by Paul Morand
“No.”
“In a desert in Mongolia he discovered the huge skull of a horse—that of Genghis Khan’s horse, he immediately claimed—a malevolent skull that wreaked ruin and death and which eventually caused their plane to crash. That lucky Pierre was the only survivor of the accident.”
Hedwige shuddered. Delighted to have had such an effect, Placide continued:
“I should also like to tell you of another of our excellent Pierre’s juicy adventures: his forced landing in a district of Baluchistan on a day in Ramadan when any foreigner found out of doors was immediately butcherefd. Did Pierre know this or had he guessed it?—he doesn’t lack for intuition at times—in any case he walked through the entire town, bolt upright, staring straight ahead and as though turned in on himself, with such determination not to be seen or above all lynched, that he passed unnoticed!”
Placide stopped talking, his job was done; Hedwige was no longer listening to him, she was waiting for Pierre.
He entered the room in a whirlwind.
“Quick, Hedwige, I’m taking you with me.”
“What time is it?” asked Hedwige.
“Thanks to you, it’s four o’clock,” replied Pierre, proudly pointing to his watch.
Hedwige had given him as a wedding present a magnificent stopwatch chronometer, with nineteen markers for every hundredth of a second and with adjustable repeaters. It was a symbolic present that was not so much a reward as a good lesson.
Pierre placed a fur-trimmed hat on his wife’s head, wrapped her up in an ocelot fur coat that he had just bought her and that made her look like a maenad (a maenad with her entire head), and whisked her outside.
“Fancy not knowing how to go downstairs on the banister at your age, Hedwige! What, not even on your stomach?”
He lifted her up, making her jump from one landing to another. Hedwige deliberately pressed herself heavily against him. She admired him for always being out in the open, free, daring, tall and quick.
“When I was little, I learnt a La Fontaine fable,” she said. “An eagle that was carrying a tortoise through the air… I remember it very well: the tortoise falls and is about to smash into someone’s skull which the eagle, from up above, took for a pebble.”
“Yes, the skull was that of Aeschylus if I remember correctly. Having a tortoise land on your head! Yet another who would have been killed by slowness,” Pierre sighed.
He hugged Hedwige passionately, much more tightly than was necessary. But Hedwige did not notice, she thought that without him she would fall. In the arms of her husband, it seemed to her that she was flying as in dreams. As she went down the steps, at that very moment, she was dreaming… The eagle in the fable was Pierre; he was taking her, in his talons, on a long hunting trip; she was a poor, bleeding creature beneath his wingspan; he, in a high, audacious, sustained flight, was drawing spirals above the earth, similar to the curves of the labyrinth.
Through the windows of the stairwell, she could see the ground very far away in the distance and the pavement, very far below. She snuggled against him in joyful silence, anticipating some scratches from his royal bird’s claws; she was happy. All she lacked was an injury. Once more the bloody image returned, and remained with her until the foot of the stairs.
CHAPTER XV
THE MAN IN A HURRY had decided to hurry up at last. He would have Hedwige that very night. For almost six weeks he had been deferring the moment. It was over. He would descend onto that fertile plain. He would talk as a prince does; he would help himself to the harvest; he would control, with the full span of his domination, with all the power of his possession, that huge treasure that was Hedwige herself.
Pierre had chosen his moment, chosen it well. The timing was not merely lawful, but legitimate. Hedwige was not only contracted, but bound to him; she appeared loving and willing. She would certainly give of herself entirely: an essential condition of a great friendship, without which marriage is a bedroom as easy of access as prostitution, or a society—a polite society—game.
Pierre was looking forward to this evening, barely a few hours away.
“I’m going to take Hedwige to a restaurant, to a nice restaurant, like the last time. (I hope it will be better than the first time.) Afterwards, we shall go to the theatre. After our unfortunate experience at the cinema, we must give the theatre a chance. There must be some young playwrights who write lively dialogue… Let’s see, what’s showing?… Michel Strogoff… Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie… Tosca… Le Bossu… Les Burgraves… Paris is certainly the centre of a great dramatic renaissance! Ah, here’s something better: La Planche à plonger, at the Mathurins. There must be some activity there. ‘Madly energetic’, say the adverts.”
