Women

by Mihail Sebastian

  —If you like, I said, we could go somewhere nearby, for a drink and a talk.

  —With pleasure, but it’s a shame to miss a great show.

  We went outside. It was raining lightly. A nighttime rain in which everything looks wet—the streetlights, the lights in the shop windows, and the walls of the houses suddenly ablaze in the headlights of a passing automobile. From afar, a café’s friendly neon sign was flickering and I looked forward to the warmth and the hum of noise that awaited us there.

  November evenings in Paris cafés, when you find yourself in front of empty bottles at midnight, choked by waves of smoke through which voices and dice and the clink of coins on the zinc bar are distant, shrouded, consoling sounds, and all part of a hubbub that tells you that you are after all not alone during these last days of autumn. How good it is to be among people you do not know who all become friends and confidants when gathered together in that evening hour among those foggy mirrors and the green felt of the billiard tables, as you look out at the street through windows sprinkled with raindrops that trace ephemeral maps and continents as the rivulets trickle down the glass. It’s all familiar and anonymous in this neighborhood café, as on a train or a passenger ship, and the feeling that tomorrow you won’t recognize any of the friendly faces around you somehow makes your defenses melt and makes you want to discuss your most private affairs with the stranger next to you. I listened to Arabela’s story that evening, letting her tell it in her own way and in her own time, without interrupting her.

  —A cabaret manager, a Swiss guy, one time put me in that swing you saw at the circus, somewhere near Montreux. He said he wouldn’t hire the boys if I wasn’t part of the act. ‘But she can’t do anything,’ said Dik. ‘Doesn’t matter!’ said the guy. ‘Put her in there so people can see her—it doesn’t work without a girl.’ So that’s what we did in the end and it stayed that way. I travel around with them, keep an eye on them, because they’re all screwy and we have a show to do each evening. You’ve seen them. Dik drinks, Beb smokes, Jef chases women, and Sam can’t be bothered about anything. (Funny names, but that’s what I’m used to calling them and they always call me Arabela.) If I didn’t keep them on a short leash…One of them is my brother, another my friend, the next I don’t know what he is. Anyway, I’m used to them, and the setup works. Or maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. Sometimes I just get so bored and I don’t know what I’m doing up there on those ropes, where all I do is wait for our number to end…I don’t usually smoke, but I’m not used to refusing an offer either—since I’m not used to getting any—so I accepted your cigarette. I hope you don’t mind.

  I let her talk for a long time. I don’t remember now everything she told me. Ordinary things, occurrences, reflections, questions, memories—all in the same tired, offhand tone and without a flicker of light in her eyes, as though it were all equally unimportant. But she was probably tired, and I heard her out.

  We left late. It was nearly two. The Métro stations had long since shut and there was no sign of a taxi. I suggested she come to my place.

  —That’s not possible.

  —Of course it is. I’m inviting you to sleep, not for anything else. It’s closer and simpler.

  She thought about it for a moment and it was clear she wasn’t hesitating out of prudery, but was calculating whether it was more comfortable to go with me or not. In the end she agreed it was simpler.

  —I’ll come.

  We went up to the third floor of a nearby lodging house where I was living. There was only one bed so I told her I’d take the armchair in the next room. I meant it in good faith.

  —No, she replied. You’ll sleep in the bed. It’s big enough for both of us and I suppose we’ll manage.

  I accepted, because it made no difference and it wasn’t the first time I’d slept next to a woman with nothing else implied. Various friends, male and female, would often end up at my place after a party and sleep wherever they could make do. But when I turned off the light and sank into the familiar warmth of the pillows, the slow breathing of the woman next to me, her heart burdened with some private sorrow, felt so close and familiar, and I could feel her body throbbing so close beside me. To the dull sound of the rain still falling in the street, I took her arms and put them around my neck, happy that she was next to me. She submitted to me without any reproach for having broken my word, but at the same time passively, absurdly, calmly, and without enthusiasm. She tasted of warm bread and that feeling I still have inside is the only sure thing I have left of Arabela, today, after so many years living together and so many of separation.

  When our embrace ended she turned over, facing the window, said she was very tired, and fell instantly into a deep sleep.

  TWO

  I’ve never tried to explain to anybody how Arabela ended up with me and how I, always so steadfast in defending my freedom, entered into such a serious relationship. It all happened so simply and impetuously that I’m sure any explanation would be false. Arabela stayed out of laziness, just as she came.

  —How about staying here and abandoning the tour? I suggested, the next day.

  —Dunno. Let’s give it a try.

  And by evening she’d moved in. She’d brought a small suitcase and a few toiletries—her entire baggage. I asked her how she’d settled things with her colleagues.

  —They’ve gone away.

  —Was it tough?

  —No. I explained things to them and they left. I didn’t do anything anyway.

  The situation should have been awkward, with this woman whom I’d met only the day before and who had, on the basis of a few casual words, given up a life, or a career at least, to throw her lot in with a strange man with whom she had nothing in common. But how can I explain that feeling of calm I had from the very first, the familiar atmosphere Arabela brought to my room, the tone of shared memories created by the sound of her footsteps through our home? She knew how to open precisely the drawer she needed, to find where things were located, to turn on the light without asking me where the switch was, to put a book back in its place. She found everything on her own, instinctively. By intuition, I suppose.

