The Age of Reason

by Jean-Paul Sartre

  She fell silent

  ‘Or possibly?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t let’s talk any more about it, please, it makes me feel ashamed. Ah — here’s the champagne,’ she said gaily.

  Mathieu eyed the bottle and thought: ‘350 francs.’ The fellow who had spoken to him the day before in the Rue Vercingétorix, was a wash-out too, but on a modest footing — no champagne and agreeable follies: and, moreover, he was hungry. Mathieu was revolted by the bottle. It was heavy and black, with a white napkin round its neck. The waiter, bending over the ice-pail with a stiff and reverential air, twirled it dexterously with his fingertips. Mathieu was still looking at the bottle, he was still thinking of the fellow of the day before, and felt his heart contract with genuine anguish: but at that moment, a decorous young man appeared on the platform, and chanted through a megaphone: ‘Oh yes he threw a winner — Did Émile.’

  Here was that bottle revolving ceremoniously between those pallid fingers, and here were all those people stewing in their juice without making any fuss at all. ‘Well,’ thought Mathieu, ‘he smelt of cheap red wine; so there’s really no difference. Anyway, I don’t like champagne.’ He saw the dancing-hall as a miniature hell, as light as a soap-bubble, and he smiled.

  ‘What do you find so funny?’ asked Boris, laughing in anticipation.

  ‘I’ve just remembered that I don’t like champagne either.’

  Whereupon they all three burst out laughing. Ivich’s laugh was rather shrill: the neighbouring lady turned her head and looked her up and down.

  ‘We’re very cheerful!’ said Boris. And he added, ‘We might empty it into the ice-pail when the waiter has gone.’

  ‘Just as you like,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘No,’ said Ivich, ‘I want to drink, I’ll drink the whole bottle if you don’t want any.’

  The waiter filled their glasses, and Mathieu raised his gloomily to his lips. Ivich looked at hers with an air of perplexity.

  ‘It wouldn’t be bad,’ said Boris, ‘if it were served hot.’

  The white lights went out, the red lights came on, and a roll of drums echoed through the room. A short, bald, paunchy gentleman in a dinner-jacket jumped on to the platform, and began to smile into a megaphone.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the management of the Sumatra has great pleasure in presenting to you Miss Ellinor on her first appearance in Paris. Miss El-li-nor,’ he repeated. ‘Ha!’

  At the first chords from a dulcimer, a tall, blonde girl entered the room. She was naked, and her body, in the crimsoned air, looked like a long strip of cotton. Mathieu turned to Ivich: she was gazing at the naked girl with her pale, wide open eyes: she had assumed her convulsed and cruel expression.

  ‘I know her,’ whispered Boris.

  The girl danced, agonizing in the desire to please: she seemed amateurish; she flung her legs vehemently to and fro, and her feet stood out like fingers at the extremities of her legs.

  ‘She can’t keep that up,’ said Boris. ‘She’ll collapse.’

  And in fact her long limbs looked disquietingly fragile: when she put her feet on the floor, her legs quivered from the ankles to the thighs. She came up to the edge of the platform and turned round: ‘Oh Lord,’ thought Mathieu wearily, ‘she’s going to do the backside act.’ From time to time the music was drowned by bursts of conversation.

  ‘She can’t dance,’ said Ivich’s neighbour, with set lips. ‘With drinks at thirty-five francs, the show ought to be first-rate.’

  ‘They’ve got Lola Montero,’ said her large companion.

  ‘That doesn’t matter; it’s a disgrace, they’ve picked that girl up in the street.’

  The woman sipped her cocktail and began to fidget with her rings. Mathieu looked round the room — all the faces were stern and critical: the audience were enjoying their own disfavour: the girl seemed to them doubly naked, because she was so clumsy. She looked as though she sensed their hostility and yearned to placate them. Mathieu was struck by her wild desire to give satisfaction: she thrust out her parted thighs in a frenzied effort that wrung the very heart.

  ‘She’s trying very hard,’ said Boris.

  ‘It won’t be any use,’ said Mathieu, ‘they want to be treated with respect.’

  ‘They want to see backsides.’

  ‘Yes, but that sort of thing needs to be neatly done.’

  For a moment the dancer’s legs tapped the floor beneath that gay but ineffectual posterior, then she stood up, smiled, raised her arms and shook them: a shiver rippled down them, slid over the shoulder-blades and vanished in the hollow of the back.

