solange, perhaps. How painful the interview would be! The idea that finally kept running through his mind was this: that he should never have committed himself until after having consulted his son.

  Costals had leapt the hurdle of decision. He no longer wavered, no longer suffered from it, scarcely thought about it. But he had not yet taken this other hurdle: the Brunet-Solange problem. And faced with it he wavered and suffered. Since Solange was near at hand, he would begin with her. Tomorrow, under the pretext of showing her his family, he would run through his photograph album with her. When he came to the photograph of his son, he would first pass him off as a young cousin. According to her reaction, he would either speak or not.

  Every other day, the fiancés spent the afternoon and evening together. Costals gazed at this stranger, at this face which, in Genoa, he had seen as though diluted by love, this face of a sleeper awakened, now cold, hard and dry (the girl's handwriting, too, had become more angular). He had forgotten Mme Dandillot's words: 'She has no will-power, you'll be able to do what you like with her', and remembered only that slightly different version: 'She has a will of iron, that child. She's said to herself: "He's the man I want".' He concluded that he had been had. Thyroid glands, injected into a sheep, will make it bite the bars of its cage. Hippogriffical glands, injected into a vigorous man, will make him as weak as a lamb. By dint of harassing a man, stuffing him with worries, responsibilities, obligations, scruples, decisions to be taken, self-questionings, one can stupefy and wear him down to such an extent that he no longer offers any resistance to another's will, even when he knows it to be inimical. Women know this, and that is why to introduce a woman into anything is to introduce strife and confusion: like warships, they proceed behind their own smoke-screens. In the past Costals had been 'bewitched' by the pall of boredom that emanated from Solange. Now he felt equally bewitched by her will, more potent than his own. He felt a sense of inferiority, as with a dangerous chance companion, a tough customer who seems more mobile, more vigorous, more active and aggressive than oneself. And the fact of being armed, when he is not, only adds to one's shame the shame one feels at cheating. Costals no longer dared to say to Solange what he had to say to her, particularly on the subject of his son; day after day went by without his saying a word about Brunet. He was continuously obliged to make an effort in her presence. When she looked him straight in the eyes he no longer thought: 'What magnificent honesty!' but 'She's challenging me. She wants to get the whip hand.' It seemed to him that the way he looked at her was softer, that his very features were softer, and that she must be able to read in them how dominated he felt - at times almost annihilated, for she made him sleepy. In certain parts of Moslem Algeria - and in the South of France, too, apparently - custom demands that in the course of a ceremony the fiancé should step lightly on the tips of his fiancée's toes, to indicate that he will keep the upper hand in the household. 'The opposite happens too,' he thought to himself.

  Since the decline in her health, Solange had been more preoccupied than before with her creature comforts. And she ate more, thinking to build herself up, the more so as she had been forbidden wine and coffee because of her boils. Perhaps, too, soured by a sense of disappointment, although victorious and moreover full of confidence (whereas her mother was still doubtful, she no longer feared a new volte-face by Costals), she was more or less unconsciously taking her revenge by lolling about, by being a dead weight, by forcing him to overspend. Costals became exasperated by the fact that she could not get through an afternoon without wanting to go into a tea-room. Whatever they might be doing, however important, everything had to be dropped there and then while they went and had tea, like cats that stop dead in the middle of an apparently determined gallop in order to lick their behinds. Having tea would be stretched out over an hour: it was probably just a way of killing time. No sooner was tea over (so it seemed) than they had to start looking for a restaurant for dinner. Out of politeness, as in front of the scruffy little cinema in the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, Costals pretended to find such and such a restaurant not 'good enough'. And Solange would never say, any more than she had in the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle: 'What does it matter! Let's go anywhere.' He could tell that she preferred luxury restaurants, or so-called luxury restaurants; and in his view, with few exceptions, only people of doubtful quality can like luxury. 'The waiter pisses in the soup, the bellhop spits in the oysters, not to mention the scullion, who cleans his fingers with the lemon; the service is inefficient and interminable; the prices are scandalous; but there is plenty of fake gilt and fake marble, a basket for the wine, pretentious music, menus on which the names of dishes are embellished by the unemployed definite articles laid off by literary gentlemen who have no more use for them in the titles of their works (no! no! there is nothing more grotesque than a smart restaurant!), and given all this, she purrs, she is in her element. She would happily spend the whole afternoon there. . . . But at least the music allows us to be silent. Orchestras in restaurants must have been invented for the benefit of couples.'

