G. (28 page)

Madame Hennequin and Mathilde Le Diraison are riding in a dilapidated carriage with a hood with holes in it and a driver with a straw hat, along the Via al Calvario, towards the church of San Quirico, which lies to the south, ten minutes from the centre of Domodossola.

They met G. in the Piazza Mercato. He greeted them quickly and, looking at Camille, said: Your husband with a pistol in his hand has just threatened to shoot me if I speak to you again. I must speak to you again. I will wait for you both at the church of San Quirico. We cannot talk here. Come as soon as you can. Then, without allowing them time to reply, he stepped back into the arcade and was gone.

Your friend is nothing if not dramatic, remarks Mathilde.

Do you think it is true?

That Maurice threatened him, yes.

He didn’t have a gun.

Every man has some friend who has a pistol.

Do you think Maurice is capable of killing him?

For you, my dear, men will do anything! Mathilde laughs.

Please be serious.

Do you feel serious?

When Camille heard that her husband had threatened him with a gun, she was reminded of her wedding day. Her anger at the injustice of her husband’s action, her shame on her husband’s behalf, her resentment at the fact that her husband had ignored her protestations and appeals, made her acutely aware that she was his wife, or, more accurately, that she had become his wife according to her own choice. Up to this moment being Madame Hennequin had seemed to be part of her natural life; her marriage was part of the same continuity which led from her childhood through young womanhood
to the present. There had been misunderstandings and disagreements between her and her husband, but never before had she felt that the course of her life was out of her control, that what was happening was unnatural to her. She remembered how, at their wedding, Maurice and she had knelt, isolated, alone, in front of the entire congregation, but side by side so that she could feel his warmth, in order to receive communion. He had knelt shyly and with what she then believed to be true humility. Now she imagined him getting to his feet with a pistol in his hand and a look of blank unfeeling on his face.

Suddenly amazement overcame her anger with a thought which restored to her a little of her natural identity, which suggested that she was not entirely helpless and which confirmed her sense of being blindly wronged by her husband. This thought was: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me because he can see me as I am.

No, I do not feel serious, says Camille.

You should persuade them to fight a duel for you.

That is what I told Maurice. He said it wasn’t modern.

I don’t see what being modern or not has to do with it. Men don’t change in that respect.

Do you think we do? asks Camille.

You are changing. You are transformed. You are a different person from what you were two days ago. If you could see yourself now—

What would I see?

A woman with two men in love with her!

Mathilde, please promise me one thing—do not, on any account, leave me alone with him.

Not if you both insist?

I am serious now. I cannot see him unless you promise me this.

Fortunately Harry is not jealous. Well, he is jealous, but not to the point of shooting or threatening. Afterwards he may make a scene in private with me, but I can put a stop to that quite quickly.

It would be as much as his life is worth, says Camille, please promise me.

I think Harry is the type of man who might under certain conditions shoot himself, but he would never shoot anybody else. What do you think
he
would do—Mathilde nods in the direction they are going—if he had reason to be jealous?

Jealous of me? asks Camille.

Yes, says Mathilde smiling.

When she thought: Under the threat of being shot, he still wants to speak to me, her vision of his appearance altered. The alteration was also retrospective. What she had noticed but not remembered came to light. Hundreds of details assembled to form the whole man before her. He attracted everything she had seen him do. Her impressions rushed towards him, attached themselves to him, as though magnetized, and, covering him, became his characteristics. His head addressed her. She saw into it. The head was larger than average. It lunged forward when he spoke. Thick curls fell over the back of his neck. The tops of his ears entered other thickets. His hands with which he gesticulated were smaller than average. The veins on them were rather pronounced. The missing teeth, when his mouth was open, made it seem wider than it was. The gaze of his eyes was insistent. His feet, like his hands, were small. His walk was light and fastidious and in contrast to the heavy thrust of his head and shoulders. She found each physical characteristic eloquent of an aspect of his nature, as a mother may find the characteristics of her infant before it can talk or sit up.

I think he would kill me and then himself, says Camille, laughing.

Where does he live? It would be fortunate if it were Paris.

I don’t know. He says he is half English and half Italian.

That might explain a lot, remarks Mathilde.

Please promise me, says Camille.

Has he told you how he lost his teeth?

Mathilde, listen to me, this could be a matter of life and death.

He has an expression that I’ve only seen on one other man.

Who? asks Camille.

He was a friend of my husband’s, an Armenian who fell in love with me.

Exasperation wells up with tears in Camille’s eyes. Mathilde lowers her voice and whispers: Camille, you can trust me. But you are naive about such situations. The danger is Maurice, and there you can depend on me.

Camille rests her head back against the dusty leather upholstery and lays her gloved white hand on Mathilde’s arm.

How hot it is today! says Mathilde. There are days when grand passion is just not possible. The weather is a woman’s best friend!

We shall be there too soon. I don’t want to have to wait for him. Mathilde, ask him to drive more slowly.

Camille touches the fringe of her hair and stares at her own hand. It looks to her extremely small and delicate, likewise her wrists and forearms. She wants to appear as fresh and as intricate as white lace (she remembers a painting she once saw of a girl on a swing in a garden in Montpellier whose petticoats were bordered with white lace). She wants to appear like that in this green, overgrown, remote landscape for a few minutes before her enforced return to Paris where there are more clothes than trees and the streets are like rooms.

The carriage stops by the church. The same Fiat car in which they made the trip to Santa Maria Maggiore is parked in the shade of a plane tree. There is nobody to be seen. They ask the driver to wait. He nods, gets down and lies on the grass by the side of the road. One of the brass lamps on the Fiat is dazzling in the sun. Camille lowers her head and, pointing her parasol towards the ground, opens it; Mathilde points hers at the sky to open it. They walk together round the church.

