Climates (11 page)

He took a piece of paper from a table and a pencil from his pocket.

“The two fleets … this arrow is the wind direction … This cross-hatching here, the shallows …”

I leaned over him. Odile had sat down at the same table, her hands together with her chin resting on them. She was admiring François and, from time to time, watched me from beneath her long eyelashes.

“Would she be listening like this,” I thought, “if
I
were describing a battle to her?”

Another fact that struck me during the few visits that François de Crozant made to our house was that Odile often dazzled as she related anecdotes and expressed ideas that I had told her about while we were engaged. She had never mentioned them to me again; I thought she had forgotten everything. Yet now here was all my poor knowledge resuscitated to amaze another man with the masculine clarity of a woman’s mind. As I listened to her, I remembered that this had been the case with Denise Aubry too, and that when we take great care to instruct an individual, we are almost always working for another man’s benefit.

The strange thing is that the beginnings of a true relationship between them probably coincided with
what was a brief period of relative security for me. François and Odile, who had openly compromised themselves in front of me and all our friends for several weeks, suddenly became extremely cautious, rarely appearing together and never in the same group in a salon. She did not talk about him, and if, out of curiosity, another woman pronounced his name in her presence, she replied with such perfect carelessness that I myself was taken in by it for a few weeks. Unfortunately, as Odile herself said, I was demonically intuitive wherever she was concerned, and it was not long before logical reasoning explained their behavior to me. “It’s precisely because they are seeing each other freely behind my back,” I thought, “and don’t have much left to say to each other in the evening, that they now avoid each other and make a show of hardly speaking to each other.”

I now habitually analyzed what Odile said with frightening clairvoyance, and I found François hiding in her every sentence. Thanks to Doctor Pozzi, François was now a friend of Anatole France, and he went to the Villa Saïd every Sunday morning. I knew this. Now, in the last few weeks, Odile had taken to telling the most interesting and private stories about France. One evening when we dined with
the Thianges, Odile, who was usually so quiet and modest, astonished our friends by commenting with some verve on France’s political ideas.

“You were dazzling, my darling!” I told her afterward. “You’ve never talked to me about all that. How did you know about it?”

“Me?” she asked, both pleased and worried. “Was I dazzling? I didn’t notice.”

“It’s not a crime, Odile, don’t be defensive. Everyone thought you were very intelligent … Who taught you all that?”

“I don’t really know. It was the other day, taking tea somewhere, someone who knew Anatole France.”

“But who?”

“Oh, I can’t remember … I can’t see that it matters.”

Poor Odile! She did make such blunders. She wanted to keep to her usual tone of voice, not to say anything that might give her away, but still her new love was just beneath the surface of her every utterance. It reminded me of flooded meadows that still look intact at a glance, the grass seems to stand
tall and vigorous, but every step you take reveals the treacherous layer of water already seeping into the soil. Though attentive to direct indicators such as naming François de Crozant, she did not see the indirect indicators that flashed over and above her own words and paraded his name for all to see like great illuminated signs. For me who knew Odile’s tastes, ideas, and beliefs so well, it was at once easy, interesting, and painful to watch them swiftly altering. Without being very pious, she had always been a believer; she went to mass every Sunday. She now said, “Oh, I’m like the Greeks in the fourth century
B.C
. I’m a pagan,” words I could attribute to François as surely as if he had signed them. She would say, “What
is
life? Forty paltry years spent on a lump of mud. And you expect us to waste a single minute being bored for no gain?” And I thought, “François’s philosophy, and a rather vulgar philosophy to boot.” Sometimes I needed a moment’s thought to spot the link between some newfound interest of hers that struck me as out of the ordinary and the true object of her thoughts. For example, she who never read a newspaper spotted the headline, “Forest Fires in the South,” and snatched the page from my hand.

“Are you interested in forest fires, Odile?”

“No,” she said, rejecting the newspaper and handing it back to me. “I just wanted to see where it was.”

I then remembered the little house surrounded by pine forests that François owned near Beauvallon.

