Women

by Mihail Sebastian

  But today I’m not going to mince my words. Do you know I love Andrei? Don’t tell me I’m choosing the wrong moment: you don’t need to be treated with kid gloves, I don’t have that kind of finesse. The only thing that matters is for us to be clear with one another. I’ve heard that people refer to my relationship with Andrei as a casual sort of thing: an “arrangement” which has lasted five years and will sooner or later come to an end. Perhaps that is why women permit themselves to flirt with Andrei in front of me and why men talk to me rather freely when they get me on my own. Perhaps that’s why you tend to say harsh things about him and, in front of me, give him little ironic smiles. He may deserve them, but they hurt me. Because, in the end, you’re naive. You believe in intelligence, good taste, discretion, subtlety, and beyond all that you don’t understand how somebody could possibly love Andrei. Yes, Andrei, your friend and my lover. More than once I’ve caught you smiling with disbelief when I went up to him to stand by his side or say something to him in private. Maybe you told yourself that all there was to that beautiful man was fooling about with jazz and spending two hours every morning arranging his hair, and that in his bedroom he had a pinup of Rudolph Valentino cut out from some movie magazine. I’m not proud, but in those moments I would have liked to have gone up to you and told you that you’re dull and conceited and what bothers you is that he’s so much handsomer than you. Your superiority pains me. When you say something intelligent, it feels as though you’re reprimanding me. I would have liked to tell you that I’m aware of this. That I know Andrei just as well as you do, and it doesn’t change a thing.

  I once told you how Andrei finished second in a tennis tournament. You flicked the ash from your cigarette, looked at me, and said casually, in passing, “Missed the top spot!”

  I hated you that day. Because, you know, you force me to judge a feeling which I entertained in a simple, undemanding way. You were like a botanist intent on demonstrating that the laws of science required me to dislike a flower that I liked. You were the first person to make me ask myself why I loved Andrei, which is a completely irrelevant question and gets us nowhere.

  Why do I love him? Good God! Because it was meant to be that way! I met him a year after the divorce. I was in no mood for crazy passion. I was taking pleasure in dressing and inventing my own outfits for the days of travel and sunshine. I was preparing to leave but was unable to decide between the coast and the mountains, and kept putting off my departure from one week to the next, even though Bucharest was beginning to bore me. Then Andrei turned up. He courted me with the devilish impudence of a theatrical young suitor, and it amused me, just as it must amuse the Prince of Wales to be accosted by strangers in the street who are ignorant of his identity and ask him the time or for a small favor. I laughed and, for fun, encouraged him. Because I couldn’t in any case tell this likable, enterprising, self-confident person that he was mistaken: “Whom do you take me for, sir?” is a formal response. I like to be taken for exactly who people think I am.

  Perhaps if then, in the first days of that spring, I’d known where the joke was going, I would have cut it short. I close my eyes and, without any regrets, wonder how my life would have turned out. What sweet silence, what warm tiredness!

  Andrei entered my life in a moment of inattention, when I’d left the doors open and the shutters up. You know him: you can’t guard against him. He isn’t difficult, he isn’t bad, he isn’t good, he isn’t simple, and he isn’t complicated. Evening falls, it’s dark in the bedroom, you tiredly switch on the lamp and, in the sudden brightness, in a corner, there’s Andrei.

  —You were here?

  Yes, he was there. And since he happened to be there and because you’re tired and it’s late, you ask him to do you a little favor, to call the maid, to get you a book from the shelf, to tell you if he liked the green dress you were wearing the previous day, to pull the tea table a little closer, to hum the melody you heard last night at the Modern that you’ve forgotten.

  Summer slipped away, spent in the enjoyment of these little pleasures. One day I looked at the calendar and it was August 15. Now it was too late to leave Bucharest. The evenings were hot and muggy, with an enervating undercurrent of tension. Andrei found me by the window, my forehead pressed against the glass, as back in my adolescent days when I was home alone, not expecting any visitors, looking out from the balcony, past my neighborhood, past the city, for something that was surely on its way, though I knew not what. I told him I no longer planned to leave. He was voluble, enthusiastic, he kissed my hands, fell to his knees, rose and did a pirouette—all of which he could get away with because it was part of a joke:

  —Madame, ma voiture vous attend!

