The Girls Read online

  'How lucky you are to find that simple. As far as I'm concerned we're in a stew, a real sentimental stew.'

  'You talk about love like a schoolboy. You ought to be ashamed of your childishness about such a subject.'

  'A man without childishness is a monster.'

  'You're a monster because you're too childish.'

  Her voice was full of tears. Costals went on in a more affable tone:

  'You're the one who's absurd, my poor girl, for giving me the power to make you unhappy. Do you know how I'd like you to be? I'd like to be able to say the most cruel and wounding things to you without your minding in the least.'

  Her only reply was a shrug of the shoulders. Then she added:

  '"My poor girl." Careful, don't start being "too nice" again.'

  'Well, I must say you really are maddening! If I'm brusque with you it won't do. If I'm nice to you it won't do. I'm getting fed up with all this slop. After all, what am I doing here?'

  Costals had never taken much part in the emotional brawling which women try to impose on any man who comes near them, not even with the ones he liked. And to have to indulge in it with a woman he was indifferent to....

  But it was too much for Andrée. The tears gushed from her eyes.

  'There, there, my dear girl! Stop crying. If women only knew how much they lose by their whimperings. A man has to be a saint, when he sees they're hurt, not to want to hurt them more. But I am such a saint. Although ... women have to be continually enlightened (I mean one always has to be explaining to them), enlightened, pampered, consoled, petted, appeased. I must admit I've no vocation for wet-nursing or for handling cases of porcelain. I like the things of the heart to be treated fairly briskly, without too much fuss, without going on about it as if there weren't other things in life. I believe that the more one really loves, the less one talks about it. … You silly girl, do you want to kill yourself!' (He had grasped her by the arm. She was so distraught that in crossing the street she had allowed a car to brush past her in a quite terrifying way.) 'Well, you're lucky I didn't push you under it! It's a sort of reflex I have with women when a car goes by. Especially with those I like best. However, up to now I've always resisted the impulse. And in your case, as you see, I had the reflex to protect you. And yet you complain!'

  'No, Costals, I don't complain. I know you're fond of me. There are moments when I think of you as a kindly father figure, and of how nice it would have been to be created, re-created by you from scratch. Have I reproached you? If so, forget it. I can't imagine what nonsense I must have talked … I'm not myself today … I don't want you to feel under any obligation towards me. Even if, one day, by some miracle of fate, I were to acquire a privileged position with you, I wouldn't wish for any other bond between us but your tenderness, never your pity or your charity, as with the flower-seller . ..'

  'What she doesn't want is the one thing I can give her,' Costals thought to himself. 'And what's this "miracle of fate" that might give her a privileged position with me? What new chimera is she riding off on now?'

  It was perhaps the third or fourth time they had walked round the square des Etats-Unis, marked by the dainty feet of countesses and dotted with statues of Liberators and Benefactors and Enthusiasts. The leaves of the spindle-trees glowed in the nocturnal gloom, as though each manservant daily polished the foliage opposite the house of his noble master. The windows with their closed shutters called to mind a row of strong-boxes in the vaults of a bank. There were a few humble people about who, in this opulent setting, looked like prisoners-of-war working for the enemy: black-faced coal-men, paid to be disfigured; a little butcher's boy bringing the countesses' meat, slipping down through a tiny tradesmen's entrance, like a cat through a hole in a door. It was Costals who noticed these things, because his mind was free. Andrée noticed nothing. Novelists have always gone into elaborate detail about the settings in which their lovers meet; but only the novelists notice these details; the lovers see nothing, immersed as they are in their slop.

