Pity for Women Read online

  LADIES!

  NEVER OFFER GENTLEMEN MORE THAN THEY ASK FOR

  Another:

  THIS GENTLEMAN DOES NOT MARRY

  And another:

  THIS GENTLEMAN NEVER RETURNS LETTERS

  It was not in awfully good taste, but youth will have its fling. And the highest moral altitudes are all the more pleasurable if one comes down to earth occasionally. [Untranslatable pun here. The French is pied-à-terre, = 'feet on the ground' and also 'bachelor flat' (Translator's note).]

  'None of this is meant for you,' Costals said to Solange. 'Don't worry, I shall give you back your letters. And now, follow me.'

  At one end of the studio was a staircase leading to a tiny loggia, which Costals called the dovecot because, perched high as it was, it did bear some resemblance to a dovecot, and because human doves did nestle there at times. He also sometimes called it his columbarium, by virtue of an old saw according to which funereal thoughts stimulate pleasure, though he himself had little need of such stimulants.

  'Well, my pet, no more nonsense; now's the time for you to take the plunge. On this bed, shortly, you will become a woman. So you'd better get a good eyeful of the décor, if what they say is true, that the act still has some importance for a girl in spite of everything. And it has! A moment like that is like an oil-stain that will spread over a woman's whole life. So try and do it properly. For the time being, though, the only thing I ask is that you should stay here and keep mum. In a few minutes, I shall have a visitor downstairs. You see this curtain? Behind it you'll hear everything, and see everything too, if you draw it aside a little, without being seen. Goodbye for now. If you get restless, you'll find plenty of books on morals lying around. Here, for instance: Louis Ménard's La Morale avant les Philosophes. You'll see the progress morality has made since then. Splendid chaps, the Philosophes'.'

  He went downstairs and settled in an armchair. For a moment, his eyes vacant, he wondered how he would tackle the scene with Andrée. Then, with the touch of arrogance that woke in him at times, he decided that such a question was not worth his bothering about, that Andrée did not deserve to have a set speech prepared for her, and he made it a point of honour not to think about her any more. He flicked through a magazine and thought of Solange, hidden and yet present, like God perhaps ... Whereupon he plunged into a sort of lucid confusion, was seized with a gust of spirituality, and composed some lines, which he jotted down:

  O God! Hide then yourself but in appearance.

  Not in reality.

  And when you withdraw deep into your silence.

  Listen to me.

  At four thirty-five, Andrée had still not arrived. At twenty to five still nobody. He was glad she was late, as it was further justification for the cruelty he was about to inflict on her. The fact was that he would cheerfully have suffered insults, dishonour, desertion, the loss of all his money; but he could not bear to be kept waiting. He always told his women, from their very first meeting: 'The chief qualification of a woman in love is punctuality. Everything else is secondary.' He had told Solange, too. He had a notebook in which he kept a record of the number of minutes his girl-friends kept him waiting, and when the total reached five hours, he broke with them - at least in principle. Not without warning them three times, at the end of two, three and four hours, in accordance with an old Arab precept: 'Warn the snake three times before you kill it.' To date, after six weeks, Solange's total only came to one hour seven minutes. A very decent average.

  At a quarter to five, the bell rang and Andrée appeared. 'Ah! there you are, my dear Mademoiselle. The burnt child still risks the fire, eh?' On shaking hands with Costals, she held his for a long time, which the writer found far from agreeable. Mlle Hacquebaut, who was usually content with a dab of powder and a touch of lipstick, had today really made herself beautiful, but in a Saint-Léonardesque style: glaring red lips and irregular blotches of dark powder. Her legs were bare, which could have been explained by the heat, though the real explanation lay elsewhere. Her face looked parched and emaciated, like that of a literary gentleman who has had to wait too long for a good review (a plant without water). And there were dark rings under her eyes such as Costals had never seen there before: blue, purple, glossy, huge, spreading out like a fan, or the wake of a boat, nearly up to the temples - terrifying in the broad light of day. He thought she must have developed a taste for solitary practices.

  She glanced round the room and read the show-cards.

  'No, dear Mademoiselle, you are not really in a house of sin. The worst that ever happens is that I occasionally shut my cat up in here with some tom when she's on heat. But one or other of them always seems to lack interest. The tom, usually. Isn't nature odd? Some day I must shut the tom up here with a mouse. It might sharpen his desire.'

