Pity for Women Read online

  I know not why 'twas you I chose.

  What are you? A little thing like so many others, a dewdrop in the meadow. You might have had all the "negative qualities" in the world: do you think that would have stopped me? All you had to do was please me, and you couldn't help that. Picked out almost at random. That's how life goes - everything a matter of chance. Why this rather than that? In reality, there is no reason, or what reason there is is absolutely unimportant. For you, everything; for the others, nil. There's a terrible injustice there, and that is what I like about it. Not that I don't love justice too; I enjoy them both in turn. I had to tell you all this. In any case, you know that I enjoy telling you unpleasant things. It's part of my love for you.'

  She listened without really understanding, with a certain bewilderment that was natural enough. But she belonged to a world where writers were thought of as 'literary chaps, not to be taken too seriously'. As for him, he was glad that she did not answer, for whatever she had said would doubtless have been very different from what he himself thought. He went on:

  'There are so many worlds that are foreign to you. The world of knowledge. The world of justice. The world of suffering. The world of responsibility. You do not even suspect their existence. And I am only aware of them in flashes. A rocket soars, lights them up for a moment, then they are plunged in darkness once more. My darkness.

  'Yet I devote time and attention to you, I give you part of my substance, there are times when I speak to you as if I were speaking to some unknown world. How many of my words have reached their target? What a lot of wasted shots! Am I right, or am I wrong? A little girl. A little twenty-year-old bourgeois Parisian girl. There are those who will say: "So that's what you spend your time on! When the social structure ... When whole nations.... When empires ... Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" And there are others who will say: "This little soul is every bit as important as the soul of an entire nation. All the suffering caused throughout the world by the war weighs no more than the tears of this chit of a girl. If there was nothing else in your life but the fact that you treated her lovingly, you would have fulfilled your human role here below, you would have worked the tiny human plot that is allotted to each of us." Which of these two viewpoints is the right one? A vulgar and meaningless question. Both of them are right. You must immerse yourself in one of them until you have exhausted it, and then do the same with the other. They're two aspects of a single truth. Fancy writers tell us that truth is a diamond, but what they never stop to consider is how many facets this diamond may show. And now, quiet! Don't try to answer. There's no need for you to understand, as there's no need for me to know that you haven't understood.'

  He went and closed the shutters, [The columbarium overlooked the gardens of a convent (of which there were many in the district). The convent bells could be heard, and the nuns could be seen from the windows. The author has refrained from exploiting the too obvious contrasts.] drew the curtains, and modestly turned over a little card from a press-cutting agency which bore the legend 'WE SEE ALL' in large letters. His soul was still smouldering, as if under the influence of some life-giving spirit: this delectable brew was his cruelty to Andrée. He flung Solange, fully dressed, on to the bed, and straightened her legs out. From then on, he was like an apache trying to pin a man to the ground. Usually he dared not squeeze her too hard for fear of hurting her: she was so young! Now for the first time he was brutal with her, and although this was partly from necessity, because she struggled, it was also calculated, for he was determined to leave her with an unforgettable memory. She screamed, 'No! No!' with her mouth wide open and her head lolling from side to side, and he drank in her breath which no longer had the odour he knew but an odour which came from deeper down, as though her cries drew it up from the depths of her being. He could keep her head still only by seizing her tongue between his teeth and clenching them when she tried to move. And with every limb he systematically manhandled this thing which was Mlle Dandillot. Suddenly everything became easy and he let himself sink into a new sensation. She closed her eyes, and her plaints ceased. Meanwhile he was absorbed in his sensation, mediocre though it seemed. It gave him no more than an intellectual satisfaction: 'Well, that's done!' And he sniffed vaguely at this woman's face, as a lion, tearing chunks off the meat it holds between its paws, stops now and then to lick it.

  With one of the handkerchiefs embroidered for him by Andrée Hacquebaut, he wiped Solange's forehead and the curve of her nostrils, so divinely moist. Her head, having slipped between the pillows, was now tilted even further back, so that the long, pale curve of her neck and throat assumed more prominence than the face itself, on which there appeared a look of such complete surrender that he pressed her eyelids closed in alarm. Her lips were parted a little, disclosing the small teeth like those of a sheep's head on a butcher's stall. There are three smiles that have something in common: the smile of a corpse, the smile of a gratified woman, and the smile of a decapitated beast.

  He scrutinized her thus for a while, attentively. He was trying to differentiate her, to see in what way she was more than a mere body, more than an instrument for his caresses, more than a mirror in which to observe his own pleasure.