  He waved toward the door, smiling, young, and gallant, and the invitation in French reminded me of a phrase I’d often heard people using affectionately when referring to him: Ce cher André. I laughed and took his arm, like a friend, and went down. In those days he had a little Chenard Torpedo, which if I recall rightly he wrote off two years ago in Italy when we had that accident in the Alps. He got behind the wheel, drove off with me with an arrogant little smile that suited him very well back then and also intimidated me somehow.

  I’m writing quickly, without reading back over what I’ve written. Telling you all this, I have a distinct feeling of how obscene it all is. Yes, I became Andrei’s lover with the complicity of an automobile, an August evening, and a smile. I, who retain from love a bitter memory of time wasted, should not perhaps have the right to regret plunging into passion like that, through a side door. Still, I think sometimes of a love that is solemn and begins cleanly and clearly, with a kind of secret wedding between me and a man—which is perhaps only the result of my good bourgeois upbringing and which amuses me, but it might also be something else, something harder to explain.

  I wasn’t intoxicated that evening and I think I’ve never let myself go completely, which I actually despise about myself, because I wish I could have lived such pleasant, frivolous moments free of the constraints of good taste, but at the very moment I rested my head on Andrei’s shoulder, let myself go in the blowing wind, I told myself it was just a harmless bit of vaudeville.

  The lights became fewer after Otopeni. Andrei took a small, portable flashlight from his dashboard and handed it to me so I could illuminate the curves of the road. It was utterly entrancing. All I had before me was the white strip of the headlights, then a stretch of inky blackness, and then far beyond that a patch of incandescence made by the flashlight I was holding. Applying gentle pressure with two fingers, I maneuvered this unsteady light and followed how it fell on a rock a kilometer away, on a hanging branch, on the base of a bridge. I looked intently ahead, peering through the dark for unexpected twists in the road. It was an intense task. All I had was the sharp, immediate sense of my own tension: around me was the nervous tempo of the motor, the man sitting confidently beside me and steering, the black, rustling trees sweeping past on both sides, the silver dials near the brake, and perhaps still—distant-feeling, fabulous—the surrounding light. And now, leaning over my page at this little table, remembering that trip, I can feel the same pulsation beneath my temple.

  It was late, I don’t know how late, or where it was, when Andrei braked hard. The lights from a few scattered houses nearby shone through the trees.

  —Madame, la nuit vous attend.

  It was beautiful, the way he said it. Don’t laugh. The way he said it, it was like the chorus from some melody with awful lyrics which you sing anyway and enjoy because they’re beautiful in the passing moment. You’re far too intelligent to be able to understand that. I followed him.

  TWO

  We stayed there for two weeks. It was a village beyond Câmpina, not so far from Sinaia. I still don’t know what it’s called. I wanted to return to Bucharest the next morning. I told Andrei, the way you’d tell someone at a party, after midnight, that it’s late and you want to leave. He laughed and shrugged.r />
  —We can’t!

  —Andrei, be reasonable. It’s been lovely, but I have to leave now!

  —In what?

  —In your automobile.

  —It’s broken.

  —There was nothing wrong with it yesterday.

  —And today there is. Automobiles are temperamental things…

  —You’re kidding me.

  —No, I swear. This morning—you were still asleep—I went out to the yard and smashed the carburetor. I don’t like to take chances. It occurred to me that you might want to run off. And I decided that our adventure had to be defended against everybody, against yourself above all. Believe me: a functioning automobile is a dangerous thing. A broken-down one, forty kilometers from a town, you can rely upon. I’ve wrecked mine.

  —You’re crazy!

  —Indeed.

