Xavière smiled. Ever since they had stepped into the taxi, she had not taken her eyes from Paule. She took off her coat with the docility of a somnambulist.
‘What a lovely dress! ’ said Paule.
Pierre turned his piercing gaze on Xavière.
‘Why do you keep that rose? It’s wilted,’ he said tersely.
Xavière stared at him. Slowly she unpinned the rose from her bodice and put it in the glass of Manzanilla the waiter had just brought.
‘Do you think that will revive it?’ said Françoise.
‘Why not?’ said Xavière, gazing out of the corner of her eye at the drooping flower.
‘The guitarists are good, aren’t they?’ said Paule. ‘They have the real flamenco style. They create the whole atmosphere.’ She looked at the bar. ‘I was afraid it might be empty, but the Spaniards aren’t so affected by events.’
‘These women are amazing,’ said Françoise. ‘They are covered with layers of make-up and yet it doesn’t make them look artificial; their faces are still completely alive and sensual.’
One by one she was studying the short, fat, Spanish women, their heavily painted faces crowned with thick black hair. They were all like the women of Seville who, on summer evenings, wore clusters of richly scented spikenard flowers behind their ears.
‘And how they dance!’ said Paule. ‘I often come here to admire them. When they’re standing still, they look rather dumpy and short-legged. They appear clumsy, but as soon as they begin to move, their bodies become so light and so full of grace.’
Françoise took a sip from her glass. The flavour of dried nuts brought back at once the merciful shade of the Seville bars where she and Pierre had stuffed themselves with olives and anchovies, while the sun beat down pitilessly on the streets. She turned to look at him, she wanted him to join her in recalling that wonderful holiday. But Pierre kept a malevolent eye fixed on Xavière.
‘Well, it didn’t take long,’ he said.
The rose was drooping sadly on its stem, as if it had been poisoned; it had turned yellow and its petals were tinged with brown. Xavière picked it up gently.
‘Yes, I think it’s quite dead,’ she said.
She threw it on the table and then looked at Pierre defiantly. She seized her glass and drained it at one draught. Paule gaped in astonishment.
‘Does the soul of a rose have a pleasant taste?’ said Pierre.
Xavière leaned back and lighted a cigarette without answering. There was an awkward silence. Paule smiled at Françoise.
‘Would you like to try this paso doble?’ she said, obviously trying to change the subject.
‘When I dance with you, I almost have the illusion of knowing how,’ said Françoise, rising.
Pierre and Xavière sat side by side without exchanging a word. Xavière was gazing at the smoke of her cigarette with an entranced look.
‘How far advanced are the plans for your recital?’ asked Françoise, after a short space of time.
‘If the situation clears up I’ll try something in May,’ said Paule.
‘It will certainly be a success,’ said Françoise.
‘Perhaps.’ A shadow passed over Paule’s face. ‘But that does not particularly interest me. I would so like to find a way of introducing my dance technique to the stage.’
‘But you’re doing that to a certain extent,’ said Françoise. ‘Your plasticity is so perfect.’
‘That’s not enough,’ said Paule. ‘I’m sure there must be something else to discover, something really new.’ Again her face clouded over. ‘Only I would have to feel my way, take risks …’
Françoise looked at her with warm appreciation. When Paule had renounced her past to throw herself into Berger’s arms, she thought she was starting upon an adventurous, heroic life at his side; and now Berger, like a good man of business, was doing nothing more than exploit an established reputation. Paule had sacrificed too much for him to admit her disappointment to herself. But Françoise could guess the painful flaws in this love, in this happiness which she continued to assert. Something bitter rose in her throat. In the recess where she had left them Pierre and Xavière were still not speaking. Pierre was smoking, his head slightly bowed. Xavière was staring at him with a furtive and woebegone expression. How free she was! Free in heart, free in thought, free to suffer, to doubt, to hate. No past, no pledge, no loyalty to herself to shackle her.
The music of the guitars died away. Paule and Françoise came back to their places. Françoise noticed a little anxiously that the bottle of Manzanilla was empty, and that Xavière’s eyes had a too brilliant lustre beneath their blue-tinged lashes.
