The Lepers Read online

  A.

  This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

  8

  Costals was due to have lunch at the Dandillots'. In the ten days since he had become engaged, he had met Mme Dandillot only twice, both times at her solicitor's: they had only talked 'business'. This morning, he was confronted with a tiny problem which, greeted at first in a light-hearted vein, had gradually taken a serious turn: what to call his mother-in-law when he had to address her?'Call this stupid and rather vulgar stranger, this Pulcinella, this police horse, "mother"? Not that I subscribe to the convention that regards the word mother as sacred. There are women of every kidney; and as the majority of women are mothers, there must be mothers of every kidney. But I personally had a very nice mother. To give this stranger the name I gave her is something I will not and cannot do - it wouldn't come out. "Dear Madame" is insulting. "My dear" - we haven't reached that stage yet. The only alternative is not to call her anything at all. Very convenient! ..." The thought of this luncheon was torture to him. Incapable this time of taking refuge in creative stupefaction (work), he ended up by stretching himself out on his bed - the bed in which, a few hours earlier, while asleep, he had dreamed of these two women: it is not the ghosts of the dead that haunt us, it is the ghosts of the living. 'It's also essential to fix a date for the wedding. It's also essential and urgent to come to some decision about Brunet. And all this for what, FOR WHAT? Because there's no sense in this marriage.'

  At first, the idea of the fiancé prostrate on his bed also seemed rather a joke. His laughter subsided when he felt himself in the grip of a real physical malaise (occasioned, no doubt, by his mental distress but also perhaps by the cigarettes he had been nervously chain-smoking for three hours - Caporal cigarettes, which taste as if one were smoking arse-hairs). He got up to fetch some Eau de Cologne, poor fellow, and saw himself in the mirror. In ten days his face had aged, and had taken on a permanent expression of melancholy. 'I shall grow thin while she grows fat: communicating vessels.' He thought he looked ugly. 'No, she can't love me. It's all a ridiculous farce.' His head really began to spin; his face was as pale as death; he lay down on the bed again. 'I shall have to get drunk before going to the registry office with her. The instinct of self-preservation might easily arise in extremis.'

  'If I could only say to myself, as I've sometimes done: "It's only a parenthesis. A bore with whom one finds oneself in a railway compartment, and one thinks: ten hours to get through." But no, she'll refuse to divorce me. One can see it in her face - in everything she's transformed herself into today, her new hair-style, her new handwriting. Perhaps I shall end up by becoming attached to her, because of what I've given her. I've nurtured the little feeling I had for her, which God knows what would have become of (nothing at all) if I had left it to itself, if I hadn't fed it with charity, as one metal is fed with another at the mint to make the coins more durable. The disease is in me - this charity - and that is what's getting me down.'

  By noon he had neither washed nor shaved nor dressed. He got up once more, and once more was quickly obliged to lie down. Dramatic! To have to spend one's life with people the anticipation of whose mere presence for the space of a luncheon was enough to nail him to his bed with a face like a corpse - and when there was still time to say no - yes, that was no joke, it was really dramatic.

  He telephoned to say he felt unwell and would probably be late. (Mme Dandillot thought he would fail to turn up. She herself, often enough, had feigned a stomach-ache at mealtimes when she was in a fit of sulks with her husband.)

  A splash of cold water on the temples, a sniff of Eau de Cologne.... At half past twelve he managed to get to the bathroom, and at half past one he was ringing the bell at the avenue de Villiers.

  'From now on, consider this house your own,' said Mme Dandillot as he entered the drawing-room. These are words to which it is pretty well impossible to reply when one's heart is not in it.

  On a table there were photographs of Solange and Costals, jointly framed. The day after his yes, Mme Dandillot had asked the fiance for a photograph of himself 'which hadn't appeared in the papers'. Faced with these likenesses, so full of idealistic implications, Costals was reminded of the 'He' and 'She' whose effigies were discovered in mosaic among the ruins of Pompeii: She, a goose. He, a nincompoop - so ineffably the Eternal Couple, even then. Representing, more or less, for the Couple, what Goya's Family of Charles IV represents for the Family.

