Her sister was the first to find a husband. The winter they married, Alice was seventeen and feverishly preparing for her first ball, at the Mulhouse College of Chemical Engineering. Too ill to play her role as chaperone, Anna delegated the task to her eldest daughter, now “settled.” The evening was a source of some anxiety to her in prospect. The young chemists, who were very rowdy, frequently made the town buzz with their practical jokes. No one had forgotten the morning when the main street had woken to an appalling racket—its garbage cans had all been strung together on a rope tied to the back of a garbage truck making its rounds; or the day when frightened pedestrians found a crocodile swimming in the ornamental pool on the main square. A zealous policeman had actually fired a shot at it. This produced a notably metallic ring, and no wonder: the monster was actually the sign of a restaurant called The Crocodile and had been taken down by those college scamps during the night.
A thousand times over Anne advised Alice to be careful and well-behaved—if your grandmother knew you were in such a sinful place she’d pop her corset! Alice promised to be good.
Before the big day, her mother insisted that she be photographed in her pretty mauve dress, whose collar and low waist she had adorned with a pattern of stiff muslin pansies. Alice always kept this portrait: it was a souvenir of the most wonderful day in her life. In it she looks like the romantic woman of one’s dreams against the background of trompe-l’oeil clouds, standing erect, her head bent as if swaying in the breeze that quickens the cardboard sky, while her hand rests nonchalantly on a gilt wood credenza.
Who could number the times she has sat in reverie in front of that oval picture frame? The ball might have turned out quite differently that night, and then she would never have dreamed her life away with him. It makes her head spin reliving that moment when, in the flash of their meeting, everything was settled. She might still have brushed against his back, jostled his elbow in the crush, blushed after spilling his drink and knocking cigarette ash over the jacket of his impeccable young officer’s uniform—and then forgotten him and rushed onto the dance floor on someone else’s arm. Or he might have ignored her awkwardness and gone on talking man’s talk, or perhaps for the next tango invited the blonde, or the young lady in blue flounces, or the excited girl in pink who was laughing so loud. But no: that night he was the hero and she was the heroine of a novel that time was writing for them. No sooner had their eyes met in fleeting appeal than that decisive moment already was part of their past.
In my darkness, I can see the young girl in mauve in the middle of the crowd. I can imagine her emotion and the faint giddiness that transports her as she goes into the ballroom and breathes in the first sounds of dancing. That night she may not have been the gayest woman, or the most confident; but beneath the crystal chandeliers of the vast, austere hall, rimmed with dark paneling and leatherette settees, in the midst of the laughter, the waltzing, and the petticoats, she was the only one he saw.
He was chatting at the bar with a group of young men, no doubt discussing politics, careers, the future. Soon they would start talking about the young ladies, making enthusiastic or ironic remarks about their dresses and hairdos. Each would then choose one of the lovelies and, with a becoming bow, invite her to join in the dancing.
But then she makes her entry and, as in a movie, all eyes turn toward her. As for him, I can see him leave his drink on the bar; someone whispers in his ear, takes him by the arm, and leads him to her. He tells the others, “I’ll be back.” But he won’t be back.
As a joke, the band is playing an old-fashioned quadrille. The floor trembles, bits of color are bobbing up and down among laughing faces. Along the walls, the mothers’ hats straighten up, eyes stare anxiously at the middle of the room. Can you dance that in a short skirt?
They are introduced. Alice distractedly proffers her hand. From her wrist a velvet reticule dangles on a gilded chain. She doesn’t catch his name; he sees nothing but her eyes. Side by side they watch the dancers’ merry-go-round. Enchanted by the spectacle, she has clasped her hands under her uplifted chin. He is entirely preoccupied by the mauve dress, the garland of pansies encircling the white neck, the pink cheeks and black lashes, the reticule brushing against her bosom at the end of its chain.
Then, without knowing how—applause has acknowledged the end of the square dance, the band has barely started “The Blue
Danube”—she is in his arms. All that separates their faces are her chestnut locks and the scent of the lavender water with which he must have doused himself.
He danced badly, but all night long. The waxed floor squeaked in places; near the bar it had lost its polish from spilt white wine. All night long her brown moiré pumps followed in the steps (a trifle awkward at first, more confident by dawn) of his patent leather shoes.
Alice’s sister has to wait a long, long time. Through sleeping streets she brings Alice home on her cloud. Streetlamps are extinguished in the morning fog. Going up the stairs, they keep laughing all the way to the apartment door, which Anna soundlessly opens, revealing to the early morning an insomniac’s face and a voice stifled with anxiety.
“Good Lord, what have you been doing so late?”
Enfolding her in her soft arms, Alice, drunk with sleep, tells her that she is engaged. By the time her mother faints she is already sound asleep on the couch in the hall, amid the crumpled folds of her mauve dress, hugging the velvet reticule to her heart.
The night wore on. I keep expecting to hear something stirring; but it’s the hour between night and morning when, even in Paris, everything is calm. There is only from time to time the distant growl of a car; and, much nearer, the throbbing tick tock of the alarm clock that fills my head. It’s the hour when the sleep of city dwellers is deep, before the familiar noises of morning. Juliette has fallen asleep. I’m sitting alone, facing the empty chair. Soon I’ll hear the wine merchant rolling up his iron curtain, the clash of bottles in wooden crates, the metallic sound of stands being set up on the sidewalk. Today is market day.
But for the moment it’s still the damp bitter time when the eyelids of those standing watch grow heavy, the time when night owls are returning from their festivities, the time when you came home from the ball. If I had moved out of the red circle of the little lamp that insulates me from this baneful night, if I groped my way to your room, perhaps the door would open on a seventeen-year-old young woman, asleep in a mauve dress sprigged with faded pansies: perhaps, perhaps . . . if the stories you once told me were not tall tales, and if the years, the wearing years, hadn’t killed Sleeping Beauty.
I sit rooted to my chair. Morning is tracing gray stripes on the blind, and I wish I could utterly expel from my weariness the image of an old woman I no longer know, now lying in the depths of a most incomprehensible solitude. Around me objects are emerging from the shadows. It’s as though they were speaking of you through a veil—as if, no longer destined to exist in the light of your gaze, your touch, your scent, they were withdrawing from the oncoming day that will render them forever useless; as if they were already vanishing into the museum of oblivion.
I almost fell asleep. Rousing myself, anxious not to sink into some cloying dream—boarded