Young, too young for me, idle, free, loving, yes, but spoiled:
“My mother has always done whatever I wanted . . .” I can hear his voice uttering those words, his beautiful voice—dark, varied, attractive, and as if theatrically trained, his voice that embellishes his words—and I hear, like a diabolical echo, another voice, muffled, rising from the depths of my memory:
“The woman who can run my life hasn’t been born yet! . . .”
A coincidence, if you like . . . but all the same I feel as if I have just swallowed a little piece of sharp glass . . .
Yes, what’s my role in all this?
That of a happy woman? . . .
This sunlight, imperiously penetrating my intimate camera obscura, is making it hard for me to think . . .
“I’m going back to the hotel, Brague: I’m tired.”
Brague looks at me over his paper, his head tilted toward one shoulder to avoid the thread of smoke rising from his cigarette, which hangs, half-extinguished, from the corner of his mouth.
“Tired?
Not sick?
It’s Saturday, you know! The Eldorado audience will be lively: get hold of yourself!”
I don’t take the trouble to reply.
Does he take me for a raw beginner?
Everyone knows this Marseilles audience, both irritable and good-natured, which scorns timidity and punishes cockiness, and can’t be won over unless you give it everything you’ve got . . .
The act of undressing, and the coolness on my skin of a bluish shantung kimono that’s been laundered twenty times, dispel my incipient headache.
I refrain from stretching out on my cot, afraid I might fall asleep: I haven’t come here for a rest.
Kneeling on an armchair by the open window, I lean on its back, rubbing my bare feet together behind me.
In the last few days I’ve rediscovered the habit of plunking myself down on the edge of a table, sitting down sidewise on the arm of an easy chair, and maintaining awkward poses on uncomfortable chairs for a long time, as if my brief stops on my journey weren’t worth the trouble of settling in or relaxing with any premeditation . . . The hotel rooms I sleep in look as if I’d just come in for fifteen minutes; my cloak is flung here, my hat there . . . It’s only in the railroad car that I show myself obsessively orderly, what with my bag, my rolled-up rug, my newspapers and books, and the rubber cushions propping up my rigid slumbers; I fall asleep quickly like a seasoned traveler, and I disarrange neither my veil, tied like a nun’s headband, nor my skirt, which is pulled down to my ankles.
I’m not resting.
I want to force myself to reflect, but my thoughts jib, escape me, and run away down the path of light opened for them by a sunbeam that has landed on the balcony and is now shifting onto a roof that’s a mosaic of green tiles; there it halts childishly to play with a reflection, the shadow of a cloud . . . I struggle, I lash myself . . . Then I yield for a minute and start all over again.
It is battles like this that give exiles like me such wide-open eyes, eyes that find it so hard to detach their gaze from some invisible lure.
The sour-faced exercise of hermits . . .
Hermits!
What will I think of when my lover summons me, ready to take charge of me for my whole life? . . .
But I don’t know what this “whole life” is.
Three months ago, I used to utter those horrible words, “ten years,” “twenty years,” without understanding them.
Now it’s time to understand them!
My lover is offering me his life, the improvident, generous life of a young man who’s about thirty-four, like me.
He has no doubts about my youthfulness, he doesn’t see the end—mine.
His blindness denies me the right to change, to grow old, whereas every moment, added to the moment just gone by, is already purloining me from him . . .
I still have the wherewithal to satisfy him; even more: to dazzle him.
I can put aside this face, as if taking off a mask; I have another, more beautiful, one, which he has glimpsed . . . And my undressing is like other women’s self-adorning; having been Taillandy’s model before becoming a dancer, I’m used to eluding the perils of nudity; I can walk naked under a strong light as if in a complicated drapery.
But . . . for how many years am I still equipped to do so?
My friend is offering me his name and his wealth along with his love.
No doubt about it, my master Chance arranges things skillfully; he wants to reward me all at once for my capricious devotion to him.
It’s unhoped-for, it’s insane, it’s . . . it’s a little too much!
That dear, honorable man!
He’ll await my reply impatiently, he’ll lie in wait on the postman’s route, along with Fossette, my Fossette who delights in playing the lady of the manor, who’s been riding in cars and trotting in circles around saddled horses! . . . He must be spicing his joy with a naive but legitimate pride, the pride of being the gentleman sufficiently classy to raise to his own level, from the basement of the Emp’-Clich’ to the white terrace at Salles-Neuves, “a poor little girl from vaudeville” . . .
Dear, dear heroic bourgeois! . . .
Oh, why isn’t he in love with some other such girl?
How happy some other one would make him!
I don’t think I will ever be able to . . .
If it were merely a question of giving myself!
But sex isn’t the only thing involved . . .
In the boundless desert of love, sex occupies a fervent but very small place; it’s so fiery that at first you can see nothing else, but I’m not a young ingenue who can be blinded by its glare.
Beyond that inconstant flame there lies the unknown, danger . . .
What do I know about the man whom I love and who wants me?
When we finally arise from our brief embrace, or even from a long night together, we’ll have to start living in each other’s company, for each other.
He’ll bravely hide the first disappointments that I cause him, and I’ll conceal mine, out of pride, out of modesty, out of compassion, and especially because I will have expected and dreaded them, because I’ll recognize them . . . I, who freeze when I hear him call me “my dear child,” I who tremble at certain gestures of his, at certain tones of voice that have come back to life, what army of ghosts is lying in wait for me behind the curtains of a bed that is still enclosed? . . .