Dimanche and Other Stories (3 page)

The street was empty, and a bluish mist seemed to float over everything, as if a fine shower of ash had begun to fall gently from the overcast sky. The golden star of a streetlamp lit up the shadows, and the towers of Sainte-Clotilde looked as if they were retreating and melting into the distance. A little car full of flowers, returning from the country, went past; there was just enough light to see bunches of daffodils tied onto the headlights. Concierges sat outside on their wicker chairs, hands folded loosely in their laps, not talking. Shutters were being closed at every window, and only the faint pink light of a lamp could be glimpsed through the slats.

“In the old days,” remembered Agnes, “when I was Nadine’s age, I was already spending long hours waiting in vain for Guillaume.” She shut her eyes, trying to see him as he had been then, or at least how he had seemed to her then. Had he been so handsome? So charming? My God, he had certainly been thinner than he was now, his face leaner and more expressive, with a beautiful mouth. His kisses … she let out a sad, bitter little laugh.

“How I loved him … the idiot I was … stupid
idiot … He didn’t say anything loving to me. He just used to kiss me, kiss me until my heart melted with sweetness and pain. For eighteen months he never once said, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I want to marry you’ … I always had to be there, at his feet. ‘At my disposal,’ he would say. And, fool that I was, I found pleasure in it. I was at that age when even defeat is intoxicating. And I would think, ‘He will love me. I will be his wife. If I give him enough devotion and love, he will love me.’”

All of a sudden she had an extraordinarily precise vision of a spring evening long ago. But not a fine, mild one like this evening; it was one of those rainy, cold Parisian springs when heavy, icy showers started at dawn, streaming through the leafy trees. The chestnut trees now in blossom, the long day and the warm air seemed like a cruel joke. She was sitting on a bench in an empty square, waiting for him; the soaking box hedges gave off a bitter smell; the raindrops falling on the pond slowly, sadly marked the minutes drifting inexorably by. Cold tears ran down her cheeks. He wasn’t coming. A woman had sat down next to her and looked at her without speaking, hunching her back against the rain and tightly pinching her lips together, as if thinking, “Here’s another one.”

She bowed her head a little, resting it on her arms as she used to do in the old days. A deep sadness overcame her.

“What is the matter with me? I am happy really; I
feel very calm and peaceful. What’s the good of remembering things? It will only make me resentful and so pointlessly angry, my God!”

And a picture came into her mind of her riding in a taxi along the dark, wet avenues of the Bois de Boulogne; it was as if she could once again taste and smell the pure, cold air coming in through the open window, as Guillaume gently and cruelly felt her naked breast, as if he were squeezing the juice from a fruit. All those quarrels, reconciliations, bitter tears, lies, bad behavior, and then that rush of sweet happiness when he touched her hand, laughing, as he said, “Are you angry? I like making you suffer a bit.”

“That’s all gone, it will never happen again,” she said aloud despairingly. And all at once, she was aware of tears pouring down her face. “I want to suffer again.”

“To suffer, to despair, to long for someone! I have no one in the world left to wait for! I’m old. I hate this house,” she thought feverishly, “and this peace and calm! But what about the children? Oh yes, the illusion of motherhood is the strongest and yet the most futile. Of course I love them; they’re all I have in the world. But that’s not enough. I want to rediscover those lost years, the suffering of the past. But at my age love would be unpleasant. I’d like to be twenty! Lucky Nadine! She’s in Saint-Cloud, probably playing golf! She doesn’t have to worry about love! Lucky Nadine!”

She started. She had not heard the door open, nor
Nadine’s footsteps on the carpet. Wiping her eyes, she said abruptly, “Don’t put the light on.”

Without replying, Nadine came to sit next to her. It was dark now. Neither of them looked at each other. After a while Agnes asked: “Did you have a nice time, sweetheart?”

“Yes, thank you, Mama,” said Nadine.

“What time is it?”

“Almost seven, I think.”

“You’ve come back earlier than you thought,” Agnes said absentmindedly.

Nadine did not answer, wordlessly tinkling the thin gold bracelets on her bare arms.

“How quiet she is,” Agnes thought, slightly surprised. She said aloud, “What is it, sweetheart? Are you tired?”

“A bit.”

“You must go to bed early. Now go and wash, we’re going to eat in five minutes. Don’t make a noise in the hall. Nanette is asleep.”

As she spoke the telephone started ringing. Nadine suddenly looked up. Mariette appeared. “It’s for Miss Nadine.”

Nadine left the room, her heart pounding, conscious of her mother’s eyes on her. She silently closed the door of the little office where the telephone was kept.