‘You’re going to see the dancer,’ said Paule. ‘I think she’s first-rate.’
A plump, mature woman, in Spanish costume, was moving towards the middle of the dance floor. Her features were suddenly animated and assumed the fullness of youth beneath her black hair parted in the middle and crowned by a comb as red as her shawl. She smiled to everyone around her while the guitarist plucked out a few staccato notes on his instrument. He began to play. Slowly the woman straightened her torso. Slowly she raised her two beautiful arms; her fingers clicked the castanets, and her body began to spring with childlike lightness. The wide flowered skirt whirled about her muscular legs.
‘How beautiful she became all of a sudden,’ said Françoise turning to Xavière.
Xavière did not reply. Deep in her enraptured contemplation, she was oblivious to everyone near her. Her cheeks were flushed, her features were no longer under control and her eyes followed the movements of the dancer in dazed ecstasy. Françoise emptied her glass. Although she knew well that no one could ever be at one with Xavière in any single thought or action, it was hard, after the earlier joy she had felt at regaining her affection, not to exist for her any longer. She again turned her attention to the dancer. She was now smiling at an imaginary gallant. She enticed him; she spurned him; finally, she fell into his arms; then she became a sorceress, every movement suggesting dangerous mystery. Following that dance, she mimed a joyful peasant woman at some village festivity, whirling dizzily, her eyes starting out of her head. All the youth and reckless gaiety evoked by her dancing acquired a moving purity as they sprang, transmuted, from her no longer youthful body. Françoise could not help taking a surreptitious glance at Xavière: she gave a gasp of amazement. Xavière was no longer watching, her head was lowered. In her right hand she held a half-smoked cigarette which she was slowly moving towards her left hand. Françoise barely repressed a scream. Xavière was pressing the glowing brand against her skin with a bitter smile curling her lips. It was an intimate, solitary smile, like the smile of a half-wit; the voluptuous, tortured smile of a woman possessed by secret pleasure. The sight of it was almost unbearable, it concealed something horrible.
The dancer had finished her repertoire, and she was bowing amid applause. Paule had turned towards the table, and now gaped speechlessly with questioning eyes. Pierre had noticed Xavière’s performance some time before. Since no one thought fit to speak, Françoise held her tongue, and yet what was going on was intolerable. With her lips rounded coquettishly and affectedly Xavière was gently blowing on the burnt skin which covered her burn. When she had blown away this little protective layer, she once more pressed the glowing end of her cigarette against the open wound. Françoise flinched. Not only did her flesh rise up in revolt, but the wound had injured her more deeply and irrevocably to the very depths of her being. Behind that maniacal grin, was the threat of a danger more positive than any she had ever imagined. Something was there that hungrily hugged itself, that unquestionably existed on its own account. Approach to it was impossible even in thought. Just as she seemed to be getting near it the thought dissolved. This was no tangible object, but an incessant flux, a never-ending escape, only comprehensible to itself, and for ever occult. Eternally shut out she could only continue to circle round it.
‘That’s idiotic,’ she said. ‘You will burn yourself
to the bone.’
Xavière raised her head and gazed about her with a slightly wild look.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she said.
Paule took her wrist.
‘In a few moments it’s going to hurt terribly,’ she said to her. ‘How childish!’
The burn was as large as a sixpenny-piece and seemed to be very deep.
‘I assure you I don’t feel it at all,’ said Xavière, pulling her hand away and looking at Paule in a self-satisfied and mysterious way. ‘A burn is voluptuous.’
The dancer came to the table. In one hand she was holding a plate, and in the other one of those double necked porrons from which the Spaniards drink on festive occasions.
‘Who wants to drink my health?’ she asked.
Pierre put a note on the plate and Paule took the porron between her hands. She said a few words to the woman in Spanish. She threw back her head and skilfully directed a jet of red wine into her mouth, and then cut off the flow with a quick jerk.
‘Your turn,’ she said to Pierre.
Pierre took the contraption and examined it warily. Then he tilted his head back, bringing the nozzle to the very edge of his lips.