  Oh! as far as the grub was concerned they had certainly put themselves out. It was the betrothal feast to end them all. Caviare, duck, truffles, and extremely enticing bottles. Materially perfect, morally lamentable, like American films. The police horse caracoling as gaily as one could wish. Solange with a look of severity and constraint as on the day he had visited the Dandillots for the first time, when they were still pretending to be semi-strangers: 'Good morning, Mademoiselle,' 'Good morning, Monseiur.' And as for Costals: 'If only a trapdoor would open and swallow me up.' However, he soon perceived that the watchword was not to broach that subject, and was duly relieved.

  After lunch, there was a period of embarrassed silence. To have nothing to say to one another, but never to show it, is the whole art of the drawing room. The wireless and the gramophone were invented for just such circumstances: it is then that the hostess puts on a Mozart record, casts a withering eye at anyone who dares to venture a word, and a dozen puppets hold their breath in the interests of musical conformity; for to feel anything for Mozart is of course inconceivable in a man of 1928, but the humbugs of society get together on Mozart as intellectual humbugs do on Racine. But there were none of these machines in the Dandillot house. So Solange, to keep herself in countenance, stroked the grey cat (and a rasping purr reverberated through the flat), gazing at it as one gazes at a flame, though this did not prevent her from darting in Costals' direction, from time to time, one of those furtive glances characteristic of little girls and bull calves. 'Do leave that cat alone!' Mme Dandillot burst out, and one might have imagined oneself back in the days when Mme Dandillot, who detested her husband, nevertheless became hysterical whenever he stroked one of the cats too fondly. At last Mme Dandillot had a brainwave: still at a loss for something to say, she picked up one of Costals' books and began to read aloud a passage she 'adored'. 'Is it going to go on for ever?' he wondered, his eyelids drooping with boredom: there are writers who find something indecent in their prose being read aloud. Mme Dandillot closed the book with cries of 'Admirable! Prodigious!' She made such a din one could have sworn she was a real society lady.

  Now will you allow me to ask you what you meant by this sentence, which I don't quite understand?'

  She re-read a sentence. Hearing it out of context ten years after having written it, Costals could not immediately recollect what he had meant to say, and admitted it frankly, as though he were talking to intelligent people. Whereupon the two women shrieked with laughter. And he realized that neither of them had for a single moment assimilated the air he breathed and lived by. He remembered a remark Solange had made to her mother and which the latter had repeated to him without any suggestion of malice: 'I would love him just as much if he were a wholesale grocer. And besides, he'd have fewer women clinging to him.... '

  Mme Dandillot had to go out. They remained alone. If the question 'When do we meet again?' is destructive, 'What shall we do?' is its brother. Solange volunteered that she would gladly go to his flat to look through an album of Egyptian sculpture he had told her about. 'Of course she doesn't give a damn for Egyptian sculpture. But she has to kill time somehow. And pretend to be interested in what interests me.'

  She went into her room to change. She continued to forbid him entry to it because she was ashamed of her little girl's things, which she thought ridiculous but could not bring herself to throw away. Ashamed, too, of the perpetual mess the room was in. Costals had constructed a theory on the subject: 'No doubt she considers that room more sacred than herself. Just as a man may not respect
himself, but respects an object of worship. Transferring on to an external object what should be dedicated to oneself alone. It has happened to me, having worked out a routine for myself, to become such a slave to it as to detest anything unexpected, however agreeable.'

  As they leafed through the album at the avenue Henri-Martin, Costals suddenly felt tempted to pass from this album to another. The temptation grew, like the noise of a shell approaching. Then the shell burst, the decision was made: he went to fetch his photograph album.

  As she looked at the pictures of his parents, of his grandparents, of his childhood, she spoke nicely about them, with sweetness and tact. As they went on turning the leaves, Costals felt a strange calm take possession of him, a most mysterious calm. It was the sort of calm that grips a runner in the hundred metres, during which he stops breathing. He turned a page, and two photos of his son appeared.

