The Age of Reason (11 page)

She clutched the sheets; she was afraid: ‘If I start detesting him, what would be left to me?’ Did she even know if she wanted a child? She could see, in the distance, in the mirror, a dark limp mass: her body — the body of a barren odalisque. Would he even have lived? for I am tainted. She would go to this old woman, under cover of night. And the old woman would stroke her hair, as she had stroked Andrée’s, and call her dearie; with an air of vile complicity. ‘When a woman isn’t married, pregnancy is as awkward as gonorrhoea. I must pretend I’ve caught a venereal disease.’

But she could not refrain from passing a hand over her belly, thinking: ‘It is there.’ Something living and unlucky, like herself. An absurd, superfluous life, just like her own... Then she thought vehemently: ‘He would have been
mine
. Imbecile, or deformed, still mine.’ But that secret desire, that dark oath, were so remote, so utterly beyond avowal, and must be kept so carefully concealed from so many people, that she suddenly felt guilty and filled with self-contempt.

W
HAT
first met their eyes was the escutcheon above the door, bearing the letters ‘R. F.’ and the tricolour flags: which set the atmosphere at once. Then the visitor entered vast, gaunt saloons, flooded by an academic light from frosted windows in the roof; a gilded light that soaked into the eyes, melted, and turned grey. White walls, beige velvet curtains: and Mathieu thought: ‘The French Spirit.’ A visitation of the French Spirit, it was indeed all-pervading — on Ivich’s hair, on Mathieu’s hands, in the muted sunshine, and the official silence of these halls. Mathieu felt overwhelmed by a cloud of civic responsibilities. Visitors must talk in an undertone, not touch the exhibits, exercise their critical instinct with moderation, but also with decision, and not on any account forget the most French of all the virtues — Consistency. There were patches, of course, on the walls in the shape of pictures, but Mathieu no longer felt any wish to look at them. However, he took Ivich round, and silently pointed out to her a Breton landscape with a Calvary, a Crucifixion, a flower-piece, two Tahitian women kneeling on a beach, a dance of Maori horsemen. Ivich said nothing and Mathieu wondered what was in her mind. He made spasmodic efforts to look at the pictures, but they conveyed nothing to him. ‘Pictures,’ he thought with annoyance, ‘have no positive force, they are no more than suggestions; indeed their existence depends on me, I am free as I confront them.’ Too free; he felt burdened by an additional responsibility, and somehow at fault, ‘That,’ he said, ‘is Gauguin.’

It was a small square canvas labelled: ‘Portrait of the Artist, by himself.’ Gauguin, pallid and sleek-haired, with an enormous jowl, combining an air of suave intelligence with the sullen conceit of a child. Ivich did not answer, and Mathieu flung her a further glance: he could only see her hair, tarnished by the false splendour of the day. The week before, when he had seen the portrait for the first time, Mathieu had thought it good. At present he felt desiccated. Besides, he didn’t
see
the picture: Mathieu was over-saturated by reality and truth, permeated by the spirit of the Third Republic: he saw all that was real, he saw — he saw everything that that classic light could clarify, the walls, the canvases in their frames, the scumbled colours on the canvases. But not the pictures; the pictures had become extinct, and it appeared monstrous, in the depths of this little domain of consistency, that people could have been found to paint, to depict non-existent objects upon canvases.

A lady and a gentleman came in. The gentleman was tall and pink with eyes like boot-buttons, and soft white hair; the lady was of the gazelle-like type, and about forty. No sooner had they entered than they looked at home: no doubt a habit of theirs, indeed there was an undeniable connexion between their air of youthfulness and the quality of the light: the light of national exhibitions was clearly best fitted to preserve them. Mathieu pointed out to Ivich a large dark patch of muddy colour on the side of the end wall.

‘That’s him again.’

Gauguin, naked to the waist under a staring sky, glaring at them with the hard, false eyes of the hallucinated mind: solitude and pride had eaten up his face, his body was transformed into a lush, limp, tropical fruit with pockets full of water. He had lost his Dignity — that Human Dignity which Mathieu still preserved without knowing how to use it — but he had kept his pride. Behind him loomed dark presences, a whole Sabbath of grim figures. The first time he had seen that foul and dreadful flesh, Mathieu had felt moved: but he was alone. Today there was a rancorous little body at his side, and Mathieu felt uneasily intrusive: a heap of refuse against a wall.

The lady and the gentleman approached; they took their stand opposite the picture, Ivich had to step aside as they blocked her view. The gentleman tilted his head back, and eyed the picture with critical intentness. Obviously a personage: he was wearing the Rosette.

‘Dear, dear, dear,’ he observed, wagging his head. ‘I don’t like that at all. He positively seems to have conceived himself as Christ. And that black angel — there, behind him, can’t be seriously meant.’

The lady began to laugh.

‘Bless me, it’s true,’ said she, in a flower-like voice, ‘it’s such a terribly literary angel.’

‘I don’t care for Gauguin when he tries to think,’ said the gentleman portentously. ‘The
real
Gauguin is the
decorator
.’

He looked at Gauguin with his doll’s eyes, a neat slim figure in an elegant grey flannel suit, confronting that great naked body. Mathieu heard an odd gurgle and turned round. Ivich had been seized with a paroxysm of laughter, and threw him a despairing look as she bit her lips. ‘She isn’t angry with me any more,’ thought Mathieu with a flash of joy. He took her by the arm and led her, still convulsed, to a leather arm-chair in the centre of the room. Ivich sank laughing on to the chair, her hair had tumbled all over her face.

‘It’s terrific,’ she said aloud. ‘Did you hear him say: “I don’t like Gauguin when he tries to think?” And the lady — just the sort of female for a man like that’

The lady and the gentleman were standing very erect: they exchanged looks in apparent consultation on the proper line to take.

‘There are more pictures in the side room,’ said Mathieu timidly.

Ivich stopped laughing.

‘No,’ she said gloomily. ‘It’s not the same now: there are people...’

‘Would you like to go away?’

‘Yes, I think so; all these pictures have brought my headache back. I should like to take a little walk.’

She got up. Mathieu followed her, throwing a regretful glance at the large picture on the left-hand wall. He would have liked to show it her. Two women were trampling bare-footed on some pink herbage. One of them hooded like a sorceress, the other with an arm out-stretched in prophetic impassivity. They were not quite alive. They looked as if they had been caught in the process of transforming themselves into objects.

Outside, the street was aflame. Mathieu had a sense of walking through an oven.

‘Ivich,’ he said involuntarily.

Ivich grimaced, and raised her hands to her eyes.

‘I feel as if they were being pricked with pins. Oh,’ she said vehemently; ‘how I hate the summer.’

They walked a few steps. Ivich swaying slightly, her hands still held against her eyes.

‘Look out,’ said Mathieu. ‘You’re on the edge of the pavement.’

Ivich dropped her hand abruptly, and Mathieu saw her pale, staring eyes. They crossed the street in silence.

‘They oughtn’t to be public,’ said Ivich suddenly.

‘You mean — exhibitions?’ asked Mathieu in astonishment.

‘Yes.’

‘If they weren’t public,’ — he tried to resume the tone of gay familiarity in which they usually conversed — ‘I wonder how we should get there?’

‘Well, we wouldn’t go,’ said Ivich curtly. They were silent, and Mathieu thought: ‘She’s still angry with me.’ And then suddenly, a ghastly certainty flashed through his mind. ‘She wants to clear out. That’s all she’s thinking of. She’s simply trying to find a polite way for saying good-bye, and when she’s found one, she’ll leave me standing. I wish she wouldn’t go,’ — he thought despondently. ‘You haven’t got anything particular to do?’ he asked.

‘When?’

‘Now.’

‘No, nothing.’

‘As you wanted to go for a walk, I thought... would it bore you to go with me as far as Daniel’s place, in the Rue Montmatre? We can say good-bye outside his door, and you must let me stand you a taxi back to the Hostel.’

‘If you like, but I’m not going back to the Hostel, I’m going to see Boris.’

So she didn’t mean to leave him: which did not prove he was forgiven. Ivich had a horror of leaving places and people, even if she hated them, being afraid of what might come next. She acquiesced with sulky indolence in the most disagreeable situations, and ended by finding a sort of solace in them. Mathieu was glad all the same: as long as she stayed with him, he could stop her thinking. If he talked incessantly, if he asserted himself, he could for a little while delay the angry and contemptuous thoughts which would soon possess her mind. He must talk, and talk at once, about no matter what. But Mathieu could find nothing to say. In the end he asked sheepishly, ‘But you did enjoy those pictures, didn’t you?’