He is on the north side sitting on a stone bench. He kisses Camille’s hand and then immediately takes Mathilde’s arm and saying: You are her friend, she confesses to you and so I need not explain what has happened to us. He leads her away towards a path bordered by gravestones. Camille makes as though to follow them. He turns. No, he says, please wait. Sit where I was sitting.

It is very quiet. The doors of the church are locked. There is nobody on the road. It is hard to believe that they have driven no further than the outskirts of the town. To Camille the silence sounds abnormal. She believes that on ordinary mornings carts pass along the road, children play near by, the priest prays in his church, peasants work in the fields. In the silence she can hear the beating of her own heart and his voice, but she cannot distinguish his words.

He is telling Mathilde that he and she will surely meet again and that he will always be in her debt, if she agrees to his plan. He loves Camille: he has never been alone with her: he can no longer write to her: all he asks is that Mathilde take the carriage and
wait by the Rosmini College—the driver will know it—where he and Camille will join her by motor car in half an hour. He needs that little time to explain his feelings to the woman with whom he has fallen so desperately in love. He speaks lightly, as though he has no need to convince Mathilde, or as though he knows it is hopeless to try to convince her.

Whilst appealing to Mathilde, he is careful to remain in sight of Camille, to speak conspiratorially in Mathilde’s ear, to make Mathilde laugh once or twice, to continue holding her arm and to give their collusion every appearance of intimacy.

The lightness with which he speaks intrigues Mathilde. It does not force her to decide whether he is telling the truth or not. If what he said was too credible, she would be obliged, as Camille’s friend, to find it incredible. If what he said was obviously untrue, she would be obliged to tell him so. As it is, the question of the truth of what he is saying does not arise, because in the way he speaks he assumes that she already knows the truth. Which she doesn’t. And the fact that she doesn’t arouses a very acute curiosity in her. If she cannot discover the truth directly, then Camille must discover it and tell her. The truth, she feels, will not be terrible for, if it were, he would not assume so easily and naturally that she already knows it. She trusts him immediately because he gives her no reason to. It is Maurice that Mathilde does not trust. And in order to convince herself that she is not being reckless on her friend’s behalf, she imagines how it would be possible for her to ask Harry, who is in a position to put considerable professional pressure on Maurice, to persuade Maurice to be more reasonable. She says she will take the carriage to the college if Camille agrees.

Camille watches them walking up and down behind the gravestones which, old and eroded, are the shape of half-eaten biscuits. The anomaly of the situation makes Camille angry and impatient. Why, she asks, must she, after all the risks she has taken, sit here whilst Mathilde jokes with him over there? She decides that she must speak to him by herself.

A few minutes later the driver gets up from the grass, rubbing his knees. Mathilde steps into the carriage and waves to Camille. Don’t be long, she cries, I can’t work miracles. As the carriage, which is
crookedly suspended over its back axle, departs down the deserted road, Camille thinks: Mathilde believes that in Paris I may become the mistress of this man with whom I have just agreed to be left alone.

There is a look which can come into the eyes of a woman (and into the eyes of a man, but very rarely) which is without pride or apology, which makes no demand, which promises no adventure. As an expression, signalled by the eyes, it can be intercepted by another; but it is not addressed, in the usual sense of the word, to another: it takes no account of the receiver. It is not a look which can enter into the eyes of a child for children are too ignorant of themselves: nor into the eyes of most men for they are too wary: nor into the eyes of animals because they are unaware of the passing of time. By way of such a look romantic poets thought they saw a path leading straight to a woman’s soul. But this is to treat it as though it were transparent, whereas in fact it is the least transparent thing in the world. It is a look which declares itself to be itself; it is like no other look. If it is comparable with anything, it is comparable with the colour of a flower. It is like heliotrope declaring itself blue. In company such looks are quickly extinguished for they encourage neither discourse nor exchange. They constitute social absence.

His desire, his only aim, was to be alone with a woman. No more than that. But they had to be deliberately, not fortuitously, alone. It was insufficient for them to be left alone in a room because they happened to be the last to leave. It had to be a matter of choice. They had to meet in order to be alone. What then followed was a consequence of being alone, not the achievement of any previous plan.

In the company of others women always appeared to him as more or less out of focus. Not because he was unable to concentrate upon them but because they were continuously changing in their own regard as they adapted themselves to the coercions and expectations of the others around them.

He was alone with Camille, walking back to the north side of the
church which was in the shade. He took her arm. He could feel with his fingers that it was warmer on the inside than on the outside. He was overcome by a sense of extraordinary inevitability. The feeling did not surprise him. He knew that it would arrive, but he could not summon it at will. He felt the absoluteness of the impossibility of Camille being, in any detail, in the slightest trace, different from what she was; he felt she was envisaged by everything which preceded her in time and everything which was separate from her in space; the place always reserved for her in the world was nothing less than her exact body, her exact nature; her eyes in tender contrast to her mouth, her small breasts, her thin rakelike hands with their bitten fingernails, her way of walking with unusually stiff legs, the unusual warmth of her hair, the hoarseness of her voice, her favourite lines from Mallarmé, the regularity of her smallness, the paleness of—with this concentration of meaning which he experienced as a sense of inevitability, came the onset of sexual desire.

I want to tell you, she said—

Your voice, he interrupted, is also like a cicada, not only a corn-crake. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

I want to tell you, she repeated, that I love my husband dearly. He is the centre of my life and I am the mother of his children. I consider he was wrong to threaten you, and I want you to know that I gave him no grounds, absolutely no grounds, for believing that he needed to threaten you. He discovered the foolish note you wrote to me—

Foolish? We have met, we are alone, we are talking to each other—and that is all I asked of you. Why was it foolish?