Nausea (26 page)

She says suddenly:

"I've changed."

This is the beginning. But she is silent now. She pours tea into the white porcelain cups. She is waiting for me to speak: I must say something. Not just anything, it must be what she is expecting. It is torture. Has she really changed? She has gotten heavier, she looks tired: that is surely not what she means.

"I don't know, I don't think so. I've already found your laugh again, your way of getting up and putting your hands on my shoulders, your mania for talking to yourself. You're still reading Michelet's History. And a lot of other things. . . ."

This profound interest which she brings to my eternal essence and her total indifference to all that can happen to me in this lifeùand then this curious affectation, at once charming and pedanticùand this way of suppressing from the very outset all the mechanical formulas of politeness, friendship, all that makes relationships between people easier, forever obliging her partners to invent a role.

She shrugs:

"Yes, I have changed," she says dryly, "I have changed in every way. I'm not the same person any more. I thought you'd notice it as soon as you saw me. Instead you talk to me about Michelet's History."

She comes and stands in front of me.

"We'll see whether this man is as strong as he pretends. Guess: how have I changed?"

I hesitate; she taps her foot, still smiling, but sincerely annoyed.

"There was something that tormented you before. Or atleast you pretended it did. And now it's gone, disappeared. You should notice it. Don't you feel more comfortable?"

I dare only to answer no: I am, just as before, sitting on the edge of the chair, careful to avoid ambushes, ready to conjure away inexplicable rages.

She sits down again.

"Well," she says, nodding her head with conviction, "if you don't understand, it's because you've forgotten things. More than I thought. Come on, don't you remember your misdeeds any more? You came, you spoke, you went: all contrarily. Supposing nothing had changed: you would have come in, there'd have been masks and shawls on the wall, I'd have been sitting on the bed and I'd have said (she throws her head back, dilates her nostrils and speaks in a theatrical voice, as if in self-mockery): 'Well, what are you waiting for? Sit down.' And naturally, I'd have carefully avoided telling you: 'except on the armchair near the window.'"

"You set traps for me."

"They weren't traps. . . . So, naturally, you'd have gone straight over and sat down."

"And what would have happened to me?" I ask, turning and looking at the armchair with curiosity.

It looks ordinary, it looks paternal and comfortable.

"Only something bad," Anny answers briefly.

I leave it at that: Anny always surrounded herself with taboos.

"I think," I tell her suddenly, "that I guess something. But it would be so extraordinary. Wait, let me think: as a matter of fact, this room is completely bare. Do me the justice of admitting that I noticed it right away. All right. I would have come in, I'd have seen these masks on the wall, and the shawls and all that. The hotel always stopped at your door. Your room was something else. . . . You wouldn't have come to open the door for me. I'd have seen you crouched in a corner, maybe sitting on that piece of red carpet you always carried with you, looking at me pitilessly, waiting. ... I would have hardly said a word, made a move, taken a breath before you'd have started frowning and I would have felt deeply guilty without knowing why. Then with every moment that passed I'd have plunged deeper into error."

"How many times has that happened?"

"A hundred times."

it!"

"At least. Are you more adept, sharper now?"

"No!"

"I like to hear you say it. Well then?"

"Well then, it's because there are no more . . ."

"Ha, ha!" she shouts theatrically, "he hardly dares believe

Then she continues softly:

"Well you can believe me: there are no more."

"No more perfect moments?"

"No."

I am dumfounded. I insist.

"You mean you . . . it's all over, those . . . tragedies, those instantaneous tragedies where the masks and shawls, the furniture, and myself . . . where we each had a minor part to playù and you had the lead?"

She smiles.

"He's ungrateful. Sometimes I gave him greater roles than my own: but he never suspected. Well, yes: it's finished. Are you really surprised?"

"Yes, I'm surprised! I thought that was a part of you, that if it were taken away from you it would have been like tearing out your heart."

"I thought so too," she says, without regret. Then she adds, with a sort of irony that affects me unpleasantly:

"But you see I can live without that."

She has laced her fingers and holds one knee in her hands. She looks with a vague smile which rejuvenates her whole face. She looks like a fat little girl, mysterious and satisfied.

"Yes, I'm glad you've stayed the same. My milestone. If you'd been moved, or repainted, or planted by the side of a different road, I would have nothing fixed to orient myself. You are indispensable to me: I change, you naturally stay motionless and I measure my changes in relation to you."

I still feel a little vexed.

"Well, that's most inaccurate," I say sharply. "On the contrary, I have been evolving all this time, and at heart I ..."

"Oh," she says with crushing scorn, "intellectual changes! I've changed to the very whites of my eyes."

To the very whites of her eyes. . . . What startles me about her voice? Anyhow, I suddenly give a jump. I stop looking for an Anny who isn't there. This is the girl, here, this fat girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love."I have a sort of ... physical certainty. I feel there are no more perfect moments. I feel it in my legs when I walk. I feel it all the time, even when I sleep. I can't forget it. There has never been anything like a revelation; I can't say: starting on such and such a day, at such a time, my life has been transformed. But now I always feel a bit as if I'd suddenly seen it yesterday. I'm dazzled, uncomfortable, I can't get used to it."

She says these words in a calm voice with a touch of pride at having changed. She balances herself on the chest with extraordinary grace. Not once since I came has she more strongly resembled the Anny of before, the Anny of Marseilles. She has caught me again, once more I have plunged into her strange universe, beyond ridicule, affectation, subtlety. I have even recovered the little fever that always stirred in me when I was with her, and this bitter taste in the back of my mouth.

