Saturday

Anny opens the door to me, in a long black dress.  Naturally, she doesn't hold her hand out to me, she doesn't say hello.  I have kept my right hand in the pocket of my overcoat.  Sulkily and very quickly, to get the formalities over with, she says:

      "Come in and sit down anywhere you like, except in the armchair near the window."

      It's her, it's her all right.  She lets her arms dangle by her sides, she has the sullen face which used to make her look like a little girl at the awkward age.  But now she doesn't look like a little girl anymore.  She is fat, she has a big bosom.

      She shuts the door, she says thoughtfully to herself:

      "I don't know if I'm going to sit on the bed...."

      Finally she flops onto a sort of chest covered with a rug.  Her walk is no longer the same: she moves with a majestic heaviness which is not ungraceful: she looks embarrassed by her youthful paunch.  Yet in spite of everything it's her all right, it's Anny.

      Anny bursts out laughing.

      "What are you laughing for?"

      As usual she doesn't answer straightaway, and assumes a captious expression.

      "Tell me why."

      "It's because of that big smile you've been wearing ever since you came in.  You look like a father who's just married off his daughter.  Come on, don't just stand there.  Put your coat somewhere and sit down.  Yes, there if you like."

      A silence follows, which Anny makes no attempt to break.  How bare this room is!  In the old days, wherever Anny went, she used to take with her a huge suitcase full of shawls, turbans, mantillas, Japanese masks, and popular pictures.  As soon as she arrived at a hotel - even if it was only for one night - the first thing she did was to open that suitcase and take out all its treasures, which she hung on the walls, hooked on to the lamps, and spread over the tables or on the floor, following a changeable and complicated order; in less than half an hour the most ordinary room took on a heavy, sensual, almost unbearable personality.  Perhaps the suitcase has got lost, or has been left at the cloakroom ... this cold room, with the door into the bathroom half open, has something sinister about it.  Though sadder and more luxurious, it looks like my room at Bouville.

      Anny laughs again.  How well I recognize that shrill, rather nasal little laugh.

      "Well, you haven't changed.  What are you looking for with that frantic look on your face?"

      She smiles, but her eyes examine my face with an almost hostile curiosity.

      "I was just thinking that this room doesn't look as if you were living in it."

      "Really?" she answers vaguely.

      Another silence.  Now she is sitting on the bed, very pale in her black dress.  She hasn't cut her hair.  She is still looking at me, calmly, raising her eyebrows slightly.  Hasn't she anything to say to me then?  Why did she ask me to come?  This silence is unbearable.

      Suddenly I say in a pitiful voice:

      "I'm glad to see you."

      The last word sticks in my throat: if that's all I can find to say, I would have done better to keep quiet.  She is going to lose her temper for sure.  I expected the first quarter of an hour to be difficult.  In the old days, when I saw Anny again, whether it was after an absence of twenty-four hours or on waking up in the morning, I could never find the words she expected, the right words to go with her dress, with the weather, with the last words we had spoken the night before.  What does she want?  I can't guess.

      I raise my eyes again.  Anny is looking at me with a sort of tenderness.

      "So you haven't changed at all?  You're still as big a fool as ever?"

      Her face expresses satisfaction.  But how tired she looks!

      "You're a milestone," she says, "a milestone by the side of the road.  You explain imperturbably and you'll go on explaining for the rest of your life that it's twenty-seven kilometres to Melun and forty-two to Montargis.  That's why I need you so much."

      "Need me?  You mean you've needed me these four years that I haven't seen you?  Well, you've kept very quiet about it, I must say."

      I smiled as I spoke: she might think I bore her a grudge.  I can feel this false smile on my mouth, I am uncomfortable.

      "What a fool you are!  Naturally I don't need to see you, if that's what you mean.  You know you're not exactly a sight for sore eyes.  I need you to exist and not to change.  You're like that metre of platinum they keep somewhere in Paris or nearby.  I don't think anybody's every wanted to see it."

      "That's where you're mistaken."

      "Anyway, it doesn't matter, I haven't.  Well, I'm glad to know that it exists, that it measures exactly one ten millionth of a quarter of the meridian.  I think of it every time anybody takes the measurements of a flat or sells me some material by the metre."

