The Age of Reason (29 page)

A life. He looked at all those empurpled visages, those russet moons that slid across the cushionings of cloud. ‘They have lives. All of them. Each his own. Lives that reach through the walls of the dancing-hall, along the streets of Paris, across France, they interlace and intersect, and they remain as vigorously personal as a tooth-brush, a razor, and toilet objects that are never loaned. I knew. I knew that they each had their life. And I knew that I had one too. I had begun to think: I do nothing, I shall escape. And now I’m bloody well in the thick of it.’ He laid the knife on the table, took the bottle, and tipped it over his glass: it was empty. There was a little champagne in Ivich’s glass, he picked up the glass and drank.

‘I’ve yawned, I’ve read, I’ve made love. And all that
left its mark
! Every movement of mine evoked, beyond itself, and in the future, something that insistently waited and matured. And those waiting-points — they are myself, I am waiting for myself in the squares and at the cross-roads, in the great hall of the Mairie of the XIV District, it is I who am waiting for myself on a red armchair, I am waiting for myself to come, clad in black, with a stiff collar, almost choking with heat, and say: “Yes — yes, I consent to take her as my wife.”’ He shook his head violently, but his life maintained itself around him. ‘Slowly, surely, as suited my humours and my fits of idleness, I have secreted my shell. And now it is finished, I am utterly immured in my own self! In the centre, there’s my flat with myself inside it, and my green leather armchairs, outside there’s the Rue de la Gaité, oneway only, because I always walk down it, the Avenue du Maine and all Paris encircling me, north in front, south behind, the Pantheon on my right hand, the Eiffel Towel on my left, the Clignancourt gate opposite and, halfway down the Rue Vercingétorix, a small, pink, satined lair, Marcelle’s room, my wife’s room, and Marcelle inside it, naked, and awaiting me. And then all round Paris lies France, furrowed with one-way roads, and then the seas dyed blue or black, the Mediterranean blue, the North Sea black, the Channel coffee-coloured, and then the foreign lands, Germany, Italy — Spain white, because I did not go and fight there — and all the round cities, at fixed distances from my room, Timbuctoo, Toronto, Kazan, Nijni-Novgorod, immutable as frontier points. I go, I go away, I walk, I wander, and I wander to no purpose: this is the University vacation, everywhere I go I bear my shell with me, I remain
at home
in my room, among my books, I do not approach an inch nearer to Marrakesh or Timbuctoo. Even if I took a train, a boat, or an autocar, if I went to Morocco for my holiday, if I suddenly arrived at Marrakesh, I should be always in my room, at home. And if I walked in the squares and in the souks, if I gripped an Arab’s shoulder, to feel Marrakesh in his person, well I — that Arab would be at Marrakesh, and not I: I should still be seated in my room, placid and meditative as is my chosen life, two thousand miles away from the Moroccan and his burnous. In my room. For ever. For ever Marcelle’s former lover, now her husband, the professor, for ever a man ignorant of English, a man who has not joined the Communist Party, who has not been to Spain: — for ever.’

‘My life.’ It hemmed him in. It was a singular entity, without beginning or end, and yet not infinite. He surveyed it from one Mairie to another, from the Mairie of the XVIII District, where he had attended his Recruiting Board in October 1923, to the Mairie of the XIV District where he was going to marry Marcelle in August or September 1938: it had, like natural objects, a vague and hesitant purpose, a kind of insistent futility, a smell of dust and violets.

‘I have led a toothless life,’ he thought. ‘A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on — and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides — what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistening trail behind it.’

