Nausea (25 page)

case, I saw no more of it; nothing was left but the yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches rose upward.

I got up and went out. Once at the gate, I turned back. Then the garden smiled at me. I leaned against the gate and watched for a long time. The smile of the trees, of the laurel, meant something; that was the real secret of existence. I remembered one Sunday, not more than three weeks ago, I had already detected everywhere a sort of conspiratorial air. Was it in my intention? I felt with boredom that I had no way of understanding. No way. Yet it was there, waiting, looking at one. It was there on the trunk of the chestnut tree ... it was the chestnut tree. Thingsùyou might have called them thoughtsùwhich stopped halfway, which were forgotten, which forgot what they wanted to think and which stayed like that, hanging about with an odd little sense which was beyond them. That little sense annoyed me: I could not understand it, even if I could have stayed leaning against the gate for a century; I had learned all I could know about existence. I left, I went back to the hotel and I wrote.

Night:

I have made my decision: I have no more reason for staying in Bouville since I'm not writing my book any more; I'm going to live in Paris. I'll take the five o'clock train, on Saturday I'll see Anny; I think we'll spend a few days together. Then I'll come back here to settle my accounts and pack my trunks. By March 1, at the latest, I will be definitely installed in Paris.

Friday:

In the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous." My train leaves in twenty minutes. The gramophone. Strong feeling of adventure.

Saturday:

Anny opens to me in a long black dress. Naturally, she does not put out her hand, she doesn't say hello. Sullenly and quickly, to get the formalities over with, she says:

"Come in and sit down anywhereùexcept on the armchair near the window."

It's really she. She lets her arms hang, she has the morose face which made her look like an awkward adolescent girl. But she doesn't look like a little girl any more. She is fat, her breasts are heavy.She closes the door, and says meditatively to herself:

"I don't know whether I'm going to sit on the bed. . . ."

Finally she drops on to a sort of chest covered with a carpet. Her walk is no longer the same: she moves with a majestic heaviness, not without grace: she seems embarrassed at her youthful fleshiness. But, in spite of everything, it's really Anny.

Anny bursts out laughing.

"What are you laughing at?"

As usual, she doesn't answer right away, and starts looking quarrelsome.

"Tell me why you're laughing."

"Because of that wide smile you've been wearing ever since you got here. You look like a father who's just married off his daughter. Come on, don't just stand there. Take off your coat and sit down. Yes, over there if you want."

A silence follows. Anny does not try to break it. How bare this room is! Before, Anny always used to carry an immense trunk full of shawls, turbans, mantillas, Japanese masks, pictures of Epinal. Hardly arrived at an hotelùeven if it is only for one night ùthan her first job is to open this trunk and take out all her wealth which she hangs on the walls, on lamps, spreads over tables or on the floor, following a changeable and complicated order; in less than thirty minutes the dullest room became invested with a heavy, sensual, almost intolerable personality. Perhaps the trunk got lostùor stayed in the check room. . . . This cold room with the door half-open on the bathroom has something; sinister about it. It looks likeùonly sadder and more luxuriousù like my room in Bouville.

Anny laughs again. How will I recognize this high-pitched, nasal little laugh?

"Well, you haven't changed. What are you looking for with that bewildered look on your face?"

She smiles, but studies my face with almost hostile curiosity.

"I was only thinking this room doesn't look as if you were living in it."

"Really?" she answers vaguely.

Another silence. Now she is sitting on the bed, very pale in her black dress. She hasn't cut her hair. She is still watching me, calmly, raising her eyebrows a little. Has she got nothing to say to me? Why did she make me come here? This silence is unbearable.

Suddenly, I say pitifully:

"I'm glad to see you."

The last word sticks in my throat: I would have done better to keep quiet. She is surely going to be angry. I expected the first fifteen minutes to be difficult. In the old days, when I saw Anny again, whether after a twenty-four-hour absence or on waking in the morning, I could never find the words she expected, the words which went with her dress, with the weather, with the last words we had spoken the night before. What does she want? I can't guess.

I raise my eyes again. Anny looks at me with a sort of tenderness.

"You haven't changed at all? You're still just as much of a fool?"

Her face shows satisfaction. But how tired she looks!

"You're a milestone," she says, "a milestone beside a road. You explain imperturbably and for the rest of your life you'll go on explaining that Melun is twenty-seven kilometres and Montargis is forty-two. That's why I need you so much."

"Need me? You mean you needed me these four years I haven't seen you? You've been pretty quiet about it."

I spoke lightly: she might think I am resentful. I feel a false smile on my mouth, I'm uncomfortable.

"What a fool you are! Naturally I don't need to see you, if that's what you mean. You know you're not exactly a sight for sore eyes. I need you to exist and not to change. You're like that platinum wire they keep in Paris or somewhere in the neighbourhood. I don't think anyone's ever needed to see it."

"That's where you're mistaken."

"Not I. Anyhow, it doesn't matter. I'm glad to know that it exists, that it measures the exact ten-millionth part of a quarter of a meridian. I think about it every time they start taking measurements in an apartment or when people sell me cloth by the yard."

"Is that so?" I say coldly.

"But you know, I could very well think of you only as an abstract virtue, a sort of limit. You should be grateful to me for remembering your face each time."

Here we are back to these alexandrine discussions I had to go through before when in my heart I had the simplest, commonest desires, such as telling her I loved her, taking her in my arms. Today I have no such desire. Except perhaps a desire to be quiet and to look at her, to realize in silence all the impor-tance of this extraordinary event: the presence of Anny opposite me. Is this day like any other day for her? Her hands are not trembling. She must have had something to tell me the day she wroteùor perhaps it was only a whim. Now there has been no question of it for a long time.

