The Conspiracy

by Paul Nizan

  He wanted to think only about fighting: a fighter is always delivered. He looked at his brother, perhaps for the first time in twenty years without hatred. The unease, the strange anguish he had always felt in his presence had just evaporated. He had finally been cured of his family by scandal, by daylight. He had finally forced them to enter with him the world without lies: the unpolished world of Cain and Abel, Eteocles and Polynices, the Seven against Thebes – the world of tragedy. Claude was crushed and certainly looked it: everything was about to collapse – family tradition, primogeniture, brotherly love. The irruption of the unforeseen into the Rosenthal order was making him doubt his reason and his eyes.

  ‘Who’ll dare to speak?’ Bernard wondered. ‘They’d be wrong to think I’m going to begin . . . My mother, no doubt – the woman for big occasions.’

  Bernard sat down. The silence, of course, was unbearable. From time to time the sound of glassware could be heard coming from the dining-room: the housemaid was setting the table. Even if there is a dead person in the house, one has to eat. Mme Rosenthal said, quite quietly:

  — Bernard . . .

  ‘Here we go, then,’ he said to himself. ‘I knew it . . .’

  — Bernard, you know no doubt that we know. Claude has told us everything. Catherine has confessed. We wanted to talk to you, in front of her.

  Bernard looked at Catherine, who still did not move, who was no longer even smoking. The smoke from her cigarette climbed straight, then trembled at a distant eddy of Mme Rosenthal’s voice.

  — I suppose, she said, that it’s no use reading you a sermon.

  — No, it isn’t, Bernard said.

  — Be quiet, said Mme Rosenthal. You’re a kind of monster. You fill me with horror. And please don’t defy us.

  — Oh, of course, said Bernard.

  Mme Rosenthal burst out sobbing. She lost face at the thought that she must renounce all power over her son. When she was able to speak, she sighed:

  — And I almost hoped that when you saw us, you’d understand the horror of your behaviour . . . that you’d at least have some good impulse, some cry of regret. From you, my poor child, there’s nothing more we can look for . . .

  — Look for what? said Bernard, casting another glance in Catherine’s direction, catching the ghost of a smile which she suppressed and telling himself: ‘She still sees them with my eyes!’ What good impulse? Ought I to throw myself at Claude’s knees? Since I didn’t imagine he could ever forgive me, I don’t really see what we could do in the way of tender feelings, morals and collective tears . . . And since I regret precisely nothing . . .

  — Swine! exclaimed Claude, tensing and gripping the back of his mother’s chair.

  — Claude, said Mme Rosenthal.

  M. Rosenthal, who could stand no more, left abruptly slamming the door. His wife shrugged her shoulders.

  — So, we have very little to say to one another, said Mme Rosenthal. No one must know anything about our troubles. Catherine will remain with her husband . . .

  She looked towards Catherine, who gave a slight nod. Bernard thought it was impossible, they were all crazy and this family tribunal was vile.

  — You’ll live on your own, his mother continued, as you’ve begun to do. Your father will pay you your monthly allowance. If you want to, you may come here whenever you wish – you’re our child. I shall make arrangements so that you don’t meet either your brother or his wife here. There will be no public rupture: I won’t tolerate a scandal. Later, we shall see . . .

  — Time doesn’t solve anything, said Bernard. Let’s make no plans. Is that all?

  Was it all? He still waited. Was no one shouting? Was no one hurling themselves at him? He had had a moment of hope, when Claude had called him a swine. It was over, they were all silent now, they were curling up like hedgehogs, softening the impact of the blow.

  ‘Are they hoping I’ll roll at their feet, or weep? I look a fool, nothing’s happening. No tragedy. No sentimental drama. At most a bourgeois piece, second-rate Diderot, that middle course . . .’

  Bernard stood up and walked to the far end of the room, towards Catherine. Catherine’s cigarette, almost completely burnt down, was still smoking in the ashtray. It was the time for decision. Catherine watched him coming, she straightened her body, crossed her fingers. Mme Rosenthal stood up. Claude held his breath.

  — Let’s go, Catherine, Bernard said. Come and put your coat on . . .

  Catherine raised her eyes and looked at Bernard.

