The Lepers Read online

  This last heart-cry, which might have been uttered by an Aristotle or an Einstein, on the lips of a sort of shop-girl, froze Costals, who up to then had been moved. He plunged into that well of sadness into which men are forced by women when they would so much like to be able to take them seriously, and cannot. Although nothing was more foreign to him than the desire to 'mould' a woman (he had never thought of 'moulding' anyone but his son, and even then only rather desultorily), Solange's remark had touched him at first: 'With you I should have had a personality' (it was extraordinary that she never flattered him, incredible in fact). Now the remark irritated him, reminding him of those comic articles in the women's pages of weeklies, in which Sylphide or Cousin Annie provide their 'sisters' with the recipes for 'developing their personalities'. These efforts to inject a semblance of life into what has none are the most astonishing and depressing thing in the world.

  'But... would you say I had understood you, then?'

  'Of course,' she said. Costals was a bit flummoxed by this, thinking that there was so obviously nothing to understand in Mlle Dandillot.

  'Are you then so different from the rest?' he asked treacherously.

  'Haven't you ever noticed?' Every woman, so cruelly similar to her companions, believes herself to be different.

  'The important thing is not to be different from others, but to be different from oneself. And you are always like yourself.'

  There were flowers shedding their petals in a vase, like a man dropping women from his life.

  'All the same, it's stupid,' he went on. (Like all men, often unexpectedly modest, he thought that since she had given herself to him she must be prepared to give herself to anyone.) 'Women only become attached when they're not intelligent. Come, be a little intelligent, like a cat that pushes a half-open door with its paw, in order to get out: learn how to get out. There are plenty of Costals in the world who are made for you, whereas it's obvious that we weren't made for each other. Quite apart from the fact that your experience with me will have stood you in good stead; now you'll be on your guard; until you met me you let other people think for you. Besides, what you want is not love but marriage. We'll deceive your husband as much as you wish.'

  'What if I'm incapable of leading a double life? You know perfectly well I shall never be unfaithful to my husband, whoever he is. I'm not made that way.'

  'Well, what do you want? What can I do for you?'

  Suddenly he had an idea, a typically masculine idea, in the worst possible taste, but the outcome of which proved that it was an excellent one.

  'As you know, I've never doubted that we'd get a divorce, and I wanted it to be as solemn as our marriage would have been clandestine. Divorce is the cardinal instrument of marriage, it's there that the emphasis ought to be put, and I could even wish that the Church would make it a sacrament.... But no doubt that will come one of these days....'

  She smiled, and he was pleased to see this first ray of sunshine. Oh! there's nothing more stupid than a psychologist. As if one didn't smile when one suffers!

  ' ... Which is why I told you that I'd give you an engagement ring when we divorced. Let me offer it to you now. The diamond on it is a solitaire: symbol of the destiny of your friend.'

  'I'm not going to accept a ring from you now!'

  He went to a jewel-case and took out a rather handsome ring which had belonged to his mother. Shortly before she died, his mother had said to him: 'As for my rings, you can give them to your girl-friends.'

  The room was still in darkness. But when Solange, with the ring in her hand, switched on the light in order to examine it, he knew that she was feeling better.

  She made as if to give the ring back to him.

  'Don't you want it?'

  Silence.

  'Please!'

  She pouted her lips as she had done when 'refusing' the Peach Melba:

  'All right, I accept. But not as a present - that wouldn't be very dignified of me. As a souvenir of you.'

  'Of course! I never meant it otherwise. It isn't at all a present.'

  She flashed the ring in the light.

  'It's a pity the setting's a bit old-fashioned.'

  'I'll get a modern one put on for you.'