  He stretched himself out at her side. His soul, already clouded with intimations of sadness, took flight and hovered in realms remote from her. It was the primordial moment when man asks, as in the Gospel: 'Woman, what have I to do with thee?' The primordial moment of pity for women. Outside, the sky must have clouded over, for the room was now almost dark. He had visions of flabby, white-skinned women, women of infinite depravity, who lie in one's arms at nightfall as the lights spring up one by one around the city, and who say: 'Look ... there's a light... ' and whom one goes on holding, out of pity, making them believe that one loves them, out of pity. This memory brought back others: the whole of his life opened out like a peacock's tail, and all of it, past and future, was dotted with faces like the golden circles on a peacock's tail. He felt pity for this young creature alive at his side, her face nestling in the hollow of his left shoulder, where so many faces had lain. (If that shoulder had been a photographic plate, how many superimposed faces would have been visible there, and what a hideous monster the composite face that eventually appeared.... ) He felt pity for her for having placed herself in hands such as his (and yet, had he detected the slightest little ruse or merely precaution on her part, to protect herself, he would have held it against her). He felt pity for her because he did not love her more, could not find more reasons for loving her - and because for him she was but one among many, whereas for her he was the only one - and because of what she believed he was giving her, when in fact it was impossible for him to give it. He thought: 'One spends one's youth loving people one cannot possess fully (through shyness), and one's maturity loving people one cannot possess fully (through satiety).'

  One of his arms lay under Solange's head, but his face and body were turned away from her. There was a moment when he betrayed her so cruelly in his thoughts that he put out his hand to seek hers and comfort her, as if she must have guessed what was going on inside him (and also because, now that he no longer expected anything from Solange, he felt he must be doubly kind to her as though to counteract the suspension of his love). She turned and, without a word, kissed him on the cheek - still the same childish kisses, in spite of all that had happened. She had emerged from her stillness to do this, as a solitary wave rises above a calm sea. A cry burst from his heart: 'She can suffer because of me, but I cannot suffer because of her. I love her, yet it is not in her power to make me suffer. This game must end, this abominable one-sided game, so harmful to the weaker of us.' Then a voice rose: 'You say you love her, yet she cannot make you suffer: therefore you do not love her.' And he answered: 'Why must I always be lumped together with other people! I love her but she cannot make me suffer, because I am not like everybody else. I am not so easily hurt.' He was suddenly seized with a passion for truth that was either dazzling light or cloudy o
bfuscation, either a glory or a vice (one of his women had called it his 'catastrophic honesty'); he wanted to say to her: 'Little one, my darling little one, I had better warn you now: I do not love you enough. You too will have to stand aside for someone else. The day will come when I shall have even forgotten your face. I am of the wandering race of men. The day will come when I shall love other women, different women. Perhaps it has happened already!' (this was not true). 'Perhaps already I have stopped loving you ... Perhaps I have never loved you at all, my darling child...." But he knew that she was like all the rest, that she too, like the great ones of the earth, lived and fed almost exclusively on lies, and would soon die if the lies were to cease, and that Truth, anyway, is ipso facto reprehensible and punishable by law since, as everyone knows, she goes about naked. He said nothing, but squeezed her hand more tightly. 'The main thing is that she should be happy.' Then, with her face buried in his neck, she made a cooing noise which it would be feeble to describe as being like the cooing of a dove, for it literally was the cooing of a dove. He asked her what it meant. She answered, 'It means I'm happy,' in the same far-away voice, as of another self, the ghost of the little girl she had once been, speaking from the depths of her subconscious where it had sunk long ago.

  Then he remembered that there had been other women beside whom, lying thus after the act, he had not felt the same impulse to escape - others beside whom at such moments he had thought: 'I could die quite happily, like this. Now I really wouldn't mind dying, like this.' But lying there beside Solange, he did not say this to himself; no, he did not say to himself that he was ready to die.

  'The main thing is that she should be happy.' Once again, his lucid mind laid bare the underlying meaning of the words. And he saw that it hardly differed at all from what he had felt for many, many others, of the most diverse kinds (and what does it matter how a person behaves towards those he loves; his behaviour towards the rest is what really counts). He remembered the emotion he had felt on reading the words of that splendid old fossil Captain Hurluret in Les Gaîtés de l'Escadron, when he is eventually retired: 'I've been forty years in the service, and the only thing in all that time that really counts for me is the fellows I've stopped making fools of themselves and getting into trouble, the fellows for whom barrack-room life has been a little more tolerable thanks to me. And if, later on, there are some of them who remember their Captain and say: "He wasn't a bad sort, after all," I shall have had my reward.' On reading this, Costals had raised his head from the book. It had struck a deep chord in him, and he thought: 'I am the same sort of chap as Hurluret. Of course, there are other things in me, but I'm Hurluret as well.' And now he realized that underlying his words about Solange, his wish for her 'to be happy', was something not so very different from what he had felt towards his men during the war: 'Are the men happy? Is there anything wrong?' - or at home towards the servants, always going out of his way to see that they got their fair share of pleasure in this world - or towards the hired native in the colonies, getting up in the middle of the night to give him an extra blanket because he had heard him cough in his sleep - or towards the almost unknown vagrant he had sheltered under his roof as a guest, and with whom he identified himself through the mere fact of this hospitality. And so it was for all that race of men and women encountered by chance, to whom he had given more than any other man would have given in his place - given not for the sake of 'principle', not because he believed that good was preferable to evil - given without even any preconceived ideas about the world, for he had come to the conclusion long since that no definition holds water, that 'the people' are not this or that, that 'natives' or 'women' or 'Frenchmen' are not this or that, that all is in everything, that the good are also bad and the bad also good - given, finally, without the least thought that it might be counted to his credit somewhere, in the hearts of these men and women, who had promptly forgotten him, or in the eyes of public opinion, which knew nothing of his actions, either before those human tribunals where the riff-raff dispense injustice, or before that supreme tribunal in which he did not believe and of which all he could say was that if it existed, and if one day he were to appear before it (as he no doubt would, having always lived without giving much heed to the Law), hundreds of people would come and bear witness in his favour. And he saw that there, too, Solange Dandillot was one of a crowd, and he pitied her for not being more clearly set apart.

