by Paul Morand
“And then… and then there was my wedding night.”
Pierre paused: he had smoked so much, and the tobacco was so hot that his tongue was burning. He searched in vain for a carafe of water; it irritated him to have to get up and see that lonely shadow on the white wall: he drank water that tasted like burnt rubber straight from his hot-water bottle. The bad memory came back to plague him: he recalled his failed evening a fortnight ago, the absurd Alavoine play, the hurried return home before the end of the last act, the sudden, premeditated and certainly clumsy way he had dived into Hedwige’s bed.
“Hedwige resisted me, why? To begin with, she was willing, no doubt about that; she wanted and was eager to know me. And I, I… well, I hesitated for ages. I was in awe of her; through her nakedness, I could see her fully dressed, proud, demure and beautiful, too beautiful.
“So I feared the worst and plunged into the water so as not to be left on the shore for good. She tensed up violently, recalcitrant, stubborn, frigid.”
He tossed and turned. Even normally, lying in a horizontal position infuriated and exhausted him; he only felt at ease when he was standing up; as soon as he lay down, unlike all other men, he could feel the weight of his body, his head heavier than a paving stone, his back sinking into the blanket, his pelvis and even his heels which hurt when they came into contact with the mattress. And he longed for the morning, to be getting up, to be upright, for the earth to be like a springboard on which he would at last regain the lightness that was his strength. He had chosen a bed that was so wide in order that he could do the scissors, possibly a cartwheel, and even pretend to himself that he was running, that he was swimming; but at the slightest nightmare he once again felt trapped in his sheets and dreamt that he was being thrown into some dark Bosphorus, sewn into a sack and powerless.
Through tossing and turning in his bed, Pierre has allowed the cold, satin bedspread to slip onto the floor; he is lying on frozen peaks, his sheets eventually fall off too, goodness knows where.
“I plunged into her as if she were some difficult obstacle, something forbidden that infuriated me; something that contradicted everything that I had originally loved and found passionate and sensitive about her. I can see her that evening in her bed, clad in white as though in mourning…
“I was insistent, I was aware of my clumsiness, but my overexcitement got the better of me. This Lucretia-like resistance infuriated me. I behaved like a hustling bully. I rushed things at the end… and what did I achieve? Total disharmony.”
And Pierre could still see his solitary, hasty self lying beside this tight-lipped woman looking as beautiful as she would in death.
“And there I was thinking I could create a work of art with my own hands: a fine outcome!”
Pierre fell back heavily on his pillow.
“Yet God is my witness that in all of this I acted sincerely and in good faith! I thought only of her! I should have been like all men and thought only of myself; you can’t save other people without saving yourself first. Sincere in my embarrassment, in my determination to act slowly, in my zealousness to keep still… then suddenly shooting off in one direction and behaving with a brutality that was unacceptable, I must certainly have struck her as loathsome, distorted and ridiculous.
“Conclusion: here I am this evening, victorious, holding my ground, but holding it alone.”
CHAPTER XVII
PIERRE WOKE UP in the morning feeling refreshed, rested and calmer; he felt ashamed of his nocturnal alarms. Would he not have done better just to have accepted Fromentine’s simple explanation: Hedwige was tired and it was past the time to return home, that was all…
But what had she done yesterday that was so exhausting? At eight o’clock in the morning they had gone skating at Molitor; at half past nine they had gulped down a hot chocolate at Prévost’s; at ten o’clock they had chosen fabrics for a coat (Pierre, let loose among the samples, went straight to the prettiest material, depriving himself of the pleasure of making up his mind); at half past ten they went to buy some American corned beef from a charcuterie at Les Halles; from there he had taken her to the Doucet Library where he needed to make a sketch (very quickly, without even getting down from the librarian’s ladder), then to the Cernuschi Museum; after that, she had waited for him in the car while he negotiated a deal with Gulbenkian; since the time for lunch was well past, they made do with a few sandwiches soaked in beer in a bar on the Champs-Elysées. At three o’clock, while he took part in the committee meeting of the Musées Nationaux, he had sent Hedwige to try on her dresses, with instructions to collect him at four o’clock at the printers of an art magazine he owned and to drop him at the Arts of Benin exhibition in the avenue Matignon, from where she had driven back to Saint-Germain. Well? What was so tiring about that? An absolutely normal day. But her indolent sisters must have persuaded her that she needed to rest.