  And how she ate! Choosing, too, as though deliberately, nearly always the most expensive dishes. 'She orders expensive drinks. One can tell she comes of a good family, that girl,' Costals had once heard a man naively remark of a woman at the table next to his in a café. Costals, on the contrary, when he saw Solange peel her banana with a knife and fork so that her precious fingers should not touch the coarse substance, thought: 'Bogus refinements by which vulgar people try to make believe they are arch-dukes, when in fact they only proclaim the gutter.' She, so slender and light, whose weight 'would scarcely hold down the flap-seat in a cinema' (so she said), the amount she could swallow! Mockingly, to see how far she would go, he tempted her: 'You'll have another Peach Melba, won't you? Don't you fancy the rum pancake?' Then he would see a look of hesitation on her face, a struggle between her greed and her awareness that he was teasing her. She would push out her lips in a pout that signified 'no', while her eyes said 'yes' and always ended up with: 'All right... just to please you.' At these moments, she filled him with such disgust. As she did when she would say apologetically: 'I have to eat a lot to feel completely myself.' That's it, he thought, she has no reserves.... In the end he would fold his arms and stare straight in front of him in silence, while she swallowed and swallowed, his tongue itching to reply to her interrogatory look: 'I'm waiting for you to eat the rind of your cheese.' He thought despairingly that all the money he would ever draw from his intelligence, his skill and his hard work would flow down into the intestines of a woman. 'Can one be both greedy and worthy of respect? I almost think I would have preferred the money to be wasted on clothes and cosmetics.' Thus did the hours go by, annihilating the inestimable boon of time. And Costals parodied the words of Alexander swept away on the waters of Hydaspes: 'O Society, the things one must do to merit thy praise!'

  'It is often said against Donjuanism: "Ah! one sole woman, whose depths one plumbs ever more deeply, from whom one draws ever more marvellous harmonies!" And this is indeed tempting, provided one is given the recipe for finding a woman in whom there are depths to plumb, and from whom these stupendous harmonies can be drawn. Because one sole woman who is a void.... I'd much prefer a thousand and three voids. Look at this one, clinging on to me, although she loves neither me, nor my work, nor making love. What has she done to adapt herself to me? How can one love a person if one doesn't modify one's own life, add to or subtract something from it because of that person? She sullies me by condemning me to so-called gourmet's food, which I don't want and which I disapprove of, by dragging me to so-called luxury establishments, which I dislike and disapprove o
f, in fact thoroughly abominate. This tartishness that potentially exists in almost every woman, even the best (like her humming in the taxi)! Eating, always eating. Sprawled in armchairs for hours on end. She wants to turn me into a typical French capon, a pot-bellied bourgeois with his aperitif, his brandy, his cigar, his motor-car, his "good living". Frigid herself, she wants to emasculate me, out of jealousy. Lacking vitality, she wants to devitalize me. Then there are the shops, the buying of useless objects, the cinema, the theatre, anything as long as it's idiotic, for the only object is to stupefy me here as it is to emasculate me there. All this with endless precautions to avoid being seen, because one's in deep mourning, because one's joyously trampling on the grave of dear sweet papa; civilization run by women: everyone watching everyone else, guided by others, inspired by fear of what others may think. And always ingurgitating. Now she's really getting down to the job of sucking the life-blood out of her prey. Women always claim to give, when they do nothing but engulf. Think of their position in the sexual act (such a ridiculous posture, too: froglike). She sees me as a being specially created for her (every woman's dream!), destined to make her happy, to bring her, together with a "position" and material security, something to keep her occupied and distracted; charged by Providence to prevent her from being bored. How much of my strength, my substance, my time, my money, has this once so simple, or fake-simple, girl already forcibly sucked out of me! The engulfment of valleys.... The woman-valley.... A valley in her embraces, a valley in her organs, a valley in her very essence, cut off from the world, seeing no further than the end of her nose, surrounded, hemmed in by walls which sometimes may be the walls of her love, and sometimes not even that. And the enervating climate of valleys....

