by Paul Morand
So intense was her curiosity that she felt none of that sweet shame experienced by girls who have never slept with a man.
CHAPTER XVI
THE BOISROSÉ FAMILY’S wounds healed slowly, and they all maintained a silence about their amputation. Hedwige’s marriage which, after all, was natural, even honourable and certainly desirable so long as it was merely a marriage of convenience, became, from the moment it took on the appearance of a love match, an object of scandal, a notion all the more obsessive the more firmly it was swept aside. Contrary to the laws of perspective, Hedwige grew taller once she moved away. No one dared talk about her, at least not “plainly”, because they did not refrain from speaking in that sort of coded language that families use without danger of conflict to control their most explosive secrets.
The happiness that a loved one discovers when he or she has left us, after previously having experienced it with us alone, is not merely immoral, but humiliating too, because it forces us to reach difficult conclusions about ourselves and to make admissions of suspicion and distress. Shame is not always the awareness of the harm we do, it is often the awareness of the harm done to us. The Boisrosés felt ashamed because of Hedwige, and even more so in her presence than when away from her, for Hedwige frequently came to Saint-Germain, even though Bonne claimed that “we never see her”. (For Bonne, there was never a halfway point between all and nothing, and if she had not spent twenty-four hours with her head on her mother’s knees then she had not come at all.) And yet she suffered less from Hedwige’s disloyalty than her daughters did because, being more experienced than them and being endowed with a more dependable sixth sense, she had no doubt that the lost sheep would return. For Fromentine and Angélique, the absence of Hedwige was a disaster; their grief was heightened by a sense of impoverishment; in addition to their individual beauty the three sisters had a kind of beauty in togetherness. Like an ancient cellar full of liqueurs in which a clumsy servant had broken one of the three carafes, like a triptych in which one of the three sections had vanished, they were left incomplete and depreciated, having lost ninety per cent of their value.
Although Angélique had also married, and had also gone through her crisis of growing up, her conscience was clear: in her, there was nothing to exorcize. Her sorrow was thus tinged with disapproval. As for Fromentine, she harboured a host of small demons, silly, grimacing creatures that teased her like a thousand needling irritations caused by uric acid, and they made her envy, loathe and adore Hedwige simultaneously. Secretly, she admired her for becoming self-sufficient and she was half upset and half delighted at the thought of the wave of melancholy that had so troubled the Boisrosés. Being a better person than her, Angélique felt sorry for her mother and she had settled herself on the chaise-longue at Saint-Germain in a bedridden attitude entirely in keeping with this disaster. She looked after Bonne de Boisrosé, massaging her, and carrying her from one part of her bedroom to another just as Aeneas carried his father on his shoulders, while Monsieur de Rocheflamme took his part in the family grief and jealousy as uncle, old man and antique dealer.
Only Vincent Amyot, intrigued by Pierre’s achievement and dazzled by this inexplicable marvel—a Boisrosé girl living away from the nest—allowed his delight to show; disregarding the general inhibition, he mentioned the name of the missing girl purely for the pleasure of doing what was forbidden and for the spectacle of a mother-in-law in a state of distress. He took pleasure in teasing, from which he derived flimsy revenge, informing Fromentine that Hedwige was wearing new fox furs and that she would not lend them to her; telling Angélique that Hedwige had confessed to making Creole dishes for Pierre; letting Bonne know that from the moment she was first married her daughter had not once spent a night away, that is to say she had slept with her husband, and that there was therefore no point in keeping her room and her bed untouched unless it was to do so for a beloved person who had died. The family allowed him to drone on; secretly, they had not entirely given up hope of seeing an end to the profligate daughter’s lawful vagrancy. But for the time being Hedwige was in love. Hedwige loved someone outside the permitted perimeter, and her love was remarkable for the time it had lasted; Hedwige had disappeared; the family waters had closed over Hedwige’s plunge.
The doorbell rang, but the ring was not unfamiliar; that succession of light, delicate trills that was like music, everyone knew that ring, it was her. She came in, as tall as the door, with that sumptuous air that all tall women have, even the poorest, wearing a white scarf round her neck like a flag of truce.
“Hedwige!”
She made her way over to her mother’s outstretched arms, mounted the steep folds of the eiderdown and the snowfield of drapery, and collapsed onto the beloved breast like someone returning to their homeland. Bonne de Boisrosé, at the risk of spoiling the triumph that was unfolding, took Hedwige’s head in her hands and gazed into the velvety white face pitted with golden, dutiful eyes. No blemishes? Yes, two wrinkles, the first, at the corners of her mouth. They were scarcely wrinkles; they began like small lines, but at each side of the small aperture and contracted by the muscles of the mouth, there were the beginnings of a slight furrow, a fissure that no transversal line would stop as it made its way to the crevice and the gully.