  'She's a pathetic little tart,' he thought. 'The girl who didn't like jewellery! Prostituting herself in order to get married, and when that goes phut, quite ready to accept the price of her disappointment. Just like all the rest of them, in fact, for there isn't a woman who doesn't prostitute herself. And a sponger, too; in the eight months we've been going out together, she's put her hand in her purse only once - to buy herself a reel of cotton. All that remains for me to do is to write out a testimonial for her, with her five out of twenty for sexual capacity, and the dates of enrolment and departure. But what could I want better? Now we're quits.' As a potential wife, then as a fiancée, she had dragged him into a 'sublime' element, which was not his. As a tart, she put him at his ease once more: they were back in the world of reality. And he had paid her, as a prisoner bribes his warder in order to escape. One pays women to come, one pays them to go; it's their destiny. His old rakishness reappeared. Besides, he was incapable of taking his misdeeds seriously for long.

  'When you marry, you can tell your bridegroom it's a diamond you inherited from your grandmother, who used to wear it at Napoleon III's balls. Warn your mother, so that she doesn't betray you.'

  "Betraying is your forte, it seems to me.'

  'In my family, we've always betrayed. Betrayed for the sake of betraying, as we waged war for the sake of waging war. For five centuries. It's in our blood. But if you had been a daughter of the house of France, I should have treated you differently - because you would have been different. You like to think you're a phenomenon. It's now that you'd be a phenomenon, if a man hadn't betrayed you.'

  Somewhat brutally, he asked her to undress. For the first time since Genoa he wanted her. Because he no longer feared her. Because she was no longer his wife to be. And because he saw her as a tart.

  "Do you want me to undo my hair?' she asked, as though nothing had happened.

  He took her twice, buoyed up by the excitement of the whole scene as though by a wave. And she too, for the first time since Genoa, seemed to find some pleasure in it. Unresponsive when he was an absent-minded lover and a pusillanimous fiancé, she warmed up a little when he was once again forceful in his decisions and his caresses. And besides, they were nothing but lovers now: they might as well be good ones.

  As she was leaving, Solange slipped the box of Abdullahs Costals had just finished into her bag - a final souvenir of her engagement! But he had spotted it.

  'People who keep my letters or my old packets of Abdullahs for sentimental reasons exasperate me, in the same sort of way as people who pray for me. You have the ring, dear Solange, that's enough.'

  He took back the cigarette packet and threw it into the waste-paper basket.

  On the telephone, after dinner, Mme Dandillot was 'perfect'. How easily they had given up, these women! How quickly they accepted everything (the docility of Frenchwomen)! Where was that determination which women talk about so much and which wears out so soon? Four times the mother forbids her child to do something, but after the fourth time she gives up, and the child can break his leg in peace. To Costals' question, 'Shall I go on seeing Solange?' Mme Dandillot, with apparent firmness, answered in the negative.

  It was the answer Costals had hoped for, and he had planned in that event to go to Morocco to join his little girl-friend Rhadidja, whom he had not seen for eighteen months. There was a boat leaving for Casablanca in two days' time. The next day he took the train to Bordeaux without having seen Solange again. 'Not only have I always known how to escape, but I've always known how to escape in time.'

  He was closing the brackets.

  10

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

  27 January 1928
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  I've brought back from an antique shop in Orleans a sheet of Chinese rice paper with a bird painted on it. It's the only original work of art in my room and even in the whole house (the rest are reproductions). I gaze and gaze at it.... And I think: it was a man who painted that. I remember a little wood carving in the Musée Dennery: a snake coiled round a tortoise. The snake's body was slightly flattened where it rested on the edge of the shell, and that single detail was enough to give it life. Thousands of miles away, hundreds of years ago, it was also a man who had carved that. Brought up in uncultured surroundings, for a long time I believed that art was superfluous, fit only for women and school-children, and elementary education was hardly calculated to change my ideas. When I began to realize that art was almost exclusively male, and the highest form of masculine activity, I was so dumbfounded that I probably haven't got over it yet. So, when I see a work of art that moves me, when I read a passage that makes me turn pale, I remember that it was a man who did it, and I am filled with respect and gratitude, and feel that we women ought to keep our mouths shut. The Virgin in the sculpture museum at Autun, Andromache holding Hector's son. the Jungle bidding farewell to Mowgli, Chartres, the Parthenon - all these, in the last resort, were born of love, of that love of other men which men are capable of giving otherwise than by taking someone in their arms. But for art to transmit to me fully the love with which it was conceived, I should have to have been in those arms once at least, to know what it means, to be able to take it or leave it. Once I had experienced this, the world of art, which at the moment I have only an inkling of, would really be mine, I should be swept into the vast, slow current that circulates between the artist, his fellow-creatures and the world of things, instead of being condemned to remain on the edge of it. By your pitiless and unjustifiable veto, you have thwarted me of a whole world, and yet at this moment I do not bear you any grudge.