  'Not knowing what to say to each other. Not knowing where to go. Dragging from place to place, desperately trying to dredge something up out of one's brain and one's heart. And always by taxi, because of course no woman can go anywhere except by taxi. (All that putting on of airs: the simplest of them is the Queen of Sheba for life. They can't understand how much good they would do a man by allowing him to treat them casually - and how much they would gain thereby.) And always with the same one: "Always the same one! Always the same one!" like the baby pelican's "Tripe! always tripe!" And always that snap of the clasp of her hand-bag when she closes it, which irritates me in the same way as did the rustle of that Spanish amiga's fan when she closed it at least thirty times a minute (for which, in the end, I had to get rid of her). And each of these wasted, deadening, soul-destroying days costing you several hundred francs, money with which so many persons ... so many things....'

  It was at the end of one such day, eaten up by chatter, vacuousness, sterility, by the futile and exhausting task of trying to work up some enthusiasm for insipid remarks which he would have condemned as such had they issued from other lips than those of a 'beloved' woman, of trying to make someone intelligent and lively when she was neither, a day when all the meaningless words he had uttered had left a kind of dough in his mouth, that Costals, in one of his notebooks, came across the following reflection by his beloved Abbé de Saint-Cyran: Any converse he may have with a man without due necessity, or without appreciable purpose, is ample cause to prevent a priest from sacrificing the next day. Ah! fellows like that were capable of reconciling a man with Christianity. However little store one set by Christianity, the cloister was after all a bit better than a fiancée.

  As though to make up for all this, he began to treat her with less ceremony. Sometimes, when they left each other, he would proffer her his left hand, as though he were withdrawing at the same time as giving himself. And he no longer looked at her, in fact he avoided looking at her: there are women with whom one lives, with whom one sleeps, and yet whom one never looks at, about whom one knows no more than a passenger who has spent the whole crossing in his cabin knows of the sea.

  She had kept her make-up and her 'young woman' hair style, although he had expressed his irritation with it, and had even said one day: 'Go and wash your face before I kiss you' - because she liked herself so, and because she thought it was high time she had her own way a little. He no longer desired her physically, and he knew that she did not desire him, nor ever had. Marriages, for a time, are sustained by desire; a day of scenes and silences is balanced by twenty minutes in the dark. But if there is not even that? Nevertheless, on no account would he have had her believe that her boils and her drawn face were the cause of his coldness. Besides, he was a little ashamed of loving her less because she was less pretty; he had been moved by the gesture she had made once when he was looking at her closely: she had put her hand over his eyes to prevent him from seeing the decline of her face from so near. So he took her, he caressed her, with his nerves severed, as it were, like those of the 'énervés' of Jumièges. [There is a tomb in the Abbey of Jumièges, Normandy, which is said to be that of two sons of Clovis II, King of the Franks, who were punished for having rebelled against their mother Bathilde by being hamstrung (Translator's note).] To beslobber each other's mouths, when one isn't particularly keen to do so, is no joke. (And outrageous thoughts came into his head, such as this, when she threw back her head and opened her mouth during the act: 'Does she want me to pull one of her teeth out?') How exhausting it was to simulate desire! To what extent would his body lend itself to the farce? One day, like a stubborn animal, it would simply refuse. The camel remains on top of the she-camel for a quarter of an hour thinking of something else. The cameleer belabours it with his cudgel. The camel gives a thrust or two, grunting the while, then relapses into contemplation. Another whack. Another burst of passion. And more contemplation. After the fashion of this absent-minded beast, Costals…Drudgery for them both, enough to disgust you with the flesh for ever - or else plunge you into every sort of frantic debauchery. But Charity demanded it, Politeness demanded it, Duty demanded it. One can hear the derisive laughter of the Daemon of the Good as he presides over these sublime and sinister gymnastics.

