The Girls Read online

  But Costals, having caught sight of a notice-board advertising a flat to let, glanced up at the building and said:

  'I've been haunted by the idea of moving ever since I can remember. Would you mind coming with me while I have a look at this place? I've rather fallen for the house.'

  A few minutes later the concierge was showing them round the flat. What a strange sensation for Andrée! Almost as though they were a young married couple, or engaged. It made her feel dizzy ... and it was even more extraordinary when the concierge said to her:

  'Everything works very well. Perhaps Madame would care to see ... the hot water ... '

  'Madame'. . . . And in the bathroom! Was it really possible that Costals did not realize how provocative it was for a girl - and a girl of whose love for him he was well aware - to be shown round a flat which he thought of making his home? Was it possible that he had no ulterior motive? And she was not too badly dressed to be taken for his wife! Meanwhile he was asking her advice: should that window be walled up, this wall knocked through? She answered mechanically, like a good housewife, but her soul was elsewhere, borne away as though on a gust of wind to a realm so unexpected and improbable that it frightened her.

  'Six rooms . . .' she said for the sake of saying something. 'Isn't it rather on the large side?'

  'Not at all. Drawing-room, dining-room, my study, my bedroom, a junk-room, and then the other bedroom, the "tomb of the unknown woman"...

  'Tomb? Are you a Bluebeard?'

  'No, "tomb" in another sense - a double sense. [Untranslatable pun on the words tomber, to fall, and tombeau, tomb (Translator's note).] The room in which women fall. And the room in which their illusions tumble down.'

  Was it really possible that he could be so lacking in tact if. . . . She felt as though in a dream, in an abyss. On the way downstairs, she was afraid she might lose her balance.

  Outside, the cold gripped her. She shivered. Now he was walking beside her, and his long overcoat, tight at the waist, flapped against his legs like a skirt (like a German officer's great-coat, she thought) to the rhythm of his footsteps which rang out with a power and majesty which startled her. His gloved hands were clasped together over his stomach in an attitude which he maintained almost throughout their entire meeting - an attitude Andrée found somehow hieratic. It seemed to her that she was walking beside a Homeric hero.

  'What torture all these domestic problems are,' he was saying. 'My family are always on at me: "You must get married, you need a woman to look after you." That's a moral way of looking at marriage, don't you think? Marry for social or family reasons, or to make a girl happy - not at all. It's simply a question of having someone there to see that you're not swindled when you buy the upholstery. Fancy getting married on those terms! One might just as well engage a housekeeper, whom one can always get rid of if she won't do. Whereas a wife....'

  Costals was obsessed with the idea of the wrongness of marriage for a writer - a real writer, who takes his art seriously. He was inexhaustible on the subject. For five minutes, without drawing breath, he railed against marriage, extravagantly and, it must be said, tastelessly. Truths, half-truths and sophistries welled from his lips, accompanied by bitter jibes. A great burst of eloquence. He was like a cup full to the brim and continually overflowing, like the basins of Moroccan fountains.

  'You see how I trust you,' he said at the end. 'I talk to you as I would to a man.' Regardless of the fact that almost everything he had said had wounded the woman who walked at his side, numb with cold, hurrying to keep up with him along the dark avenues. Had he not raised her to the seventh heaven, only to plunge her back into the abyss? At first she had ventured a few remarks in favour of writers marrying. She was sure these remarks were sound, but she felt so self-conscious that now she did not know what to say, the words refused to 'come out'; she was like a schoolboy being tortured by a sadistic examiner, knowing the answers perfectly well but standing there like an idiot, overcome with nerves, his mind a blank. Nevertheless, incapable of rejecting the idea that the visit to the flat was not unintentional, she began to think that he was only saying all this to provoke her into taking the opposite view, and to hear it from her lips. She allowed herself to indulge in this fantasy, this madness, this senseless daydream. ... Then she thought it would be cunning to switch from wives to children.

