The Hippogriff

by Henri de Montherlant

  It was the first time he had spoken to her about such matters. They went in, and talked to the salesman for some time. It gave Costals a feeling of gratification, not only because it committed him further ('Now I can't possibly turn back.') but because this future he was preparing was attractive to him. He took a little sketch out of his wallet and showed it to her: it was the plan of a flat. One of the rooms was marked: 'Sol.'s room.'

  'I've put your room and mine at opposite ends of the flat, for days when I can't stand you any longer.'

  She did not reply, but he felt her hand searching for his.

  During the next hour, in a tea-room, he recaptured once more the atmosphere of that Sunday in the kitchen, when he had thought her so serious. But what giant strides had been made since then! They spent this hour chatting about their future, and about the flat, which was to be 'as pale as Parian marble', and the servants, who 'mustn't be too intelligent', and the food, which should be 'plentiful, but decidedly mediocre' (he had noticed she was something of a gastronome, and disapproved), etcetera, etcetera, the whole thing cosy, familiar, cordial - and so simple! Impossible to treat her more like his wife. (And that soft voice of hers, that was so well bred.) He found that, in everything, she met his tastes more than halfway. 'She won't disturb me,' he told himself, with some amazement. 'Perhaps she will even help my work, by keeping my friends at bay.' For a moment he thought of hastening the celebration of the thing. From time to time she would turn towards him suddenly, and, being smaller than he, raise her eyes a little, smiling, with an expression of radiant tenderness, as though to thank him for giving her his love - which was not love but a sincere attachment.

  'You happened to be there, so it was you I chose. Yes, if this thing takes place, I shall have picked you more or less at random, so that it should really be like life, since most marriages happen by chance. I wanted to place myself in the normal circumstances of marriage, and that is why, quite voluntarily, I shall have married in absurd circumstances. I also wanted not to give it too good a chance of succeeding, because I was curious to see what mutual sympathy and goodwill could make of it. You notice that I still say "If this thing happens." I'm not making any promises. You would lay yourself open to the most horrible disappointments if you got it into your head that we were engaged. When I consider we're engaged, I'll let you know.'

  He asked her what she wanted to do - whether she wanted to come back to his flat (with all that that setting now usually involved), or go somewhere else. She said her mother had seen a film which was partly set in Chatelaillon, where they used to spend the holidays when Solange was a little girl, and that she had even recognized their villa in it. She would very much like to see this film. Costals could not help thinking that she did not have a very pressing desire to yield to his embraces.

  The pen jibs at having to describe, however sketchily, the depths of stupidity, vulgarity, imbecility and baseness of this comico-lachrymose film, which was of course French. Five hundred half-wits licked up this pus with ecstasy. There was the Supercretin and the Supersucker, the pure-bred Degenerate, the unadulterated Subman and the quintessential Innocent; and beside each of them, one tenth of a virgin, meaning eight and a half virgins for the whole assembly, if our count is right. Our friends had been there for half an hour, and Costals noticed that not once had Solange retched with disgust. She did not laugh, but she swallowed the worst without turning a hair, whereas it had happened to Costals, sometimes even when he was at the cinema with a woman he had just picked up and was therefore in a good mood, to have to leave the theatre because he was physically at the end of his tether. On the contrary, when the action of the film switched from Chatelaillon to the Côte d'Azur and he said to her 'Shall we go?' she answered: 'Couldn't we see how it ends?' So she liked it! Crucified in his seat, Costals had to swallow this French film to the dregs.

  'Well, I might have known,' he thought, 'but even so … '

  This is what she makes me a party to. And whenever one sees men at such squalid shows, they've been dragged there by women. I dislike anything that brings out the stupidity in men, and that's why I dislike woman. If it were Brunet, I'd say to myself: "It's his age." The eternal superiority of kids over women! They can't irritate us, or at least it's wrong to be irritated by them, since there's only one answer to everything they do: "It's their age." It's exactly the same with the proletariat: we forgive them what we cannot forgive the bourgeoisie.'