  During the hours when he was not with her, he flung himself into his work as others fling themselves into alcohol or drugs. He was hungry for his work; it was his life-line. He gathered up and filtered into it everything he was living through with Solange: art is a quintessence of life, it purges it of its waste products and offers only the undiluted blood. Had he not worked in the morning, he might not have been able to endure Solange in the afternoon and evening without falling really ill himself. His lucidity, his creative power, were what they had always been. As soon as his fiancée ceased to exist for him (otherwise than in his art), he became a man again.

  He constantly put off showing Solange the photograph album or mentioning his son. He put off writing to Brunet. The preposterous idea he had toyed with for a moment - flying to England with all Solange's letters and photographs and the diary entries he had written about her, and spreading them all out for his son to see, talking to him about Solange for two hours, and then asking this youngster of fourteen and a half, whose character was that of a thirteen-year-old: 'Do you want me to marry her? If you don't, there's still time' - this idea had evaporated. In becoming engaged, he had reached the limits of his will. Now he had given up the struggle.

  The two of them were sinking, as though drowned, their faces already those of another world, into ever darker depths, a few feet from each other, without touching.

  One day, however, a shaft of light pierced momentarily through the gloom. Some cad (a man from the sixteenth arrondissement, as might have been expected) asked Costals with a playful wink: 'Who's that ravishing girl I saw you with in the avenue du Bois?' Whereupon Costals realized that people would find his wife ravishing, and preened himself on it, and was ashamed of doing so. Everyone speaks against the world, and everyone has it in his heart.

  7

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

  22 January 1928

  All alone! Yes, yes, come quickly. I'll
open the door. Oh! how cold you are! You have a nice wintry, frosty smell. I must warm you up. Get rid of your overcoat, your hat, your scarf, and let me get a good look at you, you whom I've merely imagined for so long. How I love it when you stretch out all five fingers at once in your big fur-lined gloves! Such a man's gesture.... But look, a ray of sunlight on the snow! Let's go out. Go and wait for me for a few minutes by the fountain, while I change. Which dress shall I put on?

  My little town, so calm and peaceful. I'm glad you've seen it at last. And it's so sweet of you not to be afraid of people seeing us together. Let's go for a long, long walk, until I beg for mercy. Me, cold? You keep me nice and warm. Me, annoyed because you ogled old Bernardeau's daughter? Jealousy's a shop-girl's emotion. Don't talk; you'd only talk about yourself, and what more could I learn? I know you like the back of my hand. I don't feel the need to talk to you either. I'm going to keep you with me for a while, just breathing you in and feeling myself throbbing with life close beside you. Let's walk in silence. You are the only man who never bores me. How could I ever get bored with this soul-to-soul between us?

  You make me happy, very happy, and so you should: I've deserved your kindness. And then, this certainty that at last you have understood. You realize at last that you love me.

  Life is wonderful.

  They're celebrating the return of one of my cousins from his regiment at Didier-le-Petit, and I have to be there with my uncle on Wednesday and Thursday. For two whole days, no more Sainte-Beuve, no more wireless, and cousins by the score. The restfulness of being with simple people, oh yes, I'll say! Before I loved you, all this drudgery was somehow bearable, but now it seems beyond my strength. On Friday I shall be back, and we'll go for another walk together.

  Much love,