Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 35

Sala

In the years that followed, Simone and Jacques would have many rows over his marriage to Sala, and the lugubrious pace of his extrication from it. (As later he would have quarrels with Dominique over Simone.)

Simone, her eyes welling with tears, pleaded, “Why did you marry her?”

Jacques responded with a shrug of his shoulders.

“I didn’t mean that as a rhetorical question. I really want to know: why on earth did you marry her?”

He gave yet another shrug of his shoulders.

“That is not an answer!” Simone screamed.

“It is an answer. Perhaps not a satisfactory one, but nonetheless it is an answer. The only one I have. You know full well I am dispassionate by nature. I feel about myself the way that I feel about rhubarb: I can take it or leave it. I recognize—”

“Oh, please! Not another one of your speeches!”

“You ask me for an explanation, and then when I attempt to give you one, you—”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard it all before! It’s your Egyptian blood! It’s your phlegmatic character! It’s—!”

In fact, Jacques knew quite well why he had married Sala.

When Sala was seventeen she and her widowed mother had moved into an attic room in the boarding house run by Jacques’ mother. His mother had more or less fallen into the occupation of landlady, offering a room first to a relative—after all, it was little enough extra work, and the added money certainly helped their straitened circumstances—then to a friend of a friend. Once she was making dinner for five, it was scarcely any more work to make dinner for six. And once she was making dinner for six, the adding of a seventh was of little consequence.

His mother had become the family’s financial mainstay because her husband had a stutter so severe it prevented him from assuming the university position which should rightfully have been his. His father’s debility did not fill Jacques with shame. Indeed, his father seemed like a delicate flower, ill-suited to the crassness of everyday life. Jacques acted as his father’s deputy, accompanying him to the tobacconist and the stationer, saying, My father would like…almost as if his father was a royal who did not deign to speak to commoners.

(Was it his father’s impediment which led to him being drawn to the broken: the stuffed bear with a cracked eye, the beggars in the Court of Miracles at Nîmes, displaying their stumps and sores?)

Simone would know Jacques for more than two decades before she learnt that his mother, like hers, had taken in boarders.