  Afterwards they dined in a restaurant. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to speak to her. He wondered why: they had talked with perfect ease before. At first he thought the cinema had frozen him up; then he realized that it was simply because he had nothing more to say to her. He racked his brains, but nothing came. 'We're not yet engaged, and already we've nothing left to say to each other. The marriage of the young carp and the old rabbit.' Solange did not seem surprised at his silence: she herself was so used to that condition. ...

  He had chosen a rather common restaurant, to punish her for being a gastronome. All their fellow-diners looked revoltingly healthy: must one, then, be tubercular, in order to look at all well-bred? As soon as he entered the restaurant, Costals had felt capable of murdering the lot of them. Characteristically, he at once envisaged the most extreme act: with him, there was none of the sort of protective padding that Europeans normally interpose between irritation and the thought of acting on it. He looked at each of these men and wondered which of them would get the better of it if it came to a fight. Everything else was nonsense. At table, he was to all appearances extremely quiet, and even had a slightly dopy look. And yet, at the slightest provocation, he would have grabbed a knife from the table and struck.

  Their immediate neighbours were a party of eight - father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, muchacho, little girl and babour [A word used in the author's family on the maternal side, meaning baby. (Author's note)] (the count is wrong: that only makes seven). The father, a realist. With dazzling intuition Costals guessed that he was a realist from Oran (a settler?) on holiday in the 'metropolis'. Blond, energetic-looking, with a tooth-brush moustache and aggressively untidy hair (no comb had ever passed through that mane), for a realist must be untidy: it proves that he is no aesthete, that he is of the earth earthy. A certain resemblance to Benda, which sounds a bit steep but is nevertheless so: if Benda, instead of having a few wisps of hair, had a proper thatch, he would look like a realist from Oran. The mother, perhaps calving under the table, just like that, simply by opening her legs, like a true realist from Oran. The daughter, short-arsed, a swarthy young she-goat, and ditto the little girl. The muchacho, from whose agreeable physiognomy one could tell at once that he was called Albert. And the babour, muscle-bound, a show-off if ever there was one. These seven persons (or eight) vied with one another as to whose nails should be most deeply in mourning - perhaps mourning their lost illusions about French colonization in Oran.

  But we haven't mentioned the son-in-law, and it was on him that Costals' attention was mainly concentrated: already in his eyes all sons-in-law formed one big family. Moreover, this one was a Son-in-law with a capital S, the prototype of the species. Dumb as a carp. Sitting there smiling at everything that was said by his father-in-law - his mother-in-law - his wife - and the muchacho - and the little girl. And lines had formed on his face, already deeply ingrained, in spite of his youth: the lines of perpetual approbation. He even turned towards Costals from time to time, doubtless so that Costals should also approve of the father-in-law - or the mother-in- law - etc. No one ever addressed a word to him, or even glanced in his direction: he really was the ideal Son-in-law. Whenever he opened his mouth, rather than look at him they lowered their eyes - that is, when they didn't start talking to someone else. Only the muchacho showed the slightest kindness towards him: when the Son-in-law spoke to him, the good-natured boy would offer him a few words in reply. The agony of being a son-in-law! But then, why was he a son-in- law? And yet he had had his day of triumph, dressed in tails cut like a wa
iter's, with bridesmaids got up like sugar-plum fairies. And to think that Socrates, Goethe, Hugo had been sons-in-law. Costals' faith in humanity trembled.

  'Miamiamiam!' said the babour.

  'Yes, my little one. Didiadodoadoda,' said the mother.

  'Dodoadidi?' queried the realist from Oran. 'That's right, dodoadidi,' he affirmed.

  'Diddums want to go walkies,' said the she-goat.

  'Diddums want to go walky-walkies,' said the son-in-law, going one better, to get a share of the limelight.

  'Meueueueuh!' howled Pipicaca, who saw the effect he was producing.

  'Yes, my little precious one, yes, bibiabobo,' said the mother, putting her hand under its bottom, the instinctive gesture of every fond mother.

  'I think that child wants to be sick,' said the realist from Oran, who, like a true father, wanted to show how competent he was.

