The Conspiracy (21 page)

I do not know why I am telling you this story, which ends there, since I have not been back to Le Vésinet and have not seen Jeanne for five years. My whole life is made up of such abortions. It is probably the only memory that still consoles me for my youth, even though it is slightly sordid and tainted by some humiliating details.

It is not necessary for me to dwell much on my memories of school. I should be lying if I said that I suffered much, up to the age of seventeen, from the secret shame my family inspired in me. There was play, the occupation of children: childhood is able to put the future tragedies of the man into abeyance. Everything came to a head when I encountered the two of you at Louis-le-Grand.

We had all just started our first preparatory year for the Ecole Normale entrance; we none of us knew one another, since we came from a dozen different lycées in Paris and the provinces; we were all the pride and joy of our schools; we all felt that stupid collective arrogance of candidates for the Grandes Ecoles. We were supposed to be seventy equals. I did not share these joys even for a fortnight.

I still find it hard to explain to myself why my meeting with the two of you should have had such a devastating side to it. Love at first sight is a well-worn cliché, but no one has ever said anything about envy at first sight. Rosenthal and you straight away inspired in me a passionate emotion, in which a blinding compulsion to imitate you was all mixed up with the need to hate you.

You struck me as inimitable, and had the same attraction for me that, in the Army, Parisian soldiers sometimes have for recruits from the back of beyond. You managed everything with a facility I found disconcerting. You were the type, people said, who could get into Rue d'Ulm at will. The teachers maintained an odious relationship of complicity with you. You used to produce the most brilliant philosophical dissertations. You read books that none of our schoolmates from the provinces had laid hands on, and that I barely knew of: Claudel, Rimbaud, Valéry, Proust. You were boarders – yet you looked clean, you shaved, you would reappear of a Monday talking to each other about the girls with whom you had danced on Sunday. I was concerned only with you. There was no question for me of making friends with our fellow students from schools at Bordeaux, Toulouse or Lyon: those sons of elementary schoolmasters and minor officials struck me as plodding and dull, destined for obscure careers as teachers in the provinces; one could see in advance their whole lives, which, like those of animals, would be punctuated only by illnesses, accidents, couplings and death. Yet I envied the facility with which you, nevertheless, had made friends with them: I was indignant about it on your behalf – it seemed to me you were wasting your time. I did everything to make you notice me, to make you realize that I was at a higher level than those solid but crude lads, yet I managed to extract nothing from you save an indifferent cordiality. I saw you alone as worthy of me, yet felt perpetually exasperated by you. I fought against this feeling, but it was like an external force dominating me. I had trouble knowing my own mind: I could no longer tell whether I hated you, or merely wished to be your equal. I would sometimes find myself defending you, when Brossard said you were poseurs; actually, I was defending in you the man I aspired to be. At other moments I felt longings for revenge against you take shape within me – yet there was nothing, nothing was happening, those longings for revenge were based on nothing, they had no motive, I could find no justification for them.

I was living in an extraordinary state of bitterness, as vague as one's first ruminations on love. I had been well brought up – the humanities are a noble education – and I felt my concealed hatred to be base. I vainly did everything to overcome my bitterness. But nothing ever liberated me from myself: neither work at the lycée – do you remember how hard I worked the year of the Ecole entrance? – nor later on (without your ever knowing anything about it) debauchery.

In country districts, old wives' tales are told about rickety children who cannot grow up straight: I was like them, I was stunted morally. And you, you were there,
unforgivable
and exceptional – like every object, like every creature. Your existence alone was enough for me to feel myself the victim of a generalized injustice that was gradually poisoning me. You never suspected the hate-filled admiration I felt for the two of you: perhaps you would have found it natural, or flattering.

It was no use my exclaiming to myself, alone, that I was just as good as you. That I would oblige you to consider me your equal. There was always an intolerable gap between what I felt myself capable of being and the value you put on me.

Then came the entrance competition for the Ecole Normale. You got in, as our teachers and schoolfellows had expected. I was fortieth, after the oral. I could not bear to think of myself, on a state grant, taking a degree in some provincial university; so I chose the Sorbonne, and gave up my grant and a second attempt at the Ecole. That failure separated me from the two of you. I was in despair. I did not know how to carry on that life in common with you which had given me so much pain – it never even occurred to me that I might be able to forget you. You were hateful, you tried to console me for my failure, you never saw more of me than during your first year at the Ecole. You used to tell me to come and work at Rue d'Ulm in your digs; you obtained private lessons on the side for me, to help my existence as an unassisted student and because you knew I was poor. I did not once cross your threshold without feeling sick with shame. I sometimes thought myself a monster, for seeing in your marks of friendship merely pity and casual kindness. Yet I know I was not mistaken, since my treachery two months ago at once struck you as natural; since you suspected me straight away.

God, how hard these last years have been! Success at the Ecole would have saved me – I needed only to prove myself, failure was a deadly humiliation. Well, I told myself it was in the nature of things: that I would go and rejoin my family in some damp, dark existence of the kind one associates with insects in rotting wood; that I would be cast back into its universe. Then I began to be ashamed of my body, about which I had scarcely thought up till then: I would look at myself in the mirror with disgust; I would see myself doomed – in the domain of the body as in all others – to Heaven knows what sort of inevitable defeat; I could not forgive myself for this detestable frizzy hair, this butcher's-boy charm attractive only to little factory girls, the awkwardness of my movements, the dark bristles that grew on my cheeks. I could no more forgive myself for being me than I could forgive you for being you.