Anny unclasps her hands and drops her knee. She is silent. A concerted silence, as when, at the Opera, the stage is empty for exactly seven measures of music. She drinks her tea. Then she puts down her cup and holds herself stiffly, leaning her clasped hands on the back of the chest.

Suddenly she puts on her superb look of Medusa, which I loved so much, all swollen with hate, twisted, venomous. Anny hardly changes expression; she changes faces; as the actors of antiquity changed masks: suddenly. And each one of the masks is destined to create atmosphere, to give tone to what follows. It appears and stays without modification as she speaks. Then it falls, detached from her.

She stares at me without seeming to see me. She is going to speak. I expect a tragic speech, heightened to the dignity of her mask, a funeral oration.

She does not say a single word.

"I outlive myself."

The tone does not correspond in any way to her face. It is not tragic, it is ... horrible: it expresses a dry despair, without tears, without pity. Yes, something in her has irremediably dried out.

The masks falls, she smiles.

"I'm not at all sad. I am often amazed at it, but I was wrong: why should I be sad? I used to be capable of rather splendid passions. I hated my mother passionately. And you," she says defiantly, "I loved you passionately."

She waits for an answer. I say nothing.

"All that is over, of course."

"How can you tell?"

"I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it's quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don't do it. I know I'll never jump again."

"Why?"

She looks at me ironically and does not answer.

"Now," she says, "I live surrounded with my dead passions. I try to recapture the fine fury that threw me off the fourth floor, when I was twelve, the day my mother whipped me."

She adds with apparent inconsequence, and a far-away look:

"It isn't good for me to stare at things too long. I look at them to find out what they are, then I have to turn my eyes away quickly."

"Why?"

"They disgust me."

It would almost seem . . . There are surely similarities, in any case. It happened once in London, we had separately thought the same things about the same subjects, almost at the same time. I'd like so much to ... But Anny's mind takes many turnings, you can never be sure you've understood her completely. I must get to the heart of it.

"Listen, I want to tell you something: you know, I never quite knew what perfect moments were; you never explained them to me."

"Yes, I know. You made absolutely no effort. You sat beside me like a lump on a log."

"I know what it cost me."

"You deserved everything that happened to you, you were very wicked; you annoyed me with your stolid look. You seemed to say: I'm normal; and you practically breathed health, you dripped with moral well-being."

"Still, I must have asked you a hundred times at least what

a . .

"Yes, but in what a tone of voice," she says, angrily; "you condescended to inform yourself, and that's the whole truth. You were kindly and distrait, like the old ladies who used to ask me what I was playing when I was little. At heart," she says dreamily, "I wonder if you weren't the one I hated most."She makes a great effort to collect herself and smiles, her cheeks still flaming. She is very beautiful.

"I want to explain what they are. I'm old enough now to talk calmly to old women like you about my childhood games. Go ahead, talk, what do you want to know?"

"What they were."

"I told you about the privileged situations?"

"I don't think so."

"Yes," she says with assurance. "It was in Aix, in that square, I don't remember the name any more. We were in the courtyard of a cafe, in the sun, under orange parasols. You don't remember: we drank lemonade and I found a dead fly in the powdered sugar."

"Ah yes, maybe . . ."

"Well, I talked to you about that in the cafe. I talked to you about it a propos of the big edition of Michelet's History, the one I had when I was little. It was a lot bigger than this one and the pages were livid, like the inside of a mushroom. When my father died, my Uncle Joseph got his hands on it and took away all the volumes. That was the day I called him a dirty pig and my mother whipped me and I jumped out the window."

"Yes, yes . . . you must have told me about that History of France. . . . Didn't you read it in the attic? You see, I remember. You see, you were unjust when you accused me of forgetting everything a little while ago."

"Be quiet. Yes, as you remember so well, I carried those enormous books to the attic. There were very few pictures in them, maybe three or four in each volume. But each one had a big page all to itself, and the other side of the page was blank. That had much more effect on me than the other pages where they'd arranged the text in two columns to save space. I had an extraordinary love for those pictures; I knew them all by heart, and whenever I read one of Michelet's books, I'd wait for them fifty pages in advance; it always seemed a miracle to find them again. And then there was something better: the scene they showed never had any relation to the text on the next page, you had to go looking for the event thirty pages farther on."

"I beg you, tell me about the perfect moments."

"I'm talking about privileged situations. They were the ones the pictures told about. I called them privileged, I told myself they must have been terribly important to be made the subject of such rare pictures. They had been chosen above all

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the others, do you understand: and yet there were many episodes which had a greater plastic value, others with a greater historical interest. For example, there were only three pictures for the whole sixteenth century: one for the death of Henri II, one for the assassination of the Due de Guise and one for the entry of Henri IV into Paris. Then I imagined that there was something special about these events. The pictures confirmed the idea: the drawings were bad, the arms and legs were never too well attached to the bodies. But it was full of grandeur. When the Due de Guise was assassinated, for example, the spectators showed their amazement and indignation by stretching out their hands and turning their faces away, like a chorus. And don't think they left out any pleasant details. You could see pages falling to the ground, little dogs running away, jesters sitting on the steps of the throne. But all these details were treated with so much grandeur and so much clumsiness that they were in perfect harmony with the rest of the picture: I don't think I've ever come across pictures that had such a strict unity. Well, they came from there."