Climates (7 page)

At the time of our marriage, I believed that, like me, Odile could not bear the social scene. This was not the case. She liked dinners and balls; as soon as she discovered the dazzling animated group that revolved around Aunt Cora, she wanted to go to avenue Marceau every Tuesday. My only desire since our marriage had been to have Odile to myself;
I could rest easy only when I knew that so much beauty was perfectly contained within the narrow confines of our home. This was something I felt so powerfully that I was happier when Odile, who was always fragile and often laid low by exhaustion, had to keep to her bed for a few days. Then I would spend the evening in an armchair beside her. We would have long conversations together that she called “waffling,” and I would read to her. I quickly learned what sort of book would capture her attention for a few hours. She had quite good taste, but in order to please her a book had to be both melancholy and passionate. She liked
Dominique
, Turgenev’s novels, and a few English poets.

“It’s strange,” I said. “Someone who doesn’t know you well might think you frivolous, and yet deep down you like only rather sad books.”

“But I’m very serious, Dickie; perhaps that’s why I’m frivolous. I don’t want to show everyone what I’m really like.”

“Not even me?”

“Well, you, yes … Remember Florence …”

“Yes, in Florence I came to know you well … But you’re very different now, darling.”

“We mustn’t always stay the same.”

“You don’t even say anything kind to me anymore.”

“People don’t say kind things to order. Be patient; it will come back …”

“Like in Florence?”

“Well, of course, Dickie. I haven’t changed.”

She held out a hand to me and I took it, then another great “waffling” began about my parents, hers, Misa, a dress she had ordered, life. On these evenings when she was tired and gentle, she really was like the mythical Odile as I had conceived her. Kindly and weak, in my power. I was grateful to her for this languor. The moment she felt stronger and could go out, I was confronted with the mysterious Odile again.

She never told me spontaneously, as many chatty transparent women might, what she had done in my absence. If I inquired about this, she would reply with very few, almost always vague words. What she told me never allowed me to picture at all satisfactorily the succession of events. I remember one of her friends telling me long afterward (with that harshness that women have toward each other), “Odile always embroidered the truth.” This was not true, and at the time I felt indignant about the comment, but when I thought about it later I could
easily see what it was about Odile that might give this judgment some weight: the nonchalant way she described things … her contempt for precision … If, surprised by an improbable detail, I questioned her, she would shut down like a schoolboy when an insensitive master asks questions beyond his scope.

One day when, unusually, I was able to come home for lunch, Odile asked the maid for her hat and coat at two o’clock.

“What are you doing this afternoon?” I asked.

“I have an appointment with the dentist.”

“Yes, darling, but I heard you on the telephone; your appointment isn’t until three. What will you do until then?”

“Nothing. I’d like to go there slowly.”

“But, my child, that’s absurd; the dentist lives on the avenue de Malakoff. It will take you ten minutes to get there and you have an hour. Where are you going?”

“You do amuse me,” she replied and went out.

After dinner that evening, I could not help asking her, “So what did you do between two and three?”

She tried to joke at first, then, because I pressed the point, she got up and went to bed without saying
good night. This had never happened before. I went to ask her forgiveness. She kissed me. Before leaving the room, when I could see she was pacified, I asked, “Now, do be kind and tell me what you did between two and three.”

She burst out laughing. But later in the night I heard some noise, turned on my light, and went to her room to find her crying softly. Why was she crying? With shame or concern?

She answered my questions: “Be careful about this. I love you very much. But beware: I’m extremely proud … I have it in me to leave you, even though I love you, if there are more scenes like this … I may be in the wrong, but you will have to accept me as I am.”

“Darling,” I said, “I shall do my best, but you too must try to change a little. You say you’re proud; could you not occasionally overcome your pride?”

She shook her head obstinately. “No, I cannot change. You always say that what you like about me is how natural I am. If I changed I would no longer be natural. It is up to you to be different.”