  ‘Well, I never saw such a stick of a girl,’ said Boris.

  Mathieu did not answer, he had been thinking about Ivich. He did not dare look at her, but he remembered her air of cruelty: when all was said, she was like the rest — the nasty little creature: doubly protected by her charm and her unassuming frock, she was possessed by all the sensations of the vilest of her kind, as her eyes devoured that poor naked flesh. A flood of bitterness rose to Mathieu’s lips, and brought a taint of poison to his mouth. ‘She needn’t have troubled to make such a fuss this morning.’ He turned his head slightly, and caught sight of Ivich’s fist lying clenched upon the table. The thumb-nail, scarlet and sharpened, pointed to the dance-floor like an arrow on a dial. ‘She is quite alone,’ he thought; ‘she is hiding her wrecked face under her hair, she is sitting with her thighs together, and enjoying it!’ The idea was more than he could bear, he nearly got up and went, but had not the strength of will, and merely thought: ‘And I love that girl for her purity.’ The dancer, with her hands on her hips, was shifting sideways on her heels, she brushed her hip against the table, Mathieu wished his desires could have been aroused by that large and cheerful tail beneath the wriggling back-bone, if only to distract him from his thoughts, or to put Ivich out of countenance. The girl was now crouching, legs apart, slowly swaying to and fro, like one of those pale lanterns swung by night in wayside railway stations by an invisible arm.

  ‘Pah!’ said Ivich. ‘I shan’t look at her any more.’

  Mathieu turned towards her with astonishment, he saw a triangular face, distorted by anger and disgust. ‘So she was not excited,’ he realized with thankfulness. Ivich shuddered, he tried to smile at her, but his head was echoing with the sound of fairy-bells: Boris, Ivich, the obscene body, and the purple mist, slid out of his ken. He was alone, there were Bengal lights in the distance, and, in the smoke, a four-legged monster turning cartwheels, and the festive strains of a band that reached him in gusts through a damp rustle of foliage. ‘What can be the matter with me?’ he asked himself. It was like what had happened in the morning: all this was just a mere performance; Mathieu was somewhere else.

  The band came to a stop, and the girl stood motionless, turning her face towards the hall. Above her smile were lovely, agonized eyes. No one applauded and there were a few jeers.

  ‘Brutes!’ said Boris.

  He clapped loudly. Astonished faces turned towards him.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Ivich, ‘you mustn’t applaud.’

  ‘She does her best,’ said Boris, applauding.

  ‘All the more reason.’

  ‘I know her,’ he said; ‘I’ve dined with her and Lola, she’s a good sort of girl, but silly.’

  The girl disappeared, smiling and blowing kisses. A white light flooded the room, this was the moment of awakening: the audience were relieved to find themselves in their own company again after justice had been done. Ivich’s neighbour lit a cigarette, and smiled a winning smile solely for her benefit. Mathieu did not awaken, this was a white nightmare; faces aglow all round him with laughing, limp complacency; most of them apparently uninhabited — mine must be like that, with the same alertness in the eyes and the corners of the mouth, and yet only too obviously hollow; it was a nightmare figure of a man who jumped on to the platform and waved for silence; there was a foretaste of the surprise he expected, and an affected nonchalance, in his mere announc
ement into the megaphone of the celebrated name: ‘Lola Montero!’

  The hall thrilled with responsive enthusiasm, there was a crackle of applause, and Boris seemed delighted.

  ‘They’re in a good mood tonight — this is going to be some show!’

  Lola was leaning against the door: from a distance, her flattened, furrowed face looked like the mask of a lion, her shoulders, a quivering whiteness flecked with green, recalled a birch tree on a windy evening under the headlights of a car.

  She advanced with long, calm strides, and a sort of nonchalant despair: she had the small hands and the loaded charms of a sultana, but there was a masculine lavishness in her approach.

  ‘She’s the goods,’ said Boris admiringly: ‘she won’t get the bird.’

  It was true: the people in the front row were sitting back in their chairs, quite awed, as though they hardly dared look too closely at that famous head. It was the head of a tribune, the large commanding head of a public personage, with something of a politician air that thickened the features: a practised mouth, trained to open wide, and spit horror and disgust through out-thrust lips, in a voice that all can hear. Lola stiffened suddenly, Ivich’s neighbour heaved a thrilled, admiring sigh. ‘She’s got them,’ thought Mathieu.

