Lol was looking. Behind her, I was trying to accord my look so closely to hers that, with every passing second, I began to remember her memories. I remembered events contiguous to those events she remembered having been present at, sharp profiles of similarities that vanished the moment they were seen into the dark night of the room. I heard the fox trots of an uneventful youth. A blonde was roaring with laughter. A couple—two lovers—came toward her, a slow-moving comet, the primary maw of love, she still didn't realize what it meant. A sputtering of secondary incidents, a mother's screams, occurs. The vast, dark field of dawn arrives. A monumental calm reigns over everything, engulfs everything. One trace remains, one. A single, indelible trace, at first we know not where. What? You don't know where? No trace, none, all has been buried, and Lol with it.
The man is pacing to and fro behind the curtain in the corridor, he coughs, he is waiting patiently. I move closer to Lol. She doesn't see me come. She cannot keep her eyes fixed for more than a moment on one thing, has trouble seeing, closes her eyes to see better, opens them again. Her expression is set, conscientious. She can spend the rest of her life here looking, stupidly seeing again what cannot be seen again.
We heard the faint click of a light switch, and the ballroom's ten chandeliers light up together. Lol gives a cry. I call out to the man:
"Thank you, but that won't be necessary."
The man turns out the lights. By contrast, the room is much darker than before. Lol leaves. The man is waiting behind the curtains, smiling.
"Has it been a long time?" he asks.
"Oh, ten years," Lol says.
"I was here."
His expression changes, he recognizes Miss Lol Stein, the indefatigable dancer—seventeen years old, eighteen—of the Potinière. He says:
"I'm sorry."
He must know the rest of the story too, I can see he obviously does. Lol hasn't the slightest inkling that he knows.
We have emerged through the main door out onto the beach.
We went to the beach without having made up our minds to. Once outside in the light, Lol stretched, yawned broadly. She smiled, she said:
"I got up so early this morning I'm sleepy."
The sun, the sea, the tide is going out, is out so far it has left behind a marshland of sky-blue puddles.
She lies down on the sand, gazes at the patches of blue water.
"Let's go and get something to eat, I'm hungry."
She falls asleep.
Her hand, lying on the sand, falls asleep with her. I toy with her wedding ring. Beneath it the skin is lighter, smoother, like a scar. She is completely oblivious. I remove the ring, smell it, is has no odor, I slip it back on. She is completely oblivious.
I make no effort to fight the deadly monotony of Lol's memory. I fall asleep.
SHE'S STILL ASLEEP, in the same position. She's been asleep for an hour. The light is more oblique now. Her eyelashes cast a shadow. A light breeze is blowing. Her hand is still in the same place as it was when she fell asleep, buried a trifle deeper in the sand, her fingernails are no longer visible.
She wakes up a moment after I do. There are very few people on this part of the beach, here the beach is silty, people go swimming farther down, miles away, the tide is way out, ebb tide for the moment, beneath the screams and shrieks of the idiotic gulls. We study each other. We've known each other so briefly. At first we're astonished. Then we rediscover our current memory, our marvelous, recent memory of this morning, we move into each other's arms, let me hold her tight, we stay this way, not saying a word, there being nothing to say until, looking toward that section of the beach where the swimmers are and which Lol, because of the position of her head on my shoulder, cannot see, there is some commotion, a crowd gathering around something I cannot see, perhaps a dead dog.
She gets up, takes me to a little restaurant she knows. She is famished.
Here we are then at Town Beach, Lol Stein and I. We are eating. Another series of events might have taken place, other revolutions between people other than ourselves, with other names, other spans of inner time might have occurred, longer or shorter, other tales of oblivion, of a vertical descent into the oblivion of memory, of lightning-like access to other memories, of other long nights, of love without end, of God knows what? Lol is right. That does not interest me.
Lol is eating, gathering sustenance.
I refuse to admit the end which is probably going to come and separate us, how easy it will be, how distressingly simple, for the moment I refuse to accept it, to accept this end, I accept the other, the end which has still to be invented, the end I do not yet know, that no one has invented: the endless end, the endless beginning of Lol Stein.
Watching her eat, I forget.
There's no way we can avoid spending the night in Town Beach. We realize this while we are eating, and the realization affixes itself to us, clings to us, we forget there might have been any other possibility. It is Lol who says:
"If you like we can spend the night here."
She's right, we can't get back.
I say:
"Yes, we'll stay here. We have no choice."
"I'm going to telephone my husband. The mere fact that I'm in Town Beach can't really be sufficient reason for him to ... "
She adds:
"Afterward I'll be so good and reasonable. Since I've already told him it was all over between us, I can change, can't I? I can, you see I can."
She clings to this conviction.