“My darling, I could never be different enough to understand what I do not understand. I was brought up by a father who always taught me to respect the truth and precision above all else … It’s the very
way my mind works … No, I could never say with any sincerity that I understand what you did today between two and three o’clock.”

“Oh, I’ve had enough!” she said bluntly. And, turning to one side, she pretended to sleep.

The following morning I was expecting to find her displeased, but, quite the reverse, she greeted me gaily and seemed to have forgotten everything. It was a Sunday. She asked me to go to a concert with her. They were playing Wagner’s “Good Friday Spell,” a piece we both liked very much. As we emerged, she asked me to take her somewhere for tea. There was nothing more touching than Odile when she was happy, glad to be alive; she gave such a powerful impression of being made for happiness, that it seemed criminal not to give it to her. Looking at her that Sunday, so animated and dazzling, I could scarcely believe our quarrel the previous evening had been real. But the more I came to know my wife, the better I understood that she had a capacity for forgetting that likened her to a child. Nothing differed more from my own nature, my own mind, which noticed, accumulated, and recorded. That day, life for Odile was a cup
of tea, hot buttered toast, and cream. She smiled at me and I thought, “What truly divides people could be the fact that some live mostly in the past while others only in the present moment.”

I was still suffering slightly but was incapable of resenting her for long. In my head I upbraided and lectured myself, swore I would no longer ask pointless questions, would have faith. We went home on foot, across the Tuileries Gardens and the Champs-Elysées; Odile inhaled the cool autumn air with delight. It seemed to me, as it had in Florence in the spring, that the russet-colored trees, the shifting gray and golden light, the happy bustle of Paris, the children’s boats whose sails leaned over the large pond, and the flexible spray of the fountain in their midsts—everything was singing the Knight’s theme in unison. I kept repeating a sentence from Rondet’s
Christian Manual
to myself, one I liked very much and that I had grown accustomed to applying to my relationship with Odile: “Here I am before you like a slave and I am ready to do anything, for I want nothing for myself, but for you.” When I succeeded in conquering my pride like this and humiliating myself, not before Odile but to be more precise before my love for Odile, I felt pleased with myself.

The person Odile saw
most often was Misa. They telephoned each other every morning, sometimes talking for more than an hour, and went out together in the afternoon. I was in favor of this friendship, which kept Odile occupied without danger while I was at work. I even enjoyed seeing Misa at our apartment on Sundays and, more than once, it was I who suggested this friend accompany us when Odile and I made little two- or three-day trips. I want to try to explain the feelings that guided me in this, because they will help you understand Misa’s unusual role in my life. First, if, as in the early weeks of our marriage, I still wanted
to be alone with Odile, it was now more out of a vague fear of what new friends might bring than for positive pleasure. I loved her no less, but I knew that exchanges between us would always be limited and that she would accept truly serious, in-depth conversations only with listless goodwill. On the other hand, it is fair to say that I was developing a taste for the slightly mad, slightly sad, often frivolous, and always gracious chattering, the “waffling” that was Odile’s real form of conversation when she was quite natural. But Odile was never more herself than with Misa. When they talked together, they both displayed a puerile side, one I found very entertaining and touching too, in that it showed me what Odile might have been like as a child. I was delighted one evening while we were staying in Dieppe when they argued like children, and Odile ended up throwing a pillow at Misa’s face, crying, “Beastly girl!”

I also harbored more unsettling feelings, the sort that must appear every time circumstances rather than love cause a young woman to be involved in a man’s daily life. Thanks to our journeys and thanks to Odile’s own familiarity that permitted my own, I found I was almost as initimate with Misa as with a mistress. One day when we were discussing
women’s physical strength, she challenged me. We wrestled for a moment; I tipped her over, then stood up, slightly ashamed.

“Really, you’re such children!” said Odile.

Misa stayed on the floor a long time, staring at me.