  'To be sick!' screamed the mother. 'You're seeing double ... oh! It's because Paulette was holding him. He wants me to hold him, doesn't he?' She sucked the baby's cheek (kiss), then shook it like a plum-tree, then sucked it again, ferociously, then slapped it. She was almost beautiful, as everything is beautiful when it is a perfect specimen of its type - and she was the incarnation of maternal hysteria. Finally she bore the child away to the lavatory. And the entire family, rid of the mother and the baby, gradually reverted to a semblance of dignity. Another twelve years, Pipicaca, today so beloved and so important, and you will be almost a little stranger at the family table. You will no longer be stupid, so you will no longer be interesting.

  Costals and Solange left on foot, and went round to the avenue Henri-Martin. He felt so acrimonious towards her that he bought her a bunch of roses. She insisted on carrying the box. This quasi-oriental self-effacingness pleased him rather, although he wondered if it might not be part of her pre-nuptial strategy.

  'I cannot offer you these roses without accompanying them with an amatory quotation,' he said to her. ' "Do not expect fidelity from the nightingale, for every moment it sings on a different rose," we read in the Gulistan.'

  Inside his flat, they stood for a while leaning on the window- sill: he did not want to appear impatient. Clouds sped across the nocturnal sky above the Bois, so dense and so low that they might have been taken for a trail of smoke left by a locomotive. Popping open the press-studs on the side fastening of her costume, he had slid his hand in next to her skin, imprisoning one of her breasts. But anxiety about the future nullified the enjoyment he would have got from this contact if they had had a future of freedom before them.

  'Would you mind undressing?'

  As though she were incapable of anticipating his desires!

  'Would you mind taking off your stockings?'

  As though she did not yet know that he loved putting the sole of his bare foot on the bare arches of hers, like a crucified man on the foot-rest of his cross.

  She had to go to the lavatory, and Costals remembered the Arab mare he had once had, so proud and so delicate that she would never urinate or dung when he was on her back.

  We read into the sensations of physical love what the soul, planing above it, puts there. Something immense, when a sensation of this sort is powerful enough to be sufficient unto itself. Mlle Dandillot was not the woman to give a man a self-sufficient pleasure. Moreover, did she perhaps feel Costals' aloofness? One has only to see the word 'French' on a box of matches to know that they will never light. The same is true of French girls, and it was true, that evening, of Solange. In bed, she clasped him limply, as if for form's sake; as he did, too, feeling the grain of her skin with his finger-tips, and savouring every last drop of boredom this odourless body, these flaccid legs might contain. There was absolutely nothing in this girl that could rouse him. From a distance, her face gave the impression of being clear-cut; close to, in the act of love, it seemed rather blurred and flabby, without a hint of pathos. (And how passionately he loved the faces of women at the moment of satisfying them. There were women he passed in the street whom he would have liked to have just once, for ten minutes, simply to see what happened to their faces at that moment. He would have liked to have a little camera on his forehead, like a dentist's lamp, to film their faces at that moment. Quite apart from the fact that it would have provided him with a 'collection' which, if offered to a few of the more venerable academicians, would appreciably have hastened his progress to the Quai Conti.) Almost the whole of Solange's body, even her arm-pits, was as odourless as a sheet of paper: there was nothing but the slightly sour smell of her mouth, the faint, insipid smell of her hair, and another, sweetish smell. (Why was Costals reminded of the lively, wholesome smell of his son's hair? He was unaware of the fact that it is the rule for a boy's hair to smell stronger and better than a woman's.) They were folded in each other's arms, but still she did not clasp him, and he would not have known she had moved her arms but for the ticking of her wrist-watch which he could hear in different positions, like some importunate insect that had crept in between them.