  — Go away, she said.

  — Yes, go away, said Mme Rosenthal.

  Everyone began to move. Catherine uncrossed her legs and her fingers, leant back on the settee, closed her eyes. Claude kissed his mother, Bernard left.

  XIX

  The days went by. Bernard did not go back to Avenue Mozart, where no doubt, he thought, they were all saying that the hardest moment was long past and, after an ambiguous stifling of passions, life would begin again.

  Precautions were taken against him. He did not manage to see Catherine again, or speak with her. He came up against the dreadful barrier of the housemaids’ furtive glances – Catherine was never there. He wrote letters without expecting any great result from them – wasted messages – telling himself that a letter is torn up or forgotten: that what was needed was his voice, his anger, the heart’s eloquence, his presence, his body. With what terrifying ease, then, was she complying with the conditions of her pardon? Was she simply saying that she had got off lightly?

  Bernard felt that a kind of great machine had begun to operate – at the very moment when he had let Claude enter the room on Place Edmond Rostand – and that, strive as he might to arrest its driving-rods, he would not stop it turning now.

  How powerful and inflexible a family is! It is as peaceful as a body or an organ that barely stirs, that breathes dreamily until the moment of danger – yet it is full of secrets, hidden counterstrokes, a biological fury and swiftness, like a sea anemone in the recesses of a fold of granite, peaceful, inattentive, unaware as a flower, which lets its dapple-grey tentacles drift as it waits to close them upon a crab, a shrimp, a sinking shell.

  At last Bernard received a letter from Catherine, in November. She entreated him not to write any more, not to seek any further meetings.

  ‘Understand,’ Catherine wrote, ‘that I simply do not want to see you any more. My poor Bernard, I am not cut out for your challenges and your love of storms: you demanded too much of a woman like any other.

  ‘You are terrible, you want everything from a woman, you will never have anything. For weeks you blinded me to yourself, to myself, to your mother, to my husband – and it is over, that is all, I have woken up, I can see clearly again. They have been simply perfect: how could I have guessed that Claude was capable of dignity?

  ‘Your terrible pride is your undoing – you, who are worth no more than others, who are merely a little different. This tragedy happened because you wanted it. I have wondered – I still wonder – whether you had not warned my husband yourself. If you did not bring him deliberately to the room where I was sleeping . . . I do not know how I resisted you so feebly. How I did not understand, even during that summer, that you believed you loved me, whereas I was only the opportunity for you to revenge yourself on your family. How easily you breathe in the midst of scandal! Not I. I feel as though I were convalescing . . .

  ‘Perhaps we shall see each other again one day. In the end everything is forgotten. Forget me too, think of yourself.’

  Bernard told himself furiously that Catherine had aligned herself with the party of order against him. What a capacity to retreat and forget!

  ‘As for me,’ he thought, ‘I forget nothing of her body . . . And there’s no other truth than a body.’

  It is hard to accept despair, or recognize that matters are closed. Lov
e is as tenacious as life itself. This letter, arriving out of the blue, re-established a kind of link. Catherine’s farewells seemed less cruel than her silence. Perhaps she had forgotten nothing – perhaps she had just been lazy, cowardly, duped. Bernard had to believe that Catherine was lying: for he could overcome lies, but not oblivion. One can defeat sicknesses, but not death. He pictured Avenue Mozart, Avenue de Villiers, big emotional scenes, heartfelt phrases, a comedy of generosity and affliction, Catherine’s tears, his mother’s open arms, his brother drowning his humiliation in the charms of magnanimity. The idea that they had triumphed over his Catherine only by underhand means gave him the courage to hurry round once more to Avenue de Villiers, in order to say to Catherine: ‘Do you remember?’ For an hour he thought himself omnipotent, still capable of saving her.

  The housemaid told him that Madame had not come home, and had said nothing about when she would be back. This lie seemed insulting to Bernard, who from the pavement had seen a light in Catherine’s room. He went away. In Rue Jouffroy he entered the post office and wrote an express message, in which he told Catherine that he did not believe her and that the hardest words in her letter had been dictated to her.

