Winter of artifice; three novelettes (8 page)

At the sight of her waiting on the doorstep he smiled, a feminine smile, and moved towards her with a neat, compact grace, ease, youthfulness. She felt unsettled. This man coming towards her did not seem at all like a father.

His first words were words of apology. After he had taken off his gloves, and verified by his watch that he was on time—it was very important to him to be on time—after he had kissed her and told her that she had become very beautiful, almost immediately it seemed to her that she was listening to an apology, an explanation of why he had left them. It was as if behind her there stood a judge, a tall judge he alone could see, and to this judge her father addressed a beautiful polished speech, a marvelous speech to which she listened with admiration, for the logic was so beautiful, the smooth change of phrases, the long and flawless story of her mother's imperfections, of all that he had suffered, the manner in which all the facts of their life were presented, all made a perfect and eloquent pleading, addressed to a judge she could not see and with whom she had nothing to do. He had not come out free of his past. Taking out a gold-tipped cigarette and with infinite care placing it in a holder which contained a filter for the nicotine, he related the story she had heard from her mother, all with an accent of apology and deference.

She had no time to tell him that she understood that they had not been made to live together, that it was not a question of faults and defects, but of alchemy, that this alchemy had created war, that there was no one to blame or to judge. Already her father was launched on an apology of why he had stayed all winter in the south; he did not say that he enjoyed

it, but that it had been absolutely essential to his health. It seemed to her as he talked that he was just as ashamed to have left them as he was of having spent the winter in the south when he should have been in Paris giving concerts.

She waited for him to lose sight of this judge standing behind her and then, plunging into the present, she said: "It's scandalous to have such a young father!"

"Do you know what I used to fear?" he said. "That you might come too late to see me laughing—too late for me to have the power to make you laugh. In June when I go south again you must come with me. They will take you for my mistress, that will be delightful."

She was standing against the mantelpiece. He was looking at her hands, admiring them. She leaned backwards, pushing the crystal bowl against the wall. It cracked and the water gushed forth as from a fountain, splashing all over the floor. The glass ship could no longer sail away—it was lying on its side, on the rock-crystal stones.

They stood looking at the broken bowl and at the water forming a pool on the floor.

"Perhaps I've arrived at my port at last," she said. "Perhaps I've come to the end of my wanderings. I have found you."

"We've both done a lot of wandering," he said. "I not only played the piano in every city of the world. . . sometimes when I look at the map, it seems to me that even the tiniest villages could be replaced by the names of women. Wouldn't it be funny if I had a map of women, of all the women I have known before you, of all the women I have had? Fortunately I am a musician, and my women remain incognito. When I think about them it comes out as a ^o or a la, and who could recognize them in a sonata? What husband would come and

kill me for expressing my passion for his wife in terms of a quartet?"

When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and willful.

He appeared cold and formal. She realized it was this mask which had terrorized her as a child. The softness came only in flashes swift as lightning, like breaks.

Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness broke and the softness which came was so feminine, so exposed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but a scar from the time he had slid down the banister.

As a child she had the obscure fear that this man could never be satisfied, by life, by human beings, by the world. Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his exactingness which haunted her, an obscure awareness of his expectations which excited her to the great efforts she had made. But today she told herself that she had strained enough, that she wanted to rest, that she had waited a long time for it. She felt she did not want to appear before him until she was complete, and could satisfy him.

She wanted to enjoy. Her life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass herself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday's woman to pursue a new vision.

Today she wanted to enjoy

They were walking into a new world together, into a new planet, a world of transparency where all that happened to them since that day she clung to him so desperately was reduced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a sUhouette. His vision 70

and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around them: the color of the room, the smell of Tabac Blond, the warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuff's. Everything vanished around them, the walls, the rug under their feet, the satin rays of her dress, the orange rim of her sleeve, the orange reflections of the walls, the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of the French books yielding under the stiff-backed English books, the lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling between the French.

She could only see the point he watched, the intense focusing upon the meaning of their lives, the clear outUne of their patterns, and his questions: What are you today? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you read? What do you love? What is your music? What is your language? What is your climate? What hour of the day do you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is youi; god? Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What do you remember? What image do you have of me? What have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I understand you?