  As they circled the square des Etats-Unis, Andrée noticed only the darkness of its green arbours, its lonely paths, and that almost suspect nook with its benches (just behind the statue of the Enthusiast), and her crazy hopes revived: here she was among these groves at night with this man, and - whether he kissed her or not - he could not have brought her there by chance. And he had called her 'my dear'. Would a man say 'my dear' to a woman he was indifferent to, to a woman with whom he did not feel to some extent intimate? Perhaps he would, after all (when one lives at Saint-Léonard one ends up by not knowing what's done and what isn't). And he had taken her by the arm and said 'Silly girl!' For the first time, he had touched her. (At that moment she had raised her eyes to see if she could read the plaque bearing the name of the street, so that for the rest of her life this memory should be linked to a precise spot.) She began to believe that he had held her arm for a long time, squeezing it in a meaningful way, and that a man did not say 'Silly girl!' unless he felt a certain tenderness. All her earlier clear-sightedness - 'You give each one the impression that you like her best' - had dimmed, like a sky clouding over. Passionately she wished that he would take her arm, or that she could dare to take his. But they left the square with its dark thickets, and her hopes subsided. Where was he leading her now? Were they going to resume their fearful chase through those streets in which there was nothing but chemists and flower-shops? [A symbol, perhaps, of the ruling class (Author's note).] Once, indeed, she had complained of the cold, but he had replied with a winning air: 'A nice dry cold … Very healthy!'

  'Anyhow,' he said, 'we must clear up this question of friendship between men and women.'

  'No, no, let's forget it, there's no point … '

  'Well then, here we have an intelligent, shrewd (when she chooses to be), cultivated, self-made girl, a girl who knows my work better than I do myself, and knows it intelligently – in short, a girl worthy of the highest praise. She vegetates in Saint-Léonard (Loiret), that is to say in an indescribable backwater … '

  'I beg your pardon,' she said with a smile, 'Saint-Léonard (Loiret) has three thousand one hundred and eighty inhabitants. Important textile mills. Birthplace of the great agronomist Leveilley …'

  Now she was trying to adopt his tone. She felt rather ridiculous being a woman, and thought he was quite right to be a healthy, cheerful overgrown schoolboy made for bachelor friendships and easy-going love affairs, whose only fault was to be too down-to-earth and not to take himself seriously enough.

  'I offer this interesting young woman the sympathy which is her due. She seems very pleased. For years she goes on telling me in a thousand different ways that I have saved her,

  that I "have given her nothing but joy" … You see, I know your letters by heart too,' he interjected, succumbing once more to his natural imprudence.... 'One fine day, I realize she's going to fall in love with me, and that I shall be unable to respond adequately to her love, because I'm not a man of love but a man of pleasure. (Yes, there it is, I like pleasure. And pleasure likes me too.) So I take up my finest pen and I write to her and say: "Dear Mademoiselle, I have regretfully perceived that you were about to fall in love with me. Don't deny it: I saw it with my lynx-like eye (am I, or am I not, our 'eminent psychologist'?) And so, from today onwards, nothing doing. I shall write to you no more. I shall return your letters unopened. When you come to Paris, 'Monsieur is away'. I opened the door of enlightenment to you; now I am closing it again. I dragged you away from the birthplace of the great agronomist Leveilley; now I am sending you back there. Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. The best of luck to you." I ask you to consider a moment, quite calmly, what you would have thought of such a letter. You don't answer? Well, you would have thought this: "He's a swine. What a fine friendship he must have had for me, when it can be destroyed at one blow! And what conceit! He thinks every woman wants to fling herself at him. Just like men. You talk to them of friendship: they assume you mean sex. Afterwards they accuse you of thinkin
g of nothing else." You would have suffered then what you are suffering now, and with good reason. Why didn't I write you that letter? Because I didn't want to lose your friendship, because I knew that my friendship was a help to you, and because I should have loathed

  myself for plunging a dagger into your heart ... Well, then, did I behave badly in not breaking with you?'

  'Of course not, I know very well how kind you are.'

  'You'll have to pay a forfeit every time you mention my kindness.'

  'Oh, you're really too mischievous,' she said, half laughing.

