again, wrong to plot against me with him and Irène, wrong to make a fool of me, to lie to me. That’s very far in the wrong.’
‘Listen … will you listen to me quietly?’
‘No. I don’t want to talk to you any more; I don’t want to see you any more. I must be by myself: I am going out for a walk.’
‘Go for a walk then, and try to calm yourself down,’ he said curtly.
I set off through the streets and I walked as I often used to do when I wanted to calm my fears or rages or to get rid of mental images. Only I am not twenty any more, nor even fifty, and weariness came over me very soon. I went into a café and drank a glass of wine, my eyes hinting in the cruel glare of the neon. Philippe: it was all over. Married, a deserter to the other side. André was all I had left and there it was—I did not have him either. I had supposed that each of us could see right into the other, that we were united, linked to one another like Siamese twins. He had cast himself off from me, lied to me; and here I was on this café bench, alone. I continually called his face, his voice to mind, and I blew on the fire of the furious resentment that was burning me up. It was like one of those illnesses in which you manufacture your own suffering—every breath tears your lungs to pieces, and yet you are forced to breathe.
I left, and I set off again, walking. So what now? I asked myself in a daze. We were not going to part. Each of us alone, we should go on living side by side. I should bury my grievances, then, these grievances that I did not want to forget. The notion that one day my anger would have left me made it far worse.
When I got home I found a note on the table: ‘I have gone to the cinema.’ I opened our bedroom door. There were André’s pyjamas on the bed, a packet of tobacco and his blood-pressure medicines on the bedside table. For a moment he existed—a heart-piercing existence—as though he had been taken far from me by illness or exile and I were seeing him again in these forgotten, scattered objects. Tears came into my eyes. I took a sleeping-pill; I went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning he was asleep, curled in that odd position with one hand against the wall. I looked away. No impulse towards him at all. My heart was as dreary and frigid as a deconsecrated church in which there is no longer the least warm flicker of a lamp. The slippers and the pipe no longer moved me; they no longer called to mind a beloved person far away; they were merely an extension of that stranger who lived under the same roof as myself. Dreadful anomaly of the anger that is born of love and that murders love.
I did not speak to him. While he was drinking his tea in the library I stayed in my room. Before leaving he called, ‘You don’t want to have it out?’
‘No.’
There was nothing to ‘have out’. Words would shatter against this anger and pain, this hardness in my heart.
All day long I thought of André, and from time to time there was something that flickered in my brain. Like having been hit on the head, when one’s sight is disordered and one sees two different images of the world at different weights, without being able to make out which is above and which below. The two pictures I had, of the past André and the present André, did not coincide. There was an error somewhere. This present moment was a lie: it was not we who were concerned—not André, nor I: the whole thing was happening in another place. Or else the past was an illusion, and I had been completely wrong about André. Neither the one nor the other, I said to myself when I could see clearly again. The truth was that he had changed. Aged. He no longer attributed the same importance to things. Formerly he would have found Philippe’s behaviour utterly revolting: now he did no more than disapprove. He would not have plotted behind my back; he would not have lied to me. His sensitivity and his moral values had lost their fine edge. Will he follow this tendency? More and more indifferent … I can’t bear it. This sluggishness of the heart is called indulgence and wisdom: in fact it is death settling down within you. Not yet: not now.
That day the first criticism of my book appealed. Lantier accused me of going over the same ground again and again. He’s an old fool and he loathes me; I ought never to have let myself feel it But in my exacerbated mood I did grow vexed. I should have liked to talk to André about it, but that would have meant making peace with him: I did not want to.
‘I’ve shut up the laboratory,’ he said that evening, with a pleasant smile. ‘We can leave for Villeneuve and Italy whatever day you like.’
‘We had decided to spend this month in Paris,’ I answered shortly.
‘You might have changed your mind.’
‘I have not done so.’
André’s face darkened. ‘Are you going to go on sulking for long?’
‘I’m afraid I am.’
‘Well, you’re in the wrong. It is out of proportion to what has happened.’
‘Everyone has his own standards.’
‘Yours are astray. It’s always the same with you. Out of optimism or systematic obstinacy you hide the truth from yourself and when it is forced upon you you either collapse or else you explode. What you can’t bear—and of coarse I bear the brunt of it—is that you had too high an opinion of Philippe.’
‘You always had too low a one.’
‘No. It was merely that I never had much in the way of illusions about his abilities or his character. Yet even so I thought too highly of him.’
‘A child is not something you can evaluate like an experiment in the laboratory. He turns into what his parents make him. You backed him to lose, and that was no help to him at all.’
‘And you always back to win. You’re free to do so. But only if you can take it when you lose. And you can’t take it. You always try to get out of paying; you fly into a rage, you accuse other people right and left—anything at all not to own yourself in the wrong.’
‘Believing in someone is not being in the wrong.’
‘Pigs will fly the day you admit you were mistaken.’
I know. When I was young I was perpetually in the wrong and it was so difficult for me ever to be in the right that now I am very reluctant ever to blame myself. But I was in no mood to acknowledge it. I grasped the whisky bottle. ‘Unbelievable! You as prosecuting counsel against me!’
I filled a glass and emptied it in one gulp. André’s face, André’s voice: the same man, another; beloved, hated; this anomaly went down inside my body. My sinews, my muscles contracted in a tetanic convulsion.
‘From the very beginning you refused to discuss it calmly. Instead of that you have been swooning about all over the place … And now you’re going to get drunk? It’s grotesque,’ he said, as I began my second glass.
‘I shall get drunk if I want. It’s nothing to do with you: leave me alone.’
I carried the bottle into my room. I settled in bed with a spy-story but I could not read. Philippe. I had been so wholly taken up with my fury against André that his image had faded a little. Suddenly he was there smiling at me with unbearable sweetnesss through the swimming of the whisky. Too high an opinion of him: no. I had loved him for his weaknesses: if he had been less temperamental and less casual he would have needed me less. He would never have been so adorably tender if he had nothing to beg forgiveness for. Our reconciliations, tears, kisses. But in those days it was only a question of peccadilloes. Now it was something quite different. I swallowed a brimming glass of whisky, the walls began to turn, and I sank right down.
The light made its way through my eyelids. I kept them closed. My head was heavy: I was deathly sad. I could not remember my dreams. I had sunk down into black depths—liquid and stifling, like diesel-oil—and now, this morning, I was only just coming to the surface. I opened my eyes. André was sitting in an armchair at the foot of the bed, watching me with a smile. ‘My dear, we can’t go on like this.’
It was he, the past, the present André, the same man; I acknowledged it. But there was