  We went out for dinner, then to a local cinema, and got home late, not in any rush—at least not on my part—because although I liked the warmth of her arm and I was looking forward to having her entirely naked beside me, in bed, she felt so familiar beside me that it all savored of an old love affair and a settled passion, as though we had been together for years and were used to each other’s physical presence.

  I’ve always been an oddball and a loner, always protected my freedom any time a woman tried to tie me down. I’m a bachelor by nature and I hadn’t understood until then how living with someone could be possible. I, who always lived for surprise and temporary arrangements, found the idea of coming across the same body with the same reactions every night absurd. Perhaps I could find some way to explain how Arabela made me abandon my vocation as a vagabond in love from our first moment together, but why bother using psychology to explain something that happened so naturally and which I welcomed gladly? No, no, Arabela would laugh if she read such a thing.

  All I remember is that she smelled lovely. She had a faint aroma of perfume, warmed by her blood; a slightly animal smell, redolent of night. It was incredible how her skin transformed a banal and inexpressive cologne into such an alluring aroma that she seemed to exhale it.

  —Que tu sens bon! I told her sincerely, when I wanted to tell her how much I loved her, and I would find it very hard to translate that into Romanian. I think it would sound ridiculous.

  In the evening, when I got home from work, the memory of that smell would hit me from afar, filling my mouth and nose like the warm aroma of roasted chestnuts, and I’d take those stairs with the impatience of an adolescent, to get home and to embrace her and press my cheek to hers.

  There haven’t been many women in my life. But there have been a few. As
many as any man of average unattractiveness might have, when he acts kindly and knows when to insist. I’m not boasting, as I know any number of acquaintances of mine, taller and darker and better-looking, who have had ten times the number of “conquests.” Still, I’ve never met a woman—and I’ve been in love with some of them—who has ever given me the sense of cool sensuality that I found in Arabela’s arms, as I inhaled the smell of her warm, lazy, indifferent flesh.

  Because Arabela wasn’t a passionate woman, and it wasn’t an affair of passion. When I got into what they call my “mess”—when the ministry back home informed me I was suspended from duty—I know that my well-wishing friends back in Bucharest were alarmed and told me they pitied me, and spread the news that I’d fallen into the clutches of a femme fatale. I laughed, looking at that femme fatale in her housedress, almost always of a rough, warm color, doing chores about the room like a real housewife or fetching a book for me that I’d mislaid. There was something so conjugal and maternal about her (her serious, domineering expression in the evening when she took care of me, just as she’d taken care of Beb and Dik before), that the idea that someone could mistake Arabela for the somber heroine of a novel cracked me up.

  —What’s wrong with you, Stefan? Why are you laughing?

  —Nothing, sweetheart! I like watching you…

  —You’re not in your right mind.

  No, I was not in my right mind at all. On the day I completed my preliminary study for the international commission, to which I had been sent as a medical adviser to the Ministry of Health, I should have returned home nicely to Romania and submitted my report. That’s really what I should have done. That’s what Arabela advised me to do. I couldn’t. I’m not saying that I’d have been devastated without her or claiming I couldn’t have managed. I don’t think splitting up would have been terribly difficult. It was nothing like that. Still, I didn’t leave. Giving up her closeness and her full body—a little too full, to tell the truth, but so warm and welcoming—and forgetting those calm arms which I caressed with my lips evening after evening, from her shoulder down to her wrists and hands, seemed a bit too much of an effort. And on the other hand, I couldn’t take her back with me to my country, for many reasons (including, I must admit, a degree of cowardice; it would have been difficult to turn up in Bucharest with Arabela, where a number of respectable friends were expecting me, including a woman—Maria—whom I’d been pointlessly in love with for a long time and whose regard I still craved, precisely because we’d taken great pains never to allow ourselves to be more than close friends).

  To leave there—how dull! I just stayed, and there was nothing heroic about my decision. Just as back in my high school days when I’d sometimes wake at dawn and look at the clock in panic, then, after a brief hesitation, pull the quilt over my head, happily resolving to skip school.

  I didn’t go to school, even at dawn on those January mornings when my diplomatic case was expected in Bucharest and when, looking out the wide windows of our room at a long strip of overcast Parisian sky, I told Arabela I was staying. Sanctions soon followed. First a warning for grave dereliction of duty. Then my suspension. If I wasn’t prosecuted and punished more severely it was because Andrei Giorgian, a friend and political dilettante who had since become a member of Parliament for Turda and then a very serious undersecretary of foreign affairs, had apparently put a good word in for me. Andrei wrote to me in a personal capacity also (I recall it was printed on official ministerial stationery, which amused me greatly) and told me off for my frivolity. In the postscript he informed me that he was going to marry Maria (whom he had in any case been living with for some time, this being the same Maria to whom, at a ball one evening some years before, I had made an inappropriate confession, which I regret still). The postscript in itself made no sense to me, as their wedding had been announced in the papers and I’d already written to congratulate them.