By seven o’clock, Hedwige had not returned from Saint-Germain.
“She’s not used to my car, let’s hope she hasn’t had an accident. Why do women always confuse the time of departure with the time of arrival? They obey some invisible clock; the proof is that they are consistently late; they keep to psychological time and not to the Observatoire time, that time that comes grating out of the radio, as if through a reed pipe.”
Pierre lit cigarettes, one after the other (he sometimes lit several at the same time).
“In actual fact, there are three types of time: exterior time, interior time and organic time, which is that of our body busy getting older, our body that knows, with the dreadful precision of the unconscious, how many heartbeats it has left before the grave. I still have black hair and flexible arteries, but underneath my black hair there must be an impatient white hair that knows that the hour it is to appear will chime.”
Pierre looked out of the window.
“Time likes to play a coconut shy game with us,” he thought. “It bombards us every second; when we are kids, we recover immediately; then, less and less quickly; the spring wears out, we stagger about more and more until the day that we tumble over for good and when, like an old worn-out doll, we leave an empty space between the nurse and the soldier. Ever since Metchnikoff, doctors have been bending over the human body trying to discover the secret of its longevity: why should a pigeon, which has the same cell structure as a crow, live twenty times less? If time is the same for all organisms, why do we heal at different speeds? If I heal in five days and Hedwige in two, won’t we find it difficult to adjust our bodies to the same speed? The years she lives will actually be fifteen or sixteen months long; whereas the years I live shall be of eight or nine months. Therefore Hedwige, having promised to be back by seven o’clock, is not late; even though it’s eight o’clock.”
She arrived enveloped in a large cape belonging to Angélique. Having set off in violet, she came back in grey. Even in the midst of grieving, she dressed up.
“I have mitigating circumstances…” she began.
“Get dressed quickly, we’re dining at the cabaret and we’re going to the theatre.”
“Will you stay until the end?”
“I promise.”
“I’m already dressed,” said Hedwige. “Just a little powder, but… why are you making your bed already?”
“Precisely because I intend staying until the end of the show.”
While she was powdering herself, Pierre brought in the chair on which he would lay his clothes that evening when he got back, filled the glass from which he would drink water, laid out the nightshirt he would put on, and took out the suit he would wear next day from the cupboard.
“You’re exaggerating,” said Hedwige affectionately, sadly.
When Pierre thought about the future in her presence, it was nothing much more than a state of mind, but when he lived it, dashing around with orchestrated movements, it induced a manic automatism in him that was really rather tiresome. He opened one drawer, closed the other with his foot, put on a glove with his teeth so that he didn’t have to lay down the pen he was using to make notes.
“You need ten hands,” she said.
“Get a move on, instead of making fun of me.
We’re in a hurry…”
“The house is not on fire.”
On his hands and knees, Pierre was now spreading out the foam-rubber mat upon which he would do his exercises when he woke up. He went to look for his dressing gown. He sharpened his razor, doing so himself because he worried overly about the servants delaying everything.
“I’m ready.”
Hedwige went to her bedroom, sat down at her dressing table and hastily set out a few veils on a pale background so that she could make her choice.
“From the moment a woman says she is ready,” thought Pierre, “a great deal of time elapses before she leaves the house, and even when she has left, there is the ‘How silly of me, I almost forgot…’ that causes her to go back inside.”
“I was trying to move too quickly,” said Hedwige. “I wanted to please you. One of the buttons of my sleeve has got caught in the netting of the veil. Pierre, don’t get impatient. I can’t see what I’m doing. Be kind and untangle it for me. It won’t come out.”
“Hurry up, hurry up!”
“Release me, please don’t allow me to be upset any more, dear husband.”