I envied you your gifts, your money, your families. The mockery you heaped on your fathers was merely one further ornament of style: a sign of your bourgeois nature, like the suits you had made for yourselves in Boulevard Malesherbes, at a Scottish tailor's. The music and painting of which you spoke seemed to me nothing but subtle means of excluding me: as you know, the world of music is utterly closed to me, I might as well be deaf; and each time you mentioned the Uffizi, the Prado or the Terme, I was sure it was only an occasion to make me feel I knew nothing of travel – Florence, Madrid, Rome . . .

What was most unbearable of all was believing you to be happy – for I had no doubt about your happiness. Yet I would have held it against you had you bemoaned your fate: suffering, in you, would have been merely an attitude and, as it were, an additional talent or luxury. Even Rosen's suicide, which I heard about a few days ago, I saw as the last challenge that could reach me from you: the last inimitable act one of you could propose to me . . .

What a dazzling revelation, the day I grasped that I should never be able to assert myself, take my revenge or give my full measure except in fields other than those which you had chosen! We are not so far away now from this story . . .

When Rosen and you began to lean towards revolution, I followed you at once: it was at last a way of establishing a link between us. I could not complain, you accepted me as you had never previously done.

More than it did you, who came from far away, revolution struck me as easy. I saw it confusedly as the site of all possible opportunities for reparation and the slaking of resentment, and as a kind of paradise for the formerly defeated . . .

I was immediately more violent than yourselves. We were in a new set-up, where the old distinctions no longer obtained. I sensed
other dimensions
: the possibility of becoming your equal, in a world where only differences of intensity, speed and emphasis came into play, not those of social attitude . . .

I breathed easier for a few months; I was soothed; I was united with you by a complicity. I suddenly ceased to see everything as an opportunity for failure. Your tastes, your clothes, your successes, your attitudes, became failings rather than advantages; you were supposed to be ready to sacrifice them to a new loyalty, to which you could not refuse to admit me.

This respite did not last: I soon saw myself being reborn before my eyes; I stopped forgetting myself. I sensed that even amid our shared ambitions, you were marking out Heaven knows what new boundaries against me. When Rosen founded the journal, you allocated yourselves the big articles, the prophecies, the ‘messages'. You never left for Jurien or me, whom you despised, anything except reviews and critical comments. I was still only in your retinue, beneath you: there were still different
levels
. Do you remember that time earlier this year, around Easter, when Rosen and you certainly concocted something from which I was excluded: more than once, when I entered your digs, I caught you falling suddenly silent or talking of what ‘lovely weather' we were having. So I had been pushed aside again – admitted only to your half-secrets and your esoteric life; excluded from your most intimate passwords and your deepest complicities. Never did I hate you as much as then. I was brought down to earth. It was as if I had inspired you with a physical disgust, against which you were yourselves ceasing to struggle.

I had an idea, which might perhaps save me – remember that I did not accept my ailment, but tried persistently to be cured. I joined the party.

I shall always see before me your look of perplexity when I gave you this news, it was around the end of May. Joining the party had for a year played too big a role in our conversations, and in what you used to call our problems, for my decision not to touch you: I was the first of our group to take the plunge. You were flabbergasted, humbled. You at last had something to envy me for – an act you did not yet dare decide upon. You did not follow me, you wanted to remain free, you contented yourselves with getting excited over those who had died on
1 May
in Berlin.

Once again, I thought I could forgive you. There was a domain of politics and of the mind in which I had outstripped you; in which I was six months, or two months, ahead of you – you could not get over it . . .

I shall always remember my entry into the party as one of my rare moments of relaxation and peace. By chance, I had ended up in the cell at a factory in the 20th, a firm producing machine tools not far from Place des Fêtes. There were not many of us, eleven or twelve, it was an organization in which you could get to know one another. I was the only member drafted in, or ‘attached' as they used to say in the party. Those fellows were extremely fine and friendly people, they did everything to put me at my ease. It was a period when there was still a great deal of workerism in the party, but they never made any allusion to my status as an ‘intellectual', other than through a sort of kindly irony at which it was impossible for me to take offence. That little group of men gave me the only idea I shall ever have of a human community: one does not recover from communism, once one has experienced it . . .

No one called me to account for my past life, or my family. If I had spoken to them about my father's profession, they would simply have remarked how there really are people doing some funny things that you never think about. Understand me clearly: the question of original social sin was absolutely never posed . . .

This kind of political friendship covered everything – but only in the present of each one of us. It concerned not merely action, the factory, war and peace, but personal problems, anxieties, our whole lives. Since the party was extremely isolated at that time – as it is again, since 1 August – the feeling of shared solitude created an extremely powerful bond: something like a carnal complicity, an almost biological consciousness of one's
species
. For the first time in my existence, I felt a great warmth surrounding me.

My comrades were cheerful, they knew how to laugh, they were far more human than you were – you who were forever mouthing the words Man and Humanism. They were utterly free from resentment, or hatred: they were healthy constructors. The meaning of life shone out beneath the awkwardness of their words. I must have watched them in the way a child who cannot run watches other children at play: never did I see myself as more of a failure than among them.

I kept the secrets of my new life to myself. I did not tell you anything, but I pretended to know a great deal. I had a moment of pride the day Rosen, almost timidly, asked me in connection with some question or other:

— What do they say about it in the party?

I was your superior, your judge, each time I told you:

— All the same, we should make up our minds to raise the question of party control over the journal . . .

— There's no hurry, you would say.

And I would reply:

— If we're consistent revolutionaries, the decision is obligatory. The CP is the only authentic force in the service of the revolution . . .

The July holidays arrived. At the end of June, after the examinations, Rosen and you went away. I stayed alone in Paris: I did not have enough money that year to go away anywhere. I did not even have Marguerite, who was with her family in Britanny.