  'It's a little cousin of mine. They say he looks like me at that age. Don't you agree?'

  'Oh, no! You must have looked nicer than that.'

  'Don't you like him?'

  'Frankly, no. He has a rather bumptious look that I don't care for.'

  Costals turned the page.

  Peace. It was no longer a calm, it was unutterable peace. Sudden peace, like the outer harbour for the liner once it has crossed the bar out of a heavy sea. He remembered also the remark she had made in Genoa: 'It's lucky you haven't a son.' Anyone observing him then would have seen his face, tightly drawn ever since waking, relax and light up, like the face of a martyr in the midst of the flames, at the moment when, expiring, he imagines he has seen his God. For the first time since his return from Genoa, he took Solange in his arms with genuine feeling.

  9

  Next day, at about five, Costals awaited Solange. He had sent her an express letter that morning: 'Come to my flat at five. And be brave, my sweet. I have some extremely unpleasant news for you.' Afterwards he had switched off the telephone.

  Each time he recalled her face, it was as if it were reappearing above the surface of the water with an imploring look: 'Save me!', and each time he thrust her back under with an oar. 'Yes, it's true, I'm murdering her' (he caught sight of himself in the mirror) 'and I look it. What I'm doing is abominable. Nevertheless I'm right, a hundred, a thousand times right to do it. I'm right to prefer myself to her, since I don't love her.'

  She rang. He went to the door. He was moved, and yet he had great difficulty in repressing a desire to smile - not a smile of affection but the smile of someone who is amused - so much so that he paused behind the door to compose his features.

  He opened the door. She was without make-up or powder. He knew she had understood. There was that tiny moment of immobility that occurs immediately after one has been wounded and the blood has not yet begun to seep out.

  In absolute silence - no greetings - he led her to his bedroom. The lights were off, he did not switch them on. She-who- stares-at-the-sun collapsed into an armchair; her hand-bag slid down her legs and fell on the floor. He knelt beside her and kissed her frozen hands, her deep-blue veins, flowing like a river with several tributaries under the bridge of her wrist-watch. The cat whose kittens have just been taken away from her, and whose neck one scratches to make her purr. He noticed that some of yesterday's dust still clung to her black suede shoes: 'Slovenly - and an ill-kept house.' He kissed her face a little, too. She did not return these kisses, and he wondered whether it was out of ill-humour or because she was prostrate with grief. Her face was white in the darkness, like a glacier at night; the blow she had just received gave her a vague, cloudy, sunken look. Several times, in a touching, silent gesture of despair, she raised her fore-arm and let it fall again on the arm of her chair (when a man makes this gesture of discouragement, he does it with his fist clenched). He had always had the knack of retrieving painful situations, of making an angry woman smile in spite of herself; but faced with this gesture of despair he was left speechless. Presently he began to feel that her eyelids were moist under his lips, and he spoke for the first time: 'If you want to cry, you mustn't stop yourself.' Whereupon, springing up suddenly, she threw herself on the bed, face down, in that little girl's posture she loved to adopt, and sobbed.... Suddenly she cried: 'No, no! I don't want to lose you.'

  Now it was she who was kissing him, running her hands over the contours of his face, stroking his hair, thrusting her hands between his jacket and his shirt, and always, when he said, 'My little darling . ..' she answered with one word only: 'Yes.... ' Just as a cat which you talk to answers each of your sentences with a single brief little miaow. In a voice that was barely perceptible she murmured: 'My heart's overflowing with tears....' All her recent hardness had melted; she was full of gentleness, like a dying dog that wags its tail in a final farewell. She knew it was all over now. And she loved him as she had not loved him since his return. She loved him because it enabled her to plumb the depths of her despair, she loved him because he was no longer a bewildered chicken, because he was resisting her once more, because he had become her master again. When he had stopped enumerating - as in a dream - his never-ending reasons 'against', she said:

  'Do you remember what Paul says in The Holidays: "Whatever you may do against me, I shall never do anything against you"? Well, that's what I say to you. Try as I may, I can't bring myself to blame you. I can't do anything against my love for you. You would have had to be very nasty to me, and you haven't been.... '

  'I don't blame you either,' he said. He knew what he meant, but Solange did not, and drew herself up: 'That would be the last straw!'

