Читать книгу Woman - Magdeleine Marx - Страница 7

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Will the noise never stop? But there are walls to shut it out.

Let them hop about, shout, dance, amuse themselves. As for me, I have left them, I am alone in my room, I don't want to see or hear them any more.

I burrow my head desperately in the dark depths of the cushions. In vain. The eddying music follows its implacable course, drapes its arabesques of melody about me, and when I stop my ears, still keeps whirling round and round.

A mazurka. Who was it begged for a mazurka? Ah yes, I remember. When I left the group of young girls sitting on the watch, a quivering basket of artificial flowers, one of them was saying: "After the mazurka, I'll take him out into the garden, where I'll manage to make him kiss me."

Which of them? It is easy to imagine her: they are all alike. She laughs, I am certain, and expands her budding breasts; her beaded tunic sparkles and strikes a rivulet of light against her pretty legs; she has glossy hair faultlessly dressed and when she turns round in the mazurka, you see she has one of those plump, discreet faces over which feelings slide without leaving a mark.

But I am forgetting. Mother had to take part in the dance too, as it was the only one she knew and it unrolled tender memories. She braced herself, then started off, her features gently composed, leaning on my father, who accommodated his step to hers while seeming to guide her. "Let's see, that's not it ..." and they set out again—one, two, three, four—heavy, both of them, with their reputation as a happy, united couple, and laden with the looks that follow them.

If one knew....

The engaged couples have disappeared, swallowed up by the nearest dark corners, where passion is of scarlet and nothing exists but arms and lips and bodies surmised. When the music will have finished and they will have reappeared, the chatter and the sharp raw laugh of the young fiancée will be heard; she will open her eyes wide, like this; her childish mouth will be seen, and her slim figure, which retains an air of awkward shyness. "How unsophisticated she is," they will say in gratitude to her for being an example of the velvety purity of the young girls.

The last measures. They are all perspiring, out of breath, soberly triumphant, and as they go back to their chairs each man gives a last squeeze of the slender arm he is about to relinquish.

My father is entirely engrossed in his guests; he has led mamma, dizzy, back to her chair, and has moved off. As she sits there with her eyelashes fluttering, you would think she has returned from a wonderful long journey. "I am happy, happy," she is reflecting. "I have such a good husband." The wounds of every day are closed—they have to be overlooked—and if any cloud darkens the horizon, it is that she is thinking of me: "But that is what marriage means, my little daughter; you'll see, it is just a big renunciation: you will change, you too, and do like the rest; look at me; am I unhappy?"

No, you are not unhappy, my poor little mother, with your injured voice, your charitable eyes, and your lifeless gestures; you are dead; it is twenty years since you have had a will of your own, a desirous look, a single manifestation of impatience, a stray impulse, an hour, anything you can call your own; it is twenty years since you renounced. But your husband never goes out, he has his wife and children, he earns your living, a comfortable living; everyone respects him, and "one cannot have everything."

As for you, you can live contentedly with a twenty-year-old unhappiness upon your shoulders; you breathe, you go about; the women around you have the same fate, and this sustains you. But we, mother, who are different, the daughters of my generation, we who have sensual hearts, reasoning minds, new energies—I, who have done nothing, I cannot, I tell you, and if a future is given me, I want to snatch whatever it holds.

The music has stopped; I cannot hear them any more.... It is as if my heart were beginning to live.

The tangible darkness of the room deepens little by little. Its peace, its solitude. I can distinguish the walls, or rather the vaporous shadows of walls, the windows where the cold light of the garden is paling, the indistinct rectangle which stretches along the ceiling ... and in that silence in which God is rooted is the hunted soul returning to its place.

Ah, shattered again! The music sets the hubbub going....

Besides, certain words are too beautiful, and you say them to intoxicate yourself, but when they are gone, you realize, your arms are empty.

I asked myself: "What is youth?" This is what youth is: that terrible thing, that sin, that torture which one must stifle: it is my pure intoxication defiled by their impure intoxication. I wanted to sing my youth, give it out, exhale it. Jeering life is below, with its people, its fouling habits, its sneers and titters. They were quite right; you can't escape it. You must adapt yourself to it; it is the law. I will adapt myself; I will have a husband; he will be kind, faithful; there will be no one beside him; he will be all in all to me; he will skirt the shores of my being; he will pronounce judgment on all my actions, my comings and goings, my looks; his word will be final. I shall lie in his bed every night; he will see my timid body, my naked sleep, my sleeping life; he will stand upright in my life as in a garden which one is not afraid to ravage, and when truth will pass by us, he will sit still and let it pass.

I shall have no more confused desires, no more sudden impulses of kindliness, no more agonized expectancy, and no more of those questionings which make a stifling desert about me. I shall be satisfied. If my hell returns at times to visit me, that red-eyed narrow-chested hell, my husband will be there, seated opposite me at table; he will raise his head. "What's the matter, aren't you hungry?"

The soul, the essence, the deep voice from within—words, mere words.... There is nothing but the noise below. And only that. And I must return to it. Well, come on, go down, speak, smile. All existences are alike. When there is no longer a single lie left to tell, it means the time has come to die.

Why obstinately wish to discover a way out and knock your head against a stone wall? There is no way out. You must not cherish the impossible; get up and go gaily downstairs. A little cold water, a little powder; this is a grief you are not permitted to indulge in.

Once again and for all time I shall go to them. If they are boisterous, spineless, unobservant, with no warmth in them, perhaps after all at some time at the bottom of their hearts they have felt, if only vaguely and vanishingly, the jealous fever which weighs like a heart; perhaps they have suffered; perhaps in looking back, when the sunshine has burst forth, they have understood that the period of their twenties was sacred. The twenties! And we, the youth, say to ourselves: wisdom is within us, the future is within us, and reason, salt, blood, the truth. It is ourselves, only ourselves. And we wish to open our hearts and say to those who pass: "Come to us, ask us. It is from us that everything can be learned; we can explain the secret things, the inner meanings, the words hidden in the folds of the body, the startling confessions that are breathed on the highways, everything that is changeful, for nothing is permanent but change; we know everything, and more than everything; we who have never loved, we know the whole of love." Perhaps they, the dancers downstairs, have stretched out their arms, tasted the fresh morning with their lips, felt the beating of a heart of sobs; perhaps they have once been their hope. I shall do what they have done; it is my turn; my time for withering will surely come too.

The farandole! Ah, they are holding each other's hands, the old folks are also joining in. "Let's enjoy ourselves!" Their faces are tense, and above their footsteps and above the avalanche of their bodies, I hear the shrill cries of the young girls.

They are leaving the drawing-room; it sounds as if they were approaching.

Don't come here. Even if it is dark in this room, even if I have wept, and even if the walls have taken on this aspect of distress, it does not mean that I can be reduced to your level.

The galop moves faster, wilder. The chain in the center is flung together in a heap, those at the end are almost scattered. The last one waves his arm in the air. The noise sickens me.

The floor of my room quivers. I will go down, I will go down to them....

But not yet....