Ivich shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course I did.’

Mathieu wanted to wipe his forehead, but didn’t dare to do so. ‘In one hour she will be free, she will judge me without appeal, and I shall no longer be able to defend myself. I can’t let her go like this,’ he decided. ‘I must explain.’

He turned towards her, but when he saw her rather haggard eyes, the words would not come.

‘Do you think he was mad?’ asked Ivich suddenly.

‘Gauguin? I don’t know. Is it because of the portrait that you ask?’

‘It’s because of his eyes. And then there are those black figures behind him — they somehow suggest whispers.’

She added with a sort of regret: ‘He was good-looking.’

‘Well,’ said Mathieu with surprise, ‘that’s an idea that would not have entered my head.’

Ivich had a way of talking about the illustrious dead that scandalized him slightly. She did not establish any relation between the great painters and their pictures. Pictures were things, beautiful objects to be appreciated and possessed: painters were men like other men. She felt no gratitude to them for their works, and did not respect them. She asked if they had been pleasant, kindly, and whether they had had mistresses. One day Mathieu had asked her if she liked Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings, and she had answered, ‘Good heavens, no — he was horribly ugly!’ And Mathieu had felt quite aggrieved.

Mathieu shrugged his shoulders. The insignificant students of the Sorbonne, youths as trivial and fresh as girls — Ivich could devour them with her eyes as she pleased. And even Mathieu had found her charming one day when, after watching a girl from an orphanage school accompanied by two nuns, she had with rather uneasy gravity said: ‘I believe I’m becoming homosexual.’ Women, too, she might admire. But not Gauguin. Not that man of middle years who had made
for her
pictures that she liked.

‘The trouble is,’ said he, ‘that I don’t find him sympathetic.’

Ivich made a contemptuous grimace and said nothing.

‘What is it, Ivich?’ said Mathieu quickly. ‘You aren’t cross with me for saying that he wasn’t sympathetic?’

‘No, but I wonder why you said it’

‘Just like that. Because it’s my impression: that haughty air of his gives him the look of a boiled fish.’

Ivich began to tug at a curl; she had assumed an expression of blank obstinacy.

‘He has an air of distinction,’ she said in a nonchalant tone.

‘Yes...’ said Mathieu in the same tone, ‘he looks arrogant enough, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Quite,’ said Ivich with a little laugh.

‘Why do you say — quite?’

‘Because I was sure you would call it arrogance.’

‘I don’t mean to say anything against him,’ said Mathieu mildly. ‘I like people to think well of themselves.’

For a while they were silent. Then Ivich said abruptly, with a set and foolish look: ‘The French don’t like anything aristocratic.’ Ivich was rather fond of talking about the French temperament when she was angry, and always looked rather silly when she did so. But she added in an ingenuous tone: ‘I can understand it, though. From the outside, it must look so exaggerated.’

Mathieu did not answer. Ivich’s father came of an aristocratic family. But for the 1917 Revolution, Ivich would have been educated at Moscow, at the academy for the daughters of the nobility. She would have been presented at Court, she would have married a tall and handsome Guards officer, with a narrow forehead and dead eyes. M. Serguine at present owned a sawmill at Laon. Ivich was in Paris, and going about Paris, with Mathieu, a French bourgeois who disliked aristocracy.

‘That’s the man who... went away, isn’t it?’ asked Ivich suddenly.

‘Yes,’ said Mathieu eagerly. ‘Would you like me to tell you the story of his life?’

‘I think I know it: he was married, and he had children — isn’t that so?’

‘Yes. He had a job in a bank. And on Sunday he used to go out into the surburbs with an easel and a box of colours. He was what was called a Sunday painter.’

‘A Sunday painter?’

‘Yes, that’s what he was to begin with — it means an amateur who messes about with paints and canvases on Sunday, just as people take a rod and line and go out fishing. Partly for health reasons, too — painting landscapes gets a man out into the country, and good air.’

Ivich began to laugh, but not with the expression that Mathieu expected.

‘I suppose you think it funny that he should have begun as a Sunday painter,’ asked Mathieu, uneasily.

‘It wasn’t him I was thinking about.’

‘What was it, then?’

‘I was wondering whether people ever talked about Sunday writers, too.’

Sunday writers: those petty bourgeois who wrote a short story, or five or six poems, every year to inject a little idealism into their lives. For health reasons. Mathieu shuddered.