  'Yes, his desire to eat her up, after torturing her for hours. And you would be watching them through the window, gloating. I can see it all!'

  'What a lurid image you have of me,' he said with disgust.

  Still, he had her there in front of him, completely at his mercy, and he wondered what would be the best way of making her suffer. For a sort of chemical reaction had taken place in him since the day before. For nearly five years he had restrained himself from wounding her, for five years he had been waiting for the present moment. All that pity, that kindness, that forbearance had been transmuted by last night's irruption into an element which was chemically their opposite: cruelty. Like milk changed into blood. 'Milk or blood, it's all the same. I love both milk and blood, like the manes of antiquity.' And all the effort that had gone into his benevolence now went to reinforce his cruelty. 'I felt heroic, and that's a feeling I dislike.' Now he could give rein to that other self that had been stifled so long, now he could drop the weight he had been holding up for five years. The strength to make her suffer began to wake and stretch itself within him, and he watched the girl as a wrestler measures up his opponent, wondering what sort of hold to try on her. 'She once wrote to me, paraphrasing Cleopatra's words about Antony, in Shakespeare: "For thy bounty, there is no winter in't." Why, in the first place, should I show myself bountiful to her? Don't know. And then, why should there be no winter in my bounty? Winter's a very fine season, when you look at it in relation to the others. Blessed are those who blow hot and cold together. If the souls of the just are like good trees and good pastures, as the Gospel says, they must love winter as well as summer, drought as well as plenty, darkness as well as light: it needs a little of everything to make a man. All the seasons exist in me, one after another. I am a revolving cosmos that presents every point of its surface to the sun, one after another. One after another! Always one after another! Now she'll see what it costs, five years of pity from a man like me.'

  'I see you have bare feet,' he said nonchalantly. 'In Algiers, when young Frenchmen of the upper classes want to seduce a girl who also belongs to the upper classes, they take her by car to the forest of Bainem. There, if she refuses, they wait until nightfall, then take her shoes and jump into the car. She gets back as best she can, barefoot. The forest of Bainem is twelve kilometres from Algiers.'

  'Poor things!'

  'Well, it teaches them to stand on their own feet, no pun intended. We must defend ourselves, mustn't we?'

  'Defend yourselves! Poor helpless males! Either defending themselves against women who refuse, or defending themselves against women who throw themselves at their heads. But I,' she said (with sudden volubility, rushing the words to the point of stammering, as though all of a sudden she had started rushing down a slope), 'whatever you may have thought, I never threw myself at your head: I never begged; on the contrary I offered. You refused. Of course, to be loved takes away part of one's freedom. But so does everything that has to do with life. By simply going on living, you accept the tyranny of time and space, the weather, the need to eat and sleep ... '

  'My entire life is based on one thing: getting rid of everything that isn't essential to me.'

  'If you r
eally had to be afraid of something, you could have chosen something else to be afraid of besides love - mine, at any rate. But however that may be, you can't say I've forced myself on you. I went out of your life in silence, and so I have remained. Shall I tell you? I was utterly fed up with you. With you, and with this wretched love that has never fed upon anything but itself. And then, just as I imagined you must be thinking: "Now she's dead all right, and she'll never stir again," you wrote to me, you shouted "encore" to bring me back on stage, as if you had enjoyed my little tragi-comic act. Oh! you know how to keep women in suspense all right. Why did I come? First of all, to show you I wasn't sulking. And then because, in spite of everything I wrote, I hadn't given up. The only way you could have made me give you up would have been to tell me you didn't love me. But that you've never done. Not once, in four years and nine months. Not once. You've always run away, but you've never really broken off. And then, after running away, you return to the attack with redoubled vigour.' ('My head! My head!' thought Costals, putting a hand to his head in the gesture of Achilles tearing his hair.) 'I came here in order to hear these words from you, if that is what I am to hear. To hear them from your own lips. Whatever happens, this abscess must be lanced.'

  'Well, we'll see about that,' he said cheerfully, not yet clear as to what he was going to say or do.

  From her spotless legs, her made-up face, he guessed she must have prepared herself with minute care. He could also guess why. Yet the seam of her dress had come unstitched in places, the lace edge of her petticoat, showing at her throat, might have been cleaner, and her nails - pointed and varnished - retained a thin streak of black under the artificial pink, which made him wonder whether she thought black fingernails an additional attraction, as negro women do their lip- plates, or a measure of hygiene like the dirt on Arab babies which their mothers preserve religiously because it is a guarantee of good health. Slatternly people, in their occasional attempts at cleanliness, always overlook some detail that betrays them. And it is the misfortune of women that men can bear negligence in a man but loathe it in a woman.