  It was true, she no longer knew whether he was kind or cruel. Now she was rather inclined to think that it was she who was in the wrong. But she no longer really knew; everything was getting mixed up in her mind. What she would have liked would have been to be back at her hotel; alone with herself, decanting all the happiness and all the pain he had poured into her, to see which, the happiness or the pain, would float above the other. What she would have liked most of all was not to feel cold any more. But at the hotel she would still be cold. She repeated to herself a saying of Costals': 'Cold is a disease of the planet', and more especially a remark of St Thérèse of Lisieux, a remark so ordinary on the surface, but in reality most moving: 'You don't know what it's like to have been cold for seven years.' She was worn out (they had been walking for two hours) and her fatigue was befuddling her brain; her eyelids were aching, and she could feel a headache coming on. She said to herself: 'What a night it's going to be!' But having invoked his presence month after month at Saint-Léonard, she could never be the first to put an end to it. She would collapse, exhausted, on to the pavement rather than give the signal for his 'Good-bye, dear Mademoiselle. I'll get in touch with you one of these days.'

  In the avenue Marceau the north wind swept out from each side-street with a bombastic flourish. From the top of the avenue Pierre-Ier the Champs-Elysées could be seen below, a valley of light. She longed for him to decide to go down there. She would be warmed by those lights, those human beings.

  the noise, the movement, the luxury. They would go into a café and listen to some music: she would show him a shop where there were 'ensembles' for 390 francs - incredible, they might have come from one of the big fashion houses ... but no, that would be impossible, it might look like cadging.... Suddenly, for the first time, it struck her that he had not thought of buying her a few francs' worth of flowers at any of the florists they had passed, even though they had stopped in front of one of them. No, not even One of those bunches of violets which, he had so tactfully informed her, he used to buy 'for his girl-friends'. In fact he had never given her anything at all except books - oh yes, he was generous enough with books ('You see, I'm an intellectual girl ... so naturally!...'). She fought against the unexpected bitterness it caused her, considering it naïve and vulgar. But Costals turned his back on the Champs-Elysées, the Promised Land, and plunged once more down one of the drearier streets, as though he took pleasure in pacing up and down like a caged beast, as though he enjoyed this spasmodic, nightmarish flight, like some legendary descent into hell. Almost fainting, her thighs aching with fatigue, dabbing at a drip on the end of her nose ('I'm sure my nose is red'), biting her lips from which she thought the cold and the pain must have drained all colour, and, with all this, a pressing need to obey a little call of nature, she heard him hold forth ('hold forth' was the word that came to her mind, she was so weary of him):

  'According to your theory, then, the magnificent realm of friendship between man and woman would become forbidden territory. Women would be penned in the "heart and senses" domain, incapable of being raised to a nobler, more rarefied world. And, for fear of disappointing them, a man would have to avoid social contact with any young women not destined for his bed, licit or illicit - in other words, when all is said and done, the vast majority of women. He would have to rush past them with lowered eyes like a seminarist: "Noli me tangere, ladies! Because you might think I was in love with you, which I'm very far from being - no offence meant." Or like the young Kabyles. A Kabyle once told me that, in his village, boys who had reached the age of fifteen and were not yet married were packed off by their parents to Algiers, so as not to be an object of temptation to the girls of the village. And whenever they returned to the village for a few days (on the occasion of a funeral, a wedding, or for the feast of A'id) they had to give warning of their comings and goings by shouting "tree, tree, tree", so that the girls could go and hide, such a temptation were boys to them. In future I too shall say "tree, tree, tree", so that the girls can take cover. Or rather I shall have a rattle, like a leper.... '

  He went on to say something rather cruel: 'Girls are like those stray dogs you can't throw a friendly glance at without their assuming that you're calling them and will welcome them with open arms, and without their wagging their tails and scrabbling at your trouser-legs.'

  He embroidered on this. As always when he was talking or writing to someone he was indifferent to, he said more or less anything that came into his head (Andrée had never been aware of this in their relations with each other). Just as matadors regard anything that happens to them in bull-rings outside Spain, successes as well as failures, as non-existent, so Costals, a born writer, really only took trouble with one of his modes of expression - books. Conversation and correspondence belonged to the sphere of relaxation and spare time; in those spheres he did not mind what he said; it did not count.

  Suddenly he stopped dead.

  'Do you understand what I'm saying?'

  'Of course.'