In fact she was the only human being Odile and I received at home with equal pleasure. Halff and Bertrand hardly came anymore and I did not miss them much. I very soon felt the same way about them as Odile did. And when I listened to her talking to them, I experienced a strange duality. Seeing her through their eyes, I felt she treated serious subjects with inappropriate levity. But at the same time I managed to prefer her flights of fancy to my friends’ theories. I was ashamed of my wife in front of them but proud of her in front of myself. When they left, I would think to myself that, in spite of everything, Odile was superior to them in her more direct contact with life and nature.

Odile did not like my family and I did not care much for hers. My mother had wanted to give her advice on her choice of furniture, our way of life,
and a young wife’s duties. Advice was Odile’s least favorite thing in the world. When she talked about the Marcenats, she adopted a tone I found rather shocking. I was bored at Gandumas and felt that there all life’s pleasures were sacrificed to a family conformism whose sacred origins were utterly unproved, and yet I was quite proud of the austerity of our traditions. Life in Paris, where the name Marcenat meant nothing, should have cured me of my insistence on granting them such importance, but like a small religious community transported to a barbarous continent and whose religious faith remains undisturbed by the sight of millions of people worshipping different gods, so we Marcenats, transported into a pagan world, remembered Limousin and recalled our greatness.

My own father, who admired Odile, could not help but be irritated by her. He did not show it; he was too good and too reserved for that. But, being familiar with and having inherited his propriety, I knew how much Odile’s tone of voice must have pained him. When my wife had cause to doubt something or to be angry, she would express her views forcefully and then forget about them. This was not how we Marcenats had been taught that
human beings communicate with each other. When Odile said, “Your mother came here while I was away and took the liberty of making certain comments to the manservant; I shall call her to tell her I won’t tolerate that …,” I begged her to wait.

“Listen, Odile, deep down you’re right, but don’t try to tell her yourself, you’ll only make her angry. Let me do it or, if you prefer—and it would actually be better—ask Aunt Cora to tell my mother that you told her that …”

Odile laughed in my face. “You have no idea,” she said, “how comical your family is … Except, it’s also terrible … Yes really, Dickie, it’s terrible, because I actually love you less when I see the caricatures of you that all these people effectively are … I do understand that you’re not like that by nature, but you’ve been affected by them.”

The first summer we spent together at Gandumas was quite difficult. At home, my family had lunch at exactly noon, and it had never occurred to me to keep my father waiting. But Odile would take a book down to the meadow or go for a walk along the river and forget the time. I watched my father pacing backward and forward in the library, and ran across the park looking for my wife, only
to come back out of breath having failed to find her. Then she would appear, all calm and smiling, and happy to be warmed by the sun. At the beginning of the meal we would sit in silence to show our disapproval, which (given that it came from a group of Marcenats) could only be indirect and unspoken, and she would watch us with a smile in which I could read amusement and defiance.

In the Malet household, with whom we dined once a week, the situation was completely reversed; I was the one who felt scrutinized and judged. Here meals were not solemn ceremonies. Odile’s brothers would get up to fetch bread; Monsieur Malet might mention some saying he had read, could not quote it exactly, and he too would go out to consult a book. Conversation was extremely free, and I did not like to hear Monsieur Malet discussing improper subjects in front of his daughter. I knew how ridiculous it was to attach so much importance to such small details, but it was not a judgment, it was an uncomfortable impression. I was not happy in the Malet house; it was not my sort of climate. I did not like myself, I seemed solemn, boring, and, even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.

But in the Malet household and at Gandumas alike, my discomfort was only skin-deep because I had the still potent pleasure of watching Odile live. When I was seated opposite her at a dinner, I could not help watching her. She had a dazzling, luminous whiteness and reminded me of a beautiful diamond twinkling in the moonlight. At the time she almost always dressed in white and surrounded herself with white flowers at home. It suited her well. What a fantastic combination of candor and mystery she was! It felt like living alongside a child, but sometimes, when she spoke to another man, I caught glimpses of unfamiliar sentiments in her expression and something like the distant murmurings of a passionate and savage race.