Odile did not like my family and I did not care much for hers. My mother had wanted to give her advice on her choice of furniture, our way of life, and a young wife’s duties. Advice was Odile’s least favorite thing in the world. When she talked about the Marcenats, she adopted a tone I found rather shocking. I was bored at Gandumas and felt that there all life’s pleasures were sacrificed to a family conformism whose sacred origins were utterly unproved, and yet I was quite proud of the austerity of our traditions. Life in Paris, where the name Marcenat meant nothing, should have cured me of my insistence on granting them such importance, but like a small religious community transported to a barbarous continent and whose religious faith remains undisturbed by the sight of millions of people worshipping different gods, so we Marcenats, transported into a pagan world, remembered Limousin and recalled our greatness.
My own father, who admired Odile, could not help but be irritated by her. He did not show it; he was too good and too reserved for that. But, being familiar with and having inherited his propriety, I knew how much Odile’s tone of voice must have pained him. When my wife had cause to doubt something or to be angry, she would express her views forcefully and then forget about them. This was not how we Marcenats had been taught that human beings communicate with each other. When Odile said, “Your mother came here while I was away and took the liberty of making certain comments to the manservant; I shall call her to tell her I won’t tolerate that …,” I begged her to wait.
“Listen, Odile, deep down you’re right, but don’t try to tell her yourself, you’ll only make her angry. Let me do it or, if you prefer—and it would actually be better—ask Aunt Cora to tell my mother that you told her that …”
Odile laughed in my face. “You have no idea,” she said, “how comical your family is … Except, it’s also terrible … Yes really, Dickie, it’s terrible, because I actually love you less when I see the caricatures of you that all these people effectively are … I do understand that you’re not like that by nature, but you’ve been affected by them.”
The first summer we spent together at Gandumas was quite difficult. At home, my family had lunch at exactly noon, and it had never occurred to me to keep my father waiting. But Odile would take a book down to the meadow or go for a walk along the river and forget the time. I watched my father pacing backward and forward in the library, and ran across the park looking for my wife, only to come back out of breath having failed to find her. Then she would appear, all calm and smiling, and happy to be warmed by the sun. At the beginning of the meal we would sit in silence to show our disapproval, which (given that it came from a group of Marcenats) could only be indirect and unspoken, and she would watch us with a smile in which I could read amusement and defiance.
In the Malet household, with whom we dined once a week, the situation was completely reversed; I was the one who felt scrutinized and judged. Here meals were not solemn ceremonies. Odile’s brothers would get up to fetch bread; Monsieur Malet might mention some saying he had read, could not quote it exactly, and he too would go out to consult a book. Conversation was extremely free, and I did not like to hear Monsieur Malet discussing improper subjects in front of his daughter. I knew how ridiculous it was to attach so much importance to such small details, but it was not a judgment, it was an uncomfortable impression. I was not happy in the Malet house; it was not my sort of climate. I did not like myself, I seemed solemn, boring, and, even though I loathed my own silences, I withdrew into them.
But in the Malet household and at Gandumas alike, my discomfort was only skin-deep because I had the still potent pleasure of watching Odile live. When I was seated opposite her at a dinner, I could not help watching her. She had a dazzling, luminous whiteness and reminded me of a beautiful diamond twinkling in the moonlight. At the time she almost always dressed in white and surrounded herself with white flowers at home. It suited her well. What a fantastic combination of candor and mystery she was! It felt like living alongside a child, but sometimes, when she spoke to another man, I caught glimpses of unfamiliar sentiments in her expression and something like the distant murmurings of a passionate and savage race.
. VIII .
I have tried to help you grasp the entrance, the first exposition—half hidden beneath louder instruments—of the themes around which the unfinished symphony of my life has been built. You have seen the Knight and the Cynic, and perhaps you have also noticed, in the ridiculously intricate ornamentation, that I have scrupulously chosen not to omit the first distant call of Jealousy. Be indulgent now and try not to judge but to understand. It is painful and difficult for me to tell you what happened next, and yet I want to be accurate. And this desire is all the greater because I believe I am cured, and I will try to describe my madness with the objectivity of a doctor who has had a fit of delirium and forces himself to write about it.
There are illnesses that begin slowly with slight, increasingly frequent dizzy spells; others explode in the space of an evening with a bout violent fever. For me jealousy was a sudden and terrible scourge. If I try now, in a calmer state, to trace its causes, they strike me as very varied. First there was my great love and the natural desire to keep for myself the tiniest portions of the precious materials that were Odile’s time, her words, her smiles, and her expressions. But that desire was not the most important element, for when I could have Odile to myself (if, for example, we were alone at home in the evening, or if I went away with her for a couple of days), she complained that I was much more interested in my books and thoughts than in her. It was only when she could have been taken by others that I wished I had her to myself. This sentiment was mostly due to pride, a subterranean pride masked by the modesty and reserve characteristic of my father’s family. I wanted to rule over Odile’s mind in the same way that, in the Loue valley, I ruled over the waters, the forests, the long machines sliding across the white paper pulp, the peasants’ houses and the workmen’s cottages. I wanted to know what was going on inside her pretty little head, beneath that curly hair, just as I knew, from the clear printed statements that came every day from Limousin, how many kilos of Whatman were left and what the factory’s daily output had been over the last week.