  'Well, I don't. For some time now it's ceased to have any meaning - pure word-spinning. If you can't see that, what's the use of talking to you? In short,' he concluded, 'since, according to you, it was my duty to break with you, and I've delayed all too long, it's quite simple.... I cannot give you what you want from me. Let us, therefore, cease to know one another.'

  'No! No!' cried Andrée, springing up from the depths of her torpor, 'you have no right to desert me now. But you're not serious, are you?'

  ' "Have no right",' Costals thought. 'Ah, well, as I've always said, the trouble with charity is that you have to go on with it.'

  As though she had read his thoughts, she went on:

  'Loving commits one, doing good commits one. One hasn't the right to love people in the same way as one dispenses charity, anonymously, without entering their lives.

  'Let's stay as we are, then. Only, from now on, don't complain of the situation. You're the one who wants it.'

  'I shall never complain of anything again, I give you my solemn word. There's only one thing I want: not to lose you.

  You know what the key to it all is,' she said point-blank. 'The fact that you're a man who has always jilted and never been jilted. One can sense it.'

  'It's not true. I've been jilted twice, and in the most cruel way.'

  'And ... you were hurt?'

  'No, I found it quite natural. What could be more legitimate than to have had enough of someone? I've felt it too often myself not to understand it in others. When I see a woman with whom I've had months of intimacy drop me from her life overnight, no longer want to have anything to do with me, I recognize myself.'

  She was silent, as though stunned. But then he said:

  'Goodness! I must leave you. I'm dining with some people at eight, and it's now ten to.'

  'Shall we see each other again?' she asked, feeling at the end of her tether, incapable of further speech, of uttering anything more than a few banal remarks.

  'Of course. I'll get in touch with you.'

  'Don't leave it too long.... If I write to you, you probably won't answer. To think that you've never given me your telephone number!'

  'I thought you were supposed not to complain anymore.'

  'Sorry.'

  'Even if I did give you my telephone number it wouldn't make any difference, because it's permanently switched off: "the silence of those infinite spaces" reassures me. And do you know who drove me
to take this step, which is irritating for friends or business people who want to talk to me, and inconvenient for me since I'm liable to miss things that might be important? Women, and women only. Women in general, with their daily or twice-daily calls, each one lasting a quarter of an hour, and always about nothing. And a particular category of women, who are the most dangerous of all: the women who love me and whom I do not love. Result: I get three express letters from women per day, always about nothing, of course. And there's nothing more exasperating than to be pestered with letters from people one doesn't love when one expects every post to bring a letter from somebody one does. Well, good-bye, dear Mademoiselle, and don't catch cold.'

  He had spoken to her in a tone that froze her to such an extent that she wondered whether she might not faint. She gave him her hand mechanically. She had no feeling left.

  She walked away. He called after her: 'Hey!'

  She stopped. He came up to her. Alternating waves of sincerity and trickery, of gravity and mockery, flashed across his features. And it was true that he felt more lively and restless than she, like a mischievous dog jumping round a sheep and having the greatest fun teasing it.

  'Am I a swine?'

  'I don't know. Leave me alone.... Leave me alone...."

  'Good-bye.'

  He went off, and after a few steps lit a cigarette. He felt ten years younger now that she was no longer there. A woman going away and leaving him alone meant ten years' reprieve if he did not love her. One or two years if he did.

  Andrée did not sleep a wink. Lying in bed, she turned over on her right side, and her anguish fell to the right, then on her left side, and her anguish fell to the left, like a lump inside her body. She kept wanting to change the position of her legs, which were still aching after the evening's frantic trek. The too-narrow sheet added to her misery: she kept finding herself uncovered, and felt (or believed) she was catching cold. In the morning, she cried from seven o'clock until twenty-five past. How cruel he had been, and at the same time how gentle! At all costs she must know 'where she stood' with him. She sent him an express letter, telling him she had cried from six to eight, and 'beseeching' him to telephone her at noon at the hotel. Having paid for the letter with a two- franc piece, she left the change to the post office clerk, who muttered a few sardonic words about forsaken women.