  ‘I want a reply from you,’ he went on to say, ‘which has the same tone that was ours during our Grandcourt nights, when the bats used to come and dash themselves against the walls of your room and I would restrain your cries; the tone of Trianon; the tone of our mornings in the Forêt d’Eu. Will you not have the courage to break with their appalling life? Do not write, I no longer even have the courage to wait. Do not be sensible, speak to me across the frontiers of Paris and your heart, telephone me. I shall wait at home this evening for your telephone call. Or yourself. Everything is still possible. Even the happiness that can spring up again at the limits of despair. You have no idea what love’s fury is capable of . . .’

  XX

  Bernard returned to Place Edmond Rostand. It was five o’clock. As in September, there was nothing more in the world to do but wait. He had issued his final appeal. Nothing protected him any longer except the hope of a telephone call, or the entrance of Catherine – which suddenly struck him as inevitable.

  At eleven o’clock Catherine had not come, the telephone had not rung. He called the Avenue de Villiers apartment. The housemaid told him that Madame had come home and gone out again, and that she had doubtless gone to dine at the house of Monsieur’s mother. Bernard asked for Catherine at Avenue Mozart, telling the housemaid that it was M. Adrien Plessis who wished to speak to Mme Claude Rosenthal. Catherine came to the telephone:

  — Did you receive my express letter? he asked.

  — Oh! so it’s you? exclaimed Catherine. Yes, I received your letter.

  — What’s your answer?

  — Nothing, said Catherine, I’ve nothing more to say to you. Catherine hung up.

  Bernard pictured the little scene at Avenue Mozart, the conversations interrupted while Catherine was on the telephone in the small drawing-room, Catherine’s return. Mme Rosenthal must be saying to her daughter-in-law, in her voice for big occasions:

  — It was that unfortunate child, wasn’t it?

  For them, he was no doubt that unfortunate child, against whom it was necessary to have so much courage and who was so dangerous – and what a good thing it was that Catherine had once again become as hard as the moral code of the Rosenthals required.

  ‘They’re sure I’m going to surrender,’ he thought. ‘That I’ll implore their forgiveness.’

  A Rosenthal could not be eternally guilty, eternally an enemy to his clan. The excuses they invented, with the blind skill of instinct, to explain their mistakes, failures and weaknesses – how should they not have manufactured them even for him? Wise as spiders, they were preparing the revival of life from afar. They must already be practising for him the parable of the prodigal child, as though they knew that everything would lapse back into the Rosenthal order. That in three months or six, the crisis suppressed and his repentance over, he would reappear with the modest air of a prodigal son, a disloyal brother, a consoled lover and a pardoned offender. That he would agree to pose for the family portrait gallery, following Claude the magnanimous elder brother and Catherine the wayward child. That he would act the young romantic placated, with the aureole of bygone storms like the glory of an illness from which he had almost died. And that of an evening he would have games of bridge with his father and with Claude – who, to the very end, would have displayed so much kindness and understanding of human passion.

  Bernard was less moved by despair than by anger at all these soft walls that were not collapsing. He no longer knew whether he was rebelling against Catherine’s disappearance, or against the victory of his relatives. It simply struck him as shameful, impossible, to live any longer defeated, despoiled, forgiven and without Catherine, once captured from the enemy and whom the enemy had now retaken: whose hair, naked back, knees, he would never again touch; whom he would have to watch walking amid the smug looks of the Family – promoted eventually, no doubt, to the tender dignity of young motherhood.

  ‘It’s a sure thing,’ Bernard told himself. ‘These family reconciliations and grand healings always end up with a pregnancy. That fool must already have given her a child . . .’

  Bernard went out. It was late and the Luxembourg had long been closed, abandoned behind its railings to a nocturnal life full of mystery. He visited a number of cafés and the bars of the Latin Quarter. He drank a number of brandies, and some whores who felt like dancing accosted him. When he had no money left, he returned to his apartment. He felt really drunk and went to vomit in the bathroom. Coming back to his bedroom, he knocked over a desk lamp, whose bulb shattered with a sound like torn paper. He burnt some letters and some pictures of Catherine, telling himself this adventure had been enough for her: she had taken her revenge on Claude and could now be faithful to him for the rest of her life.