  Next day.

  You know how it is with me: I have to get things off my chest. So I will not try to conceal from you the fact that you have hurt me. Already, last autumn, I knew from the papers that you were in Italy, and I realized that you wanted to put an even greater distance between us. This time, you deliberately choose to speak on the radio on the day you know I shall be with my cousins, who have no wireless set. I remember quite clearly writing to you and saying: 'Wednesday and Thursday, no books, no wireless - that's going to be fun.'

  My uncle has just come in. Good-bye for the moment....

  Listen to this. Just now, on the way home with my uncle, exactly at the corner of the rue de la République and the rue des Tanneurs, I had the impression that someone had kissed me. The illusion was so strong that I actually blushed. It was the wind, a little puff of wind, but since I'm one hundred per cent woman, that is to say ripe for the loony bin occasionally, I believe more or less in telepathy. I come back home and what do I find in the newspapers? An announcement that your radio talk did not take place on Thursday but has been postponed until the day after tomorrow. Can I assume, am I too presumptuous in assuming, that you had a fit of remorse for giving it on the very day I couldn't listen? If so, slip the word remorse into your first sentence the day after tomorrow. For example: 'Ladies and gentlemen, the date of this talk has been changed, but I should have felt too much remorse had I not found it possible, etc.'

  Having written my letter, quickly, quickly, I hurry to the post, as though it must get to you forthwith. In fact you will no doubt receive it tomorrow morning, and it will be a crumb of pleasure to start the day with.

  A.

  p.s. I enclose a sample of the material of the costume I'm having made, so that you can choose the same for your lady friend of the moment.

  A.

  This letter was filed away by the recipient, unopened.

  11

  to Pierre Costals

  Paris

  Andrée Hacquebaut

  Saint-Léonard (Loiret)

  29 January 1928

  Costals, dear Costals, ah, no, you're not much of an orator! How I waited for your 'turn to sing'! I was so afraid you might begin five minutes early. By seven o'clock I was already listening in, and that's how I learnt that the Lapps eat cod seasoned with paraffin, that M. Claude Farrère is a 'great writer', and that Febo shoe-polish 'would put a shine even on a ball of wool'. You see the things I learn, thanks to you.

  I waited to hear the word remorse on your lips. I didn't hear it. But it's possible I may have missed it, you articulate so badly. On the other hand, when you quoted - when the quotation did not seem to me to be relevant - the remark of the mother to her daughter in Purple: 'I love you so much that I never think of telling you', I took it as being addressed to me, I thought you had perhaps said it on purpose.

  Yes, you articulate badly, you get nervous, your voice becomes strident and your delivery hurried. Do you know what the best moment in your talk was? When you whispered to the producer: 'Am I talking too fast?' Whispered! A hundred thousand listeners must have heard you. Afterwards I thought I oughtn't to have told you I'd be listening in. Perhaps it was this that disturbed you. I upset your life. My letters waste your time. My thoughts, perhaps, injure your love-life (for I love you for myself; others can give you your pleasure). Forgive me.

