Читать книгу The Conspiracy - Paul Nizan - Страница 11

III

In Rue d’Ulm it was that uncertain time when examinations are over and you have to wait for the results in a state of extreme idleness that is full of charm for naturally lazy adolescents forced for years into absurd labours.

Laforgue used to spend whole afternoons on a divan covered in a golden material now grown very dark. He would take a book and begin to read, but he would soon fall asleep. When he was too hot, he would go down to the ground floor and take a shower, or a glass of something in a bar in Rue Claude-Bernard.

One afternoon at around four, someone knocked: it was Pauline D., a young woman (no longer all that young) who from time to time used to come and see Laforgue in Rue d’Ulm, when she felt like being kissed. Laforgue had met her on a little beach in Britanny, where the young men would kiss the young women after strolls back and forth along the sea-wall, when they had stretched out on the sand and were disarmed by the darkness, the stars or the green phosphorescence of the sea which came to sputter out at their feet. Philippe always had great trouble keeping the conversation going with Pauline: he told himself he had never detested a woman as much as her, but since he did not have all that many opportunities to caress a bosom and legs, he made the best of it. He used to tell her roughly:

— You know incredible people, like the parish priest of the Madeleine and the military governor of Paris. To think you’re the niece of a police commissioner! What on earth do you come here for?

One day Pauline had taken him to a charity sale in the Hôtel des Invalides. It was spring on the streets. War invalids, sitting in their little carriages, read their newspapers in the sun. General Gouraud was parading his empty sleeve among the ladies of the Union of the Women of France; these former nurses, forewarned about the illusion amputees entertain (as much of a byword as Aristotle’s marble, or the well-worn quips of opticians), would move aside to avoid knocking against the empty sleeve, the phantom arm: did they picture the general suddenly letting himself go and releasing the scream of pain he had suppressed to the last on the fields of battle? Objects were being sold that nobody wanted to buy – it is always like that at sales, but luckily gifts are always needed for housekeepers or poor relations – cushions, mats, brushes and utensils made by blind veterans and sad as their guide-dogs, or by the yellow and black wards of the French nuns of Annam and the Somali Coast. Pauline always reminded Laforgue of wartime in the provinces, when he used to go each Thursday to the Sainte-Madeleine convent hospital to see the wounded making macramé or knitting mufflers and the sisters running about – those holy young women who had never had such a good time – and when, on Sunday evenings after he had served at the Office, tinkling the altar bells in front of the soldiers who would be dozing and thinking they were as well off there as anywhere, the convalescents used to give him cigarettes which made him throw up; returning home in a taxi with Pauline kissing him, he told himself that she was acceptable only as a childhood memory, the image of the blue-veiled nurses with their breasts so lovely beneath their square tuckers, beneath the throb of their epidemic medallions.

Pauline began talking about the Conservatory auditions and the exhibition of artworks on loan from Rome; she never had a great deal to do, she did not miss a concert, an exhibition or a big sale; she used to go one day a week to a surgery and advise young mothers about the feeding of newborn infants and the illnesses of early childhood; she did not have much money; she was not getting married.

Laforgue affected never to set foot in a picture gallery or an art dealer’s, in the Opera House or the Salle Pleyel: this was typical of him. Like his friends, he used to proclaim proudly to all and sundry that he didn’t give a fig for painting, music or the theatre, and that he preferred bars, fairs at the Belfort Lion, neighbourhood cinemas and the festivals in Avenue des Gobelins. This was a kind of challenge they threw out to people for whom the arts served as a merit, a justification or an alibi. Since he knew Spain and Italy quite well, Philippe could have spoken all the same about painting; but Pauline did not come to Rue d’Ulm to have a serious talk about pictures or music, and Laforgue considered there was no good reason to take the trouble to be polite. He sat down next to Pauline on the divan and she told him he wasn’t very chatty.

— I’m sorry Pauline, he said. And Heaven knows there’s a lot going on! Thirty degrees in the shade at Perpignan, an anti-cyclone from beyond the Sargasso Sea is moving towards the Azores. The financier Loewenstein has drowned in the Channel, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange is significantly affected. Maya is playing at the Théâtre de l’Avenue, where we shall not be going. There were forty-eight dead at Roche-la-Molière, but since they’re miners the accident is hardly of much consequence; and M. Tardieu has had an informal chat with the wounded, which was extremely helpful. In Paris . . .

— Just kiss me, said Pauline.

Philippe kissed her and found a slightly irritated pleasure in doing so, because summer perspiration made Pauline’s lips rather salty, her lipstick had an odd taste, and she was one of those impossible women who parade all their feelings, tremble when you touch their breasts and late in life will stage perfectly faked nervous breakdowns.

