Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (32 page)

It was generally towards the end of the afternoon that I rang at the street door; I would go up to the apartment. Jacques would greet me with an eager smile. ‘I hope I'm not disturbing you?' ‘You never disturb me.' ‘How's things?' ‘They're always going well when I see you.' His kindness used to warm my heart. He would take me into the long, pseudo-medieval gallery where his work table stood; there was never very much light there, as the windows were of stained glass; I liked that semi-darkness, and the trunks and chests of massive wood. I would sit on a sofa covered with crimson velvet; he would pace up and down with a cigarette dangling from a corner of his mouth, and screwing up his eyes a little as if trying to catch a glimpse of his thoughts in the whorls of smoke. I would give back the books I had borrowed, and he would lend me others; he would read to me Mallarmé, Laforgue, Francis Jammes, Max Jacob. ‘Are you going to initiate her into modern literature?' my father had asked him, in a primly ironical tone. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure,' Jacques had replied. He took this task to heart. ‘When all's said and done, I've introduced you to quite a few beautiful things!' he would tell me sometimes with a touch of pride. He guided my taste with a good deal of discrimination.
‘C'est chic d'aimer Aimée!'
he told me when I brought back one of Jacques Rivière's novels; our comments rarely went much further than that; he hated making heavy weather of anything. Often, when I asked him to explain something, he would smile and quote Cocteau: ‘It's like a railway accident; something you feel but can't explain in words.' When he sent me to the Studio des Ursulines – with my mother, when there was a matinée – to see an avant-garde film, or to the Atelier theatre to witness Dullin's last spectacular production, he would simply say: ‘It shouldn't be missed.' Sometimes, he would give me a minute description of a single detail: a yellow light at the corner of a backcloth, or a hand slowly opening on the screen; his voice, amused and rapt, would suggest the infinite. But he also gave me very precious hints on how to look at a picture by Picasso; he flabbergasted me because he could identify a Braque or a Matisse without seeing the signature: that seemed to me like magic. I was dazed by all the new things he revealed to me, so much so that I almost had the feeling that he was the author of them all. I more or less attributed to him Cocteau's
Orpheus
, Picasso's
Harlequins,
and René Clair's
Entr'acte.

What was he really doing? What were his plans, his preoccupations? He didn't seem to do much work. He liked driving about Paris at night; he occasionally frequented the brasseries of the Latin Quarter, the bars in Montparnasse; he described the bars to me as fabulous places in which something was always happening. But he wasn't very satisfied with his way of life. Striding up and down the gallery, rumpling his beautiful golden-brown hair, he would confess to me with a smile: ‘It's frightful to be so complicated! I simply get lost in my own complications!' Once he told me very seriously: ‘D'you see, what I need is to have something to believe in!' ‘Isn't it enough just to live?' I answered. I believed in life. He shook his head: ‘It's not easy to live if you don't believe in anything.' And then he changed the subject; he would give himself only in small doses, and I never asked for more. In my conversations with Zaza, we never touched on the essence of things; with Jacques, if we got anywhere near it, it seemed quite natural to do so in the most round-about manner. I knew that he had a friend, Lucien Riaucourt, the son of a great Lyon banking family, with whom he used to spend whole nights talking; they would keep walking each other back home, from the boulevard Montparnasse to the rue de Beaune and back again; sometimes Riaucourt stayed at Jacques' place and slept on the red velvet sofa. This young man had met Cocteau and had outlined a play he was writing to Dullin himself. He had published a book of poems, with woodcuts by Jacques. I felt very humble beside these great figures. I thought myself very lucky to have a small place in the background of Jacques' life. He told me that he did not usually get on well with women; he loved his sister, but found her too sentimental: it was really extraordinary for him to be able to have friendly conversations with a girl as he did with me.

I think he would have liked nothing better than to bring me a little closer into his life. He used to show me his friends' letters, and would have liked to introduce me to them. One afternoon I went with him to the races at Longchamps. Another time he wanted to take me to see the Russian Ballet. My mother put her foot down: ‘Simone may
not
go out with you in the evenings.' Not that she had any doubts about my losing my virtue; before dinner, I could spend hours alone in the flat with Jacques: but after dinner, any place, unless it was exorcized by the presence of my parents, was automatically a den of vice. So our friendship was restricted to
exchanges of unfinished sentences broken by lengthy silences and readings from our favourite authors.