When Hedwige put things in this way, tenderly, emphasizing her own incompetence, exaggerating her own foolishness, Pierre immediately relaxed.
“If I’m made the scapegoat, then it will have served you right!” he said. “Anyway, no one’s thinking of complaining. And rightly so.”
“You haven’t invited anyone else, I hope?” said Hedwige affectionately. “Rushing around must be so enjoyable for you that one doesn’t really feel guilty for having made you wait,” she concluded, tying her hat veil into a knot as if putting a full stop at the end of the sentence.
At the restaurant, Pierre once again skipped the rituals. He refused to put his coat in the cloakroom. He went straight over and raided the cold buffet; he came back, his plate loaded with cold meats, jellied eggs, and with some oranges in his pockets. People used to say that every time he went to a restaurant, Pierre would create a fuss.
“Not so much bread, darling…”
“I can’t stand slow table service. I feel I want to eat my neighbour’s helping. So I go and serve myself.”
“You swallow without chewing. On the fireplace in our dining room I shall have engraved—”
“You must…?”
“No. The remark Brillat-Savarin liked most of all and which they used to say to me all the time at boarding school: ‘You’re eating too quickly.’’’
“When I was little, Mother used to say that I didn’t suck my feeding bottle, I hurled myself at it. When I was older, I used to go to an automat bar on the boulevards, near the Parisiana. I was never as happy as when I was there. I gobbled everything down; I became dyspeptic (they had to dose me with pigs’ gastric juices). It was wonderful, that bar: one click and piles of sandwiches would descend straight into your mouth…”
Hedwige was fiddling nervously with the corner of the tablecloth.
“You don’t eat, you swallow your plate! And look at those stains on your tie!”
“Would monsieur like some strawberries? They’re the early crop.”
The maître d’hôtel presented them to him in their packaging, rather like a nurse presenting you with your appendix after an operation.
“Strawberries in January! They’re not the early crop, they’re late strawberries from last year!” Pierre replied.
Coffee was brought, together with hygienically wrapped sugar lumps. Pierre tossed them into his cup without unwrapping them.
“You really are impossible, my love! It’s as though things didn’t belong to you, as though you were stealing them.”
“Because the paper will end up floating on top of its own accord!”
At the theatre, Pierre bought two stalls seats, 85 and 87. They set off, following the usherette.
“85 and 87 are already occupied,” said the usherette.
“Any more of this and I’ll jump onto the stage!”
“Wait on these folding seats until the interval, monsieur. They must have put the people in 185 and 187 in 85 and 87…”
“Then let’s sit in 185 and 187,” said Pierre peremptorily.
“Unfortunately, 185 and 187 are occupied.”
“There’s nothing in the world slower and more foolish than an usherette,” groaned the man in a hurry.
And supporting himself on the partition of a groundfloor box, he stepped into it, fell inside it with a great deal of noise, and refused to leave. Amid much murmuring, Hedwige came and sat beside him.
La Planche à plonger was by Jean Alavoine, a dashing young playwright who, with his lively dovetailing of situations, his use of effects that had not been attempted before and a few very well-plotted scenes, had made many of those who produced plays for Paris audiences seem outmoded.
“I was very keen on seeing the first act,” said Pierre. “I know Alavoine, he gets straight to the point.”
This was true of the author’s early work, two-act plays staged in an avant-garde theatre where the director, a saintly man, awaited the takings before he could go and eat. But success had come in the past two years and Alavoine now did as his colleagues did: he took his time, did not fritter away his small amount of capital, and stretched out a sketch into a three-act play.
“It’s amazing, we can’t endure expository scenes any more,” Pierre sighed. “The audiences have been primed by film, they have guessed from the third line what they won’t be told until three-quarters of an hour later and, as with German grammar, they get bored waiting for the verb.”
“I’m not bored. I’m just happy sitting beside you.”
Only the stage set looked new. It depicted a camping site in the mountains. But the dialogue, although brilliantly syncopated in the way a tennis championship is, was that of a scribbler.