Like a child playing hunt-the-thimble who puts the trinket he wants to hide in the middle of the room, on the carpet, right under everyone’s nose, making them all smile indulgently, Odile was almost touching with her endless naïve precautions. When she relayed a fact she had learned from one of her friends or one of our relations, she always named her informer. When this was François, though, she would say: “Someone … Someone told me … I’ve heard that …” She sometimes displayed an incredible knowledge of naval facts. She knew we were to have a new faster cruiser or a new type of submarine or that the English fleet would be coming to Toulon. People were amazed.

“That’s not in the papers …” they said.

Terrified and realizing that she had said too much, Odile beat a retreat. “Isn’t it? I don’t know … Maybe it’s not true.”

But it was always true.

Her entire vocabulary had become François’s, and Odile now spouted this man’s repertoire—the repertoire that had caused me to tell Hélène de Thianges that his conversation was just a star turn. She talked about the “intensity of life,” the joy of conquest, and even Indochina. But filtered through Odile’s veiled mind, François’s hard-edged themes lost their sharp contours. I could follow them quite clearly through her but could see they were distorted, like a river crossing a wide lake and losing the rigid framework of its banks, reduced to an indistinct shadow eaten into by encroaching waves.

So many corroborating facts
proved to me beyond doubt that, even if Odile was not François’s mistress, she at least saw him in secret, and yet I could not make up my mind to have it out with her. What was the point? I would reveal all the tiny nuances and verbal coincidences my implacable memory had registered, and she would laugh out loud, look at me tenderly, and say, “You do make me laugh!” What could I reply? Could I threaten her? Did I want to break off with her? And besides, despite appearances, could I have been mistaken? When I was honest with myself, I knew I was not
mistaken, but life then felt unbearable and for few days I would cling to some unrealistic hypothesis.

I was very unhappy. Odile’s behavior and her secret thoughts had become a constant obsession for me. In my office on the rue de Valois, I now hardly got any work done, I spent days on end with my head in my hands, dreaming and thinking; at night, I could get to sleep only toward three or four o’clock in the morning, after pointlessly mulling over problems whose solution I could see only too clearly.

Summer came. François’s posting finished and he went back to Toulon. Odile seemed very calm and not at all sad, which I found quite reassuring. I did not know whether he wrote to her. In any event, I never saw any letters, and I was less aware of his disturbing shadow looming over Odile’s sentences.

I could not take a vacation until August because my father was going to take the waters in Vichy in July, but as Odile was unwell for almost the whole winter, it was agreed that she would spend the month of July at the Villa Choin in Trouville. A couple of weeks before she was due to leave, she said, “If it makes no difference to you, I’d rather not stay with Aunt Cora but go to a quieter beach. I
can’t bear the Normandy coast; there are too many people, especially in that house …”

“What do you mean, Odile? Don’t tell me you’re the one who doesn’t want to see people now, when you’re always criticizing me for not wanting to see anyone!”

“It depends on one’s state of mind. Right now, I need peace and quiet, time to myself … Don’t you think I could find a little place in Brittany? I don’t know Brittany at all and they say it’s beautiful.”

“Yes, my darling, it’s very beautiful, but it’s a long way away. I wouldn’t be able to come and see you on Sundays as I could in Trouville. Anyway, you’ll have the villa in Trouville to yourself, Aunt Cora won’t be there until August first … Why the change?”

But she was obviously keen to go to Brittany and kept gently bringing the subject up until I gave in. I could not understand. I had been expecting her to ask to be closer to Toulon; it would have been easy because the summer was awful that year, and everyone was complaining about how wet it was in Normandy. Although I was sad to see her go, I derived some pleasure from knowing she was heading in this reassuring direction. I went with her to the
station, feeling rather sad. She was particularly loving that day. On the station platform she kissed me.

“Don’t get bored, Dickie, have some fun … If you like, you could go out with Misa, she’d like that.”

“But Misa’s at Gandumas.”

“No, she’s coming to Paris to stay with her parents all of next week.”

“I don’t feel like going out when you’re not here … I stay at home, on my own, moping.”

“You mustn’t,” she said, stroking my cheek in a motherly way. “I don’t deserve that sort of attention. I’m not interesting … you take life too seriously, Dickie … It’s just a game.”