Judging by the pain it reawakens when I press on this precise spot, I can see that here was the root of the problem, in my acute intellectual curiosity. I never conceded that I did not understand. Yet understanding Odile was impossible, and I believe that no man (if he loved her) could have lived with her without suffering. I even think that, had she been different, I might never have known what it is to be jealous (because man is not born jealous, he comes only with a certain receptiveness that predisposes him to contract this illness), but Odile, by her very nature and without meaning to, constantly aroused my curiosity. Things that happened, the events of one day, were for me and for all my relations precise facts and needed only to be described scrupulously for each sentence, each element of the account to slot in perfectly with all the others, leaving no room for doubt. But when they were filtered through Odile’s mind they became a hazy, muddled landscape.
I would not like to give the impression that she deliberately dissimulated. It was far more complex. What happened was that, to her, words and sentences had little value; just as she had the beauty of a character in a dream, she spent her life in a dream. I have said that she lived mostly in the present moment. She invented the past and the future as and when she needed them, and then forgot what she had invented. If she had wanted to mislead, she would have made a concerted effort to coordinate what she said, to give it at least an air of truthfulness; I never saw her go to that trouble. She could contradict herself within a single sentence. On my return from a trip to the factory in Limousin, I asked her, “What did you do on Sunday?”
“Sunday? I don’t remember … Oh, yes, I was very tired. I stayed in bed the whole day.”
Five minutes later we were talking about music and she suddenly cried, “Oh! I forgot to tell you: at the concert last Sunday I heard Ravel’s Waltz
you told me about. I really liked—”
“But, Odile, do you realize what you’re saying? It’s lunacy … Surely you must know whether you were at a concert or in bed on Sunday … and you don’t think I could possibly believe both.”
“I’m not asking you to believe that. When I’m tired I talk complete nonsense … I don’t even listen to what I’m saying myself.”
“All right, but now, try to think of a precise memory: what did you do last Sunday? Did you stay in bed or did you go to the concert?”
She looked perplexed for a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t remember now. You get me all confused when you behave like the Inquisition.”
I emerged from this sort of conversation very unhappy: anxious, agitated, and unable to sleep. I spent hours trying to reconstruct how she had actually spent her day, from the tiniest scraps she had let slip. I then reviewed all the worrying male friends whom I knew had filled Odile’s life as an unmarried woman. As for Odile, she had the same capacity for forgetting these scenes as everything else. I could leave her sulky and uncommunicative in the morning and find her jubilant that evening. I would arrive home prepared to say, “Listen, darling, this can’t go on. We’ll have to think about a separation. It’s not what I want, but you really will have to make an effort, you need to behave differently,” only to be greeted by a girl in a new dress who kissed me and said, “Guess what! Misa called and she has three tickets for the theater, and we’re going to see A Doll’s House.” And, out of weakness and love, I would accept this unrealistic but consoling fiction.
I was far too proud to let my suffering show. My parents in particular had, at all costs, to be unaware of it. In that first year only two people seemed to have guessed what was going on. The first was my cousin Renée, and this surprised me all the more because we saw her so little. She led an independent existence, a fact that had irritated our family for some time, at least as much as my marriage. While my uncle Pierre was staying in Vittel where he went to take the waters every year, she had met a Paris doctor and his wife and grew fond of this couple. Renée had always been a fairly rebellious girl and, since her adolescence, had been very hostile to Marcenat ways. She got into the habit of making longer and longer visits to her new friends in Paris. This Doctor Prud’homme, who was wealthy, did not practice medicine but did research into cancer, and his wife worked with him. Renée had inherited from her father (whom she got along with all the worse for being so like him) a taste for a task well done. She was quickly adopted by the circle of scholars and doctors into which her friends introduced her. At twenty-one, she asked her father to give her her dowry and to consent to her living in Paris. For a few months she was on bad terms with our family. But the Marcenats clung too keenly to the notion of an indestructible love uniting parents and children to tolerate the reality of indifference for very long. Once my uncle Pierre had accepted the firm conviction of his daughter’s decision, he capitulated to restore peace. From time to time he would still have fits of anger, though they were increasingly brief. Then he begged his daughter to marry and she refused, threatening never to set foot at Chardeuil again. Horrified, my aunt and uncle promised there would be no more talk of marriage.
Renée had witnessed my engagement and had sent Odile a wonderful basket of white lilies the very same day. I remember being surprised by this. Her parents had given us a handsome gift; why these flowers? A few months later we dined with her at Uncle Pierre’s house, and I then inivted her to come to us. She was very friendly toward Odile and I was extremely interested by the tales of her travels. Since I had stopped seeing most of my former friends, I hardly ever heard such robust, informed conversation. When she left, I saw her to the door. “Your wife’s so pretty!” she said with sincere admiration. Then she looked at me sadly and added, “Are you happy?” and from her tone of voice I understood she thought I was not.