"Look at my face, you must be able to see it, tell me we can't go back."
"I can see it in your face, we can't go back."
In successive, steady waves, her eyes fill with tears, she laughs strangely, a laugh I have never heard.
"I want to be with you, you've no idea how I want to be with you."
She asks me to go and rent a room. She's going down to the beach to wait for me. I go to a hotel. I rent the room, I ask questions someone answers, I pay. I'm with her waiting for me: the tide is finally coming back in, it drowns the blue marshes one after the other until, progressively, slowly but surely, they lose their individuality and are made one with the sea, some are already gone, others still await their turn. The death of the marshes fills Lol with a frightful sadness, she waits, anticipates it, sees it happen. She recognizes it.
LOL DREAMS of another time when the same thing that is going to happen would happen differently. In another way. A thousand times. Everywhere. Elsewhere. Among others, thousands of others who, like ourselves, dream of this time, necessarily. This dream contaminates me.
I'm obliged to undress her. She won't do it herself.
Now she is naked. Who is there in the bed? Who does she think it is?
Stretched out on the bed, she does not move a muscle. She is worried. She is motionless, remains there where I have placed her. Her eyes follow me across the room as I undress, as though I were a stranger. Who is it? The crisis is here. An attack brought on by the way we are now, here in this room, she and I alone.
"The police are downstairs."
I don't dispute her words.
"People are being beaten on the stairway."
I don't dispute her words.
She doesn't recognize me, hasn't the faintest idea who I am any more.
"I don't know any more, who is it?"
Then she remembers me faintly.
"Come on, let's go."
I say that the police will catch us.
I lie down beside her, beside her closed body. I recognize the smell of her. I caress her without looking at her.
"You're hurting me."
I keep on. By the feel of my fingers I recognize the contours of a woman's body. I draw flowers upon it. Her whimpered resistance ceases. She is no longer moving, now doubtless remembers that she is here with Tatiana Karl's lover.
But now at last she begins to doubt that identity, the only identity familiar to her, the only one she has used at least as long as I have known her. She says:
&
nbsp; "Who is it?"
She moans, asks me to tell her. I say: "Tatiana Karl, for example."
Exhausted, at the end of my strength, I ask her to help me.
She helps me. She knew. Who was it before me? I shall never know. I don't care.
Later, shouting, she insulted me, she begged me, she implored me to take her again and in the same breath said to leave her alone, like a hunted animal trying to flee the room, the bed, coming back to let herself be captured, wily and knowing, and now there was no longer any difference between her and Tatiana Karl except in her eyes, free of remorse, and in the way she referred to herself—Tatiana does not state her own name—and in the two names she gave herself: Tatiana Karl and Lol Stein.
It was she who waked me.
"It's time to go home."
She was dressed, her coat on, standing there. She still looked like the person she had been throughout the night. Reasonable in her own way, since she would have liked to stay longer, she would have liked to begin all over again, and yet she decided she couldn't. Her eyes were lowered. She pronounced her words slowly, in a voice which was hardly more than a whisper.
While I am dressing she goes to the window, and I studiously avoid approaching her too. She reminds me that I am supposed to meet Tatiana at the Forest Hotel at six o'clock. She has forgotten a great many things, but not this rendezvous.
In the street, we exchanged looks. I called her by her name, Lol. She laughed.
We were not alone this time in the compartment, and had to talk in hushed tones.
At my request, she talks to me about Michael Richardson. She tells me how great a tennis buff he was, says that he used to write poetry that she found beautiful. I urge her to talk about it. Can she tell me anything more? She can. Each word is a shaft of pain wracking my whole body. She talks on. Again I urge her to continue. She lavishes pain with generosity. She tells me about nights on the beach. I want to know still more. She tells me still more. We are smiling. She's been talking the way she did that first night, at Tatiana Karl's.
The pain vanishes. I tell her so. She says no more.
It's over, truly over. She can tell me anything, whatever she wants to about Michael Richardson, about anything.
I ask her if she thinks Tatiana Karl is capable of informing John Bedford of our affair. She fails to understand the question. But she smiles when she hears Tatiana's name, at the memory of that small black head which is so far from realizing the fate that has been decided for her.
She does not talk of Tatiana Karl.
We waited until the last passengers had left the train before we left.
In spite of everything, I felt Lol's growing remoteness as something extremely difficult to bear. What? for no more than a split second. I asked her not to go home right away, told her it was still early, that Tatiana could wait. Did she even consider it? I doubt it. She said:
"Why tonight?"
Night was falling when I reached the Forest Hotel.
Lol had arrived there ahead of us. She was asleep in the field of rye, worn out, worn out by our trip.
The Ravishing of Lol Stein Page 13