He looked up and saw Lola, with a malicious smile upon her lips. He saw Ivich: she was dancing, her head thrown back, ecstatic, without age or future: ‘She has no shell.’ She was dancing, she was drunk, she was not thinking of Mathieu. Not in the very least. No more than if he had never existed. The orchestra had struck up an Argentine tango. Mathieu knew that tango very well, it was
Mio Caballo Murrio
, but he was looking at Ivich, and he felt as though he were hearing that melancholy, raucous tune for the first time. ‘She will never be mine, she will never come into my shell.’ He smiled, and was conscious of a timid but refreshing sense of regret, he looked affectionately at that passionate, frail body on which his freedom was aground: ‘Beloved Ivich, beloved freedom.’ And suddenly, above his besmirched body, and above his life, there hovered a pure consciousness, a consciousness without ego, no more than a mere puff of warm air: there it hovered, in the semblance of a look, it viewed the shoddy bohemian, the petty bourgeois clamped into his comforts, the futile intellectual, ‘not a revolutionary, merely a rebel,’ the listless dreamer immersed in his flaccid life, and the verdict of that consciousness was — ‘The fellow is a wash-out, and deserves his fate.’ And that consciousness was unlinked to any person, it revolved in the revolving bubble, crushed, adrift, agonizing, yonder on the face of Ivich, thrilling with the sound of music, ephemeral and forlorn. A red consciousness, a dark little lament,
mio caballo murrio
, it was capable of anything, of
real
desperation on behalf of the Spanish, of any wild decision. If only it could continue thus. But it could not: the consciousness swelled and swelled, the band stopped, and then it burst. Mathieu was once again alone with his own self, in the life that was his, compact and self-sufficing, he did not even criticize himself, nor did he accept himself, he was Mathieu, that was all: ‘Another ecstasy. And then?’ Boris returned to his seat, not looking over-pleased with himself. He said to Mathieu: ‘Well, well, well!’

‘What’s up?’ asked Mathieu.

‘The blonde. She’s a nasty bit of work.’

‘What did she do?’

Boris frowned, shuddered, and did not reply. Ivich came back, and sat down beside Mathieu. She was alone. Mathieu looked carefully round the room and observed Lola near the band, and talking to Sarrunyan. Sarrunyan seemed to be astonished, then he threw a side-long glance at the tall blonde who was nonchalantly fanning herself. Lola smiled at him and crossed the hall. When she sat down, there was an odd expression on her face. Boris eyed his right shoe with an affected air, and a burdensome silence followed.

‘Nonsense,’ exclaimed the blonde lady, ‘you can’t do such a thing — I shan’t go.’

Mathieu started, and everybody turned round. Sarrunyan was leaning obsequiously over the blonde lady, in the attitude of a head-waiter taking an order. He was speaking to her in an undertone, with a quiet, resolute air. The blonde suddenly got up.

‘Come along,’ she said to her companion.

She rummaged in her bag. The corners of her mouth were trembling.

‘No, no,’ said Sarrunyan. ‘You are my guest.’

The blonde flung a crumpled hundred-franc note on to the table. Her companion had got up, and was looking disapprovingly at the hundred-franc note. Then the lady took his arm and they marched haughtily out, with the same swaying gait.

Sarrunyan approached Lola whistling to himself.

‘She won’t come back in a hurry,’ he said with a quizzical smile.

‘Thank you,’ said Lola. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it would be so easy.’

He departed. The Argentine orchestra had gone, the Negroes with their instruments were returning one by one. Boris flung Lola a look of angry admiration, then he turned abruptly towards Ivich.

‘Come and dance,’ said he.

Lola eyed them placidly as they were getting out of their seats. But when they had moved away, a sudden savage look came into her face. Mathieu smiled at her.

‘You do what you like in this place,’ he said.

‘I’ve got them in my pocket,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘The people come because I’m here.’

There was still an anxious look in her eyes, and she began to tap nervously on the table. Mathieu could not find anything more to say to her. Fortunately she got up a moment later.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

Mathieu watched her walk round the room and disappear. ‘Time for her dose,’ he thought to himself. He was alone. Ivich and Boris were dancing, looking as pure as a melody, and scarcely less pitiless. He turned his head away and looked at his feet. Time passed, to no effect. His mind was a blank. A sort of raucous lamentation made him jump. Lola had returned, her eyes were closed, and she was smiling. ‘She has had what she wanted,’ he thought. She opened her eyes and sat down, still smiling.

‘Did you know that Boris was in need of four thousand francs?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t. He needs four thousand francs, does he?’

Lola was still looking at him, and swaying to and fro. Mathieu observed the pin-point pupils in her large green eyes.

‘I’ve just refused him the money,’ said Lola. ‘He tells me it’s for Picard. I thought he would have applied to you.’

Mathieu burst out laughing. ‘He knows I never have a bean.’

‘So you hadn’t heard about it?’

‘Well — no.’

‘H’m,’ said she. ‘That’s odd.’

She looked somehow like a derelict hulk about to capsize, or as though her mouth were just about to split and utter a terrifying shriek.

‘He came to see you not long ago?’ she asked.

‘Yes, about three o’clock.’

‘And he didn’t say anything?’

‘There’s nothing surprising in that. He may have met Picard this afternoon.’

‘That’s what he told me.’