‘Such airs and graces!’, thought Laforgue. ‘How would I look if Bloyé came home, with this histrionic girl apparently in a trance? Perhaps I’d better go and lock the door.’

He detached himself from Pauline and went over to shoot the bolt.

— Do you by any chance have evil intentions? she asked with a little contrived laugh. I’d probably better take off my dress.

— I think so too, said Laforgue.

Pauline stood up and took off her dress, a dress the colour of dead leaves that actually made a dry little rustle like dead leaves; she was wearing a mauve slip with broad strips of ochred lace running across her bosom and her legs.

‘This woman has no taste,’ Philippe said to himself: he liked women to wear either virginal underwear or the extravagant artifices of the tarts at the Madeleine or the Opéra.

She had a rather skinny torso and shoulders, but fairly heavy legs and hips for which Philippe had a sufficient liking to forgive her her underwear. She stretched out on the divan and spread her dress over her knees; Laforgue, lying alongside that moist body, was thinking he ought to have drawn the curtain, what with all that sun they had full in their eyes and which was highlighting the freckles on Pauline’s white skin above the broad hem of her stockings; but he was beginning to purr and couldn’t face getting up. Pauline was not a woman with whom there was any question of going all the way; she used to defend herself with a stubborn presence of mind that scarcely hampered her pursuit of pleasure. She closed her eyes; the make-up disappeared from her cheeks; the movement of her belly was reminiscent of the spasmodic, dreamy throbbing of an insect’s abdomen; she was alone, absolutely enclosed within herself and the strange concentration of pleasure; her heart beat strongly throughout this intense labour; Laforgue remembered that he had not shaved that morning, and that Pauline would get red spots round her mouth and pink patches in the hollow of her shoulder – but since he was thinking about this alien being with resentment, he congratulated himself on that. These caresses, these movements, these jerky exhalations involved a mute and shifting torpor, a blind urgency, a grimness that seemed never-ending. Suddenly, however, Pauline clenched her teeth, opened her eyes again, and Laforgue was furious to see that distraught look – that anguish of the runner who has given his all – and the girl’s body grew taut, her thighs locked with incredible force upon Laforgue’s wrist, while he himself achieved a dubious pleasure.

Pauline sank back, laying one hand on her breast:

— We’re crazy, she sighed.

She stretched, closed her eyes again. Later, she raised herself on one elbow, took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself:

— I do look a sight! she exclaimed.

— A sorry sight, said Philippe.

She was dishevelled, beads of sweat still bedewed her temples, her nostrils, the roots of her hair, after the hard begetting of pleasure. Laforgue looked at those pale lips:

‘Love doesn’t suit women,’ he said to himself.

— Wipe your mouth, said Pauline. If your friends saw all that lipstick . . .

She covered her breasts, which were set rather low, then stood up to slip on her dress. Pauline accomplished with admirable promptitude the difficult transition from the disorders of pleasure to life in society: with her clean face, her smooth hair, her ankle-length dress, nobody would have dreamed of showing her insufficient respect. She wanted to talk: idle chatter was one of the last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics and Simplicius’ Commentary. Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.

‘That’s quite enough for today,’ thought Laforgue. ‘We’re not accomplices on the strength of so little.’

— How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.

— As if I didn’t know! replied Laforgue.

— So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn’t that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance . . .

— No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She’s simpering, this is the limit.’ But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe . . .

— Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.

Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.

Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d’Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter’s lodge.

‘One’s really too polite,’ he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.’

Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:

— Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn’t go all the way!

Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud – and he went back inside to wash his hands.

This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.

At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.

Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage’s lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.

‘What a dreadful creature!’ thought Laforgue in his bed that evening, mulling over Pauline’s visit before falling asleep and thinking with some distress that he really should have had her. ‘I don’t like this little war of escapes, these solitary pleasures. Let’s hurry up and be done with onanism for two.’

He is a bit quick to generalize his own experiences. The fact is, he knows only whores or young girls, no women: which amounts to saying he knows nothing about anything. As yet, he has access only to that desert of solitude and bitterness through which a young man shapes his course towards love; of pleasure itself, he knows only a kind of organic wrench. He has never met a woman who has said to him dreamily after lovemaking:

— How painful it must be for you too!

He hopes to discover that love is a suspension of hostilities when, for a split second, a man and a woman escape from hatred and from themselves; when they forget themselves like two wartime soldiers fraternizing between the lines around a well or the burial of the dead.

‘When I know that,’ he said to himself, ‘will it be much more fun?’