Anny suddenly smiles at me with a tenderness so apparent that tears come to my eyes.

"I've thought about you much more often than that yard of platinum. There hasn't been a day when I haven't thought of you. And I remembered exactly what you looked likeùevery detail."

She gets up, comes and rests her arms on my shoulders.

"You complain about me, but you daren't pretend you re-memebered my face."

"That's not fair," I say, "you know I have a bad memory."

"You admit it: you'd forgotten me completely. Would you have known me in the street?"

"Naturally. It's not a question of that."

"Did you at least remember the colour of my hair?"

"Of course. Blonde."

She begins to laugh.

"You're really proud when you say that. Now that you see it. You aren't worth much."

She rumples my hair with one sweep of her hand.

"And youùyour hair is red," she says, imitating me: "the first time I saw you, I'll never forget, you had a mauvish hom-burg hat and it swore horribly with your red hair. It was hard to look at. Where's your hat? I want to see if your taste is as bad as ever."

"I don't wear one any more."

She whistles softly, opening her eyes wide.

"You didn't think of that all by yourself! Did you? Well, congratulations. Of course! I should have realized. That hair can't stand anything, it swears with hats, chair cushions, even at a wallpaper background. Or else you have to pull your hat down over your ears like that felt you bought in London. You tucked all your hair away under the brim. You might have been bald for all anyone could see."

She adds, in the decisive tone with which you end old quarrels:

"It didn't look at all nice on you."

I don't know what hat she's talking about.

"Did I say it looked good on me?"

"I should say you did! You never talked of anything else. And you were always sneaking a look in the glass when you thought I wasn't watching you."

This knowledge of the past overwhelms me. Anny does not even seem to be evoking memories, her tone of voice does not have the touch of tender remoteness suitable to that kind of occupation. She seems to be speaking of today rather than yesterday; she has kept her opinions, her obstinacies, and her past resentments fully alive. Just the opposite for me, all is drowned in poetic impression; I am ready for all concessions.

Suddenly she says in a toneless voice:

"You see, I'm getting fat, I'm getting old. I have to take care of myself."

Yes. And how weary she looks! Just as I am about to speak, she adds:

"I was in the theatre in London."

"With Candler?"

"No, of course not with Candler. How like you! You had it in your head that I was going to act with Candler. How many times must I tell you that Candler is the orchestra leader? No, in a little theatre, in Soho Square. We played The Emperor Jones, some Synge and O'Casey, and Britannicus."

"Britannicus?" I say, amazed.

"Yes, Britannicus. I quit because of that. I was the one who gave them the idea of putting on Britannicus and they wanted to make me play Junie."

"Really?"

"Well, naturally I could only play Agrippine."

"And now what are you doing?"

I was wrong in asking that. Life fades entirely from her face. Still she answers at once:

"I'm not acting any more. I travel. I'm being kept."

She smiles:

"Oh, don't look at me in that solicitous way. I always told you it didn't make any difference to me, being kept. Besides, he's an old man, he isn't any trouble."

"English?"

"What does it matter to you?" she says, irritated. "We're not going to talk about him. He has no importance whatsoever for you or me. Do you want some tea?"

She goes into the bathroom. I hear her moving around, rat-tling cups, talking to herself; a sharp, unintelligible murmur. On the night-table by her bed, as always, there is a volume of Michelet's History of France. Now I can make out a single picture hung above the bed, a reproduction of a portrait of Emily Bronte, done by her brother.

Anny returns and suddenly tells me:

"Now you must talk to me about you."

Then she disappears again into the bathroom. I remember that in spite of my bad memory: that was the way she asked those direct questions which annoyed me so much, because I felt a genuine interest and a desire to get things over with at the same time. In any case, after that question, I know for certain that she wants something from me. These are only the preliminaries: you get rid of anything that might be disturbing, you definitely rule out secondary questions: "Now you must talk to me about you." Soon she will talk to me about herself. All of a sudden I no longer have the slightest desire to tell her anything. What good would it be? The Nausea, the fear, existence. ... It is better to keep all that to myself.

"Come on, hurry up," she shouts through the partition.

She returns with a teapot.

"What are you doing? Are you living in Paris?"

"I live in Bouville."

"Bouville? Why? You aren't married, I hope."

"Married?" I say with a start.

It is very pleasant for me to have Anny think that. I tell her:

"It's absurd. That's exactly the sort of naturalistic imagination you accused me of before. You know: when I used to imagine you a widow and mother of two boys. And all the stories I used to tell about what would happen to us. You hated it."

"And you liked it," she answers, unconcernedly. "You said that to put on a big act. Besides, even though you get indignant in conversation, you're traitor enough to get married one day on the sly. You swore indignantly for a year that you wouldn't see Violettes Im-periales. Then one day when I was sick you went and saw it alone in a cheap movie."

"I am in Bouville," I say with dignity, "because I am writing a book on the Marquis de Rollebon."

Anny looks at me with studied interest.

"Rollebon? He lived in the eighteenth century?"

"Yes."

"As a matter of fact, you did mention something about it. It's a history book, then?"

"Yes."

"Ha, ha!"

If she asks me one more question I will tell her everything. But she asks nothing more. Apparently, she has decided that she knows enough about me. Anny knows how to be a good listener, but only when she wants to be. I watch her: she has lowered her eyelids, she is thinking about what she's going to tell me, how she is going to begin. Do I have to question her now? I don't think she expects it. She will speak when she decides it will be good to do so. My heart is beating very fast.