  Nevertheless, all this time, Costals had been smiling at her, and smiling so naturally that he was not even aware of it. He smiled at her (a) because he had a natural gaiety which expressed itself in that way, a kind of artless vitality, like one of those electric currents, innocently blue, but deadly; (b) because he was grateful to her for the pleasure he was about to derive from making her suffer; and (c) because, in spite of everything, he still rather liked her. (Through all their debates and discussions he had never stopped liking her, and that was no doubt one of the reasons why he tormented her.)

  When he had taken a good look at her, Costals shifted a vase of flowers on the table in such a way that his face was hidden from the woman who loved him. She moved her chair sideways so that she could see him again. Once more he shifted the vase.

  'Why don't you want me to see you?'

  'Just to annoy you,' he said gaily. 'But there, I'll be nice.' He pushed the vase aside.

  'I've really been an awful fool, haven't I?' said Andrée. 'If men only knew how stupid women can be, they'd pity them instead of torturing them.'

  'Women keep on begging until one gives them something. But one can give them pretty well anything. Pity, for instance. In any case, men do give it to you, though without realizing it. They call their pity love. On the whole, what brings man and woman together is pity far more than love. How could one fail to pity women when one sees what they are? One doesn't pity an old man: he has reached the end of his cycle, he has had his day. One doesn't pity a child: its helplessness is but momentary, the future belongs to it. But a woman in her prime, at the peak of her development, look at her! Woman would never have conceived herself to be man's equal, if man hadn't told her she was, out of "niceness".'

  'Sometimes, it seems, this pity turns into desire.'

  'Of course. Everything changes into everything else. What people call "love", "hate", "indifference", "pity", are only momentary phases in one and the same feeling. And we must thank God that pity is only a momentary phase. Otherwise it would annihilate us. We should escape from the enslavement of love only to enslave ourselves to pity. One can make people do anything by exciting them to pity. Do you know one can die of one's pity? Consequently, everything that is done out of pity turns out badly, except perhaps what is done out of pity for greatness, and you won't find that sort of pity every day. Half the doomed marriages in the world are marriages in which one or the other has married out of pity. When I was wounded during the war, the more the civilians at railway stations pitied me, the more I despised them. I felt their pity put them so utterly in my power! I could have got them to sign cheques or hand over their daughters, anything I wanted, and all this without deserving it, or putting on an act. It was revolting! Still, one might as well take advantage of it, and it seems to me that now, if I coveted other worldly goods than those I already possess, I should be less inclined to acquire them by exploiting the stupidity or the vanity or the greed of my fellow-men than by exploiting their pity.'

  A butterfly flew into the room through the open window and (ignoring Andrée) fluttered around Costals as though asking to be stroked. But it is not easy to stroke a butterfly.

  'I'm beginning to understand,' Andrée said slowly. 'The only feeling you have ever had for me is pity. The only feelings you ever have for women are desire, irritation and pity - never love. So you arrogate to yourself the right to pity women! Do you realize how ridiculously nineteenth-century you are? "Poor unfortunate" women! Michelet! Oh, no! please, not your pity! I've had enough of those life-belts of yours that hit one on the head and send one under. Please don't throw any more. Women don't need your pity. You're the one who should be pitied.'

  'Why? Because I don't love you?'

  'Because you love nobody. You have no wife, no home, no children, no object in life, no faith. And perhaps it's because you're ashamed of all that that you come and huddle close to those who do love - that you call them back to you, as if you were one of them. And you're not, oh no, you're not! A leper, that's what you are!'

  'Yes, it's exactly as I said: because I don't love you. But really, Andrée Hacquebaut, take a look at me: do I look like an unhappy man?'

  'It's a mask, a grimace.'

  'The grimace of the literary man is intended to make him appear unhappy. They all want to look like Pascal. "M. Thingummy's Pascalian anguish." There are two certain recipes for admission to the Academy: a book on Racine, and a book on Pascal."

  'You admitted it all to me, don't you remember: "I lie all the time"?'

  'I remember very well. I said that in order to give you a false idea of myself. And besides, what I say to you is of no importance. It's in their work that you must look for men like me, not in what they tell you.'