  He felt embarrassed: fundamentally, Lola was a noble and passionate character, but her face belied her a great deal; it merely simulated nobility and passion. She suffered; Boris drove her to desperation; but, for five minutes in the day, she took advantage of her singer’s gift to suffer beautifully. ‘Well, what about me? Aren’t I doing just the same in impersonating a wash-out to the accompaniment of a band? And yet,’ he thought, ‘it’s quite true that I’m a wash-out.’ Around him it was just the same: there were people who did not exist at all, mere puffs of smoke, and others who existed rather too much. The barman, for instance. A little while ago he had been smoking a cigarette, as vague and poetic as a flowering creeper: now he had awakened, he was rather too much the barman, manipulating his shaker, opening it, and tipping yellow froth into glasses with slightly superfluous precision: he was impersonating a barman. Mathieu thought of Brunet: ‘Perhaps it’s inevitable; perhaps one has to choose between being nothing at all, or impersonating what one is. That would be terrible,’ he said to himself: ‘it would mean that we were duped by nature.’

  Lola, without hurrying herself, looked round the hall. Her melancholy mask had hardened and set, it seemed to cling forgotten to her face. But, in the depths of her eyes, which alone showed signs of life, Mathieu thought he could descry a flame of harsh and menacing curiosity that was not feigned. She at last caught sight of Boris and Ivich and seemed reassured. She threw them a large, good-natured smile, and then announced with an absent air: ‘A sailor’s song: Johnny Palmer.’

  ‘I like her voice,’ said Ivich: ‘it reminds one of thick ribbed velvet.’ And Mathieu thought: ‘Johnny Palmer again.’

  The orchestra played a few opening phrases and Lola raised her heavy arms — there she was, standing in an attitude of crucifixion, and he watched a crimsoned mouth open.

  ‘Who is it that’s cruel, jealous, hard?

  Who cheats when he can’t hold a card?...’

  Mathieu was no longer listening, this image of grief made him feel ashamed. It was only an image, he knew that quite well, but none the less...

  ‘I don’t know how to suffer, I never suffer enough.’ The most painful thing about suffering was that it was a phantom, one spent one’s time pursuing it, one always hoped to catch it, and plunge into it and suffer squarely with clenched teeth: but in that instant it escaped, leaving nothing behind but a scatterment of words, and countless demented, pullulating arguments. ‘There’s a chattering in my head, and the chattering won’t stop. Oh, how I wish I could be silent.’ He looked enviously at Boris; behind that dogged forehead, there must be vast silences.

  ‘Who is it that’s cruel, jealous, hard?

  Why, Johnny Palmer.’

  ‘I’m lying!’ His downfall, his lamentations — all were lies and from the void; he was thrust into the void, at the surface of himself, to escape the unendurable pressure of his veritable world. A black and torrid world that stank of ether. In that world, Mathieu was not a wash-out — not by any means, it was worse than that: he was a cheery fellow — a cheery doer of ill deeds. It was Marcelle who would be washed out if he did not find five thousand francs within two days. Washed out for good and all, and that was that: which meant that she would lay her egg, or run the risk of dying under the hands of an abortionist. In that world, suffering was not a condition of the soul and words were not needed to explain it: it was an aspect of things. ‘Marry her, you shoddy little bohemian, marry her, my dear fellow, why don’t you marry her?’ — ‘I bet it’ll finish her,’ thought Mathieu with horror. Everyone applauded and Lola deigned to smile. She bowed and said: ‘A song from a musical comedy: the Pirate’s Betrothed.’

  ‘I don’t like her when she sings that. Margo Lion was much better. More temperamental. Lola is too sensible, quite devoid of temperament. Besides, she’s too nice. She hates me, but with a good compact hatred, the healthy hatred of an honest human being.’ He listened absently to these light thoughts which scurried around like rats in a barn. Beneath them lay a dense and mournful slumber, a dense world that waited silently. Mathieu would drop back into it in due course. He saw Marcelle, he saw her hard mouth and distracted eyes. ‘Marry her, you shoddy bohemian, marry her, you have reached the age of reason, you must marry her.’

  ‘A high-pooped thirty-gunner,

  rolling into port.’