‘No, not like that,’ said the woman.
With a steady hand, she drew the porron away. For a short moment Pierre let the wine run into his mouth, and then in an effort to catch his breath he moved and the liquid drenched his tie.
‘Hell!’ he said furiously.
The dancer laughed and began to rail at him in Spanish. He looked so upset that a great burst of laughter softened Paule’s grave features.
Françoise barely achieved a feeble grin. Fear had penetrated into her, and nothing could take her mind off it. This time she felt imperilled above and beyond her own happiness.
‘We’re staying on for a while, aren’t we?’ said Pierre.
‘If it doesn’t bore you,’ said Xavière timidly.
Paule had just left. It was to her calm gaiety that this evening had owed all its charm. She had initiated them, one by one, in the more unusual steps of the paso doble and the tango. She had invited the dancer to their table and had induced her to sing for them some beautiful folk songs, which the whole audience had taken up in chorus. They had drunk a considerable amount of Manzanilla. Pierre had finally brightened up and had fully regained his good humour. Xavière did not seem to be suffering from her burn; innumerable violent and contradictory feelings had been successively reflected in her face. Only for Françoise had the time passed slowly. Music, songs, dancing, nothing had succeeded in allaying the anguish that paralysed her. From the moment Xavière had burnt her hand she had been unable to detach her thoughts from that tortured, ecstatic face, the memory of which made her shudder. She turned to Pierre; she needed to regain a contact with him, but she had separated herself too decisively from him. She could not succeed in attuning herself to him. She was alone. Pierre and Xavière were talking and their voices seemed to be coming from a very great distance.
‘Why did you do that?’ Pierre was saying as he touched Xavière’s hand.
Xavière looked at him in supplication; her whole expression was one of tender pleading. It was because of her that Françoise had stood up to Pierre to the extent of being unable now to smile at him; and yet Xavière had already silently made it up with him, and seemed prepared to fall into his arms.
‘Why?’ said Pierre. He stared for a moment at the injured hand. ‘I’d swear that it’s a holy burn.’
Xavière was smiling, as she turned a guileless face towards him.
‘A penitential burn,’ he continued.
‘Yes,’ said Xavière. ‘I was so disgustingly sentimental about that rose. I was ashamed of it.’
‘You wanted to bury deep within you the memory of last night, didn’t you?’ Pierre’s tone was friendly, but he was tense.
Xavière stared with admiring eyes.
‘How do you know?’ she said. She seemed spellbound by this sorcery.
‘That wilted rose. It was easy to guess,’ said Pierre.
‘That was a ridiculous, a theatrical gesture,’ said Xavière. ‘But it was you who provoked me,’ she added archly.
Her smile was as warm as a kiss, and Françoise wondered uncomfortably what she was doing there, witnessing this amorous tête-à-tête. She did not belong here; but where did she belong? Surely nowhere else. At this moment she felt expunged from the face of the world.
‘I! ’ said Pierre.
‘You were looking sarcastic, and you were staring at me threateningly,’ said Xavière tenderly.
‘Yes, I was unpleasant,’ said Pierre. ‘I apologize. But it was because I felt that you were interested in anything rather than in us.’
‘You must have antennae,’ said Xavière. ‘You were bristling before I even opened my mouth,’ she shook her head, ‘only they’re not very good ones.’
‘I at once suspected that you’d become infatuated with Gerbert,’ said Pierre bluntly.
‘Infatuated?’ said Xavière. She frowned. ‘But what on earth did that young man tell you?’
Pierre had not done it intentionally. He was incapable of anything so contemptible, but his words contained an unpleasant insinuation against Gerbert.
‘He didn’t tell me anything,’ said Pierre, ‘but he enjoyed his evening, and it’s unusual for you to make the effort to charm anyone.’
‘I might have guessed as much,’ said Xavière with rage. ‘No sooner is one a little civil to a fellow than he gets ideas! God knows what he’s gone and concocted in that empty little brain of his!’
‘And besides, if you stayed shut up all day,’ said Pierre, ‘it was surely to ruminate over last evening’s romance.’
Xavière shrugged her shoulders.
