'You know quite well you ought to be thinking about getting yourself married. And yet you'd be prepared to spend part of your life with me, more or less as a recognized mistress (who do you think would be taken in by the "secretary" or "cousin" business?), and at the same time play the part of the pure young thing with your future husband!'
Her face took on the disconsolate look of a little girl faced with an insoluble problem in arithmetic.
'How could you think for a moment that it wouldn't be painful for me? But since it has to be....'
'What do you mean "It has to be"?' asked Costals (who understood perfectly well).
'It has to be, because I love you. But you've never wanted to believe that I loved you.'
'It's true. Perhaps because, usually, that solution - that a woman loves me - is one I don't care for. Nevertheless at this moment I'm touched that you should love me, after all I've done to you. We'll come back to your plan later on. It depends on something I must tell you after dinner.'
A little later she said a terrible thing. She had written to him while he was in Morocco to tell him that a Norman pig-breeder had proposed to her.
'Perhaps I shall settle for him one day,' she said now.
'Rather than Tomasi?'
'Yes, you see, I don't know the Norman one.'
In the cloak-room, she helped him on with his coat. He found this fitting. Ancilla domini.
On the way back to the hotel, he said to her: 'Now I must tell you.... I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm almost sure that I caught a serious disease in Morocco. It's not a very contagious disease, contrary to what people think, but there's a risk that it may be if one doesn't take certain precautions. We can go on seeing each other, but our intimate relations must cease. I'll tell you about it in my room.'
She walked on in silence, her eyes focused on the toes of her shoes. Finally she said:
'I think I can guess.'
'You can't have guessed. You think, don't you, that it's one of those diseases that are called venereal?'
'Yes.'
'It isn't that.'
In the lift she looked at him in silence, visibly nervous and perplexed. When they were inside the room he said:
'Sit down there.'
He had not switched on the light. She switched it on. He switched it off again. Through the shutters and the curtains, the red glow from a neon sign on a near-by cinema penetrated the dark room. The glow of hell. Just the thing for Mephisto and his sores.
She was sitting on a chair. He sat down on another chair beside her, facing her. He put his hand on her fore-arm. She took his hand, he drew it away. 'If you wish, you can put your hand on my fore-arm, on the sleeve. Not on the bare skin.' They held each other thus, with the 'hand-clasp' of ancient Rome, which was in fact a 'fore-arm clasp'.
'Don't be afraid. No emotionalism, please. If I really have this disease, and I'm convinced that I have, I might still live another ten years, with a great deal of nursing and a great deal of pain. I should end up as a hideous object, but there's no question of that: I shall kill myself when I have to. In the meantime, I shall remain more or less normal, and we can go on seeing each other for some time, provided we don't touch each other... except through our clothes, as we're doing now....'
She showed no impatience, did not press him: 'But tell me what it is, for God's sake! ... ' Always Miss Silence. Petrified, waiting. Always waiting. Beneath their window, the bell of the cinema began to buzz. A voice yapped: 'Continuous performance. Big atmospheric hall. A film of love and adventure. All the latest news.' What was an 'atmospheric' cinema? Costals wondered. This gibberish threatened to break down his composure.
'Do you know what Hansen's disease is?'
'No.'
'Do you know what it means to be a lazar?'
'Lazar? I don't know.... It means to be poor. What do you ... '
'Do you know what leprosy is?'
She took her hand away from Costals' arm as though she had had an electric shock. Whatever might happen subsequently, nothing could alter the fact that she had taken her hand away.
'But you haven't.
'Yes. At least, very probably.'
'No, no! It isn't possible!'
Beneath the red glow, he saw her terrified face. A perfect setting for 'hell'. With a burst of volubility he sought to bring himself back to human reality.
'You don't know anything about it. People imagine all sorts of things. There are three hundred lepers in Paris, only twenty of whom are hospitalized - and in public wards, too. Perhaps the waiter who served us.... There are women who've lived for thirty years with a leper husband without being infected. All this isn't a lot of guff I was given to reassure me. It was told to me, of course, but I've also read it in a medical textbook. You can buy one yourself.'