  ‘Stop! Stop! I’ll find some money, I’ll find it, somehow, or I’ll marry her, that’s understood, I’m not a rotter — but for this evening, just for this evening, I want to be left in peace and forget it all; Marcelle doesn’t forget, she’s in the room, outstretched on the bed, she remembers everything. She SEES me, she listens to faint sounds, within her, and what then? My name will be hers, my whole life if need be, but this night is mine.’ He turned to Ivich, and leaned eagerly towards her, and she smiled, but he felt as though his nose had come into contact with a glass wall, just as the applause broke out. ‘Encore!’ they cried. ‘Encore.’ Lola paid no attention to these appeals. She had another engagement to sing elsewhere at two o’clock in the morning, and she reserved herself accordingly. She bowed twice and approached Ivich. Heads were turned to Mathieu’s table. Mathieu and Boris got up.

  ‘How are you, my little Ivich?’

  ‘How are you, Lola?’ said Ivich in a toneless voice.

  Lola tapped Boris on the chin with a light finger.

  ‘Well, you young rapscallion?’

  Her calm, grave voice conferred a sort of dignity on the word ‘rapscallion’. It seemed as though Lola had purposely chosen it among the odd, rather touching words of her songs.

  ‘Good evening, Madame,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘Ah!’ said she. ‘So you’re here too?’

  They sat down. Lola turned to Boris, apparently quite at ease.

  ‘It seems they couldn’t stick Ellinor.’

  ‘I gather so.’

  ‘She came to cry in my dressing-room. Sarrunyan was furious, it’s the third time in a week.’

  ‘He isn’t going to sack her?’ asked Boris uneasily.

  ‘He wanted to: she hasn’t got a contract. So I said to him she goes, I go with her.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That she could stay on another week.’

  She surveyed the room, and said in a high voice: ‘It’s a foul crowd this evening.’

  ‘Well,’ said Boris, ‘I wouldn’t have said so.’

  Ivich’s female neighbour, who was eyeing Lola with greedy, impudent eyes, gave a sudden start Mathieu wanted to laugh: he was rather fond of Lola.

  ‘It’s because you’re not used to the place,’ said Lola. ‘When I came in I saw at once that they had just done the dirty on someone, they looked so sheepish. You know,’ she added, ‘if that girl l
oses her job, she’ll have to go on the streets.’

  Ivich raised her head suddenly, there was a wild look in her eyes. ‘Then let her go on the streets,’ she said savagely, ‘she’d do better there.’

  She was making an effort to keep her head erect, and her dulled, pink eyes open. She had lost a little of her assurance, and added with a deprecating, harassed air: ‘Of course I quite understand that she must earn her living.’

  No one answered, and Mathieu felt distressed on her behalf: it must be hard to keep one’s head erect. Lola eyed her composedly. As though she were thinking: ‘Nasty little rich girl.’ Ivich laughed lightly.

  ‘I don’t want to dance,’ she said slyly.

  Her laugh broke, and her head fell forward.

  ‘I wonder what’s biting her,’ said Boris, quietly.

  Lola gazed with curiosity at the top of Ivich’s head. After a moment or two she stretched out her small, plump hand, grasped a shock of Ivich’s hair, and lifted her head. And, with the air of a hospital nurse, she said: ‘What’s the matter, darling? Too much to drink?’

  She drew aside Ivich’s blonde curls like a curtain, exposing a broad, pallid cheek. Ivich half-opened her expiring eyes, and let her head roll back. ‘She’s going to be sick,’ thought Mathieu indifferently. Lola was tugging at Ivich’s hair.

  ‘Open your eyes, will you! — Open your eyes! Look at me!’

  Ivich’s eyes opened wide, and they shone with hatred. ‘There — I’m looking at you,’ she said, in a curt and icy tone.

  ‘Come,’ said Lola, ‘you aren’t as tipsy as all that.’

  She let go Ivich’s hair. Ivich quickly raised her hands and smoothed her curls back over her cheeks, she looked as though she were modelling a mask, and indeed her triangular visage reappeared beneath her fingers, but a pasty, worn look still lingered round her mouth and in her eyes. She remained for a moment motionless, with the rather awesome look of a sleepwalker, while the orchestra played a slow foxtrot.

  ‘Are you going to ask me to dance?’ asked Lola.