“Nadine? It’s me, Rémi … Oh, we are angry, are we? Look, forgive me … don’t be horrid … well, I’m saying
sorry! There, there,” he said, as if coaxing a restive animal. “Be kind to me, my sweet … What could I do? She was an old flame, I was being charitable. Ah, Nadine, you can’t think the sweet nothings you give me are enough? Do you? Well, do you?” he repeated, and she heard the sweet, voluptuous sound of his laugh through his tightly closed lips. “You must forgive me. It’s true I don’t dislike kissing you when you’re cross, when your green eyes are blazing. I can see them now. They’re smoldering, aren’t they? How about tomorrow? Do you want to meet tomorrow at the same time? What? I swear I won’t stand you up … What? You’re not free? What a joke! Tomorrow? Same place, same time. I’ve said, I swear … Tomorrow?” he said again.

Nadine said, “Tomorrow.”

He laughed. “There’s a good girl,” he said in English. “Good little girlie. Bye-bye.”

NADINE RAN
into the parlor. Her mother had not moved.

“What are you doing, Mama?” she cried, and her voice, her burst of laughter, made Agnes feel bitter and troubled, almost envious. “It’s dark in here!”

She put all the lights on. Her eyes, still wet with tears, were sparkling; a dark flush had spread over her cheeks. Humming to herself, she went up to the mirror and tidied her hair, smiling at her face, which was now alight with happiness, and at her quivering, parted lips.

“Well, you’re happy all of a sudden,” Agnes said. She tried to laugh, but only a sad, grating little sound escaped her. She thought, “I’ve been blind! The girl’s in love! Ah, she has too much freedom, I’m too weak, that’s what worries me.” But she recognized the bitterness, the suffering in her heart. She greeted it like an old friend. “My God, I’m jealous!”

“Who was that on the telephone? You know perfectly well that your father doesn’t like telephone calls from people we don’t know, or these mysterious meetings.”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Mama,” Nadine said, as she looked at her mother with bright, innocent eyes that made it impossible to read the secret thoughts within them: Mother, the eternal enemy, pathetic in her old age, understanding nothing, seeing nothing, withdrawing into her shell, her only aim to stop youth from being alive! “I really don’t understand. It was only that the tennis match which should have happened on Saturday has been postponed until tomorrow. That’s all.”

“That’s all, is it!” Agnes said, and she was struck by how dry and harsh her own voice sounded.

She looked at Nadine. “I’m mad. It must have been my remembering the past. She’s still only a child.” For a moment she had a vision of a young girl with long black hair sitting in a desolate square in the mist and rain; she looked at her sadly and then banished her forever from her mind.

Gently she touched Nadine’s arm.

“Come along,” she said.

Nadine stifled a sardonic laugh. “Will I be as … gullible, when I’m her age? And as placid? Lucky Mother,” she thought with gentle scorn. “It must be wonderful to be so naive and to have such an untroubled heart.”

Les rivages heureux

[  THOSE HAPPY SHORES  ]

A YOUNG GIRL IN A BALL GOWN WALKED PAST: HER
back was thin and golden, and her fair hair was clipped behind her ears with diamond slides. Above her long, elegant neck her face was cold, sharp, and mocking; her cheeks were flushed from dancing. Mme. Boehmer smiled with melancholy delight as she looked at her daughter and thought, yet again, “How beautiful she is … so tall … her dress is charming.”

She moved aside to allow some couples to linger under the bunch of mistletoe decorated with blue ribbons that hung over the entrance. She sighed. She was old. New Year’s Eve, with its music, dancing, and young voices, disturbed and depressed her. Her tired, blotchy face betrayed exhaustion and her disillusion with life, tempered by grudging relief that the year had brought
neither death nor serious illness. She looked coldly at her daughter’s friends through her tortoiseshell-rimmed opera glasses. “What bad taste … all that makeup … and wearing jewelry that’s far too grown-up for them. Christiane is so different!”

Christiane, surrounded by her friends, was about to leave. Her mother gestured to her to wait. But the girl was glancing around her with the hard, triumphant look of a young woman who views the world as a mirror in which she sees only her own image, made lovelier by the interest or desire of a man; in Christiane’s eyes Mme. Boehmer, standing among the other mothers, was simply a pale, calm shadow, surrounded by other shadows.

Nevertheless, Mme. Boehmer touched her on the arm.

“Are you going home, sweetheart?”

“No, Mama, we’re finishing the evening at Marie-Claude’s.”

Mme. Boehmer gave a faint sigh.