*

The term came to an end. I passed my examinations in mathematics and Latin. It was good to go so fast, and to succeed; but I quite decidedly had no liking for the exact sciences, nor for dead languages. Mademoiselle Lambert advised me to go ahead with my original plan: it was she who gave the philosophy lectures at Sainte-Marie; she would be glad to have me as a student; she assured me that I would obtain my degree without any difficulty. My parents made no objection. I was very satisfied with this decision.

Although during the previous few weeks the figure of Garric had rather faded into the background of my life, I nevertheless felt I would die when I took my leave of him in a gloomy corridor in the Institut Sainte-Marie. I went to hear one more of his lectures: it was in a hall in the boulevard Saint-Germain and Henri Massis and Monsieur Mabille also spoke. It was Monsieur Mabille who spoke last: his words seemed to have difficulty in penetrating his beard and whiskers, and Zaza's cheeks were hot with embarrassment. I couldn't take my eyes off Garric. I felt my mother looking at me in some perplexity, but I didn't even try to restrain the adoration in my gaze. I was learning by heart that face which was about to be extinguished for ever. The presence of a person is so complete, his absence so final; there seemed to be nothing between the two extremes. Monsieur Mabille stopped talking, the speakers left the platform; it was all over.

But I still clung on. One morning I took the Métro to an unknown part, so far off that I felt I must have crossed a frontier without showing my papers: the place was Belleville. I walked down the long street where Garric lived; I knew the number of his house; I moved towards it, hugging the walls: if he were suddenly to see me there, I was ready to sink through the ground with shame. For a brief moment I paused in front of his house, gazed up at the mournful brick façade, and stared at the door through which he passed every morning and evening; I went on my way; I looked at the shops, the cafés, and the square;
he
knew them all so well that
he didn't even see them any more. What had I come here for? I went home empty-handed.

I was sure that I would see Jacques again in October and I said good-bye to him without regret. He had just failed his law examination and was feeling a little depressed. In his last handshake and in his final smile he put so much warmth that I was overcome with emotion. I wondered anxiously if perhaps he hadn't taken my composure for indifference. This thought distressed me. He had given me so much! I was thinking less of the book, the pictures, the films than of that light in his eyes, like the touch of a hand, whenever I talked to him about myself. I suddenly wanted to thank him, and straight away I wrote him a little note. But my pen hovered over the envelope: should I send it? Jacques set the greatest store on restraint in human relationships. With one of those mysterious smiles that might have meant anything, he had once quoted to me Goethe's phrase, in Cocteau's version: ‘I love you: is that any business of yours?' Would he find my modest effusions embarrassing? Would he perhaps mutter to himself: ‘Is that any business of yours?' Yet if my letter might bring him a little comfort, it would be cowardly not to send it. I hesitated, held back by that fear of ridicule that had paralysed my childhood; but I wasn't going to act like a child any more. I added a hasty postscript: ‘Perhaps you will think I'm ridiculous but I would be ashamed of myself if I never dared to be.' And I went and put the letter in the letter box.

My Aunt Marguerite and my Uncle Gaston, who with their children were spending the season at Cauterets, had invited my sister and me to join them. A year earlier, I would have been enraptured by the mountain landscape: but now I had withdrawn into myself and the world outside no longer had any effect on me. And besides, I had had too intimate a relationship with nature to be willing to see it brought down to the level of a summer attraction, as it was here. It was served up to me on a plate, and I was not allowed the necessary leisure or solitude to get close to it: if I couldn't give myself up to it, it would give me nothing. Pine forests and mountain torrents meant nothing to me. We went on excursions to the Gavarnie amphitheatre and the Lac de Gaube, where my cousin Jeanne took snapshots: all I saw were mournful dioramas. These uselessly elaborate surroundings could not distract me from my grief any more than could the hideous spectacle of the hotels planted along the village streets.

