‘No, alas. As you know there’s this press-conference on apartheid in the evening. They’ve brought me a whole pile of papers I have not looked at yet.’
Spanish political prisoners; Portuguese detainees; persecuted Persians; Congolese, Angolan, Cameroonian rebels; Venezuelan, Peruvian and Colombian resistance fighters; he is always ready to help them as much as ever he can. Meetings, manifestoes, public gatherings, tracts, delegations—he jibs at nothing.
‘You do too much.’
What is there to do when the world has lost its savour? All that is left is the killing of time. I went through a wretched period myself, ten years ago. I was disgusted with my body; Philippe had grown up; and after the success of my book on Rousseau I felt completely hollow inside. Growing old filled me with distress. But then I began to work on Montesquieu, I got Phillipe through his agrégation * and managed to make him start on a thesis. I was given a lectureship at the Sorbonne and I found my teaching there even more interesting than my university-scholarship classes. I became resigned to my body. It seemed to me that I came to life again. And now, if André were not so very sharply aware of his age, I should easily forget my own altogether.
He went out again, and again I stayed a long while on the balcony. I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson; it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement. When he was sixty André was astonished at being able to cross. Sweden in less than twenty-four hours, whereas in his youth the journey had taken a week. I have experienced wonders like that. Moscow in three and a half hours from Paris!
A cab took me to the Parc Montsouris, where I had an appointment with Martine. As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the high Alpine pastures where I used to walk with André with a sack on my shoulders, a smell so moving because it was that of the meadows of childhood. Reflexions, echoes, reverberating back and back to infinity: I have discovered the pleasure of having a long past behind me. I have not the leisure to tell it over to myself, but often, quite unexpectedly, I catch sight of it, a background to the diaphanous present; a background that gives its colour and its light, just as rocks or sand show through the shifting brilliance of the sea. Once I used to cherish schemes and promises for the future; now my feelings and my joys are smoothed and softened with the shadowy velvet of time past.
‘Hallo!’
Martine was drinking lemon juice on the café terrace. Thick blade hair, blue eyes, a short dress with orange and yellow stripes and a hint of violet: a lovely young woman. Forty. When I was thirty I smiled to hear André’s father describe a forty-year-old as a ‘lovely young woman’; and here were the same words on my own lips, as I thought of Martine. Almost everybody seems to me to be young, now. She smiled at me. ‘You have brought me your book?’
‘Of course.’
She looked at what I had written in it. ‘Thank you,’ she said, with some emotion. She added, ‘I so long to read it. But one is so busy at the end of the school year. I shall have to wait for July 14.’
‘I should very much like to know what you think.’
I have great trust in her judgment: that is to say we are almost always in agreement. I should feel on a completely equal footing with her if she had not retained a little of that old pupil-teacher deference towards me, although she is a teacher herself, married and the mother of a family.
‘It is hard to teach literature nowadays. Without your books I really should not know how to set about it.’ Shyly she asked, ‘Are you pleased with this one?’
I smiled at her. ‘Frankly, yes.’
There was still a question in her eyes—one that she did not like to put into words. I made the first move. ‘You know what I wanted to do—to start off with a consideration of the critical works published since the war and then to go on to suggest a new method by which it is possible to make one’s way into a writer’s work, to see it in depth, more accurately than has ever been done before. I hope I have succeeded.’
It was more than a hope: it was a conviction. It filled my heart with sunlight. A lovely day: and I was enchanted with these trees, lawns, walks where I had so often wandered with friends and fellow-students. Some are dead, or life has separated us. Happily—unlike André, who no longer sees anyone—I have made friends with some of my pupils and younger colleagues: I like them better than women of my own age. Their curiosity spurs mine into life: they draw me into their future, on the far side of my own grave.
Martine stroked the book with her open hand. ‘Still, I shall dip into it this very evening. Has anyone read it?’
‘Only André. But literature does not mean a very great deal to him.’
Nothing means a very great deal to him any more. And he is as much of a defeatist for me as he is for himself. He does not tell me so, but deep down he is quite sure that from now on I shall do nothing that will add to my reputation. This does not worry me, because I know he is wrong. I have just written my best book and the second volume will go even farther.
‘Your son?’
‘I sent him proofs. He will be telling me about it—he comes back this evening.’
We talked about Philippe, about his thesis, about writing. Just as I do she loves words end people who know how to use them. Only she is allowing herself to be eaten alive by her profession and her home. She drove me back in her little Austin.
‘Will you come back to Paris soon?’
‘I don’t think so. I am going straight on from Nancy into the Yonne, to rest.’
‘Will you do a little work during the holidays?’
‘I should like to. But I’m always short of time. I don’t possess your energy.’
It is not a matter of energy, I said to myself as I left her: I just could not live without writing. Why? And why was I so desperately eager to make an intellectual out of Philippe when André would have let him follow other paths? When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye.
In the kitchen Marie-Jeanne was busy getting the dinner ready: we were to have Philippe’s favourite dishes. I saw that everything was going well. I read the papers and I did a difficult crossword-puzzle that took me three quarters of an hour: from time to time it is fun to concentrate for a long while upon a set of squares where the words are potentially there although they cannot be seen: I use ray brain as a photographic developer to make them appear—I have the impression of drawing them up from their hiding-places in the depth of the paper.
When the last square was filled I chose the prettiest dress in my wardrobe—pink and grey foulard. When I was fifty my clothes always seemed to me either too cheerful or too dreary: now I know what I am allowed and what I am not, and I dress without worrying. Without pleasure either. That very close, almost affectionate relationship I once had with my clothes has vanished. Nevertheless, I did look at my figure with some gratification. It was Philippe who said to me one day, ‘Why, look, you’re getting plump.’ (He scarcely seems to have noticed that I have grown slim again.) I went on a diet. I bought scales. Earlier on it never occurred to me that I should ever worry about my weight. Yet here I am! The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I looked after it with bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting