Marie (3 page)

‘I
SN’T MONSIEUR GOING
to Maubeuge this month, Madame?’

‘Yes, Germaine, he’s going as usual.’

‘Shall we take the chance to sort out the wardrobes? If you tidied them, I could clean them and put in new lining paper.’

‘Oh no, Germaine, no. Let’s leave the wardrobes as they are …’

MARIE PACKED JEAN’S SUITCASE
as usual, got up early and made his picnic lunch. And as always, when the moment came to say goodbye, she cried on his shoulder because they were going to be separated for three whole days. She went downstairs with him, all the way to the taxi that was waiting outside.

‘Goodbye, my dear.’

‘Goodbye, Jean, until the day after tomorrow. I’ll come and collect you at the station.’

As she went back into the apartment, her shoulders suddenly sagging a little, her head bent forward, it was hard to tell whether the expression on her face was one of sadness or of courage.

She gets up, makes her way to the bedroom. When she emerges a little while later she is wearing an autumn suit. She is lightly made up and her springy hair curls around a tiny beret.

PARIS IS ESPECIALLY BEAUTIFUL
in the autumn. Marie loved the streets, the squares, the houses; she was alive to the poetry that the city exudes. Today she instinctively sought out places she hardly ever visited. She had no lunch and by about four o’clock, feeling hungry, she sat down at a pavement café and ordered coffee and a brioche.

From time to time someone shouted:
‘Paris Soir, Paris Soir!’
Should she buy a newspaper? To find out that a local conflict was in danger of spreading to Europe, to endure hours of wracking fear only to discover the next morning that the London
Times
had declared that the international situation was more stable than it had been a few months earlier, and then to be plunged into anguish yet again because a German ship … Life goes on, slips through one’s fingers. There is fighting in the south, there are arguments in the east, there will be fighting here. People place all their hopes in Russia, and then complain that the country has lapsed into conformity … People throw themselves into fascism, men fight, thousands of unemployed workers are starving.
So what? Sympathy – sympathy for others? Marie feels elevated, enhanced, by a wild egoism. She thinks: Society? I don’t care about society – only the individual interests me. To each his own life.

She is hungry again. She orders a sandwich and bites into it with her mouth wide open, holding the bread with her whole hand. No one looks at her or bothers about her; she feels happy. In this vibrant city, with its noises all around her, she feels completely, delightfully alone. A flower seller passes and holds out a bouquet to her. Oh, not violets, please …

She stays like this for some time. The night falls softly around her and gradually lights up, becomes striped by neon. She looks at her hands, her arms, her legs, crossed beneath her skirt. She feels young, healthy, strong; rich, tumultuous blood pounds at her temples. Like the sound of insects’ wings …

She gets up, goes inside the cafe and asks the cashier for a token.

‘The telephone is at the bottom of the corridor, Mademoiselle.’

Mademoiselle! Marie smiles as she shuts the door of the booth. W, A, G, one, seven, four, two …

RETURNING TO THE PAVEMENT
she paid the bill and continued to wander aimlessly along the boulevards. On this soft September evening, happiness was in the air. Instead of having supper she went into another café and drank a coffee
at the counter. All around her she could hear men talking. She had another coffee, looked at the time, tidied her hair.

This time, when she got outside, she took her bearings. She made her way slowly: tall, straight, head held high.

She saw the café from a long way away, at the corner of the two roads, and checked the sign. Going in, she recognised him straight away, and held out her hand. She took him in, all of him: his face, his eyes, his shoulders. The reality of him coincided exactly with her memory.

A waiter came up and stood while Marie decided what to drink.

‘A Perrier,’ she said, though she never ordered water.

Was she moved, had she lost her nerve, or was it shyness that she felt? Some things in life were important and others were not. And at that moment it really mattered very little whether she was brought tea, water, or vermouth. She pushed the glass away without touching it. Until now they hadn’t spoken to each other.

Finally she said, quite simply: ‘I could have waited to bump into you by chance, but even if I believe in miracles, I like to connive with them.’

‘I was waiting for your phone call …’

She lit her own cigarette, without asking him for a light. His hand was on the table, and she watched it for a long time. She was not thinking. She was only able to hear, feel and see. She was aware of the slightest sound around her, she smelled the slightest scent in the air. And if she appeared to be letting her gaze wander indifferently round the room,
she frequently brought it back to the table. All she was really looking at was the young face opposite her.

He got up, standing aside to let her pass.

‘Do you want to walk or would you prefer to take a taxi?’