“It’s not a very cheerful game.”

“No,” she said, and this time she too had a note of sadness in her voice. “It’s not a cheerful game. Mostly, it’s difficult. We do things we don’t mean to do … I think it’s time I boarded the train … Goodbye, Dickie … Are you going to be all right?”

She kissed me again, turned on the step and gave one of those luminous smiles that chained me to her, and immediately disappeared into the compartment. She hated goodbyes from the window, and
sentimentality in general. Misa later told me she was hard. That was not entirely accurate. She could actually be generous and kind, but she was driven by very strong desires and, precisely because she was afraid that feelings of pity might cause her to resist her own wishes, she refused to give in to them. It was in these circumstances that her face took on the blank, impermeable-looking expression that was the only thing that could make her look ugly.

The following day
was a Tuesday and I dined with Aunt Cora. She carried on entertaining up until August but there were fewer people in summer. I ended up next to Admiral Garnier. He talked about the weather, about a thunderstorm that had flooded Paris toward the end of the afternoon, then said, “By the way, I’ve just found a position for your friend François de Crozant … He wanted to study the Brittany coast. I found him a temporary job in Brest.”

“In Brest?”

I watched the glasses and flowers spin around me; I thought I would pass out. But the social instinct
has become so strong in us that I believe we could even succeed in dying while feigning indifference.

“Oh, I didn’t know that,” I told the admiral. “Was this recently?”

“A few days ago.”

I carried on a long conversation with him about the port of Brest, its value as a naval base, its old houses and its Vauban architecture. My thoughts were racing on two extraordinarily distinct planes. On the surface, they shaped the bland, polite sentences with which I maintained the image of myself in the admiral’s mind as a calm creature enjoying this lovely cool evening and the last fleeting clouds. On a deeper level, in a silent veiled voice, I kept saying to myself, “So that’s why Odile wanted to go to Brittany.” I pictured her walking through the streets of Brest with him, leaning on his arm and wearing that animated expression I knew so well and loved so much. Perhaps she would stay with him one evening. Morgat, the beach she had chosen, was not far from Brest. Perhaps it would be the other way around, François would come to meet her by the sea. He must have a launch. They would walk along the rocks together. I knew how lovely Odile could make the scenery seem on a walk like that.
Something surprising then struck me: although it hurt, I felt a hard, intellectual sort of pleasure now that I knew at last. For all the terrible problems I had wrestled with whenever Odile’s decisions were concerned, the conclusion that had come to me with astonishing clarity when she first mentioned going to Brittany was, “François’s already there.” And he was. My heart was devastated, my mind almost satisfied.

Back at home, I spent nearly the entire night wondering what I would do about it. Take the train to Brittany? I would most likely end up on some small beach to find Odile radiant and rested; I would look foolish and not even feel reassured, because I would immediately think François had been and left again, which would in fact be likely. The awful thing about what I was feeling was that nothing could cure it, because, whatever the facts, they could be interpreted unfavorably. For the first time, I asked myself, “Must I leave Odile, then? Given that her character and mine mean I can never rest easy, given that she does not want, and never will want, to be more considerate toward me, wouldn’t it be better for us to live apart? We have no children; divorce would be easy.” I then remembered very
clearly the state of humdrum happiness and confidence I had known before meeting her. In those days, although my life had little grandeur or power, it was at least natural and pleasant. But, even as I formulated this plan, I knew I had no wish to realize it and that the thought of living without Odile was not even conceivable.

I turned over and tried to get to sleep by counting sheep and picturing a landscape. Nothing works when the mind is obsessed. At some points I was furious with myself. “Why love
her
rather than anyone else?” I asked myself. “Because she’s beautiful? Yes, but other women have lovely faces and are far more intelligent. Odile has serious flaws. She doesn’t tell the truth; that’s the thing I hate most in the whole world. So? Can’t I free myself, shake off this hold?” And I kept telling myself, “You don’t love her, you don’t love her, you don’t love her.” But I knew perfectly well it was a lie and that I loved her more than ever although I did not understand why.