  Andrei’s style in this exchange will be familiar to you. That style which you described as cordial and ingenuous, by which you surely meant to say he was boorish and conceited, but which I liked then and still do today. You see, even today, after the accumulated fatigue of the past five years and with the cruelty I’ve patiently learned from him, I can’t stop smiling when I remember that daring, happy, reckless, cocksure Andrei who took me prisoner, proud of what he’d pulled off. He was wearing white summer trousers and his shirtsleeves were rolled up and his collar open, which gave him a youthful look, and in that country yard, something of a simple, joyful, rustic air.

  I’ve told you that I’m old. I was then too. Not as old as now, but old all the same. There’s been a weariness in me for a very long time. I don’t know the reason for it, but it makes me sensitive to anything involving images of courage, to sudden gestures, to daring speech, to the face of an impetuous young man. I don’t know. It must be something like the melancholy of summer’s end, when the sun is still strong and the light is clear but the tops of the evening trees shiver with a presentiment of the coming decline, a knowledge it contains within itself the way a loaf of bread recalls the hot embers of the fire where it was baked.

  Andrei won me that morning. He won me over, won my heart, and the meaning of that expression became clear to me that morning in a way it hadn’t when I’d come across it in the cinema and the theater, probably so that the revelation could be total for me later on.

  I shook his hand, agreeing to everything. He embraced me noisily and with immense childish enthusiasm, but at the same time controlling his display—which I didn’t dislike. I don’t ever mind giving people I’m fond of the impression that a whim of theirs is an order. I don’t remember with what degree of irony I went along with him. There must have been some. Very little, though: just the amount I needed to excuse myself for my lack of what you would call “restraint.” I discarded my restraint the way you’d discard an uncomfortable hat in order to feel the wind blowing through your hair.

  —Even so, we can’t stay here.

  —Why not?

  —Simple. All I have is this dress I’m wearing and you’ve that one suit.

  He smiled, kissed me, threw his jacket over his shoulder, and took off, shouting that he’d be back by lunchtime. He ran the several kilometers to the main road, stopped the first car that appeared, surprised the driver by jumping in, and was in Brasov in an hour. He rushed through the town and in another hour was back, laden with packages, boxes, and bags which we opened together, laughing at the discovery of each purchase, as he didn’t really know what he’d brought either and every item was a surprise for both of us: pyjamas, a gramophone with a single record, a wool dress, sports clothes, candy, books, a Ping-Pong set, handkerchiefs, powders, eau de cologne, sunglasses—a fantastic bazaar composed of charming trifles, assembled with stunning bad taste.

  It’s a stupid thing to say to you and probably inappropriate, but you’ll forgive me this moment of sentiment: they were the most wonderful days I can remember. I have a whole stack of photographs from that time and I often look at them—even today—without regret, without complaint for everything that’s happened since, happy to discover some new detail in one of those pictures I know by heart and in which everything, absolutely everything, is affecting: his white shoes, my broken sandal strap (I’d been running a lot and had snagged it in a hollow in the ground one day coming back from Prahova, where we’d been bathing in a secluded spot, utterly naked, because we didn’t have swimming costumes and also just for the joy the madness gave us), and everything is intact, recent, amicable—how can I describe it?—not like a desperate evocation of something lost, rather the leisurely, relaxed recognition of a landscape you inhabit and feel will always be yours.

  Since then Andrei has, on numerous occasions, been brutal, obscene, and mean, but all this and much else—immeasurably more than I’d tell you about, not because I fear you or because I’d find it humiliating (I haven’t had that kind of pride for years) but because it would make me sick to list it all—turns to nothing when I remember those two weeks at the beginning.

  I think I mentioned that there was a gramophone player and a record among all the things brought from Brasov. Just one record. I don’t know why he’d got hold of just one and why it was that one. On one side was a Hungarian dance by Brahms and on the other a Spanish dance by Granados, both played on the violin by Jascha Heifetz. It was a red His Master’s Voice record and I can still see it perfectly, though for some reason I haven’t bothered to look for it since. For two weeks, in the morning, at lunchtime, and in the evening—mostly in the evening, after dinner—waiting on the veranda for midnight, we listened to those two melodies, which became so familiar to us that they ceased being pieces of music and became a kind of domestic ritual, an integral part of our life there, similar to all the other household sounds—familiar footfalls on the porch, the ticking of the clock on the wall, the noise of a door opening and shutting.