‘Let’s walk.’

The darkening streets were almost deserted. They didn’t speak. Words would have been a coating on reality, would have forced them into a ‘confession’. They were strong enough to look reality in the face; their desire was imperious enough to survive acknowledgement. They wanted to proceed like this towards a precise end, in a spirit of tacit, voluntary agreement. The night was fine, there was joy in the air, and they were moving towards that joy.

Stopping at a door that opened on to a brightly lit corridor, he touched her on the shoulder and said: ‘Go on in.’

They went up in a very narrow elevator where there was only room for two bodies face to face. Young maids in canvas pinafores, organdie bows in their hair, bright red lips in inscrutable faces, slip like spirits through the deserted corridors, respecting the anonymity, the secrets of every soul, and folding up quilts with vestal movements. Muffled sounds, orders given in low voices, words that turn into mysteries, doors that shut without a sound. The peace and safety of a temple, with all the solemn, human poetry of a lodging house.

Marie kept quite still and held her breath. He drew her head towards him and they stayed like that for a moment, as if in contemplation. He lifted her up, put her on the bed and
gently took off her clothes, as though she were a little girl. She let him do it, helping him by raising her arms and her knees. Soon all she could see were his eyes, close to hers. She wept tears of happiness – a happiness that was suddenly too strong to bear.

COMPLETELY NAKED
, Marie gets out of bed and draws the velvet curtains. They close badly, so she reaches across towards the fireplace and fumbles for her brooch, which she attaches to the edge of the two bits of material. Work without witness, a struggle with nature that she presided over without any sense of shame. Returning to bed – victorious or vanquished? – she slips in beside the man who is awaiting her. He has not fallen asleep. Woman, may your happiness endure …

Tender moments in which Marie relishes a face, a forehead, and eyes at once sparkling and soft, so beautiful that she cannot look into them with serenity. Slim, tanned shoulders; long, thin arms; delicate wrists; long hands, like a child’s. So very tall, and yet he’s scarcely more than an adolescent. She listens, with pride and emotion, to the irregular beating of his heart. She selects a lock of his black, springy hair, pushes it back on his face, liberates it suddenly, and then laughs, because it curls back of its own accord, like a tiny elastic snake. Short hair that she kisses, caresses, spreads out in a fan shape on the pillow and holds up against her own cheek, so that their two faces become confused. ‘Through your hair I can see the entire universe …’

And then it’s his turn to attend to her, caressing her shoulders, her arms, her hips, discovering absurd, delightful things and looking at her hair: ‘You have such beautiful hair …’

Marie makes a face, like a shy child: ‘No, you’re so much prettier than me …’

He raises his eyebrows and says, in deadly earnest: ‘I love the colour of your hair.’

Marie sees his face and gestures alter and feels their great, insatiable desire surging up again. Long after the dawn light had dimmed the brightness of the lamps in the room, they had still not given in to sleep. Finally, as the soft autumn sun lit up the windows, they fell asleep peacefully, encircled in each other’s arms.

MARIE WAS THE FIRST
to awake.

He hadn’t moved while they had slept, and when she woke she found herself still in the arms that had fulfilled their task. To Marie, this was a miracle – to find that they were still leaning against one another, her head resting against his male shoulders at the very point where he had placed it before they slept. And she was still full of joy.

Without disengaging herself from the embrace, she raised her head a little so she could look at him. Women like to watch men while they are asleep: it’s at such moments that they can give full vent to their tenderness.

He opened his eyes and, tightening his arms around her shoulders, said softly: ‘You’re there …’

Her head had fallen back on to his body and they stayed like this. They hadn’t turned off the lights in the room and these gave out an unnatural glow that now mingled with and was eclipsed by the daylight. Only from far away did the noise of the busy city reach this quiet street; all was peace, in them and around them.

LEAVING THE BUILDING
, they walked without speaking. Strange moments, when they seemed far away from each other whilst possibly thinking the same thoughts.

‘Shall I take you to the Métro or to the bus?’

‘No, I’ll be fine on my own.’

At the first crossroads, they shook hands and separated, with an almost brutal simplicity.

I
NSTEAD OF GOING HOME MARIE
continued to walk aimlessly around Paris. Head and heart empty, she lived only in the present, and as she wandered along the streets and boulevards, took in only what opened up before her. At the Faubourg du Temple a man fills his mouth with petrol, sets fire to it and spits out enormous flames. Further on a couple are singing a desperate, nostalgic song. A man passes her dressed in an old raincoat and a Basque beret; he is pushing a pram containing a sleeping child, and two other children walk either side of him, hanging on to his arms. For a long time, Marie follows the same route as this man.