'But how did you catch it? If you have caught it, because I can't believe you have.'
'From a woman.'
(Truth is tantalizing as death.)
'Was she a bird of passage, or had she been your mistress for a long time?'
'She was my mistress for four years. A native girl.'
She stared at him, her eyes dilated, with that red glow upon her, like a night-bird nailed to a wall and covered with its own blood. And he stared back at her, like a small furry creature of the fields stiff with terror in the face of a bird of prey. Not even the imbecilities of the cinema, that prostitution of pathos, could diminish the pathos of those two faces: life held its own.
'If I frighten you, you can go away at once and never see me again. I should find that perfectly natural.'
'I'm not afraid. I believe everything you've told me. I know very well that if there were any danger you wouldn't have brought me here.'
What trust! And as though to give him a proof of it, she placed her hand on his fore-arm once more. Then she smiled at him.
'You told me not to get emotional. That warning was unnecessary. I shall be upset when the doctors have made a positive diagnosis. Until then, I don't believe in your leprosy - or I only half believe in it.'
Costals was not very pleased that she did not believe in his leprosy. If he had had to choose at that moment between having leprosy or not, perhaps he would have chosen to have it, simply in order to show her that he was not bluffing.
For a long time he talked to her about his disease. The bell from the cinema buzzed intermittently. Each time it began to buzz it reminded him of the door-bell ringing in some clandestine lodging when he was there with a woman and their liaison was threatened. In these casual lodgings he often forgot that he was not in his own flat. And he would go into the hall in his bare feet with a revolver in his hand to see if there was a shadow under the door: the shadow of the man who had rung the bell, who was waiting there, who would bang on the door with his fist, interminably, if you did not open. You and he, six inches from one another, separated by a mere plank. And you, with your bare feet on his shadow.
As he talked, Solange's face was calm, calmer than when she had entered the room. Calm and thoughtful. Putting the accent always on the if, she produced a string of consoling observations, all of them sensible. 'If you've got this disease, it might have been worse. You might have died suddenly, and you've told me often enough that your affairs were not in order. Ten years! How many people in good health are certain to live ten years, the way things are these days? Then there's war.... In ten years you'll be forty-five, and haven't you always maintained that by the age of forty-five most writers have said their say and simply go on repeating themselves?'
'How she hits the nail on the head!' thought Costals. 'I've often had proof that she didn't understand who I was. Now she seems to have understood perfectly. And so wise! She's a real brick, after all.' It was then that he put to her the question which the whole evening had been leading up to:
'Would you rather marry a leper you loved than a healthy man you didn't love?'
'Yes.'
After a brief silence she added:
'Of course.'
He asked her to lie down, if she would, fully dressed on the bed. 'I won't kiss you on your bare skin. Only on your clothes. Or rather I won't even kiss them, I'll simply put my face against them. And I'm going to wear my gloves.' 'Why gloves? You've got nothing on your hands.' He put them on, and stretched out beside her in the darkness that enveloped the bed, which was out of range of the red glow. The bell still buzzed from time to time in the cinema, but the barker no longer barked. She lay huddled in his arms, curled up as in her mother's womb. He remained thus for a long time, his cheek resting on her breast, groping for her face and her hands whenever he moved so as to avoid touching them with his mouth. He felt an inner peace, and a sort of sweetness which he did not know was the false sweetness of the sea as it laps against the shore and gleams there before dying away for ever. The noise of people coming out of the cinema told them it was time to part.
She sat on the edge of the bed, plaiting her hair which had come undone, like the little school-girl of old.
Next day, more in control of himself - because his fatigue had evaporated - Costals took the decision not only not to go ahead with the crazy project of marriage which he had conceived the day before, but also to space out his meetings with Solange until finally he put an end to them altogether, whatever might be the doctors' verdict on his condition.