  But it's funny. I saw you as a splendid intelligent brute with rough hands. At last I could get rid of the wretched feeling of superiority which I was forced to get used to in my dealings with all those weak men, the only kind I came across before you. And yet, every time you make a mistake, how my heart goes out to you. I am happy when you are happy, it consoles me for having to kick my heels waiting, but happier still, I think, when you do things that bore you, or when you are bored, because then I feel more of a sister to you. That heart of yours that is continually deafened by the roar of its victories, perhaps it deigns to listen a bit when they fall silent. There can be no doubt that your somewhat feeble talk on Radio-Paris will have disappointed your admirers. Throughout the length and breadth of France people will have been saying: 'Why does he talk, since he talks so badly?' Perhaps, even, some will have felt, as I myself felt, that even the substance of your talk was not up to much. I feel I ought to warn you that you're beginning to repeat yourself a little, my friend. So much so that at the moment I have the impression that thousands of men and women must have turned away from you slightly. And because of that, I feel closer to you than ever. I at least am faithful to you. How cosy we are, huddled together, aloof, in the midst of that crowd of deserters! (Blast! My uncle is calling me to dinner. 'Dédée!' Dédée, at thirty years and nine months! If only it were you who called me that!)

  9 p.m.

  I have switched on again to tell you this: when the light went out in my room, my arms went up as though to encircle a beloved form, my face became transfigured, and I said: 'I am near you.'

  1 a.m.

  My beloved love, I write to you now, while I wait for the infusion which will bring me, perhaps, a little sleep, to tell you how much I love you. My love, my darling.... For I cannot possibly die without having said those words once, die without having said anything or done anything, die without having experienced what the poorest of the poor have experienced, and which would cost no one a penny, would do no one any harm. You can so easily find happiness in anyone's embrace, whereas I can find it only in yours - and you know this, you who love me and are yet so dishonourable as to give me nothing! And yet tonight my room is full of you, of your voice, of your presence. It was you who came, it was not I who called you. You came out of that wireless set, like a genie out of a magic box, looking a little crestfallen (your colleagues had made catty remarks to you: 'No, no, it wasn't bad at all! You'll find it easier when you get used to it.... '). I was so hungry, so terribly hungry for you. When I gave no sign of life, I was waiting for you. When I wrote to you, I was waiting for you. When I hurled insults at you, I was waiting for you. And here you are at last, your presence is not an invention of my mind. O my God, may I prove worthy of it!

  Th
ere's an electricity breakdown. I've lit two candles as in the last act of Werther, and they make everything look so fantastic in my room. It does not seem like my room, but like a completely strange room. I'm in pain. If you only knew the pain I feel. You have shaken me to the core. If you only knew how she strains towards you, this woman whom you wanted thus, whom you created thus, for, before you, she did not exist. Sit down here, and let me stay motionless against you, simply telling myself that it's you, that these are your clothes. Now lift me up, lay me on this bed which I no longer recognize, which is not Dédée's bed, which is not the bed on which I used to twist and turn as though I were pinned there by an arrow. You take my head between your hands, burying your fingers in the hair on my temples (how cold your hands are ...). How gravely you unstiffen my legs! Why doesn't the electricity come on again? We need bright lights: I'm not ugly at this moment, as you can see; and I want to see all of you, now that you are identical with the man I dreamed of. It is no longer that imperceptible infiltration of you into me which has been taking place until now, at once ineluctable and acquiesced in. I feel that you are bearing down on me, you, Pierre Costals, with your whole body, your whole work, your whole life. Your caress, so deep, deep, seeming to search beyond me, to seek me out I know not where. How it fulfils me. How well it calms this flesh that you have bruised in exorcizing. Just like those little cuts one gets on one's fingers and which one only has to squeeze hard for the pain to subside. Hug me, crush me, until I scream and beg and moan with so much happiness. And you listen to my moans; you know that you make me happy, and you are too. And you show no sign of exhaustion. You stay as long as I waited for you. Now, my friend, you know what it is to love.

  And afterwards you will speak to me the words I ascribed to you, dictated to you so often in a whisper, in solitude, words which bind the future a little, words you used to speak to me long ago when I loved you before I knew you, as the mother-to-be loves her unknown child in advance. And I shall remain at your side, all limp with happiness, I shall protect myself from myself against your flank, as a little ewe, to protect itself from the sun, presses against the flank of the ram of the flock.