As I sat there on an ottoman and heard my grandmother, who was unperturbed by the fact that he listened to her with his hat on and whistled a little tune to himself, inquire of him in an artifical tone of voice, ‘So what are your … charges? Goodness me, much too much for my slender means!’, I tried to shrink as far as possible into myself, to flee on the wings of eternal verities, to leave nothing of myself, nothing live, on the surface of my body – desensitized like the body of an animal which by inhibition feigns death when wounded – so as not to suffer too much pain in a place where my total lack of habit was made all the more agonizing by the sight of people who seemed to be in their element, an elegant lady for whom the manager showed his respect by freely fondling the little dog which followed her about, a young dandy who came strolling in wearing a hat with a feather and asking whether there was ‘Any post?’, people for whom climbing the imitation marble stairs meant they were almost home. At the same time, the baleful glare of Minos, Æacus and Rhadamanthus,10 in which I steeped my naked soul as though in some dread unknown where it had lost all protection, was turned upon me by three unreceptive individuals dignified by the title ‘Reception Service’; and a little further along, behind a glass partition, people sat in a reading-room to describe which, if I had borrowed colours from Dante, I would have had to use first those with which he depicts Paradise, then those with which he depicts Hell, as I imagined both the bliss of the chosen who had the right to sit in there quietly reading, and the torture my grandmother would visit upon me if, in her disregard for such emotions, she were to tell me to go in and join them.
My loneliness was further increased a moment later. I had told my grandmother I was not feeling very well and that I thought we might find ourselves obliged to go back to Paris; and without a word of protest she had said she was going out to buy a few things which would be of service to us whether we stayed in Balbec or went home (and which I later found out were all for me, Françoise having been in charge of the things I might have needed). During her absence, I also went out and, among hordes of people who made the streets feel as hot and stuffy as an overcrowded room, wandered up and down, past a barber’s shop which was still open, near a tea-shop where customers were eating ices, round the statue of Duguay-Trouin.11 The sight of this statue afforded me about as much enjoyment as it would to a patient coming on an illustration of it in a magazine lying in a surgeon’s waiting-room. I was amazed that the world contained people sufficiently different from myself for the manager of the hotel to have urged such a stroll upon me as a form of amusement, for there to be some to whom such a torture-chamber of unfamiliar quarters could actually be an ‘abode of delight’, as the hotel styled itself in its leaflet, possibly with some degree of licence, although it was undeniably addressing a wide public whose views it shared. So, to attract such people to the Grand-Hôtel of Balbec, it expatiated not only on ‘the exquisite cuisine’ and ‘the entrancing view from the gardens of the Casino’ but on ‘the great god Fashion, whose decrees no man of good breeding will care to flout, unless he does not mind being thought a Philistine’.
My need for my grandmother was sharpened by the fear of having been a great disappointment to her. She must be disheartened by the thought that, if I could not put up with this degree of fatigue, it was impossible ever to hope that any trip could be of benefit to me. I decided to go back and wait for her in the hotel. The manager himself came to push a button for me; and a personage hitherto unknown to me, called in a sort of English the ‘lift’ (who, like a photographer behind his window or an organist in his loft, dwelt at the very top of the hotel, where the lantern in a Norman church would be), began to descend towards me with the agility of a captive, hard-working household squirrel. Then, with me on board, he slid up his pillar again towards the dome of the commercial nave. At each floor, fanning out from both sides of a short communication stairway, gloomy galleries opened, a chambermaid lugged a bolster about. To her face, which was unclear in the inner dusk, I held the mask of my most passionate fancies; but I could read in the glance she gave me my own appalling nullity. During the endless climb, to allay the dreadful anguish which clutched at me from the silence we traversed, with the mystery of its unpoetic dimness relieved only by a vertical succession of panes casting a little light from the single W. C. on each storey, I spoke to the young organist, this functionary of my ascent and associate of my captivity, as he went on pushing and pulling the knobs and stops of his instrument. I apologized for taking up so much space and giving so much trouble; and I asked him whether I was not in his way as he exercised his art in which, to flatter the virtuoso, I showed more than mere curiosity, professing to have a passion for it. He did not answer, whether because of surprise at my statement, attentiveness to his work, a sense of protocol, hardness of hearing, respect for place, fear of danger, laziness of mind or the manager’s instructions.