‘It was inflated romance,’ she said testily.
‘That’s how it seems to you now,’ said Pierre.
‘Not at all. I knew it all the time,’ said Xavière impatiently. She looked straight at Pierre. ‘I wanted yesterday evening to seem wonderful to me,’ she said. ‘Do you understand?’
There was a silence. One would never know precisely what Gerbert had been to her during those twenty-four hours, and she herself had already forgotten it. What was certain was that now she was openly denying him.
‘It was to revenge yourself on us,’ said Pierre.
‘Yes,’ said Xavière, in a low voice.
‘But we hadn’t had dinner with Gerbert for ages. We have to see him occasionally,’ said Pierre, in an apologetic tone.
‘I know,’ said Xavière, ‘but it always aggravates me when you allow yourselves to be preyed upon by all these people.’
‘You’re a possessive little person,’ said Pierre.
‘I can’t help it,’ said Xavière dejectedly.
‘Don’t try,’ said Pierre tenderly. ‘Your possessiveness is not petty jealousy. It goes with your inflexibility, with the violence of your feelings. You’d no longer be the same person if it were taken away from you.’
‘Ah! It would be so nice if we three were alone in the world!’ said Xavière. Her eyes had a passionate gleam. ‘Only the three of us!’
Françoise’s smile was forced. She had often been hurt by Pierre’s and Xavière’s collusion, but tonight she detected her own condemnation in it. Jealousy and resentment were feelings she had always spurned; yet this pair were now discussing them as if they were beautiful, cumbersome, precious objects to be handled with respectful care. She, too, might have enshrined these disturbing riches within herself. Why had she preferred to them the old, empty precepts which Xavière brazenly kicked aside? On many occasions she had been transfixed with jealousy. She had been tempted to hate Pierre, to wish Xavière ill; but, under the futile pretext of keeping herself pure, she had created a void within herself. With calm audacity Xavière chose to assert herself. Her reward was that she had a definite place in the world, and Pierre turned to her with passionate interest. Françoise had not dared to be herself, and she understood, in a pass
ion of suffering, that this hypocritical cowardice had resulted in her being nothing at all.
She looked up. Xavière was speaking.
‘I like you when you look tired,’ she was saying; ‘you become very ethereal.’ She gave Pierre a quick smile. ‘You look like your ghost. You were beautiful as a ghost.’
Françoise studied Pierre. It was true that he was pale. That nervous fragility, reflected at this moment in his drawn features, had often moved her to tears, but she was too detached from him to be touched by his appearance. It was only through Xavière’s smile that she could sense its romantic charm.
‘But you know I don’t want to be a ghost any more,’ said Pierre.
‘Ah! But a ghost isn’t a corpse,’ said Xavière. ‘It’s a living thing, only it gets its body from its soul. It hasn’t any unnecessary flesh; it doesn’t get hungry, thirsty, or sleepy.’ Her eyes rested on Pierre’s forehead, then on his hands, long, firm, slender hands Françoise had often lovingly touched, but that she never thought to look at. ‘And besides, what I find poetic is that it’s not earthbound. Wherever it may be, it is also elsewhere at the same time.’
‘I’m nowhere else but here,’ said Pierre.
He smiled fondly at Xavière. Françoise called to mind with what joy she had so often been the recipient of such smiles, yet she was now incapable of coveting them.
‘Yes,’ said Xavière, ‘but I don’t know how to put it exactly; you are here because you want to be. You don’t look confined.’
‘Do I often look confined?’
Xavière hesitated.
‘Sometimes,’ she smiled conquettishly. ‘When you talk with dull old fogies you almost seem to be one of them yourself.’
‘I remember when you met me, you were inclined to take me for a tiresome pompous ass!’
‘You’ve changed,’ said Xavière.
She ran her eyes over him with a proud and happy possessive look. She thought she had changed him. Could it be true? It was no longer for Françoise to judge. Tonight her troubled heart allowed the greatest riches to sink into indifference: she felt obliged to trust this intense fervour that shone with new brilliance in Xavière’s eyes.
She Came to Stay Page 35
