Nausea (27 page)

"The privileged situations?"

"The idea I had of them. They were situations which had a rare and precious quality, style, if you like. To be king, for example, when I was eight years old, seemed a privileged situation to me. Or to die. You may laugh, but there were so many people drawn at the moment of their death, and so many who spoke such sublime words at that moment that I quite genuinely thought . . . well, I thought that by dying you were transported above yourself. Besides, it was enough just to be in the room of a dying person: death being a privileged situation, something emanated from it and communicated itself to everyone there. A sort of grandeur. When my father died, they took me up to his room to see him for the last time. I was very unhappy going up the stairs, but I was also drunk with a sort of religious ecstasy; I was finally entering a privileged situation. I leaned against the wall, I tried to make the proper motions. But my aunt and mother were kneeling by the bed, and they spoiled it all by crying."

She says these last words with anger, as if the memory still scorched her. She interrupts herself; eyes staring, eyebrows raised, she takes advantage of the occasion to live the scene once more.

"I developed all that later on: first I added a new situation, love (I mean the act of love). Look, if you never understood

147why I refused . . . certain of your demands, here's your opportunity to understand now: for me, there was something to be saved. Then I told myself that there should be many more privileged situations than I could count, finally I admitted an infinite number of them."

"Yes, but what were they?"

"But I've told you," she says with amazement, "I've been explaining to you for fifteen minutes."

"Well, was it especially necessary for people to be impassioned, carried away by hatred or love, for example; or did the exterior aspect of the event have to be great, I meanùwhat you could see of it. . . ."

"Both ... it all depended," she answers ungraciously.

"And the perfect moments? Where do they come in?"

"They came afterwards. First there are annunciatory signs. Then the privileged situation, slowly, majestically, comes into people's lives. Then the question whether you want to make a perfect moment out of it."

"Yes," I say, "I understand. In each one of these privileged situations there are certain acts which have to be done, certain attitudes to be taken, words which must be saidùand other attitudes, other words are strictly prohibited. Is that it?"

"I suppose so. . . ."

"In fact, then, the situation is the material: it demands exploitation."

"That's it," she says. "First you had to be plunged into something exceptional and feel as though you were putting it in order. If all those conditions had been realized, the moment would have been perfect."

"In fact, it was a sort of work of art."

"You've already said that," she says with irritation. "No: it was ... a duty. You had to transform privileged situations into perfect moments. It was a moral question. Yes, you can laugh if you like: it was moral."

I am not laughing at all.

"Listen," I say spontaneously, "I'm going to admit my shortcomings, too. I never really understood you, I never sincerely tried to help you. If I had known . . ."

"Thank you, thank you very much," she says ironically. "I hope you're not expecting recognition for your delayed regrets. Besides, I hold nothing against you; I never explained anything to you clearly, I was all in knots, I couldn't tell anyone about it,

not even youùespecially not you. There was always something that rang false at those moments. Then I was lost. But I still had the feeling I was doing everything I could."

"But what had to be done? What actions?"

"What a fool you are. I can't give you any examples, it all depends."

"But tell me what you were trying to do."

"No, I don't want to talk about it. But here's a story if you like, a story that made a great impression on me when I was in school. There was a king who had lost a battle and was taken prisoner. He was there, off in a corner, in the victor's camp. He saw his son and daughter pass by in chains. He didn't weep, he didn't say anything. Then he saw one of his servants pass by, in chains too. Then he began to groan and tear out his hair. You can make up your own examples. You see: there are times when you mustn't cryùor else you'll be unclean. But if you drop a log on your foot, you can do as you please, groan, cry, jump around on the other foot. It would be foolish to be stoical all the time: you'd wear yourself out for nothing."

She smiles:

"Other times you must be more than stoical. Naturally, you don't remember the first time I kissed you?"

"Yes, very clearly," I say triumphantly, "it was in Kew Gardens, by the banks of the Thames."

"But what you never knew was that I was sitting on a patch of nettles: my dress was up, my thighs were covered with stings, and every time I made the slightest movement I was stung again. Well, stoicism wouldn't have been enough there. You didn't bother me at all, I had no particular desire for your lips, the kiss I was going to give you was much more important, it was an engagement, a pact. So you understand that this pain was irrelevant, I wasn't allowed to think about my thighs at a time like that. It wasn't enough not to show my suffering: it was necessary not to suffer."

She looks at me proudly, still surprised at what she had done.

"For more than twenty minutes, all the time you were insisting on having the kiss I had decided to give you, all the time I had you begging meùbecause I had to give it to you according to formùI managed to anaesthetize myself completely. And God knows I have a sensitive skin: I felt nothing until we got up."

14QThat's it. There are no adventuresùthere are no perfect moments ... we have lost the same illusions, we have followed the same paths. I can guess the restùI can even speak for her and tell myself all that she has left to tell:

"So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?"

"Yes, naturally," she answers without enthusiasm.

"Isn't that it?"

"Oh, you know, I might have resigned myself in the end to the clumsiness of a red-headed man. After all, I was always interested in the way other people played their parts . . . no, it's that . . ."

"That there are no more privileged situations?"