At a glance, Madame de Boisrosé had seen all she needed to see: Hedwige was unhappy, Hedwige was pregnant. Two things which often go together, that need to be explained to men so that they understand, but which a mother can decipher like an open book. Her perfect nose had become translucent and taut due to repeated bouts of sickness. Her fine features had softened and faded; skeletal bones were pushing the flesh from behind and stretching it, making her eye sockets hollow and revealing the depths of her soul in the prison of her eyes, which had acquired a distracted, distant expression, a sort of aversion to the outside world, as the eyes of those who are very ill do.
For Bonne, the hour of battle had finally struck; she was going to begin her struggle against this weak and meticulous adversary, so full of ideas that they made him seem foolish, so fearful that he found safety in flight—in a word, her struggle against the man. In snatching his booty from him, Bonne proved to be a surprising and totally immoral bandit, with a speed of execution that Pierre would have admired; but Pierre suspected nothing, had not sensed anything, and anyway, if he had been forewarned, he would not have understood.
“Angélique, your sister looks tired; go and make her bed,” ordered a radiant Bonne.
Hedwige would return to the obeisance of Saint-Germain. She could certainly go to Pierre’s house, lend him her presence, accept the written rule of conjugal life and even give birth to a child, but it would make no difference. It was now certain that no new law would stipulate attachment to the mother and that an obligation all the more powerful for not being contracted would always bind the child first and foremost to its own family. There would simply be another human being on earth and, if it was a girl, one more Boisrosé.
“I’m fine,” Hedwige repeated, without letting her mother go, “I’m absolutely fine…”
She gazed at her mother’s bedroom as though she were returning to it after a long journey, just as the traveller who has been all over the world and endured deserts, shipwrecks and revolutions is amazed to see the white porcelain owl still perched on top of its box. She recognized the strong smell of oranges studded with cloves in the Creole manner. She was returning to her native soil, to the body of her mother which, in spite of its shapelessness and caducity, had a strange grandeur about it, blameworthy and comical perhaps when seen from outside, but which had the wild beauty of those passionate landscapes where selfishness is rated so highly that it is impossible to distinguish it from love.
Half past seven. Hedwige is not back.
Pierre, who had arranged to leave work early, is astonished. Nowadays, when he returns to his home, to their home, he hates finding his house empty. When it is said of a parcel that it is “awaiting delivery”, no one realizes how painfu
l it is for a parcel to be unclaimed.
Hedwige is not there and it is as if the pictures had been taken down and the furniture sold in her absence. Where can she be? She had set off to visit her mother at about four o’clock and she should have left Saint-Germain to return to Neuilly at about six. The road via Marly is direct: branch off at Abreuvoir, uphill, then down to Saint-Cloud, through Garches. She had done it many a time. Unless she had gone through the forest and had broken down in the woods?
“People will say that I shall always, always, always be waiting! Waiting, hoping. Driven to despair, waiting again. Being on the lookout, yet still within these four walls! How well I understand that caged animals die prematurely! It’s appalling to be on your own once you have been a couple. And on one’s own at seven in the evening without anyone for company apart from that idiot whose name is ‘me’. The lack of imagination of mirrors is astounding. When I was a child, I longed for a looking glass in which I could see movements other than my own.”
Pierre presses his nose against the window so that he can see the street better. But his nose creates several large blotches that soon prevent him from seeing a thing. In any case, there is nothing to see other than a view of Paris that looks diminished through the mist. It is pretty chilly. In modern houses, all the benefit of radiators is lost because the walls are so thin. Moping around, feeling gloomy: these words quite appropriately link feeling cold with waiting. Expectancy is a blockage in which all our plans find themselves frozen.
“I actually needed Hedwige this evening, I particularly needed her.”
Pierre was quivering with nervousness and disappointment. A woman being late is nothing very much, but as the noises grew more muffled in the fine mist, as the busy elevator came down again empty, a feeling of failure descended on him. All the tortures that are used metaphorically to describe waiting—the mouth in the water, thorns, the grill or burning coals—seemed very minor compared to what he was going through.
Pierre did not normally telephone Saint-Germain often, because it was very complicated to call and make the Boisrosés come down to the dairy. He resigned himself to doing so, however, because the dairy closed at eight o’clock. Fromentine came on the line.
“Is Hedwige with you?”
“Yes, dear Pierre. I was just about to call and tell you.”
“Will she be at Saint-Germain for long? Why hasn’t she come home?”
“She’s in bed.”
“In bed? Is she ill?”
“No.”
“Then, what’s the point?”
“She’s lying down and she’s resting.”
“If anyone goes to bed at seven in the evening, they must be ill.”
“Not in our house.”
“In my house you do,” retorted Pierre curtly.
“But haven’t you seen how she looks? You make her do too much.”
“Very well. I’m leaving straight away for Saint-Germain.”
“I’m telling you, she’s not ill. Leave her with us for one night. What difference can it make to you, dear Pierre? It would make us so happy.”
“I need her, and particularly today.”
“Listen… be reasonable… forcing her to get dressed, making her go out into the night… what time would she arrive? The road’s bad, as you well know.”