  I took all this friendly advice and criticism with equanimity. Not because I was looking to annoy anybody or to quarrel. No. Just because there was nothing I could say, and because there was no way I could talk about Arabela and about the gentle happiness I had found in loving her and about the deep, orderly, simple voluptuousness of my nights in the rue Tholoze. It was funny to think that in everybody else’s eyes I had fallen prey to this dark girl who, even in her most heightened moments of passion, was unable to smile any differently from how she’d smiled up there on her silk swing, detached and weary.

  THREE

  Things went well while the money lasted. For about four months. I began with nearly thirty thousand francs in my account from the good times. Enough that I didn’t start out worrying unduly. In the meantime, we had enough to live on—and that was all I cared about, though I was no bohemian by nature.

  I can remember almost nothing of the first months of my love for Arabela. I see her quiet, steady, and house-proud, leaving me free to wander where I wished during the day and docile when I got back home. She’d take my arm and nestle against me when we went out, and stretch out in the bed at night like a pale, purring cat when it was very cold outside and very warm inside and I went to kiss her. I forgot I had a career, forgot I had to work, and turned back into the chaotic first-year student who’d missed anatomy lectures to attend concerts at the Colonne. This time around, I found another pastime: I spent the mornings in the Louvre and the afternoons reading Vasari’s Lives of the Artists in the National Library, always in the same armchair—118—and under the same green-tinted lamp.

  I was grateful to Arabela for unintentionally knocking me off my reasonable, predestined course and turning the serious gentleman she’d met that November night into somebody who forgot that he was a doctor, adviser, and diplomat and became again what he had always wanted to be: a young man.

  When summer came we went to Talloires and stayed in a guesthouse that was very cheap but had a fashionable veneer (which flattered Arabela’s bourgeois tastes), and cheerfully played the role of happy young couple in the society of friendly, gossipy people. Arabela shone with pride among her friends at the guesthouse, who were all decent wives. How well the air of married woman became her, having spent so many years playing the role of perpetual fiancée in a shady, unstable carnival world. I was truly pleased that I had given Arabela the one deep pleasure to which she was fitted: the illusion of legitimate love. And I enjoyed seeing her slowly lose the shade of suspicion, or perhaps panic, which in the past had sometimes clouded her smile.

  Those idyllic months came to a brutal end when we returned to Paris and I calculated that I had six thousand francs left.

  —I have to do something, I told Arabela, with an embarrassed shrug.

  —We have to do something, she corrected me.

  When I came home in the evening I found her in good spirits, considering the mess things were in, anyway. She was very brave and was clear about what we had to do.

  —Listen, Stefan, six thousand francs is a lot of money. You can’t appreciate that. It can last us five months at least. The doorman’s just told me maybe there’s an apartment free from the fifteenth. We can move to another neighborhood, preferably on the Left Bank, toward the Porte d’Orléans or the Porte de Versailles. You can get cheap rooms there for a hundred and fifty or two hundred francs and we’re sure to get a good one even if it’s on an upper floor. We can eat at home in the evening, I’ll take care of that. Lunch—there are clean little places, you’ll see! We’ll stay at home mostly and when we do go out, well, I think there’s a second class on the Métro—isn’t there?

  —For forty-five centimes!

  —You’ve no right to talk that way. You’ve no idea what forty-five centimes means. Oh, and don’t forget: try smoking Gauloises; they’re cheaper and taste better.

  —Poverty, in other words, I reflected with an exaggerated sigh, to hide the real worry I felt.

  —Not poverty! Certainty! For five months only, but certainty in any case. After that…well
, we’ll see what happens.

  Arabela had turned back into the authoritative, exacting woman I had seen on the first evening in her dressing room at the Medrano, inspecting her partners and giving them brief orders which they then meekly obeyed.

  Ten days later we’d moved. Arabela had taken care of everything—the negotiations, the deposit, quarrels, and boredom—while I, after panicking for a few days (“What do we have to do? What’s going to happen?”), resumed my methodical wandering through the neighborhoods of Paris, with occasional stops in art galleries and bookstores, returning home exhausted in the evening, but with the unutterably calm feeling that there was someone who on my behalf was thinking through the “problems of life”—as Arabela gravely called them whenever we happened to have a serious discussion. Our new residence was a small room on the sixth and top floor of a row of houses with black walls and scabrous plasterwork, in an immense yard where weeds grew freely and there were many children. Somewhere in the vicinity of the Porte de Versailles. I don’t know if a day passed when I didn’t see laundry hung out to dry from a window for a nonexistent sun, as it never poked its way into the yard. At the same time every day you could hear old records being played on a phonograph—a hoarse, unremitting voice. I don’t know what floor it issued from as I could never locate the source. A complicated staircase led up to our apartment and I’d stop about five times, in front of various doors, and read those same bohemian name cards: ALEXANDRE MERENSKI, artiste-peintre; THEODOR VAN HAAS, tenor; MARCEL CHARDE, paysagiste…Only painters, poets, and singers—a poverty-stricken demimonde in which I felt out of place. I, who had never had anything to do with the arts and who, apart from a minor interest in books, did not feel its pull.