To give us an impression of the realness of people and things external to us, even if they are insignificant, there are few comparisons more instructive than the change their disposition towards ourselves undergoes between the time before we know them and the time after. I was the same person who had taken the late afternoon train on the little branch-line to Balbec; the self in me was the same. But now inside that self, occupying the space which at six in the evening had been fraught with my inability to picture the manager, the Grand-Hôtel and its employees, as well as with a vague uneasy expectation of the moment of arrival, there were the erstwhile pimples on the face of the cosmopolitan manager (who was actually a naturalized Monegasque of, as he put it, ‘Rumanian originality’, being given to sprinkling his speech with malapropisms which he thought very distinguished), the gesture he had made to summon the ‘lift’, not to mention the ‘lift’ himself, a whole frieze of puppetlike characters out of the opened Pandora’s box of the Grand-Hôtel, undeniable, unremoveable and, like all things which have come to pass, sterilizing in their effect. But at least this change, which I had not brought about, proved that something external to myself had happened, however trite a thing it was in itself; and I was like a traveller who, having set out on his journey with the sun in front of him, realizes that hours must have passed because it is now behind him. Feeling exhausted and with a touch of fever, I would have been glad to go to bed; but all my bedtime things were missing. I would have liked at least to lie down for a moment on the bed: but that would have done me no good, since I would have been incapable of granting any rest to that bundle of sensations that the waking body, even the material body, is for each of us, and also because the unknown objects which surrounded it, by forcing it to keep its perceptions in a permanent state of defensive alertness, would have held my eyes and ears, all my senses, in a posture as cramped and uncomfortable, even if I had stretched out my legs, as the one Louis XI inflicted on Cardinal La Balue12 by having him locked in a cage which made it impossible either to sit or stand. As our attentiveness furnishes a room, so habit unfurnishes it, making space in it for us. In that room of mine at Balbec, ‘mine’ in name only, there was no space for me: it was crammed with things which did not know me, which glared my distrust of them back at me, noting my existence only to the extent of letting me know they resented me for disturbing theirs. Without let-up, in some unfamiliar tongue, the clock, which at home I would never have heard for more than a few seconds a week, on surfacing from a long reverie, went on making comments about me, which must have sounded offensive to the tall violet curtains, for they stood there without a word in a listening posture, looking like the sort of people who will shrug their shoulders to show they are irked by the mere sight of someone. They gave to that bedroom with its high ceiling an almost historical air: it was the perfect sort of place for the Duc de Guise to have been assassinated in,13 say, and for crocodiles of tourists to file through led by a guide from Cook’s – but not for me to get some sleep. I was tormented by the presence of low glass-fronted bookcases which ran all round the walls, and especially by a tall cheval-glass which stood athwart
a corner of the room and which I knew would have to be taken away if I was ever to enjoy any possibility of calm. Constantly glancing or staring upwards (activities which, in Paris, were as unhindered by the things in my room as by my eyes themselves, these things being nothing but accessories of my own organs, extensions of myself), I looked at the vast height of the ceiling in this belvedere stuck on the very top of the hotel, which my grandmother had selected for me; and in that part of me which is more private than those used for seeing and hearing, that part where one is aware of shades of smell, almost inside the self, an assault by vetiver threw me back on my deepest defences as I tried to repel it, in my tiredness, with a pointless, repeated and apprehensive sniffing. Deprived of my universe, evicted from my room, with my very tenancy of my body jeopardized by the enemies about me, infiltrated to the bone by fever, I was alone and wished I could die. It was then that my grandmother entered the room and, as my shrivelled heart expanded, broad vistas of hope opened to me.