She sits down in a square and talks to three little girls who are playing ball. At the place de l’Opéra, she leans on the railings of the entrance to the Métro and looks at the handsome dragoon on horseback. She goes down the steps,
enters a compartment and gets off at a station whose name takes her fancy.

Time passed quickly. Behind windows, in brightly lit cafés, people were sitting down to eat. Marie walked into one; it was the first time in her life that she had ever eaten alone in a restaurant. She ordered a meal and some burgundy. Her cheeks reddened and as a gentle warmth enveloped her she began to emerge from her state of semi-consciousness. Her heart re-awoke and filled with all the memories of the previous night. She remembered those two arms around her with special sweetness. She recaptured, intact and perfect, the memory of a precise moment – when, still beside himself, he had let his head fall back on to her body. She’d tightened her arms around him and said, in a barely audible voice, not knowing whether he could hear her or not, as if it were a terrible thing that you are not allowed to say but that is so powerful it forces its way through your lips: ‘I love you.’ Again she rediscovered the warmth of that young body and saw his tender eyes so close to hers. Although her hands were still, one lying in her lap and the other on the tablecloth, she felt that if she raised them and stretched them out a little in front of her she would feel, softly but precisely, the outline of his slender shoulders.

Rising up, taking sudden shape with these memories, a whole new world was born.

She remained still, her eyes vague. Now she was seeing him a little while before he’d left the room. He had talked about the holidays being over, of a provincial university that
he would be leaving for very soon. He’d given her a new telephone number. It was then that she had come out with a halting sentence which betrayed her embarrassment that she alone, yet again, held their future in her hands. He’d shrugged his shoulders: ‘It looks as if I have more freedom than you, then.’ As they were leaving the room he had drawn her close to kiss her and held her tightly, gently, to his chest before opening the door: ‘After you.’ It was as if an iron curtain had been pulled behind them. A few moments later they had their simple, brusque separation at the crossroads in the rue de Chateaudun.

So she was now in possession of another four figures preceded by a name – the name of a town five hundred kilometres away. She felt that he was going to leave very soon, tomorrow or even today, perhaps at this very moment. She saw a railway station, raised hands, a train setting off. She had already been through tender farewells with Jean, and now there was this short, brusque departure at the crossroads in the rue de Chateaudun. She sat there, without moving, haunted by his image, feeling three times wounded. To involve yourself in more than one love is also to involve yourself in more than one heartbreak – and, more than likely, in regular periods of loneliness, too. Jean she would find again tomorrow, but what about this young creature of the previous night, this wild passion with no definite future?

Her throat tightened and tears came to her eyes. She got up to leave, to rediscover the noise, the movement, the colours of the street, though she was hesitant about
confronting this vibrant scene on her own. She began to walk, as if sleepwalking, moving onwards in a coloured haze. She went into the café she’d been in the previous evening. Behind the counter the cashier was making the same gestures with the same tired smile. Once again Marie drank the bitter coffee. Up at the bar, men and women were quickly downing their drinks, then leaving and making way for others – new faces which gave Marie a sense of herself, a deprived feeling of solitude. She would have liked to have followed these men and women without them knowing it, to find out whether their happiness and their pain were similar in any way.

She walked for a long time, following deserted roads, crossing busy boulevards, then along dark streets again. She walked like this, with her big, calm, springy step, all the way to where she lived, without a single detour.

She went to the bedroom straight away, stretching out without fear on the cold, empty bed.

In her thoughts she saw a train, deep in the night, making its way through the countryside. A very young man was lying on one of the wooden benches, content with the thought that his youth was being taken towards an unknown life. She saw another man, rather older than the first, in a hotel bedroom in a northern town. He was stretching out his arms, all relaxed, glad to have a bed to himself.

Marie was experiencing a deep sense of pain. Confronting it objectively, she decided that it had its proper place in the order of things. Stretching her tired limbs out across the
bed, she revelled in the exhaustion of her back and legs, in this heavy appeasement of her senses.

It was very late; the dawn light was already shining when Marie fell asleep. With her strong face, and her big body moulded by the sheets, she did not look like a woman who’d just been left by a man. She looked more like an ancient, masculine form, a young creature who had gone to sleep, body appeased, and whose sleep had been inhabited by big, warlike dreams.