  He lay there, no longer thinking about her. 'What are you thinking about?' she asked, a little alarmed by his silent daydreaming. 'About you.' A slight, very slight and tenuous thread of boredom pierced his consciousness. Then he thought: 'One day I shall put that image of her teeth, like those of a decapitated sheep, in one of my books. I use her!' At the thought that he made use of Solange, his throat tightened as if he were about to cry. But suddenly another thought leapt up like a dolphin out of a calm sea: 'I've been told often enough that I was wrong, "criminal" even, in not taking a girl who offered herself to me. Nature, society, public opinion, are you satisfied now? Well? I bet I still haven't got it right.' Amused by this thought, he was encouraged to say some things which he found a bit difficult. He sat up, and leaning over her, said with a smile: 'Well, my little Dandillot, now you're my mistress! You see the way things happen ... Now see if you can get away from me.'

  She frowned a little, and he smoothed out the furrows with his thumb.

  'You said "no" when it happened, so your honour is safe. . . . There's another thing, rather less agreeable. Do you know what a woman does when she ... '

  He gave her some pharmaceutical advice in a whisper. He would have liked the room to be darker still, as dark as night. Several times he repeated: 'I'm ashamed to have to tell you these things.... ' But it was not 'these things', or having to say them, which made him feel ashamed: he knew that there was nothing shameful about them, that on the contrary they were beneficent and therefore moral. But he was ashamed of having said them so many times before. Eventually she got up without saying a word, and disappeared into the next room.

  He sat down in an armchair. From the bathroom came the familiar sounds of the different water-pipes. 'Now she's doing this, now she's doing that...." The almost identical similarity between this moment and hundreds of others he had been through plunged his soul in melancholy. 'For her, it's something so new, so surprising.... For me it's all so stale.' His melancholy would have been less had his pleasure been really spectacular. But far from it; and he was well aware that Solange had derived no more pleasure from the act than he had.

  She came back, and with her hands on the arms of his chair, leaned over him, compassionately, in a very 'womanly' gesture; they were like two castaways flung up together on the shore. But so completely did she seem to share his sadness that this sadness vanished. He went and sat on the divan, and made her sit beside him. Then he said:

  'Yes, all this is very painful. And yet, when I showed you that woman just now, although it was indeed for the reasons I explained, it was also in order to show you what becomes of a girl who doesn't do the necessary when she should. You see, there's only one way of loving women, and that's by making love to them. There's only one way of doing them good, and that's by taking them in one's arms. Incense needs warmth in order to give out its perfume; women too need that particular warmth to give out theirs. All the rest - friendship, esteem, intellectual sympathy - is an illusion, without love, and a cruel illusion, too. For illusions are the cruel things: with realities one can always get by. You remember the words of St Paul: "The prudence of the flesh is the death of the soul." I know many unsatisfactory marriages where the trouble is entirely due to the husband's "respect" for the wife: a wife should be treated like a mistress, and not just in fits and starts but all the time; whether it's easy or not is irrelevant. That silly little get-together we had just now disappointed you, no doubt, as it did me; but it takes six months for a young Frenchwoman to learn how to be properly excited. You've only got to touch an Italian or a Spanish girl and she pract
ically swoons; but French girls are slow starters and it's the devil of a job to give them any pleasure: I usually reckon six months to get things right. Perhaps some harm may come from my having taken you; but since you love me, it would have been just as hurtful - to you - if I had refrained. And in any case you're twenty- one. Of course I don't mean it's the autumn of a woman's life, but all the same, the way things are going now.... Why, in this year's Miss World beauty competition, the age-limit was twenty-two ... Come, my beauty, let time work for you. The day will come when you will sense my desire from afar, and will welcome it. We shall be attuned to each other like a pair of runners in a three-mile race - both working hand in glove. We shall speak to one another in our silences. You will want what I want, I shall want what you want. So you'll no longer want darkness when you are in my arms; you will want broad daylight, the better to see me with, and you will see me ... What will keep me going when I am old? The books I have written and the pleasure I have given women.'