      "Really?" I say coldly.

      "But you know, I could easily think of you only as an abstract virtue, a sort of limit.  You ought to be grateful to me for remembering your face every time."

      Here we are again with those Alexandrian discussions which I had to put up with in the old days, when in my heart I had very simple, ordinary desires, such as a longing to tell her that I loved her, to take her in my arms.  Today I have no desire.  Except perhaps a desire to say nothing and to look at her, to realize in silence all the importance of this extraordinary event: Anny's presence opposite me.  And for her, is this day like any other day?  Her hands are not trembling.  She must have had something to tell me the day she wrote to me - or perhaps it was just a whim.  Now there has been no question of it for a long time.

      Anny suddenly smiles at me with a tenderness so visible that tears come into my eyes.

      "I've thought about you much more often than about the platinum metre.  There hasn't been a day when I haven't thought about you.  And I remembered exactly what you looked like down to the smallest detail."

      She gets up and comes and places her hands on my shoulders.

      "You complain about me, but dare you say that you remembered my face?"

      "That's not fair," I say, "you know perfectly well I have a bad memory."

      "You admit it: you'd forgotten me completely.  Would you have recognized me in the street."

      "Naturally.  It's not a question of that."

      "Did you so much as remember the colour of my hair?"

      "Of course!  It's fair."

      She bursts out laughing.

      "You say that very proudly.  Since you can see it in front of you, you don't deserve much credit."

      She ruffles my hair with her hand.

      "And your hair is red," she says, imitating me; "the first time I saw you, I'll never forget it, you were wearing a soft hat which was practically mauve and it clashed horribly with your red hair.  It hurt just to look at it.  Where's your hat?  I want to see if your taste is as bad as ever."

      "I don't wear one anymore."

      She gives a low whistle, opening her eyes wide.

      "You didn't think of all that by yourself!  You did?  Well, congratulations.  Of course you shouldn't wear a hat.  Only, you had to think about it.  That hair of yours can't stand anything, it clashes with hats, with armchair cushions, even with the wallpaper in the background.  Or else, if you did wear a hat, you'd have to pull it down over your eyes like that felt hat you bought in London.  You tucked that lock of yours under the brim, and nobody could tell whether you had any hair left at all."

      She adds, in the determined tone with which you end old quarrels:

      "It didn't suit you at all."

      I can't remember what hat she's talking about.

      "Did I say it suited me?"

      "I should think you did!  You never talked about anything else.  And you kept sneaking a look at yourself in the mirror when you thought I couldn't see you."

      This knowledge of the past depresses me.  Anny doesn't even give the impression of evoking memories, she hasn't the tender, distant tone of voice suitable to that sort of occupation.  She seems to be talking about today, or at the very most about yesterday; she has kept all her old opinions, prejudices, and spites fully alive.  For me, on the contrary, everything is steeped in a vague poetic atmosphere; I am prepared to make any sort of concessions.  Suddenly she says to me in a flat voice:

      "You see, I'm getting fat, I'm getting old, I have to take care of my appearance."

      Yes, and how tired she looks!  Just as I am about to say something, she adds:

      "I did some acting in London."

      "With Candler?"

      "No, not with Candler.  That's just like you.  You'd get it into your head that I was going to act with Candler.  How many times have I got to tell you that Candler is a conductor?  No, in a little theatre in Soho Square.  We put on The Emperor Jones, some plays by Sean O'Casey and Synge, and Britannicus."

      "Britannicus?" I say in astonishment.

      "Why, yes, Britannicus.  It was because of that that I left.  I was the one who had given them the idea of putting on Britannicus; and they wanted me to play Junie."

      "Really?"

      "Well, naturally I couldn't play anybody but Agrippine."

      "And now what are you doing?"

      It was a mistake to ask that.  All the life goes out of her face.  Yet she answers straightaway:

      "I'm not acting anymore.  I travel.  There's a fellow who's keeping me."