“Oh? It’s two o’clock in the morning, Cri-Cri …”

“I know,” Christiane said impatiently. She added in a mocking tone, “I’m not seven anymore, Mama, darling,” and she bent to kiss her mother’s head with a birdlike peck.

Her friends treated Mme. Boehmer with the teasing condescension due to her age, her position as a mother, and her reputation as a simple soul, a good sort; although this was tempered by envious respect, for the
glory of Boehmer Sewing Machines was reflected on the dull, breathless old woman in her plain black dress. One of the girls thought to herself, as she took Christiane’s arm, “The rich old bag!”

Smiling, she asked, “Cri-Cri, are you going to meet Gerald? Do you want me to leave with you so your mother doesn’t notice anything?”

Christiane shrugged her beautiful shoulders, still gilded from the sunny beach at the Lido. “What a silly idea! I’ve got mother well trained, you know. Anyway, my parents know I’m engaged to Jerry and I’m twenty-two, after all.”

It was snowing outside. The trees in the Champ de Mars were hardly visible, dissolving into a white, icy mist, and every streetlight shone rosily through a halo of frost. Christiane started her car and drove off. She had rolled down the window; the wind blew snowflakes onto her hair and they melted into big, cold, heavy drops. She passed a group of men wearing pink paper hats. “How unspeakably vulgar these public holidays are,” Christiane thought. “This time next year, Gerald and I will be in Saint Moritz.”

She would often plan six months ahead, saying in her cold, sharp young voice, “In September, I’ll be doing this; in March it’ll be that. In June I’ll be at the Cowes Regatta, then Cannes for the summer.” Mme. Boehmer would murmur, “As long as everything goes to plan between now and then, Cri-Cri. Nothing is certain in
this life, my poor child.” But Christiane would reply, “Your generation didn’t know how to want things, Mama. You just have to know what you want.” In English, she would add, “Make up your mind and stick to it. That’s all.”

She crossed the Seine; a very faint lilac light appeared in the east. It was late. Gerald was waiting for her in the little bar in the Rue du Mont Thabor; they often met in this discreet and, at certain times, deserted spot.

As she approached their meeting place, her heart pounded against her ribs as usual. When she thought about him, she sometimes muttered hesitantly to herself, “Love?” This was said in the same way that you might tentatively mouth the name of a passerby you think you have recognized. Gerald had been putting off the official announcement of their engagement for two years. For the first year he had cleverly given their relationship a tinge of anguish and uncertainty that both pleased and annoyed her—and added a secret stab of pain to her passion for him.

She knew he was not ready to break off a long-standing affair. She accepted the situation with the clear-sightedness of her age, the clear-sightedness that some people mistakenly think is blindness, but it is only the young who can treat life and love like a game, because they have never been defeated or had to face cold reality.

Gerald, Jerry, Gérard Dubouquet was a young man
of twenty-five with green eyes, a long nose that tended to twitch like a fox, and fair hair. He was private secretary to Minister Laclos, whose wife was Gerald’s loving and jealous mistress. When Christiane spoke to Marie-Claude, her best friend and confidante, she would always say, “He doesn’t love her, you know, but he can’t leave her. It’s just physical, do you understand, darling?”

She could allow anything, forgive everything, if it was a matter of sex, of the weakness of the flesh. She had only a sketchy and incomplete understanding of love and would say rationally and calmly, “I’m not going to cause any problems, thank you very much. I’m not a little innocent; I know what I’m getting myself into.” She had a naive, exaggerated understanding of physical desire, rather like a child who, given her mother’s jewelry to play with, handles it with exaggerated yet touching respect, not realizing that the pearls she has been given are fake.

In Marie-Claude’s little sitting room, or in Christiane’s studio, they would talk about sex, about the trap of physical desire, about life “as it is, not as our mothers saw it, poor women.” They would shake their young heads knowingly, even though it was still children’s blood that flowed beneath the smooth skin of their faces. Gerald, meanwhile, could not bring himself to leave his mistress, who bored him, because he was afraid of making an enemy of her since she might turn the all-powerful
Laclos against him. For Gerald was at the age in which a man’s desire oscillates between ambition and money, and—as if he were a butterfly fluttering from one flower to another—he sometimes landed on the influential mistress, sometimes on the wealthy young girl, without being able to control his erratic flight. In any case, he thought so much about himself, and still felt so young and healthy, that he was loath to commit himself too soon, fearing that he might miss out on a greater happiness, and a larger dowry, that could be waiting for him just around the corner. He procrastinated, like a trader who is not sure what his goods are worth but prefers to wait rather than risk selling at too low a price.