  'One has only to look at your photograph in this week's Vie des Lettres to see that you're not happy.'

  'One has only to look at my photograph in this week's Vie des Lettres to know that the photographer had disturbed and irritated me. Come, come, my dear girl, this is a perfect example of reaction 227a.'

  'I don't want to know what reaction 227a is. It's sure to be something unpleasant as usual.... What did you mean?'

  'I'll tell you - it's quite nice, really. As you probably know, all women react in the same way to a given stimulus. There's nothing mysterious about women. Men have led them to believe they were mysterious, partly out of chivalry and partly as a bait, because they desire them. And of course the women fall for it, and even improve on it. It's always the same: at first sight, in a gathering of women, when you see them all saying the same things, laughing at the same things, etc., you feel that they form a kind of interchangeable substance. Then if you get to know one of them and develop a warmer feeling for her, she begins to appear very different from the others, the others can tell you nothing about her, she is an enigma to you, and so she will remain until you have conquered her; for it was desire that made you believe a
ll this. Once conquered, she soon appears exactly like the others again. So one sees that in reality all women's reactions are automatic and can be foretold in advance. These reactions can be classified, and that is what I have done, identifying them by numbers. Reaction 227a is the classic reaction whereby a woman, because she is unhappy, tries to convince the man she loves that he too is unhappy. Not only because she wants to comfort him and "mother" him, but because it exasperates her to see the man happy, and happy without deriving his happiness from her. Men too, of course, often exhibit reaction 227a, but in them it arises exclusively from desire. And then nearly all Catholics, both men and women, also have a similar reaction: they want to convince unbelievers that their situation is desperate. In that category, the reaction is numbered 79PC. PC stands for "practising Catholic" as opposed to the non-practising variety.'

  'I don't know what women can have done to you to make you speak of them in such terms. They must have made you suffer dreadfully. Oh, of course, I forgot - I mustn't say that! It's reaction 227a. You just wait, though: one day you'll be rid of women for good. I've often wondered what you'll be like when you're old. Well, you won't be much to look at. I could tell you exactly what wrinkles you'll have: I can already see the first traces of them, like the light pencil strokes with which a painter begins a sketch. It's true, there are lines on your forehead which weren't there three months ago ... '

  He began to laugh, delighted by her naïve rudeness, and feeling slightly attracted towards her. He wondered which of his different selves to bring into play. After all, had Solange not been there, he would not have minded 'taking' Andrée. 'The nape of her neck isn't too bad. But is it enough? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as they say. But even so!' For the first time, he felt a sort of desire for her, more especially, perhaps, because of the rings under her eyes. Perhaps also because he found her repulsive: 'The strong alone relish horror.' He watched a fly in the ash-tray on the table in front of him, which had been quietly feeding on the ash and cigarette ends for three minutes with as much apparent enjoyment as if it had been jam - so drunk with ash that one could have picked it up with one's fingers. So it was with him: everything was much of a muchness. This sudden upheaval of all his feelings, of his whole policy towards this girl over the past five years, would have had its comic side. He felt no hatred towards her, merely indifference with if anything a certain liking, and from this indifference anything might emerge. He did not mind making her deliriously happy: why not? She deserved it. He did not mind making her deliriously unhappy: she deserved that too. It was just as rational to make her suffer in order to compensate for all the unwarranted good he had done her, as to make her happy in order to compensate for all the unwarranted harm he had done her. And in any case, was there any need to behave rationally at all? Everything came easily and spontaneously to him, just as it did when he sat down at his desk in front of a blank sheet of paper. Costals' inhumanity did not arise from an inability to experience human emotions, but rather from his ability to experience them all equally, and at will, as if all he needed to do was to press the appropriate button. There are those who rebel against the arbitrary nature of the laws that govern human lives; others are not even aware of it. Costals was aware of it, but rather than suffer from it, he chose instead to worship it. For his whole existence was governed by this one thought: since the world offers so many reasons for joy, only a fool would choose to suffer (since suffering has to be paid for in this world and is unrewarded in the next). After having suffered for some years from seeing the decline of France, he had decided to enjoy this decline (for patriotism, not being inborn, can be lost as easily as it is acquired). He had reacted in the same way towards social injustice, and in general to the whole problem of evil. 'If I were to suffer because of all the evil in the world, my life would be a torment, and therefore an absurdity. So let's enjoy that too.'