  See, so many years have passed, I’ve forgotten so much and will forget so much more, but I think I’ll always remember those songs. Not because they’re beautiful—I don’t even know if they are—but because the holiday is contained so deeply within them that not even Andrei, who only knows tangos, has ever forgotten them and he sometimes, without even realizing it, finds himself humming one of them while he’s eating or smiling.

  I’d love not to know what they’re called or where I heard them, and for him to take them away with him nicely, as you’d carry off a forgotten letter from last year in the inside pocket of your overcoat, a letter you thought you’d lost. Anyway, I’ve never asked him anything about that.

  THREE

  We got back to Bucharest late, at the end of September, and found that everybody else had returned from their trips long before us and the trees along the road were turning yellow. It was then that I met you also, you were just back from Paris, having studied medicine of some kind, and Andrei commented skeptically to me about this (“That Stefan Valeriu will never do anything serious”), and perhaps you remember how embarrassing it was for me that day, when he called out to you in the street so he could introduce me to you, and how he was bursting with pride and suggestiveness. I felt he expected to be congratulated for me and for his “conquest.” I felt how gratified he was by my dress, my eyes, and your amazement.

  How I struggled in those days to temper his enthusiasm and indiscretion! I wasn’t a prudent person and don’t think I am today. But I was alarmed by the rumors, assumptions, and comments, and by the opening nights when I felt a trail of whispering behind me as I passed through the foyer. Or when I entered a restaurant and was met with thirty pairs of eyes that had heard something and wanted the whole story. The awkward questions, the innuendo…If I could have distributed a circular to everybody confirming that I was Andrei’s mistress and been sure that this would have satisfied public curiosity, I would have done it. I was weary of the whiff of scandal preceding me wherever I went.

  I tried explaining all this to Andrei. I told him I wasn’t ashamed in front of anybo
dy, but that we needed to give our love time to find its appropriate “social formula” (I don’t think this horrible term was employed, but that was what I meant). I asked him to let things be, to let them settle.

  —You’re a bourgeois, was his reply.

  I didn’t get annoyed. In a way, he was right. He was impassioned, expansive, and buzzing with plans for the future; I was reserved and a little skeptical. Lucid, at least. I enjoyed his friendship, but was tired of his juvenile effusiveness. I insisted on one thing specifically: that we live apart. I wouldn’t concede on that point. He was reckless, domineering, and threatening by turns, but I was unyielding and that was the end of the matter.

  —But for God’s sake why not live together? You let me sleep at your place. You have me over for dinner. You come out with me in town. So why not live together? Why not move in with me? Why not get a bigger place, for both of us?

  It would have been hard to say why and hard for him to understand. I didn’t even try. But I remained firm. I needed my own home, where I could be alone: a room where nobody could enter without knocking, a chest where I could lock away whatever I wished, four walls between which I could gather myself, at a remove from the world. A “fortress mentality” was how you described it once and I didn’t know what to say. But don’t think that’s what it is! I just know that I like my interior life, that my greatest pleasure is to return to it in the evening, and I’ve retained a very clear idea of home as a “refuge” (the return of the prodigal son is the only passage in the Bible that has ever moved me). If I haven’t ever let my life go to pieces, it’s largely thanks to this room in which I’m writing to you today. By being here, I’ve held myself back so many times from doing crazy things, from losing my temper, from leaping before I looked…And the number of times I’ve returned here wounded, anxiety written on my face, my arms hanging by my side, unable to make sense of some disaster which had engulfed me, thinking my life was over. When you’d see me in the street a day or two later, I’d smile to myself, thinking how much personal damage lies beneath my calm exterior. Because you would congratulate me for my calmness and I was proud of it—for reasons other than those you imagine, believe me.