The other woman who I felt lifted the veil for a moment was Misa. After a few months, her behavior became rather odd. It seemed to me that she now sought far more to be my friend than to remain Odile’s. One evening when Odile was unwell in bed (she had had two consecutive miscarriages and it was unfortunately looking unlikely that she would ever have children), Misa, who had come to see her, sat beside me on the sofa at the foot of the bed. We were very close together and the high wooden footboard concealed us almost entirely from Odile’s eyes so that, as she lay there, she could see only our heads. All at once, Misa moved closer, pressed herself to me, and took my hand. I was so surprised that I do not understand to this day how Odile failed to read this in my face. I moved away, but only reluctantly, and later, when I walked Misa home, with an abrupt involontary movement I kissed her lightly. She allowed me to.
“This is too bad. Poor Odile …,” I said.
“Oh! Odile!” she said with a shrug.
I found this unpleasant and became rather cold toward Misa. It worried me too because I wondered whether her “Oh! Odile!” might mean, “Odile doesn’t deserve to be fussed over.”
. IX .
Two months later Misa was engaged. Odile told me she did not understand Misa’s choice. My wife thought this Julien Godet horribly mediocre. He was a young engineer fresh from the Central School of Engineering and in Monsieur Malet’s words “had no position.” Misa seemed more to want to love him than actually to love him. He, on the other hand, was very much in love. For some time my father had been looking for a director to run an additional paperworks he had set up at La Guichardie near Gandumas, and when he heard us discussing Misa’s marriage he had the idea of taking on our friend’s husband. This only half pleased me. I no longer felt I could trust Misa, but Odile, who so liked helping people and making them happy, thanked my father and immediately passed on the offer.
“Be careful,” I told her. “You’re sending Misa off to live in Limousin and depriving yourself of her company in Paris.”
“Yes, I know that, but I’m doing it for her, not for me. Anyway, I’ll see her during those awful stays in Gandumas, which will be a precious bonus for me, and if she ever wants to come to Paris she can always stay with her parents or with us … And this boy really does have to do something, and if we don’t take him on, he’ll trail her off to somewhere like Grenoble or Castelnaudary.”
Misa and her husband accepted the position at once, and Odile herself traveled to Gandumas, in midwinter, to look for a house for them and to recommend them to the locals. This was a trait of Odile’s, one I have not mentioned enough, devoting herself so generously to her friends.
I think that Misa’s leaving was a blow to our marriage, because it had the instant result of bouncing Odile back into a group of people I seriously disliked. Before we were married, Odile had frequently gone out alone with young men; they had taken her to the theater and she had traveled with her brothers and their friends. She had, very loyally, informed me of this when we became engaged and told me she could not relinquish this freedom. At the time, I wanted her more than anything in the world. I told her in good faith that this struck me as quite natural and I would never be an obstacle to her friendships.
It is so unfair and absurd holding people to account on their promises! When I gave that promise I had made no attempt to imagine what I might feel if I saw another man welcomed with the same gaze, the same smile I so loved. You may be surprised to hear that I was also aggrieved by the rather mediocre nature of most of Odile’s friends. I should have found this reassuring, when in fact it wounded me. If someone loves a woman as much as I loved my wife, everything connected with her image ends up being invested with imaginary qualities and virtues by that love. In the same way that the place where he met this woman seems more wonderful than it actually is, and the restaurant where he dined with her is suddenly better than any other, rivals themselves, even though despised, have their share of this aura. If the mysterious composer orchestrating our existence were to play the theme for the Rival in isolation, I think it would sound almost the same as the Knight’s theme, but ironic and
distorted. We want to see our enemy as an adversary worthy of us, which is why, of all the disappointments a woman can afford us, disappointment over a rival is the worst. I would have been jealous but not surprised if I had seen the most remarkable men of our time with Odile; instead I saw her surrounded by young men who, if I judged them impartially, may have been no more mediocre than any others, but who were certainly not worthy of her, and she had anyway not chosen them.
“Odile, why do you flirt so?” I asked. “I can see that an unattractive woman might want to test her powers. But you … it’s a game you’re bound to win every time. It’s cruel, darling, it’s disloyal … But worst of all, your choices are so strange … That Jean Bernier, for example, you see him the whole time … What on earth can you find interesting about him? He’s ugly, vulgar …”
“I find him amusing.”
“How can you find him amusing? You’re refined, you have taste. He makes the sort of jokes I haven’t heard since military service and I wouldn’t dare tell them in front of you …”
“You’re probably right. He’s ugly and he might be vulgar—although I don’t think so—but I like seeing him.”
“But you’re not in love with him, are you?”
“Oh! For goodness’ sake, no! You must be mad! I wouldn’t even want him to touch me, he reminds me of a slug …”
“My darling, you may not love him, but he loves you; I can see that. You’re making two men unhappy, him and me. Why would you do that?”
“You think everyone’s in love with me … I’m not that pretty …”
She said this with such a charming flirtatious smile that I smiled too. And kissed her.
“So, my darling, will you see him a little less?”
Her face hardened, inscrutable. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t say it, but I’m asking it of you … What difference would it make to you? It would make me happy. And you yourself have said you’re indifferent to him …”
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