Pierre imagined Hedwige lost in the fog, with a flat tyre, unable to lift up the spare wheel herself. There were two places on her route that he dreaded: the crossroads at Louveciennes and the last bend on the hill at Saint-Germain. Fromentine was still droning on, affectionate, insistent, slightly mocking:
“Do us this little favour, my dear restless, ever-frothy brother-in-law! Tomorrow, at first light, Hedwige will be back with you.”
“She has leave until nine o’clock in the morning, then! No later,” replied Pierre who, in a hoarse voice that he tried to make softer, did his best to sound like a decent, forgiving fellow.
He hung up in a fury, turned round and saw the empty studio flat, vacated for the entire night. It is ghastly when you were counting on someone not even to have the expectation to keep you company.
He wanted to have supper, but found only a solitary egg at the back of an empty cupboard, like a diplodocus’s egg in the Gobi desert; he also found an apple, deader than a still life.
“She’s not coming back… it must be my fault if she’s not coming back. Am I horrid? Am I boring? The fact is that she doesn’t love me as I love her. Why? I’ve been aware for some time that things haven’t been going well, but why?”
Truth to tell, he had not felt anything of the sort until then, but when one is in a poor state of mind it is hard to believe that it has only just occurred and so you pretend you have been in that state for a long time.
Pierre, who lived in the future as a fish takes to water, found it hard to think back on time that had passed. Weary of searching, he resorted to another pastime and opened his Manual of American Archaeology at the chapter on Columbian silver vases. To no avail. He always started analysing his marital relationship again.
“I wonder whether, at the start of my relationship with Hedwige, I may not have made a wrong move. I thought I was being clever disguising myself as someone else, I mean as someone who was a slow mover. Whereas Hedwige was expecting me—the me, as I am; the ‘no sooner said than done’ man—and she didn’t find me.”
On each of the seven floors, the lift had brought back seven husbands to their seven wives, and now it was over. There was no longer the same noise in the building any more. Occasionally, a water pipe vibrated due to air pressure. The concierge had brought up the post. The maids had taken the dogs down to the pavement. Nothing more would happen until the distant hour when the milkman and the dustbins arrived. There would just be Pierre consulting his Archaeology. Through the wisps of smoke from all the cigarettes consumed, Pierre caught sight of his bed, the bed of a solitary man. This reminded him of his fiery, unpredictable life as a bachelor when he only went out when love summoned him. Out of habit, he got into bed, with nothing else to look at apart from the ceiling, which showed patches of damp. Above the ceiling was the terrace, with the summer garden. Every time they watered the flower beds in this garden, the water ran through the cement and also watered the furniture in his bedroom. So much for modern comfort.
“Hedwige must be having great fun right now with her mother and her sisters. This boarding-school atmosphere is ridiculous. They whisper secrets to each other from one bed to the other. What can they be talking about? What secrets? Are they at my expense? No, Hedwige probably isn’t having great fun: for her to leave me alone here, it must be something important. Let’s see: could I have taken marriage too seriously? I don’t believe in penning people in, of course, but that doesn’t mean to say I condone pick-pocketing when it’s a matter of bringing two people together. I told myself marriage was not a game, but a difficult and beautiful task to accomplish. Perhaps it’s not difficult; perhaps I made it so by imagining it to be so.”
Pierre waited a moment to fall asleep; the brass handles of the chest of drawers gleamed softly, the telephone stood outlined in black against the white wall as usual. The wickerwork pattern on the chair was so regular that merely looking at the cane latticework induced a drowsiness that made sleep very imminent. A slight nervous tremor kept Pierre on that gentle slope. He picked up his Beuchat: “The plateau of Bogota was the scene of an open struggle among the caciques. At the time when Belalcazar was exploring Columbia…” He switched off the light. Then the loneliness grew until it became intolerable. In the darkness, the suspension of time became appalling. Hedwige’s absence took on a huge importance.
“She’s had enough of me, it’s obvious. How was I not aware of it earlier?”
And Pierre, hurling his book away (he never put books down, he threw them across the room), started to delve into the problem once more.
“For after all, since I can’t be accused of hurrying or pestering Hedwige, since I wooed her stealthily… docilely,
since I caused her no shock, since I approached her at the same pace she approached me and since nothing could have come between us given our perfect understanding, then it’s because I made a mistake in not hurrying her. Perhaps she was expecting to be taken straightforwardly and immediately; girls these days know very well what awaits them and that it’s not very pleasant the first time, and that it becomes more agreeable later on. It is we who persist in believing, through our foolishness, vanity and sadism, that we are going to hold in our arms shivering, terrified virgins who will get all worked up over this business.
“I must have been rather ridiculous and seemed fairly silly with my strategy of sitting there like a patient tom, night after night, in front of his pussycat! She thought me impotent, of that there can be no doubt. And my self-control must have won her over, I mean lost her.”
Pierre switched on the light again. He saw his shadow on the wall: it was a dispossessed, excommunicated shadow, a shadow embarrassed to be in the light, a shadow that would have preferred the shade. An unpleasant memory and one he always avoided came back to him and would not go away.