  Costals' body was dead, too. It was the first time it had happened to him with her. That was the last straw! Suddenly he thought - perhaps because of the stormy sky they had just seen, which reminded him of a similar sky, highly dramatic, above the Gharb, flooded as far as the eye could see - of the little Moroccan girl whom he met out there every year, and whom he called Terremoto [Earthquake, in Spanish.] because, in the way she seized and gripped and shook a man to bring the marrow through the whole length of his body from the distant cerebellum, she was like a little earthquake trying to uproot him. ('Oh, the paradise in that girl's body!') At this memory, his body awoke, came to life, like a snake hearing the snake-charmer's flute, and throbbed to the rhythm of his blood. And he clove the woman, as one opens up an artichoke to get at its heart, and he knew her. Nevertheless the whole thing was so drab that he scarcely knew it had happened until he heard Solange's impatient cry:

  'You're hurting me!'

  'What! Don't you realize that's part and parcel of your pleasure?'

  'But I don't want you to hurt me,' she insisted querulously. He threw her a sombre look.

  As soon as it was over she got up, almost with a bound - it was her only manifestation of energy during the whole evening - and made for the bathroom: how obvious it was that she had been in a hurry to get it over! Costals got up too, and met his image in the looking-glass, the tense features, the narrowed eyes of an enraged tom-cat. The face of the disappointed male, full of exasperation, malevolence and brutality - ugly and ridiculous, above all ridiculous. He flung himself back on the bed. And yet, on this very bed! ... There were plenty of others! ... Others with whom his sensuality was such that, glued to their bodies like an insect drunk and motionless in the corolla of a flower, not even a knock on the door would have budged him, as an insect will allow itself to be crushed without trying to escape. Faces rose up before him.... 'What I ask of a woman is to give her pleasure. The rest comes of itself, so to speak.' But perhaps, with this sex, everything was fake. Now to arouse a little tenderness, now to obtain marriage, now to earn a few pence. Perhaps there was not one woman in a hundred who felt anything in the arms of a man unless she had first been 'prepared'. They were not made for each other morally; they were not even made for each other physiologically. Man enjoyed, woman did not; man had to teach her that, too; nature, already miserly enough where she was concerned, had failed to provide for it. When Dubouchet had said to him: 'No matter how much women may hang around the male, listen at his doors, he remains impenetrable to them,' he might have added: 'And first and foremost - how symbolic! - in the primordial act: in the orgasm. She tries to guess what it is, but cannot begin to visualize it, and envious of this male endowment, feigns to possess it herself in order to excite the male and in order that he shouldn't pity her.' The simulation of passion, the sad nightly comedy, year after year. And it was this fundamental incapacity that women sought to compensate for when they took refuge in 'pure love', set it up as an idol, tried to force men to w
orship it when men had an instinctive loathing of 'pure love' as of everything that is against nature, and finally, representing their infirmity as a virtue, and the health of the male as an infirmity, belaboured the poor fellow with their bogus commiseration and their sublime indignation, accusing him of being too 'selfish' and too 'coarse' even to glimpse the splendours of 'pure love'. Costals thought of all this, and all the time he remembered that sweetish, almost sickly smell and that soft, nerveless body, like a white slug.... And he dreamed of embraces that would be worthier of his mettle, heroic embraces, mighty minglings as of a pair of wrestlers on the mat, in which it would be no longer a question of conquering a miserable consenting ewe-lamb (all said and done, what a farce to talk about 'victories' over women!) but of strength overcoming strength and for an instant turning it into sweetness. That would be real sport. That would be man's work....

  He got up and looked at himself in the mirror once more. Now it was not so much his disappointed face he was ashamed of. He was ashamed of having been humiliated by that, of having wasted his vanity and his appetites on that sort of 'exploit'. The mirror reflected his vigorous, half-naked torso, and he gazed at it with satisfaction. 'I'm worth more than that.'

  A blank sheet of paper lay on the table in front of him. He scribbled on it: 'Once more, that terrible thought runs through my mind: I do not know why I chose her. And once more I ask myself: "Why, oh why, am I doing this?" [Marrying Solange (Author's note).] And once more I reply: "I am doing it for her. I am also doing it in order to have experienced all the disparate savours of the world. I am also doing it in order to submit myself to the conditions of ordinary life. I wanted to be no longer aloof. I wanted, through her, to find, as it were, the subterranean water-level of what is most human and to bring back a bucketful, however bitter. I put my trust in her, in myself, in nature, in my destiny. May it not recoil on my own head."'