She was in a tea-gown of cotton cambric which she always wore about the house if one of us was ill (because she felt more at home in it, or so she said, always alleging selfish motives for what she did), and which was her nun’s habit, the handmaid’s and night-nurse’s tunic in which she would care for us and watch over us. But unlike the attentions of nuns, handmaids and night-nurses, the kindness they exercise, the excellence we admire in them and the gratitude we owe them, which have the effect of increasing both our impression of being a stranger to them and the feeling of aloneness which makes us keep to ourselves the unshared burden of our thoughts and our desire to live, I knew with my grandmother that, however overpowering any cause of my sorrow might be, its expression would be met by a sympathy that was even greater, that whatever was in me, my cares, my wishes, would rouse within my grandmother a desire, even stronger than my own, for the protection and betterment of my life; and my thoughts became hers without alteration, passing from my mind to hers without changing medium or person. So – like a man in front of a mirror wrong-handedly trying to do up his bow-tie, without realizing that the end he can see must cross to the other side, or a dog snapping at the flittering shadow of an insect – misled by the appearance of the body, as we are in this world where souls are not directly perceptible, I fell into my grandmother’s arms and pressed my lips to her face as though that were how to take refuge in the greatness of heart she offered to me. Whenever my mouth was on her cheeks or her forehead, I drew from them something so nourishing, so beneficent, that I had all the immobility, gravity and placid gluttony of an infant on the breast.
Nor could I ever tire of gazing at her large face, outlined like a beautiful cloud, calm and glowing, illuminated from within by its tenderness. Anything which partook, however faintly, however remotely, of her sensations, anything which could be said to be still a part of her being, was thereby so spiritualized and sanctified that, in smoothing under my hands her lovely hair which was hardly grey yet, my touch was as respectful, careful and gentle as though it were her goodness itself I was handling. She took such pleasure in any trouble that spared me trouble, such delight in a moment of rest and peace for my weary limbs, that when I tried to prevent her helping me untie my laces and get ready for bed, making as though to undress myself, her pleading glance halted my hands, which were already on my boots and the first buttons of my jacket.
‘Please! Let me! she said. Your old grandma loves to do it. And you must be sure to knock on the wall if you need anything during the night. My bed’s back to back with yours, you know, and it’s just a partition. In a moment, once you’ve hopped into bed, you try knocking and we’ll see how easy it is to communicate.’
So that evening I did give three knocks; and a week later, when I felt unwell for a few days, I did the same thing each morning, because she wanted me to have an early glass of milk. As soon as I thought I could hear she was awake, so as not to make her wait, to let her go back to sleep as soon as possible, I would try giving my three little knocks, gently and tentatively, but quite clearly, since, though I was reluctant to interrupt her sleep when it was possible I might have been mistaken and she was not awake, I would not have wanted her to lie there expecting a renewal of a summons which it was possible she might not have heard distinctly, but which I did not dare repeat. No sooner had I tapped on the wall than I heard her three answering knocks, quite different in their intonation from my own, full of a tone of serene control, repeated twice so that there should be no mistake, and clearly stating: ‘Not to worry – I heard; and I’ll be with you in a moment or two.’ And sure enough, she soon appeared. I said I had been anxious in case she might not have heard me or in case she thought it was someone else knocking on a wall close by. She would say with a laugh:
‘What! How could I mistake my dear little chap’s knocking for someone else’s? I’d know it a mile away. Do you really think there’s anyone else in the whole world who’s as silly and anxious and torn between the fear of waking me up and not being heard? Even a tiny little scratching on the wall would be enough for me to recognize a mouse like you, especially when you’re such a dear and doleful little mouse. I was lying there listening to my mouse rummaging about in its nest, getting ready to knock, working up to it …’
When she parted the blinds, the sun would be already up, on the roofs of the protruding annexe of the hotel, like a slater on the early shift, working in silence so as not to wake the sleeping town, which in its inactivity makes him appear all the more nimble. She would tell me what time it was, what the weather would be like that day, that I need not get up and go to the window, that there was a drift of mist on the sea, whether the baker’s was open yet, whose carriage it was that we could hear passing, commenting on the daily insignificant curtain-raiser, the banal introit that no one ever attends, a scrap of life shared only by us, to which I would smugly refer later in Françoise’s presence or when talking with other people, informing them of the peasouper there had been at six a.m., showing off not because I had been gifted with special knowledge, but because I had been singled out for affectionate attention by this quiet and gentle morning moment, opening like a symphony with the rhythmic dialogue between my three knocks and the answering three, ardently desired and twice repeated, given back by the partition full of love and joy, its solid substance turned into happy harmonies and singing like an angels’ chorus, filled by the whole soul of my grandmother and the promise of her coming, sounding its glad annunciation with the fidelity of music. But on the night of our arrival, after my grandmother had left my room, I started feeling miserable again, as I had in Paris when it was time to leave for the station. That trepidation which overwhelmed me at the prospect of sleeping in an unfamilar bedroom – which is felt by many – may be nothing more than the lowliest, most obscure, organic and all but unconscious mode of the supreme and desperate refusal, by those things which make up the best of our present life, to countenance even our theoretical acceptance of a possible future without them; a refusal which was the core of the horror I had so often felt at the thought that my parents would one day be dead, that the requirements of life might force me to live apart from Gilberte or just make me settle for good in a country where I would never see my friends again; a refusal which lurked beneath the difficulty I found in trying to think about my own death or even the kind of after-life promised by Bergotte in his books, in which there would be no place for my memories, my defects, my very character, all of which found unconscionable the idea of their own non-existence and hoped on my behalf that I was fated neither to unbeing nor to an everlasting life which would abolish them.