  'Yes, but what about children! How can a man like you, Costals, who are a sort of fertility god, have no children? I must confess that it's always surprised me. Your personality is incomplete without them. Even if only from the point of view of your work, think what riches you're depriving yourself of!'

  To every word she had said before, the fertility god had been ready with a lightning retort: a vicious thrust of the foil, and each time a hit. Now, for the first time, he did not answer. She thought she had found his Achilles heel. She turned towards him, saw his upturned face and his limpid eyes, in which she seemed to see an expression of sadness, intensely moving in a man as overconfident as he. Ah! how she adored him when she saw him weakened!

  'Your son, Costals! His little arms around your neck.... Think how he would need you.... All the messages you send out into the void, for a crowd of indifferent people, concentrated on a person who was flesh of your flesh, a person you loved.... No, you're not a complete man if you haven't experienced that. But I can tell that you regret it. No, don't deny it! You can't hide it from me any more. Women have these intuitions, you know....'

  He was like a punch-drunk boxer, who can no longer defend himself, his eyes staring into space, those eyes in which Andrée seemed to read a message of defeat. Sensing her opportunity, she brought the conversation round from children to herself. The darkness gave her courage, and the fact of not looking at him. She looked only at their two shadows, side by side, which loomed up, turned, vanished, reappeared, according to the play of the street lamps. And she thrilled at the thought of all the passers-by who knew nothing about them, suspected nothing. For she still imagined that there was something to 'know'.

  'Sometimes I think that, whatever you may say, you need to be loved, you don't dislike being loved, in spite of all your blasphemies against love. But something tells me that you may perhaps relent a little. You gave yourself away, Costals, unwittingly: I saw your look of sadness and longing when I spoke to you about that non-existent son and about the element of sterility in your love life. Something tells me that you hanker after another form of tenderness. I can understand how one might feel ill at ease if one were loved the wrong way. But I, for instance, do I love you the wrong way? Isn't my affection for you a source of sweetness and not an infliction? Don't you understand that it's the most ardent and passionate love that is most capable of renunciation and self-sacrifice? Let me love you, so that I can stop having to hold back for fear of displeasing you, saying "affection" when I mean "love". What do I want? More warmth, more life, more activity. Oh, to be able to do things for you - anything! Not to have to go away again in three weeks' time with so cruelly little to treasure.... Because what suffices me here, once I'm far away … I should like, for instance - how shall I put it - should like you to call me by my Christian name, or even "my dear". It's been "dear Mademoiselle" for four years! You might be talking to your piano teacher. I should like you to write to me more often - a few lines every fortnight (it isn't much to ask). I should like you to treat me as a little girl, if only a stupid and sulky little girl. I should like to see you in places that are more appropriate, more suited to you - gardens, the country, art galleries. ... I don't know what I want exactly.

  But I don't want things as they were, as they are, as you've wished them to be. I don't demand that it should last forever, only that I should enjoy you more, be closer to you, as long as it does last. And I should still like an answer to the question: has my affection given you some happiness? Have I the right to think that I'm to some extent necessary to you? Have you felt less alone for the assurance I've brought you of being passionately understood and loved, loved in
everything that makes you what you are, in the quintessence of your being as in your smallest idiosyncrasies, your irony, your fooling, your unkindnesses even, God forgive me? If you don't give me the terrible answer Satan gave to Eloa, it will be happiness enough for me.'

  'What a fantasy world she lives in!' thought Costals. 'Andrée Hacquebaut's affection giving me happiness! She has a mania for denying the obvious, and another typically feminine mania - wanting me to be unhappy so as to be able to console me. The idea of her consoling me for my alleged unhappiness, when it's she and her kind, meaning all those women who give you a love you haven't asked for, who are responsible for spoiling my happiness! No, the whole thing is too farcical. And yet at the same time one can respect and pity it. How can I get out of it without hurting her?' The thought of the harm he could do her by simply telling her, in one short sentence, how things stood, paralysed him - like a man playing at boxing with a child and hardly daring to move for fear of hurting it. 'God, how maddening the girl is! What a mess I've got myself into!'