Pierre stretched exultantly. How good it was in the morning, ideas had clarity, things were back in their proper place, seen in their true proportions and in their natural colours; in the morning they had the transparency of crystal whereas in the evening the sun had stained them yellow like a bad Venetian painter, and at night it was the fakes that proliferated! Pierre had rediscovered sanity and reason and clear common sense, those “very French” virtues.
But nothing is so blinding as complete clarity; mirages are a diurnal phenomenon. It’s during the dark hours of insomnia, the hours of pessimism par excellence, that the heart probes deepest and attains the truth.
*
Nine o’clock and Hedwige is not there.
When you arrange a time with a woman, you do so without believing she will keep it, it’s inclined to be a time you arrange with yourself: you tell yourself that it’s only after that time that you will have to suffer. That is the consolatory virtue of the rendezvous, the rendezvous at which they do not turn up.
Half past nine. Pierre is still waiting and time is flowing by. People talk of time flowing by as though it were tumbling from a spring and as though this spring were situated somewhere uphill. When Pierre looks up, it is as if he were searching for the fountain that marks the beginning of this great stream.
“It must be a salt-water source,” he sighs, “heavy with all the tears of those who have waited.”
At ten o’clock, Pierre was due to meet the director of the Bremen Museum of Ethnography. He rings the Hôtel Bradford to cancel the meeting. Then, since his morning has been wasted and the weather is fine, and because he is very much on edge, not having slept, and because he needs to keep himself busy, he climbs up to the terrace to do a little gardening, for it’s the right moment, one needs to be ready for the arrival of spring.
It is not the right moment, mid-February is too early.
“February or March, aren’t they more or less the same?”
No, the great frosts are the worry; they’re even obligatory. But the weather is as it is in April, it’s so still this morning. All of a sudden the west wind, while staying loyal to its traditions of warmth, no longer carries its cargo of large Atlantic clouds—there has been an inexplicable delay in the arrival of the tide—and it has left the sky completely blue, completely empty, like its colleague the east wind, but without the cold.
Pierre climbs up the spiral staircase and reaches the terrace. He is very proud of his garden, which measures barely ten by thirty metres and which only has three sides, being enclosed on the fourth by a wall from which three of the building’s chimneys protrude, quickly transforming any visitors into chimney sweeps. In the middle of the three trimmed box hedges that protect the little garden there are small ovals through which you can see Paris, her distinctive monuments, her layers of variously coloured smoke with, in the centre, the basilica of Montmartre ready to ring out like the President’s bell, before he takes the floor.
“There’s the west, and over there, it’s the north-east…”
When Pierre brings his friends up here, they are as lost as they would be at sea.<
br />
At the foot of each section of box hedge there is a small flower bed where Pierre grows common flowers that bloom in about mid-June: flax, poppies, foxgloves, lupins. In the centre there is a larger bed containing early fruit and vegetables, consisting of two cold frames and lit with neon lighting, which he is not a little proud of and which soothes all the disappointments that somnolent nature inflicts on him.
“And above all, give me something that grows quickly!” Pierre exclaims to Monsieur Priapet when he calls at Le Bon Cultivateur on the Quai de la Mégisserie to place his horticultural order.
Imperturbable, having retained his florid countryman’s complexion in the heart of the city, Monsieur Priapet, the god of gardens, believes only in the established order of gardening traditions and in the celestial code. But since chemical products make a good profit, he happily yields to the impatient fervour of his Parisian and suburban customers.