"You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at the same things. You owe me nothing. You have created yourself alone, but I gave you the seed." ^ — 71

He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the studio, asking questions, and every answer she gave was the echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. She knew it. That is what she hoped. The same: father and daughter. Unison. The same rhythm.

They were not talking. They were merely corroborating each other's theories. Their phrases interlocked.

She was a woman, she had to live in a world built by the man she loved, live by his system. In the world she made alone she was lonely. She, being a woman, had to Hve in a man-made world, could not impose her own, but here was her father's world, it fitted her. With him she could run through the world in seven-league boots. He thought and felt the same thing at the same time.

"Never knew anything but solitude," said her father. "I never knew a woman I could take into my world."

They did not speak of the harm they had done each other. The disease they carried in them they did not reveal. He did not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years of her life still colored it today. He did not know that the feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in her despite the fact that she knew it was not she who had been abandoned but her mother, that he had not really abandoned her but simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this feeling was still so strong in her that anything which resembled abandon created a violent inner storm in her: a door closed on her too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark of absent-mindedness, two people talking and forgetting to include her, or someone sending greetings to someone and forgetting her.

The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separation as keenly as she had experienced it the day her father had gone away.

In an effort to combat this anguish she had crowded her

world richly with friends, loves and creations. But beyond

the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys

given to her by friendships, loves, or a book just written,

were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are

perpetually aware of death, she was perpetually aware of

the pain of separation and the inevitability of it.

/" And beyond this, she also treated the world as if it were

yn ailing, abandoned child. She never put an end to a friend-

\ship of her own accord. She never abandoned anyone; she

/spent her life healing others of this fear wherever she saw

/ it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the

1 illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. She was incapable

\of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking

relationships, of interrupting a correspondence.

Her father was telling her the story of the homely little governess he had made love to because otherwise she would never have known what love was. He took her out in his beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun was going down so he would not have to see too much of her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, the only one she would ever have. When she came to his room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The adventure made her almost beautiful.

He was talking about his escapades, skirting the periphery of his life, dwelling on his adventiu-es. He did not dare to

venture into the realm of deep love, for fear of discovering she had given her life to another. They wanted to give each other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, and of being free to devote their whole life to each other, now that he had returned.

Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone which obsessed them. Not music, nor writing, not painting, not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration of love, its metamorphosis. She was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional love, passionate love, sensual love, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination.

"I do think," he said, "that we should give up all this for the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventures to something far more marvelous and deep, appeals so much to me. .. ."

"But mine is no adventure...."

"You should give him up. That isn't love at all. You know I've been your only great love. ..."

She did not want to say: "Not my only great love," but he seemed to have guessed her thought because he turned his eyes completely away from her and added: "Remember, I am an old man, I haven't so many years left to enjoy you. ..."

With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he was younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking her for her life, almost to be reaching out to take full possession of her life, just as he had taken her soul away with him when she was a child. It seemed to her that he wanted to take it away now again, when she was a full-blown woman. It seemed natural to him that she should have mourned his loss throughout her childhood. It was true that he was on the 74

road to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also true that she loved him so much that perhaps a part of her might foHow him and perish with him. Would she follow him from )ear to year, his withering, his vanishing? Was her love a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would she leave the earth with him today? He was asking her to leave the earth today, but this time she would not. This time she felt that she would fight against giving herself up wholly. She would not die a second time.

Having been so faithful to his image as she had been, having loved his image in other men, having been moved by the men who played the piano, the men who talked brilliantly, intellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don Juan—was it not to give him her absolute love at the end? Why did she draw away, giving him the illusion he wanted but not the absolute?

• • • •

In the south of France. Six silver-gray valises, the scent of Tabiic Blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of immaculate hands. Her father leaped down from the train and already he was beginning a story.

"There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me, had sung my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable lumbago coming on, and besides, I can't put my mind on women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed."

In the elevator he overtipped the boy, he asked for news of the Negro's wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to

be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake?

In the room he would not let her help him unpack his bags. He was cursing his lumbago. He seemed to have a fear of intimacy, almost as if he had hidden a crime in his valises.

"This old carcass must be subjugated," he said.