There were two reasons for this. No, he would not marry, in order to turn her into a leper's nurse, the girl he had not wanted to marry when it was a question of making her his companion. Furthermore (and this was perhaps the more powerful reason), he refused to allow himself to be dragged into that perilous sphere in which one noble gesture is capped by another. The sublime must not be allowed to be omnipotent. The world would fare even worse than it does already if, in order to tip the scales to the baneful side, one had only to add an ounce of the sublime. Dying for a cause does not make that cause just. Solange had been sublime; that did not make marriage with her a solution any less absurd and fraught with dangers - quite unjustifiable. The watchword must be: 'Hold out against the temptation of nobility.' 'She was sublime, and I too must have been sublime, though I can't quite see in what way. So if we went on, it would be sure to end badly, for when one plays at being sublime.... '
Five days later, when they met again, they went neither to the hotel nor to his flat (he explained that this was because of his fear of contagion). They went to a concert like old friends, or rather like strangers to each other. It was all dissolving into indifference once more, as wadis dissolve into the sand, where they end up by ceasing to be altogether.
22
Ah! make the most of what we yet may spend. - Omar Khayyam.
Every intelligent being cast on to this earth sets out each morning in pursuit of happiness. - Stendhal.
Six days later, in the place Saint-Augustin. Half past five. Costals crossed the square in the direction of the Madeleine. Heavy spring weather, almost sticky: a fumigation of asphalt. The sun hidden behind a white haze so as to be able to work its mischief undisturbed, as in the Sahara. And fellows with silk scarves in a temperature of 18 degrees Centigrade, because silk scarves look 'rich'.
Costals had just come from seeing Dr Rosenbaum, after four days of consultations and examinations with various big-shots. There was nothing wrong with him. The spot was lichen, which is not serious. The nasal catarrh was the result of having caught cold on the deck of the liner in the sea-wind. The pruritus (which anyhow had gone) was caused by the change of air between Morocco and France - something that often happens. Costals having once told Rosenbaum that the mere fact of having bought some medicament, even before opening the bottle, made him feel better, Rosenbaum tended to assume that with Costals any illness was imaginary. (We really must firmly resist our inclination to make fun of ourselves.) So the doctor had teased him a little: 'You have a lively imagination.' Costals had flung him one of those looks of superb contempt which cured patients reserve for their doctors, the look he had given the lifebelt the other day when they were in sight of Bordeaux. 'He also told me I was as healthy as an ox. But perhaps that was because he's going to send me his bill within a week. He wants me to like him for a week, so that I'll pay him pronto.' It was true that Dr Lipschutz had also told him he had an iron constitution, while Professor Lévy-Dhurmer opined that he had the constitution of a Bolivian general. Costals, who liked to have things in writing, had replied uniformly to them all: 'Send me a certificate to that effect.'
Happy? Of course, happy. One hundred per cent happy? Let's say ninety per cent. But just as it is well known that a writer, reading a dithyrambic article about himself in which there is one word of reservation, sees only this one word, so it was the ten per cent of non-happiness that set the tone for Costals. Lazarus emerging from the tomb must also have had his ten per cent of non-happiness, and railed a bit against Jesus Christ.
For a fortnight, Costals' entire future had been based - and solidly based - on this disease. And now everything had to be turned upside down again. Moreover, this disease represented grandeur, and grandeur acquired on the cheap. Now grandeur would have to be (1) invented, (2) conquered, (3) organized. In the meantime, back to the humdrum and the prosaic: it was as though a door had been slammed in his face. Rosenbaum had been right when he had made the classic remark of the doctor to the cured patient: 'You're no longer interesting.' And Costals caught himself murmuring a phrase that he regarded as blasphemy, a phrase he repudiated, spat upon - and yet a phrase that in spite of himself had risen from the depths of his being to his lips: 'Nothing but life ... ' Did he not love life? Of course, but leprosy had seemed to him an opportunity for a fuller life.
Not to mention the various inconveniences of perfect health. Since he had believed himself to have leprosy, he had cancelled all the lectures he was to have given that spring, had made up his mind to default on his contractual engagements - in short, had relieved himself of all obligations towards society. And now.... Well, no! He would pretend to be convalescing from a serious illness, pneumonia or suchlike, and give himself a rest. The moribund state has too many advantages to be relinquished just like that.