From the beginning of the second act, the author, having said all he had to say, had turned to the director and given him the task of spinning things out. During a ball, the young male lead is reminded of his former lovers: through a brilliant innovation, the various women he had favoured appear, just as he is naming them, and they descend a staircase, each wearing a mask and hat of the period. In order to fill out this meagre curtain-raiser-cum-fairy tale, a certain number of characters walk to and fro bearing Chinese lanterns.
“This is really intolerable!” moaned Pierre.
This time he did not dare say: “Suppose we went somewhere else?”, but he thought it nonetheless.
“I’m enjoying myself,” said Hedwige.
“And to think that Aeschylus is so short!”
“Would you like a sweet?” said Hedwige affectionately, offering him one.
“The Oresteia fits into the hollow of your hand.”
“Suck it. Don’t crunch it!”
“Have you ever timed Agamemnon? Barely half an hour’s reading! What takes up time in Greek theatre is the chorus with its bear-dancing, three steps to the right, three steps to the left. As for the rest, Fate has no sooner been mentioned than it has knocked already and all those famous murderers are already lying rigid without having bothered to justify themselves. Are you really sure that there’s no fourth act at least?”
Pierre held on until the middle of the last act. But then things began to take a turn for the worse. In Alavoine’s play, an irresolute Fate was unable to bring down its quarry. And yet he wasn’t being asked to make his characters die, merely to make them live.
Pierre suddenly got to his feet, for the image of his warm house, his inviting bed, his pyjamas with their arms laid out in a fan and Hedwige’s pink nightdress, its glint of gold lace rolled out on a fur rug and made to look pinker still by the embers of the fire, had suddenly affected him like a finger on a trigger. He pushed open the door of the box, grabbed Hedwige by the arm and gulped in what little fresh air there was in the narrow corridor.
“Hadn’t you promised to stay until the end?”
“I made a mistake, that’s all.”
T
hey went home. Pierre started to get undressed on the stairs. Firstly, his waistcoat; secondly, his tie; thirdly, his braces. When he reached their door, he was holding his clothes miraculously in his hand. And while Hedwige was turning the key in the lock, he took the opportunity to unlace his shoes.
“I’m getting into your bed to warm it,” he said.
He was under the blanket before Hedwige had removed her hat. He watched her making her preparations for bed: a large bag of cotton wool, cream for taking off make-up, skin lotion, tissues, large combs, looking glasses etc. (And she wasn’t concerned about her appearance!) Noises of cupboard drawers, of running or gushing water.
It was the hour when the buses run less frequently, when the métro amplifies its underground noise by a few seconds, when those who are on their own are mistaken for couples because of the echo in the reverberating streets and the shadows on the walls, when the night belongs to elderly journalists, and to all women, the women who make scenes and the women who are kind and gentle.
While she was tossing pads of cotton wool stained pink by make-up into the waste-paper basket, Hedwige was glancing behind her in the looking glass, like a driver watching the car that is about to overtake him in his rear-view mirror. She had realized that this was the night. She had guessed from a very slight hint of hoarseness in Pierre’s voice that he was hungry for her. He was taking up more space, talking far less and gradually settling into the thick wool of the mattress which, in spite of the padding, had adapted to her shape. All she could see was his black hair. The only sign on earth of this world of unsatisfied impulses that he typified was a lock of hair. This restless, over-excitable and intrepid man now lay as stock-still as a post. It was both touching and worrying. Pierre had often romped about on Hedwige’s bed in the morning and the evening. He had occasionally slipped beneath her eiderdown, but he had never got into her bed. He had never remained there as he was doing now. Was he one of those who like to be tucked in or someone who moves around in the night and pulls up the covers in the morning? She was going to discover all about him, to be able to explain him in straightforward language, to keep him in an enclosed field of linen from which he could not shy away again; she was going to find out whether her seductive powers would cause him to lie still or make him move about; she was going to get to the core of his secret, to discover finally whether Pierre’s haste was generated by muscles or just nerves, by strength or weakness.