"That's it. I used to think that hate or love or death descended on us like tongues of fire on Good Friday. I thought one could radiate hate or death. What a mistake! Yes, I really thought that 'Hate' existed, that it came over people and raised them above themselves. Naturally, I am the only one, I am the one who hates, who loves. But it's always the same thing, a piece of dough that gets longer and longer . . . everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions."

She thinks as I do. It seems as though I had never left her.

"Listen carefully," I say, "for the past moment I've been thinking of something that pleases me much more than the role of a milestone you generously gave me to play: it's that we've changed together and in the same way. I like that better, you know, than to see you going farther and farther away and being condemned to mark your point of departure forever. All that you've told meùI came to tell you the same thingùthough with other words, of course. We meet at the arrival. I can't tell you how pleased I am."

"Yes?" she says gently, but with an obstinate look. "Well, I'd still have liked it better if you hadn't changed; it was more convenient. I'm not like you, it rather displeases me to know that someone has thought the same things I have. Besides, you must be mistaken."

I tell her my adventures, I tell her about existenceùperhaps at too great length. She listens carefully, her eyes wide open and her eyebrows raised.

When I finish, she looks soothed.

"Well, you're not thinking like me at all. You complain

because things don't arrange themselves around you like a bouquet of flowers, without your taking the slightest trouble to do anything. But I have never asked as much: I wanted action. You know, when we played adventurer and adventuress: you were the one who had adventures, I was the one who made them happen. I said: I'm a man of action. Remember? Well, now I simply say: one can't be a man of action."

I couldn't have looked convinced because she became animated and began again, with more energy:

"Then there's a heap of things I haven't told you, because it would take too long to explain. For example, I had to be able to tell myself at the very moment I took action that what I was doing would have . . . fatal results. I can't explain that to you very well. . . ."

"It's quite useless," I say, somewhat pedantically," "I've thought that too."

She looks at me with scorn.

"You'd like me to believe you've thought exactly the same way I have: you really amaze me."

I can't convince her, all I do is irritate her. I keep quiet. I want to take her in my arms.

Suddenly she looks at me anxiously:

"Well, if you've thought about all that, what can you do?"

I bow my head.

"I ... I outlive myself," she repeats heavily.

What can I tell her? Do I know any reasons for living? I'm not as desperate as she is because I didn't expect much. I'm rather . . . amazed before this life which is given to meù given for nothing. I keep my head bowed, I don't want to see Anny's face now.

"I travel," she goes on gloomily; "I'm just back from Sweden. I stopped in Berlin for a week. This man who's keeping me ..."

Take her in my arms? What good would it do? I can do nothing for her; she is as solitary as I.

"What are you muttering about?"

I raise my eyes. She is watching me tenderly.

"Nothing. I was thinking about something."

"Oh? Mysterious person! Well, talk or be quiet, but do one or the other."

I tell her about the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous," the old ragtime I had played on the phonograph, the strange happiness it gives me."I was wondering if, in that direction, one couldn't find or look for . . ."

She doesn't answer, I don't think she was much interested in what I told her.

Still, after a moment, she speaks againùand I don't know whether she is following her own ideas or whether it is an answer to what I have just told her.

"Paintings, statues can't be used: they're lovely facing me. Music . . ."

"But the theatre . . ."

"What about the theatre? Do you want to enumerate all the fine arts?"

"Before, you used to say you wanted to act because on the stage you had to realize perfect moments!"

"Yes, I realized them: for the others. I was in the dust, in the draught, under raw lights, between cardboard sets. I usually played with Thorndyke. I think you must have seen him at Covent Garden. I was always afraid I'd burst out laughing in his face."

"But weren't you ever carried away by your part?"

"A little, sometimes: never very strongly. The essential thing, for all of us, was the black pit just in front of us, in the bottom of it there were people you didn't see; obviously you were presenting them with a perfect moment. But, you know, they didn't live in it: it unfolded in front of them. And we, the actors, do you think we lived inside it? In the end, it wasn't anywhere, not on either side of the footlights, it didn't exist; and yet everybody thought about it. So you see, little man," she says in a dragging, almost vulgar tone of voice, "I walked out on the whole business."

"I tried to write a book . . ."

She interrupts me.

"I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it. I have other characters, too. . . . You have to know how to concentrate. Do you know what I read? Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. It has been quite useful for me. There's a way of first setting up the background, then

making characters appear. You manage to see," she adds with a maniacal air.

"Well," I say, "that wouldn't satisfy me at all."

"Do you think it satisfies me?"

We stay silent for a moment. Evening is coming on; I can hardly make out the pale spot of her face. Her black dress melts with the shadow which floods the room. I pick up my cup mechanically, there's a little tea left in it and I bring it to my lips. The tea is cold. I want to smoke but I don't dare. I have the terrible feeling that we have nothing more to say to one another. Only yesterday I had so many questions to ask her: where she had been, what she had done, whom she had met. But that interested me only in so far as Anny gave her whole heart to it. Now I am without curiosity: all these countries, all these cities she has passed through, all the men who have courted her and whom she has perhaps lovedùshe clung to none of that, at heart she was indifferent to it all: little flashes of sun on the surface of a cold, dark sea. Anny is sitting opposite to me, we haven't seen each other for four years and we have nothing more to say.