For I was unhappy. Garric had disappeared for ever. And how did I stand with Jacques? In my letter I had given him my address at Cauterets; as he would obviously not want his reply to fall into my parents' hands he would write to me here, or not at all. Dozens of times every day I went to look in pigeon-hole number 46 behind the hotel desk: nothing. Why? I had felt a carefree confidence in our friendship; now I wondered: did I mean anything to him? Had he found my letter childish? Or uncalled-for? Was it simply that he had forgotten me? What torture! And how I wished I could brood over it in peace and quiet! But I never had a minute to myself. I was sleeping in the same room with Poupette and Jeanne; we always went out together; all day long I had to keep a ceaseless watch on myself, and other peoples' voices were constantly assailing my ears. At La Rallière, over a cup of hot chocolate, and in the evenings at the hotel the lady guests and the gentlemen guests chattered away; it was the holidays, they were all reading something and they all kept talking about what they were reading. One of them would say: ‘It's very well written, but parts of it are rather dull.' Another would announce: ‘Parts of it are rather dull, but it's very well written.' Occasionally, someone, with a far-off look in his eyes and a carefully modulated voice, would say: ‘It's a curious work.' Or, in rather severer tones: ‘It's not everybody's taste.' I used to wait for night-time in order to indulge in the luxury of tears; the next day, the letter would still not have arrived; once again I would start waiting for night, my nerves on edge, and my emotions in a very prickly state. One morning in my room I burst into tears; I don't know how I managed to reassure my flustered aunt.

Before going on to Meyrignac, we spent two days at Lourdes. It gave me a shock. Confronted with that ghastly parade of the sick, the moribund, the lame, and the goitrous, I made the brutal discovery that the world was not just an expression of the human soul. Human beings had bodies and their bodies were full of suffering. As I followed a procession, indifferent to the squalling of hymns and the sour body-smells of church-hens on the loose, I began to feel ashamed of my self complacency. This human misery was the only truth. I felt vaguely envious of Zaza who, when she went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, washed the dirty dishes in hospitals. How could one forget oneself, give oneself utterly? And for what? Tragedy, disguised by grotesquely smiling masks of hope, was here
too completely devoid of meaning to make the scales fall from my eyes. For a day or two I supped on horrors; then I took up the threads of my own worried existence again.

I spent a miserable holiday at Meyrignac. I wandered around the chestnut plantations weeping my heart out. I felt I was absolutely alone in the world. That year, my own sister was like a stranger to me. My aggressively self-critical attitude had offended my parents, who now regarded me with suspicion. They read the novels I had brought with me and discussed them with Aunt Marguerite: ‘It's morbid, it's perverted, it's not natural,' I used to hear them saying; their pronouncements used to wound me as much as their comments on my black moods or their wild guesses as to what was in my mind. With more leisure than they enjoyed in Paris, they bore even less patiently with my silences, and I didn't make things any better by giving way once or twice to reckless outbursts of temper. Despite all my efforts, I still remained very vulnerable. Whenever my mother nodded her head saying: ‘You're in a bad way, my girl,' I flew into a rage; but if I succeeded in mastering my temper and gave her a soft answer, she would give a sigh of fatuous satisfaction and say: ‘There, now, that's better!' which only served to exasperate me all the more. I was fond of my parents, and in this environment where we had been so happy together I felt our lack of contact even more painfully than in Paris. In addition I had nothing to do; I had only been able to get hold of a small number of books. Reading a book on Kant, I developed a passion for critical idealism which confirmed me in my rejection of God. In Bergson's theories about ‘the social ego and the personal ego' I enthusiastically recognized my own experience. But the impersonal voices of the philosophers didn't bring me the same consolation as those of my favourite authors. I could no longer feel their elder-brotherly presences about me. My sole refuge was my diary; when I had chewed over my boredom and sadness in it, I could begin again to feel bored and sad.

One night, at La Grillière, just as I had laid myself to sleep in a vast country bed, I was overwhelmed by a terrible anguish; I had on occasion been terrified by the thought of death, to the point of tears and screams; but this time it was worse. Life was already tilting over the brink into absolute nothingness; at that instant I felt a terror so violent that I very nearly went to knock on my mother's door and pretend to be ill, just in order to hear a human voice. In
the end I fell asleep, but I retained a horrified memory of that awful attack of nerves.