Come on, come on! I must make a decision!
I walk and walk, as if I didn’t know that, despite my spurts of energy, despite my scruples, and despite all this inner penance that I’m trying to inflict on myself—as if I didn’t already now that I won’t make that decision, but the other one! . . .
OH, HOW tired! . . . I’m so tired! . . .
I fell asleep after lunch, as sometimes happens on rehearsal days, and I’m so weary when I wake up! I wake up as if returning from the ends of the earth, surprised, sad, my mind scarcely working, my eyes hating my familiar furniture.
Really, an awakening like the most horrible ones in the days when I was suffering.
But since I’m not suffering—why? . . .
I can’t budge.
I look at my hanging hand as if it didn’t belong to me.
I don’t recognize the material of my dress . . . Who, while I was sleeping, undid my diadem of hair that had been rolled around my forehead like the braids of a serious young Ceres? . . .
I was . . . I was . . . A garden . . . the sky a peach pink at sunset . . . a high-pitched child’s voice replying to the swallows’ calls . . . Yes, and that sound of distant water, now powerful, now lulled: the breathing of the forest . . . I had returned to the beginning of my life.
So long a road just to catch up with myself here!
I summon the slumber that has fled, the dark curtain that sheltered me and has just been withdrawn from me, leaving me shivering as if naked . . . Sick people who think they’ve recovered are familiar with these relapses, which find them childishly surprised and plaintive:
“But I thought it was all over!”
It wouldn’t take much to make me groan out loud the way they do . . .
Baleful, too sweet sleep, which in less than an hour erases the memory of myself!
From where am I returning, and on what wings, to accept so slowly, like a humiliated exile, the fact of being myself? . . .
Renee Nere, dancer and mime . . . Is that the goal prepared for me by my haughty childhood and my introspective, impassioned adolescence, which greeted love so fearlessly?
O Margot, my discouraging friend, why don’t I have the strength to get up and run to you and say to you . . .
But it’s only my courage you value, and I wouldn’t dare show you my weakness.
I feel as if your manly eyes and the pressure of your little dry hands, chapped by cold water and common soap, are better able to reward me for overcoming myself than to help me in my day-to-day striving.
My imminent departure?
My freedom? . . .
Bah!
Freedom isn’t really dazzling except at the beginning of love, on the occasion of your first love, on the day you can say, as you offer it up to the man you love,
“Take it!
I wish I had more to give you . . .”
New cities, new regions, quickly glimpsed, hardly touched on, fading away in your memory . . . Are there new regions for a woman who’s turning in circles like a bird tied to a string?
Won’t my feeble flight, resumed each morning, end up every night in the fatal “first-class theater” that Salomon and Brague praise so highly?
I’ve already seen so many “first-class houses!”
On the audience side: an auditorium blindingly illuminated, where the heavy smoke barely dulls the gilt of the moldings.
On the performers’ side: filthy, airless cubicles and an iron staircase leading to abominable latrines . . .
And so, for forty days, I’ll have to put up with that struggle against fatigue, the joking malevolence of the stagehands, the flaming pride of the provincial conductors, the inadequate food in the hotels and stations? I’ll have to find and renew ceaselessly in myself that hoard of energy required by the life of wanderers and recluses?
In short, I’ll have to fight (oh, how can I possibly forget it?) against loneliness itself . . . And to get where? Where? Where? . . .
When I was little, they said to me,
“Effort is its own reward,” and I actually expected my bursts of effort to be followed by some mysterious, overwhelming reward, a touch of grace to which I’d succumb.
I’m still waiting . . .
The muffled ring of my doorbell, followed by my dog’s barking, finally delivers me from this bitter reverie.
And here I am on my feet, surprised at having jumped up so nimbly, surprised at how easy it is to come back to life . . .
“Madame,” Blandine says quietly, “may Monsieur Dufferein-Chautel come in?”
“Not yet . . . give me a minute . . .”
To powder my cheeks, put on lipstick, and push back with my comb the curls that are concealing my forehead is a rapid, mechanical task which I can perform even without the aid of a mirror. You do it the way you brush your nails, out of decency rather than out of coquetry.
“Are you there, Dufferein-Chautel?
You may come in.
Wait, I’ll switch on the light . . .”
I feel no embarrassment on seeing him again.
The fact that our two mouths touched yesterday, unproductively, doesn’t bother me at all right now.
An unsuccessful kiss is much less serious than a guilty exchange of glances . . . And I’m almost surprised to see him with an unhappy, frustrated expression.
I called him Dufferein-Chautel out of habit, as if he had no first name. I always address him as “vous” or “Dufferein-Chautel” . . . Is it for me to put him at his ease? Very well, then.
“So? You here? Are you feeling well?”
“Yes, I am, thanks.”