  He was still dragging her along with his long strides. In the past twenty minutes they had passed through one gloomy and almost deserted street after another (rue Christophe Colomb, rue Georges-Bizet, rue Magellan, etc.). These streets, with their blocks of expensive flats and private houses, and very few shops, were almost entirely plunged in darkness. The rare passers-by were hunched up against the cold. Cars were parked along the edge of the pavement. Andrée wondered why Costals did not take her into a tea-shop or a café, as any other man would have done. But no - walk! walk! (Costals had in fact thought of going into a café, but in the restaurant the other day Andrée had got stuck in the revolving doors so that she could neither get in nor out, and the waiters had laughed. And she was so dowdy and frumpish - let's face it, he was a little ashamed of her. So he preferred to let her catch pneumonia rather than suffer an affront to his vanity on her account.) Each new street they took seemed to Andrée even darker than the one before, and, although at first she braced herself against this glimpse of sky amidst her inner clouds, she ended up by thinking that the object of this Wandering Jew act of Costals' was simply to find a suitable place to kiss her; and if the expedition was becoming rather prolonged, it was because he could not make up his mind - a proof that he really loved her. As they turned into the rue Keppler, a particularly dark and deserted street, she was certain that it was there that her destiny would be fulfilled. Never would she forget those details: the terrier seated beside a chauffeur in a parked limousine, staring at her with an almost human intensity; the lantern on a heap of paving- stones, as moving as a sanctuary lamp. But they came out of that insidious street without anything having happened. Then Costals said:

  'I've listened to you with great interest, and I'm extremely touched by what you say. But I've already given you my answer. Our friendship was a very excellent thing. But the heart infects everything. On the plane of friendship, or on the plane of sensuality, things are healthy, and wounds, if they develop, are clean-cut. When the heart intervenes, the wound spreads, everything goes wrong. I've seen it happen so often.'

  'What you say is absurd. The heart infects nothing; on the contrary, it purifies everything. It's really too idiotic! So it's "the plane of sensuality" that is pure? If I had a great physical passion for you, you'd forgive me for it. If I were provocative, if I gave you to understand that it was only pleasure I was after, you might despise me perhaps, but you'd accept it. But when I offer you love, how embarrassing, how boring! If only people would leave one in peace with their love! When I offer you my love as the very basis of my life, the life of a girl still intact and (though I say it who shouldn't) fairly superior, how dull and ridiculous! You don't care for my love. You don't want everything from me, you only want a little. And I can't give you only a little. You have treated me as a sister. You have given me a privileged position at your side, as a sultan chooses his favourite concubine or his vizier from the crowd, and now you want me to stay there like a good girl without raising my voice, and content myself with what you give me - with delightful generosity, true, but that isn't enough for me anymore. Imagine having the right to nothing more than friendship! Friendships can be beautiful, marvellous even - like yours - sweet, consoling, touching, fraternal, but they are inadequate nonetheless, terribly inadequate. I cannot survive with you through friendship alone, nor indeed will I. There is something buoyant in me that transcends all that - transcends it utterly. So much inner strength that remains untapped. . . . I'm brimming over with the desire to give. I demand everything, and by "everything" I don't mean necessarily that you should abandon the disinterestedness you exploit so cleverly. ..('Ah!' he thought to himself, 'a touch of asperity! Here's a little mouse who's asking to be eaten up. That, too, might have been expected.') 'No. I'm quite sincere when I tell you, as I've told you many times, that you have never penetrated to the source of my inmost feelings, or you've touched it only fleetingly, when you were feeling particularly kind and sweet. What I ask is the right to love you, to cherish you with all my strength and all my heart. Your coldness has always restrained me. I cannot love you if you do not want me to.'

  'How can I be so frivolous as to allow you to give me a love I can't respond to? You see, I've used up all my feelings. I gave everything in a first love affair, at sixteen. From seventeen onwards I would have answered you as I do today: "Friendship, yes. Love, ecstasy, the whole shooting match: too late"'

  'Too late! Always the same devastating words: too late! Ah! well, my life is finished.'