But enough of this nonsense. Spotting a pimply passer-by, he had shuddered: it reminded him of something. Besides, if he was so keen on leprosy, all hope was not lost: the incubation is so slow.... At the centre of his ninety per cent of happiness, there was normal life with his son, back with him again. One of the drawbacks of illness is that it forces us to pay attention to ourselves rather than to those we love. During the last week he had made up his mind that if he was given a clean bill of health, he would bring his son back from England; Philippe thenceforth would live in Paris. Vita nuova. The cry that had burst from his lips in the hotel room in Marrakesh: 'What will become of him? What happens to somebody who has no one to love him?' - that cry that he could not repeat to himself without being overcome with emotion (it often happened to him to be shattered by something he himself said, or by a sentence in one of his own books) - it was that that had clinched his decision. 'When one wants to make someone happy, one must do it at once.'
And at the centre of his ten per cent of non-happiness was the fate of Rhadidja. He would look after her. Already he had spoken about her to Rosenbaum, who wanted her to be treated in France, in Paris, or rather at Valbonne. He would write to Rhadidja to this effect. He would do everything that could be done.
The Madeleine...The step on which he had sat with Solange on the first night of their engagement.... That nightmare, like the other, was over, and he was rediscovering the fresh joy of his sixteenth year. 'Freed from these two leprosies, O primal purity! May I now prove worthy of this purity!'
The temple known as the Madeleine, although exaggeratedly filthy, is one of the rare monuments in Paris which may be said to have some majesty. Costals felt an urge to go in. For he was a religious-minded man. If he had never raised his head towards the sky in supplication, he instinctively raised it in thanksgiving. In thanksgiving to whom? The Spirit who ruled over his destiny. Whi
ch was tantamount to thanking himself.
The Madeleine was the only Christian sanctuary in Paris which Costals could tolerate. Was it in memory of this doughty deed: as a little boy, in this holy place, he had once stuck his tongue out at an unknown young woman praying? (The young woman complained to the child's English governess, who recounted the doughty deed at home: 'He's a tiger.' Mme Costals had recalled this story years later when she said to her son: 'You're so naughty.... Some day you'll become the Anti-Christ.' To which the fifteen-year-old had replied: 'I couldn't be bothered.') Was it the memory of Mgr Rivière, once curé of the Madeleine, a Diocletian who was wont to flourish his over-scented hands under the noses of the little girls in catechism class, all of whom were in love with him? Chiefly it was because the Madeleine was the only church in Paris in which there was practically no trace of Christianity. For nine years the Temple of Glory under Napoleon, to Costals that was what it remained: the Temple of Glory, that of the individual and that of the nation. But it was also many other things.
A temple of syncretism, in particular. A temple of the disparate - the disparities of the world, the disparities of each of its creatures. On the pediment, to the left of Zeus-Sabazius-Christ, a naked young Dionysus with disquieting hips; to the right, another naked ephebe, the Spirit of the Dance, or some other brother of Carpeaux's bacchic dancer. Inside, a temple devoid of mystery and devoid of humbug: nothing in its pockets, nothing up its sleeve - in other words the opposite of Christianity. Behind the altar, beautiful winged urchins bringing forth from a shell, like Aphrodite of old, the modern Aphrodite, Magdalen, the holy puta. The sinner, with downcast eyes and a charmingly bulging nine-month belly, half opening her arms in a gesture of resignation which seems to say: 'It was bound to happen to me one of these days.... ' What a pleasure not to be in a temple dedicated to the Virgin - that Virgin of whom the gospel hardly speaks, of whom we know nothing except that her son abandoned her; that Virgin who was not a virgin, and who as a mother is non-existent; that Virgin who was simply an instrument for making the Word incarnate, as terrestrial virgins in the last resort are no more than instruments for reproducing mankind. A temple of the Nation, of Glory, but also a temple of the Courtesan, erected on the threshold of that 'right bank' which is the courtesans' playground (whence the fact that its façade at night is symbolically illuminated with potassium permanganate [In 1928, the façade of the Madeleine was illuminated at night with violet flood-lighting, a masterpiece of bad taste (Author's note).]), Costals was in the habit of visiting it whenever he had made a conquest on the boulevards. Pick-up and up-lift. He went there to give thanks.
The Lepers Page 15