      She smiles:

      "Oh, don't look at me in that worried way, it isn't a tragedy.  I always told you that I wouldn't object to being kept.  Besides, he's an old man, he isn't any trouble."

      "An Englishman?"

      "What business is that of yours?" she asks in annoyance.  "We're not going to talk about him.  He's of not importance whatever for you or for me.  Would you like some tea?"

      She goes into the bathroom.  I hear her moving about, rattling saucepans and talking to herself; a shrill, unintelligible murmur.  On the table by her bed, there is, as always, a volume of Michelet's History of France.  I can now see that over the bed she has hung a photo, a solitary one, a reproduction of the portrait of Emily Brontë painted by her brother.

      Anny returns and brusquely tells me:

      "Now you must talk to me about yourself."

      Then she disappears again into the bathroom.  I remember that, in spite of my bad memory: that was the way she used to ask me those direct questions which I found extremely embarrassing, because I could feel in them both a genuine interest and a desire to get it over with as quickly as possible.  In any case, after that question, there can be no doubt about it: she wants something from me.  There are just the preliminaries: you get rid of anything that might prove awkward; you settle secondary questions once and for all: "Now you must talk to me about yourself."  In a little while she will talk to me about herself.  Straightaway I no longer have the slightest desire to tell her anything.  What good would it do?  The Nausea, fear, existence ... it would be better to keep all that to myself.

      "Come on, hurry up," she shouts through the partition.

      She comes back with the teapot.

      "What are you doing?  Are you living in Paris?"

      "I'm living in Bouville."

      "Bouville?  Why?  You aren't married, I hope?"

      "Married?" I say, giving a start.

      I find it very pleasant that Anny should have thought that.  I tell her so.

      "That's absurd.  It's just the sort of naturalistic fantasy that you used to blame me for in the old days.  You know, when I used to imagine you as a widow and the mother of two boys.  And all those stories I used to tell you about what was going to become of us.  You hated that."

      "And you loved it," she replies quite calmly.  "You said that to show off.  Besides, you put on a show of indignation like that in conversation, but you're quite shifty enough to get married one day on the sly.  You swore indignantly for a whole year that you'd never go to see Imperial Violets.  Then one day when I was ill, you went to see it by yourself at a little local cinema."

      "I am at Bouville," I say with dignity, "because I am writing a book about Monsieur de Rollebon."

      Anny looks at me with studied interest.

      "Monsieur de Rollebon?  Didn't he live in the eighteenth century?"

      "Yes."

      "As a matter of fact you did tell me about him once," she says vaguely.  "So it's a history book, is it?"

      "Yes."

      "Ha, ha!"

      If she asks me one more question I will tell her everything.  But she asks nothing more.  She apparently considers that she knows enough about me.  Anny knows how to be a good listener, but only when she wants to be.  I look at her; she has lowered her eyelids, she is thinking about what she is going to tell me, how she is going to begin.  Must I question her in my turn?  I don't think she wants me to.  She will speak when she thinks fit.  My heart is beating very fast.

      She says suddenly:

      "I have changed."

      That's the beginning.  But now she falls silent.  She pours tea into some white porcelain cups.  She is waiting for me to speak: I must say something.  Not just anything, but simply what she is expecting.  I am on tenterhooks.  Has she really changed?  She has grown fatter, she looks tired; but that certainly isn't what she means.

      "I don't know, I don't think so.  I've already recognized your laugh, your way of getting up and putting your hands on my shoulders, your mania for talking to yourself.  You're still reading Michelet's History.  And then lots of other things...."

      That deep interest she takes in my eternal essence and her total indifference to everything that may happen to me in life - and then that funny affectation of hers, at once pedantic and charming - and then that way of abolishing right from the start all the mechanical formulas of politeness and friendship, everything that makes relationships between people easier, forcing the people she meets to keep on inventing.

      She shrugs her shoulders:

      "Yes, I have changed," she says dryly, "I have changed completely.  I'm not the same person anymore.  I thought you'd notice that as soon as you saw me.  And instead you talk to me about Michelet's History."

      She comes and plants herself in front of me:

      "We'll see whether this man is as clever as he thinks he is.  Come on, now: how have I changed?"