  He felt sorry for her. 'When I was seventeen,' he said gravely, 'and was beginning to move in society, I immediately began flirting a great deal, and I remember my mother saying to me then: "You mustn't excite young girls when your intentions aren't serious. It isn't fair." I'm beginning to wonder whether I haven't behaved badly towards you.'

  'Good heavens, you haven't behaved badly towards me at all, not voluntarily. You're the most upright of men....'

  'Me, upright! I lie the whole time.'

  He blinked his eyelids. Why had this cry escaped his lips? He felt a violent flush rise to his cheeks, and bowed his head.

  'Of course you sometimes lie, like everyone else. All the same you're the most upright, the most noble of men.'

  'Nobility again! You're going to make me take a violent dislike to myself one of these days with all this talk of nobility, and it would be a bore for me to dislike myself. I shall have to say to you what I said to an Italian servant who had worked for some prince or other and who, when he came to work for me, used to call me "Your Honour" at every turn. "If Your Honour would care...." "I think Your Honour had better. . . ." Finally I got so irritated that I said to him: "Don't keep talking about my honour. You'll end up by making it real".'

  'How impossible you are! Always joking at the most solemn moments ... Anyway, whether you like it or not, I repeat: you're an absolutely upright man. But you've been guilty of a certain rashness as far as I'm concerned. You shouldn't have let me get to this point.'

  It was on the tip of his tongue to answer: 'Haven't I given you enough proofs of my indifference?' but he could not bring himself to do so. What he said was:

  'So friendship isn't possible between a young man and a young woman?'

  'Oh yes, the sort of impotence such a friendship represents must be possible in certain cases. With a very young girl for instance. When I was eighteen, I should have asked for nothing better than what I have now: a masculine friendship, especially with you, would have been everything I desired. But being the woman I am, a woman of whose age, loneliness, anguish, desperation and need for love you are not unaware, how could I help falling in love with such a magnificent friend as you? I offered you my love; you rejected it. But when I told you I was coming to Paris, far from making it clear to me that you did not want to see me again, as you ought to have done . . .' ('There's my reward!' thought Costals), 'you invited me to dinner. You encouraged me to think about you, you showed me that I wasn't unattrac
tive to you. . . ('That's a good one!') 'You've done everything you possibly could to make me lose my heart to you. Because in refusing yourself, dear sir, you offer yourself. And that is what you will not see. To allow oneself to be loved is tantamount to loving. You are wrong in thinking that one can only offer oneself by promises or caresses. You have offered yourself without either promises or caresses, but just as surely, in your good-natured frivolity. ... Do you know what your trouble is, Costals? Not being able to be nasty to me.'

  'Well, well, how profound we are! So that's it, I'm "too nice"?'

  'Yes, you are "too nice". In future, Costals, in your relations with women, don't be "too nice". Out of pity for them. And then you should drum this axiom into your head: "No friendships with unmarried girls." Because each one of them will believe you like her best. And because, unconsciously, you will give each of them the impression that you like her best. Even when you aren't trying to seduce, you behave like a seducer - and then you're genuinely astonished and furious afterwards, when the harm is done. You're so extraordinarily lacking in conceit! Perhaps that's what causes the trouble.'

  'But after all, I can't pretend there aren't thousands of men as intelligent as I am, and much better looking. Just look around, and you will surely find one who will give you back as much as you give and more.'

  'How exasperating you are! I'd like to give you a good shaking. I'm sick and tired of telling you that a woman only loves once, and that for me you are that once, you are irreplaceable as far as I'm concerned. You refuse to face the reality, which is that my true life is my love for you.'

  'I don't know which of the two of us won't face up to reality,' he said gently.

  'And besides, what a charming answer: "Why don't you look elsewhere?" to a woman who tells you: "I love you more than my life. Or rather, quite simply, you are my life".'