  ‘Is this really where the tragedy begins?’ Bernard wondered. ‘They’ve defeated me . . .’

  He convinced himself that the purity of passion had come up against the omnipotence of myths, society and fate. But the passion he still at this moment believed he had felt for Catherine was less pure than he thought: it was mingled with jealousy, anger, old childhood resentments; it lacked strength and freedom from guile. No one was there to wake him up and tell him that he had himself manufactured an irreplaceable woman. He was incapable of comparisons. Incapable of saying to himself that, at his age, he could still survive on women unknown to him – and that he had been mad to gamble everything on Catherine. He was blinded. He no longer knew anything of love but the obstinacy that survived it. He was never going to admit he had been mistaken in imagining that, in the whole world, he possessed only one protection against death, only one fortune. But he was standing at the furthest limit of rage, at a point from which he could discern no possible revenge; no undertaking that could touch his relatives; no way of regaining Catherine. He took for despair the impotence of pride. It never even occurred to him that he might be able to win Catherine back by accepting, if need be, every compromise. For, in fact, he loved Catherine less than he thought . . .

  Bernard reflected, with that tottering solemnity of drunkenness, that all the motivating forces of tragedy were denied him, except the will to die.

  ‘Death could be the affirmation against them which none of my actions has succeeded in being. Am I going to sacrifice to them even the freedom of my death, my sole action? . . . Besides, they’ll look pretty sick if I kill myself . . . I’ve failed in everything, but at least I’ll have been once to my uttermost limit. If love is lost, let’s at least save tragedy!’

  It was one of those days for him when any man will admit that his death would not be particularly important to him, when even fear no longer protects him. He did not suspect for an instant that this disastrous solution would be an excellent outcome for his relati
ves. Once they knew he was no longer there – that he was eternally inaccessible – how they would forget him!

  When – towards the end of the night, after actions dictated to him only by rage, sloth and alcohol – Bernard had with two or three bouts of nausea swallowed a kind of white mash of Gardenal, he experienced his first respite for weeks, his first feeling of relaxation and almost happiness. Gardenal erases everything as a wind erases frost patterns: grief, anger, wakefulness, barriers, distances, the women one used to love and will see no more. Bernard then experienced indifference and, so to speak, a lazy dive into darkness. He was at last capable of judgement. Telling himself he had missed love – that complicity of laughter, eroticism, shared secrets, a past and hope; that union resembling a permitted incest; that bond, strong as a bond forged by childhood and blood – he recalled confusedly the gardens of Potamia, Marie-Anne, the day at Trianon, the moments when he had seen the portents of happiness appear. All that tempest and this final calm suddenly struck him as terribly absurd. He no longer even loved Catherine and he was going to die cheated. What madness! No, he must live!

  Bernard sought to stand, run, rid himself of the poison, but he managed only to slide from his bed and – without ever getting to his feet or even to his knees – to reach the entrance to the bathroom, where he finally subsided into the oozy mires of sleep.

  In the morning, the woman came in to clean as she did every day. She screamed when she saw Bernard lying there, half on the fitted carpet of his bedroom and half on the black-and-white tiles of the bathroom. She touched him and felt beneath her fingers the vile coldness of the dead. She was the concierge, she went down to her lodge, the running about and the drama began.

  That afternoon, Catherine came to see Bernard’s body. The room was already full of chrysanthemums and gladioli. Everything had settled into the order of death. Bernard was covered to the chin with his sheet, the white expanse lifted by his knees and the tips of his toes. Mme Rosenthal, seated at her son’s bedside, was no longer weeping: but no one is a monster and she had sobbed for hours. When her daughter-in-law came silently in, she scrutinized her. Catherine was wearing a black suit, she approached the bed and looked at the body for an unbearable length of time, she made no movement: she was a young woman of great promise – or perhaps her self-control cost her no effort. Eventually she sighed and looked round her and – as if this sigh and this look had been signals bringing the paralysis of the alert to an end – Mme Rosenthal rose and came over to embrace her daughter-in-law: all was truly forgiven. When death has passed, the living all adapt. Mme Rosenthal then had the second surprise of her life in six months: Catherine, who had allowed herself to be embraced, violently repulsed her mother-in-law and burst out sobbing.