“Give me something that grows quickly! Why do we have to wait till June when we have sown seeds in March?” asks Pierre, hopping from foot to foot.
“Because the earth is cold, monsieur.”
“Let’s warm it. What have you got in here?”
“Some Subitosa. Keep to the proportions of one spoonful to five litres of water. I know what you’re like, Monsieur Niox, don’t go and do what you did last year and put five spoonfuls to one litre. Remember that you burned all your spindle trees. Eh, do you remember?”
“And what does this sack contain?”
“Some Précipital.”
“What a beautiful name! Vilmorin has a genius for neologisms. How do you use it?”
Monsieur Priapet winks and brings out a Molière-like syringe.
“You apply injections.”
“A good crack of the whip on nature’s behind, that’ll teach her!” said Pierre. “Then give me some Activitte too. And add some Superroburella, one kilo, ten kilos!”
“Be careful. It’s a very stimulating product! Try some of our selected seeds instead,” advised Monsieur Priapet as he rubbed his bright red cheeks.
“Really? Are they guaranteed? Are they quick?”
“I wouldn’t just recommend them to anyone, except to a gardener like you! Look, you’ll get some ‘interesting’ results with the Bursting tomato and with the Lightning chervil. Do you know the extra-early Express sweet peas from Suttons?”
“Give me twenty packets. And put a sack of arsenic mash in my car; and another of Sulphuretted Prefoliate.”
“That’s hyperactive, Monsieur Niox. Watch out! I’ll do as you ask, but for a truly reinforced fertilizer that’s anti-cryptogamic and that will really benefit you, there’s nothing like Prematurol from Truffaut’s. Have you seen their Begonias semperflorens on the Cours-la-Reine when they’ve been watered with that? They’re huge.”
And Pierre departs straight away, his pockets filled with the Horticulturalist’s Diary, the Manual of Floriculture, eager to start planting and transplanting.
Once back home, he will increase his efforts, naturally, and fill his flower beds with stimulating substances and ashes that are so blazingly hot that they still burn the feet at the moment of planting.
“Here, I plant my clematis; behind them, the scabious; above, the pyrethrums. My delphiniums and my columbines are already in place: for two years I haven’t had to bother about them… My galloping wisteria has died from phthisis. I’m going to replace it with those nice things that are sturdy and that always grow before anything else: nasturtiums and runner beans. What a huge comfort runner beans are for the wretched amateur! They grow tall, they knock down walls, they explode, they cover everything, they get completely out of hand and they don’t give you any trouble.”
The man in a hurry pours on the nitrogen; he is unrestrained with the potassium phosphate, he shoves on ammoniac citrate at fever pitch. His ideal solution is to be rid of the sad geraniums and begonias his forefathers grew, to achieve those herbaceous borders they have in England where the flowerings follow one another on the same ground; from week to week, a blue flower bed gives way to a yellow one, then pink, then white, like a series of fireworks, with luminous fountains sending up rockets.
There is nothing else he needs; the one thing he lacks is land; but nothing is harder than finding land to buy in Paris. Horticulturists sell everything, except land!
In the gazebo, Pierre arranges his tools around a crate that is the last remnant of an unfortunate attempt to grow crops in catalysed water the previous year; with the aid of phosphoric salts, Monsieur Priapet had promised him instant canna, early anemones and a plethora of radishes: it was a flop.
Alongside spades in the shape of a swan’s neck, hoeing forks and harrows, there were scarifying claws and shears for cutting the lawn that stood rusting, while a tiny, toothless rake lay among the labels, with shards of broken pots and bits of vegetable cloches that cracked when you walked over them. A box of Armenian specifica for speeding up the laying of hens’ eggs provided the final evidence of an attempt to fatten up chickens that was abandoned at an earlier period amid corpses of one-day-old chicks that had died from white diarrhoea.
Pierre uses sulphated mulch and screens to protect his irises and primroses.