One day in Paris when I had been feeling particularly unwell, Swann had said, ‘What you should do is be off to the South Seas, the islands … You’d very likely never come back.’ I almost answered, ‘But that would mean I’d never see your daughter again – I would live among things and people she would never have set eyes on!’ But at the same moment, reason was murmuring: ‘Well, what difference will that make, since I won
’t be upset about it? When M. Swann says I very likely won’t ever come back, what he means is I won’t want to come back, and if I don’t want to come back, that will be because I’ll be perfectly happy to stay there.’ Reason was aware that habit (which was going to set about making me like these unknown quarters, change the position of the cheval-glass, tone down the curtains, silence the clock) also undertakes to endear to us people whom we disliked to begin with, alters the shape of their face, improves their tone of voice, makes hearts grow fonder. This liking for new places and people is of course worked into our forgetting of older ones; but reason suspected I could foresee without qualms a life without certain people, who would even fade for ever from my memory, and so the promise of forgetting which it held out, though intended as a consolation, was heart-breaking. Not that the heart does not also benefit, once such a divorce is consummated, from the analgesia of habit; but until that time comes, it goes on suffering without let-up. The fear of a future deprived of the faces and voices of those we love, those who today give us our dearest happiness, rather than diminishing, may in fact be made worse by the thought that the pain of that deprivation is to be compounded by something which at the moment seems even more unbearable: our no longer being affected by it as a pain, but being indifferent to it; for that would mean our actual self had changed, and not just that we had lost the delight in our parents’ presence, the charm of a mistress, the warmth of a friend; it would mean that our affection for them had been so utterly obliterated from our heart, of which it is an integral part today, that we would be able to take pleasure in a life spent without them, horrible though that seems at present; it would amount to a death of our self, albeit followed by a resurrection, but a resurrection in the form of a different self, whose love will remain for ever beyond the reach of those parts of the former self which have gone down to death. It is those parts of us, even the most insubstantial and obscure of them, such as our attachment to the dimensions or the atmosphere of a particular room, which take fright, withhold consent and engage in rebellions which must be seen as a covert and partial yet tangible and true mode of resistance to death, that lengthy, desperate, daily resistance to the sporadic but non-stop dying which attends us throughout our lives, stripping off bits of us at every moment, which have no sooner mortified than new cells begin to grow. For a nervous disposition such as mine (that is, one in which the functioning of the intermediaries, the nerves, is impaired, so that they fail to stifle the voice of the lowliest elements of self doomed to decease, and their harrowing many-headed lament, in all its sorrow, rises unmuted to the wearied ears of consciousness) the anguish and alarm I felt when lying beneath a ceiling that was unknown and too high was nothing but the protest of my surviving attachment to a ceiling which was known and lower. No doubt that attachment would end and be replaced by another: first death, then a new life, would have done their dual work at the behest of Habit. But until that end, this attachment would suffer every evening; and on that first evening especially, in revolt at being confronted with a future which had already taken shape, in which there was no role for it, it tortured me with the din of its wailing every time my eyes, unable to look away from what affronted them, tried to reach that inaccessible ceiling.
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower Page 31