  'After all, when you think of the power you gave me, I could have used it more harmfully than I have. I've given you seed for the dreams of your old age: you'll see how splendid they will be when you see them flower. I've taught you to live, I've provided you with a destiny. Thanks to me, you've discovered yourself, you've plumbed the depths of your nature. So many women never go more than half-way.'

  'Being where I am now is staying half-way. And to think that it might have worked, that we didn't try, that we suffered in vain!'

  'You haven't suffered in vain. A man may suffer in vain, not a woman. I have tormented you: what more do you want? Women need suffering. Take their suffering away from them and you kill them, more or less. There are women who go mad because they haven't suffered enough, normally suffered. If, some day, women come to have their babies painlessly, they won't love them. Which is why almost all women are unhappy, and it's right that it should be so. And anyhow, what does your despair amount to? Think of the eight million war dead. Think that it might be your mother dying, instead of a man you didn't know eight months ago disappearing from your life.'

  'So I haven't been hurt enough yet. Do you want to hurt me more by speaking about the death of my mother?'

  But her actions belied her reproaches: she went on kissing and stroking him; and there was that same way of turning her face towards him every so often with a look of tenderness still, but which he did not quite understand.

  'When I was a little girl, it shocked me that St Martin should only have given half his cloak to the beggar. What could one do with half a cloak? You've never given me more than half your cloak. And you shouldn't do that. You should give the whole of it or not give anything at all.'

  'I gave what I could,' said Costals. He was not being fair to himself. He had given what he could, but only to the extent that she seemed to him to deserve it.

  'With you I should have had a personality that otherwise I shan't have. Without you I'm nothing much, I know.... But all the same, I'm worth something,' she added.

  'What would you like me to do for you? Whatever you like, I'll do it. Would you like me to relieve you of my presence by leaving France once more? Would you like us to go on seeing each other? Look, here's what I suggest: that we go on with everything that was decided as to our future, with the exception of the registry office. In other words, I fix up a room for you in my flat, and you come and live there several days a week. I
n fact, marriage without a zero hour.'

  'Become your mistress! Oh, of course, that would suit you. But it would ruin my life. I find it hard to believe you're seriously suggesting it.'

  But... haven't you been my mistress for the past eight months?'

  "I've never lived with you, at least in Paris. In Genoa no one knew. Here! ... And besides, at that time we could have said we were engaged, which we can't any longer. I'm sure there are lots of women who would accept your proposal gladly. I suppose I must come from a different background. And I can't see myself repaying my mother's affection and understanding by agreeing to a way of life which would make us both outcasts, would close all doors to us, those of the family as well as those of society.' ('What society?' Costals wondered, contemptuous once more.) 'Furthermore, uncle Mercadier would disinherit Mummy on the spot if he heard I was living with you: the situation of the gentleman would make no difference. It's odd that you don't think of all that. What sort of women can you have known, you poor dear?'

  Ready to flout conventions when she thought it necessary in order to get herself married, Mlle Dandillot was very much the bourgeoise when it was merely a question of flouting them for love.

  Costals was rather pleased to detect in her a hint of self-interest.

  'This sort of talk seems to me a bit new on your lips,' he said gently. 'But one cannot help approving. In that case, there's nothing left for you but to get married. Would you like "the gentleman" to try and find you a husband?'

  'Are you mad! It will be years and years before I get married now. To ask me to marry would be like asking me to turn my head back to front - an appalling outrage.... Marriage with you was the only marriage which didn't seem like death to me. For the tragedy is not so much that you don't love me as that I can't love anyone else. How many women have never met an intelligent man? Where shall I ever find again such maturity combined with such freshness? Where shall I ever again find someone who understands me?'