‘Well then?’

Lola shrugged her shoulders. ‘Picard works all day at Argenteuil.’

‘Picard was in need of money,’ said Mathieu nonchalantly. ‘No doubt he went to Boris’s hotel. Not finding him at home, he met him in the street as he was walking down the Boulevard Saint-Michel.’

Lola eyed him ironically. ‘Do you imagine that Picard would ask four thousand francs from Boris, who has only three hundred francs a month pocket money.’

‘Well then, I don’t know what did happen,’ said Mathieu in a tone of irritation.

He wanted to say to her: ‘The money was for me.’ That would have brought matters to a head at once. But that was not possible, for Boris’s sake. ‘She would be terribly angry with him, he would look like my accomplice.’ Lola tapped the table with the tips of her scarlet nails, the corners of her mouth lifted abruptly, quivered, and dropped once more. She eyed Mathieu with uneasy insistence, but, beneath that watchful anger, Mathieu defined a deep void of confusion. He felt like laughing.

Lola turned her eyes away. ‘Perhaps it may have been a sort of test?’ she suggested.

‘A test?’ repeated Mathieu with astonishment.

‘Well, that’s what came into my mind.’

‘A test? What an odd idea.’

‘Ivich is always telling him I’m mean.’

‘Who told you so?’

‘You’re surprised I know it?’ said Lola with a triumphant air. ‘He’s a loyal lad. You mustn’t imagine that anyone can abuse me, without my hearing of it. I always know, simply from the way he looks at me. Or else he asks me questions in a detached sort of way. I can see it coming, you know. He just has to get it off his chest.’

‘Well?’

‘He wanted to see if I really was mean. He invented this business about Picard: unless someone put him up to it?’

‘And who, do you suppose, did that?’

‘I don’t know. There are lots of people who think that I’m an old hag and he’s just a boy. Watch them goggle at us in this place when they see us together.’

‘Do you imagine he cares for what they say to him?’

‘No, but there are people who think they’re doing him a kindness by trying to work on his feelings.’

‘Look here,’ said Mathieu, ‘let us put our cards on the table. If you mean me, you’re completely wrong.’

‘Ah,’ said Lola coldly. ‘It’s quite possible.’ A silence fell, then she said abruptly: ‘Why are there always scenes when you come here with him?’

‘I don’t know. It isn’t my fault. I didn’t want to come today... I imagine he likes each of us in a different way, and that it gets on his nerves when he sees us both together.’

Lola stared in front of her with a sombre, strained expression.

Then she said: ‘Now listen to what I’m going to say. I won’t have him taken away from me. I’m definitely not doing him any harm. When he’s tired of me, he can leave me, and that will happen quite soon enough. But I won’t let anyone else take him away.’

‘She’s unpacking it tonight,’ thought Mathieu. It was, of course, the influence of the drug. But there was something else: Lola detested Mathieu, and yet what she was then saying to him she wouldn’t have said to anyone else. Between her and him, in spite of their mutual hatred, there was a kind of link.

‘I’m not going to take him away from you,’ he said.

‘I thought you were,’ said Lola darkly.

‘Well, you mustn’t think so. Your relations with Boris are no affair of mine. And if they were, I should think they were perfectly all right.’

‘I imagined that Boris felt under obligations to you because you are his professor.’

She was silent, and Mathieu realized that he had not convinced her. She appeared to be choosing her words with care.

‘I... I know I’m an old woman,’ she repeated painfully. ‘I didn’t need you to tell me that. But that’s why I can help him: there are things I can teach him,’ she added defiantly. ‘Besides, am I really too old for him? He loves me as I am, he’s happy with me when people don’t put these ideas into his head.’

Mathieu did not reply, and Lola exclaimed with rather ill-assured vehemence: ‘Surely you must know he loves me. He must have told you, since he tells you everything.’

‘I think he loves you,’ said Mathieu.

Lola turned her heavy eyes upon him.

‘I’ve had many affairs, and it’s with open eyes I tell you — that boy is my last chance. And now — do what you like.’

Mathieu did not reply at once. He looked at Boris and Ivich dancing together, and he felt inclined to say to Lola: ‘Don’t let us quarrel, you must surely see that we’re very much alike.’ But this resemblance rather disgusted him: there was in Lola’s love, despite its violence, despite its honesty, something clinging and voracious. But he said, through half-closed lips: ‘No need to tell me that... I know it as well as you do.’