“Let us consult my Amateur Gardener calendar. ‘February… prepare your soil…’ Done that. ‘Beware cutting lilac too soon…’ These people really do lack any enthusiasm. Why not protect rose bushes from greenfly now? (But the greenfly are also late)… ‘Sow foxgloves in March.’ Who cares! Let’s try and sow them in February and we shall see…”
Thus does Pierre interfere with the flowering and overtax the vegetation. Every morning he will come, nose to the ground and with wet knees, to keep an eye on the new growths. He’ll scratch with a blackened nail in order to encourage the little tip of the tulip, he’ll raise up the wilting hyacinth (even though he has had them sent over from Scotland, so that on finding themselves in Paris, they might get a good southern surprise). He watches the hole. He sprinkles, he soaks, he splashes rather than waters. No matter what, no matter when. The water leaks through the ceiling (he waters so early in the year that there are sometimes stalactites down below, in his study).
“Nature needs to be tamed, to be given an example of vigour!”
Pierre mops his forehead, glistening with beads of sweat unknown in the Garden of Eden. He turns round: Hedwige is there, looking at him, simultaneously severe and smiling.
“Sorry for keeping you waiting,” says Pierre ironically. “You see: I lingered in the garden.”
She stands there in formal black clothes (an afternoon dress with only a small length of skunk fur fitted snugly round her neck) silhouetted against a very pale blue sky, high above the horizon, a horizon that barely reaches halfway up her legs, as in portraits of the Spanish School.
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says. “I got up late.”
Having made up his mind not to criticize her, Pierre continues in the same tone of voice:
“It’s like my tulips. This year, nothing is getting up.”
“Nature has eternity ahead of her,” Hedwige replies.
“Yes, alas! With nature one always has the impression that autumn is missing the summer and that winter never seriously settles in until the moment when you might rightly expect spring to be arriving. So when will these tulips, which are a particularly tough variety from the north of the Zuider Zee, reveal their colours? They’re white ones; I chose them with you in mind, you who like white flowers, with a border of black tulips, to show them at their best.”
“I wonder, restless gardener, how you would manage if you had to wait nine months for a child? I mean, of course, wait for a woman who would be expecting… Indeed, perhaps you wouldn’t wait?”
Pierre went back to put on his leather coat, which he had hung on a nail so that he could do the gardening, wiped his muddy hands on the back of his dungarees and looked at his wife. Her face was a pale, parchment-like colour.
“Firstly, there can be no birth without union
, no union without love and no love without excitement. A child, therefore, is something sudden, something that doesn’t wait. It’s a surprise that is the result of a collision. It’s the fruit of a sleepless night. It doesn’t settle at its mother’s breast as though it were at a picnic, it’s hurled out when you’re flat on your back like a seed about to burst. It starts by waking everybody up in the middle of the night, by causing the doctor and midwife to come running. It’s new wine which can’t bear being put in a bottle.”
“Seriously, what would you do?”
“You’ve caught me unawares. I’ve never thought about the question much. I think my reaction would be like anyone else’s.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Think of this tiny prospective creature, compressed in this narrow box; it has just one idea, which is to get out, to be born and to spin out its days in the lovely sunshine. Tiny things yearn for the gigantic; the bud craves the leaf; assets require interest: everything that lives aspires to growing taller, becoming larger and multiplying.”
“You see yourself as a grandfather already!” said Hedwige, bursting out laughing.
Pierre laughs too, happy at his wife’s gaiety, but he suddenly becomes thoughtful.
“So why are you telling me all this… today?”
“Only because I think it’s useful to think about things before doing them… so as not to regret them afterwards.”
“Regret them? Me, regret having a child? You’re joking.”
“I’m very serious.”
“Regret having something that would have its source in you! I think I would overflow with joy, I would celebrate it everywhere, it would be more important than anything! A child of yours, goodness me: what an acceleration of our existence!”