      I hesitate; she taps her foot, still smiling but genuinely annoyed.

      "There was something in the old days which used to make you squirm.  At least you said so.  And now it's gone, disappeared.  You ought to have noticed that.  Don't you feel more at ease?"

      I don't dare to tell her that I don't: just as before, I am sitting on the edge of my chair, trying hard to avoid ambushes, to ward off inexplicable rages.

      She has sat down again.

      "Well," she says, nodding her head with conviction, "if you don't understand, that's because

you've forgotten a great deal.  Even more than I thought.  Come on, don't you remember your misdeeds in the old days?  You came, you spoke, you went away again: all in the wrong way.  Suppose that nothing had changed: you would have come in, there would have been masks and shawls on the wall, I'd have been sitting on the bed and I'd have said to you:" (she throws her head back, dilates her nostrils and speaks in a theatrical voice, as if to make fun of herself) 'Well?  What are you waiting for?  Sit down.'  and, naturally, I'd have carefully avoided telling you: 'Anywhere except in the armchair near the window'."

      "You used to set traps for me."

      "They weren't traps.... So, naturally, being you, you'd have gone straight over to that armchair and sat down in it."

      "And what would have happened to me?" I ask, turning round and looking inquisitively at the armchair.

      It is ordinary in appearance, it looks paternal and comfortable.

      "Just something bad," Anny replies curtly.

      I don't press the point: Anny has always surrounded herself with things that were taboo.

      "I think," I tell her all of a sudden, "that I have guessed something.  But it would be so extraordinary.  Wait a moment, let me think: yes, this room is completely bare.  You must do me the justice of admitting that I noticed that straightaway.  Alright, I would have come in, I would indeed have seen those masks on the wall, and the shawls and all the rest.  The hotel always stopped at your door.  Your room was something different....  You wouldn't have come and opened the door to me.  I'd have seen you curled up in a corner, possibly sitting on the floor on that red rug you always took around with you, looking at me mercilessly, waiting.... I would have scarcely said a word, made a gesture, drawn a breath before you'd have started frowning and I would have felt deeply guilty without knowing why.  Then with every moment that passed, I'd have made more blunders, I'd have plunged deeper into my guilt...."

      "How many times did that happen?"

      "A hundred times."

      "At least.  Are you any smarter, any cleverer now?"

      "No!"

      "I'm glad to hear you say so.  Well then?"

      "Well then, it's because there are no more...."

      "Ha, ha!" she cries in a theatrical voice, "he scarcely dares to believe it!"

      She goes on gently:

      "No more perfect moments?"

      "No."

      I am astounded.  I press the point.

      "You mean at last you.... It's all over, those ... tragedies, those impromptu tragedies in which the masks, the shawls, the furniture, and I myself each had a minor part to play - and you had the lead?"

      She smiles.

      "What an ungrateful fellow!  Sometimes I gave him more important parts than mine: but he never suspected.  Well, yes: it's finished.  And you really surprised?"

      "Oh, yes, I'm surprised!  I thought that all that was a part of you, that if it had been taken away from you it would have been like tearing the heart out of you."

      "I thought so too," she says, looking as if she didn't regret anything.

      She adds, with a sort of irony which makes a most unpleasant impression on me:

      "But you can see that I can live without that."

      She has laced her fingers together and is holding one knee in her hands.  She is gazing into the distance, with a vague smile which makes her whole face look younger.  She looks like a fat little girl, mysterious and satisfied.

      "Yes, I'm glad you've stayed the same.  If you'd been moved, repainted, planted beside a different road, I'd have nothing stable to take my bearings by any longer.  You are indispensable to me: I change, but it's understood that you stay motionless and I measure my changes in relation to you."

      I feel a little annoyed all the same.

      "Well, that's quite inaccurate," I say sharply.  "On the contrary, I've changed a great deal lately and, at heart, I ..."

      "Oh," she says with crushing contempt, "intellectual changes!  I've changed down to the whites of my eyes."

      Down to the whites of her eyes.... What is it then which, in her voice, has just stirred me?  In any case, all of a sudden, I gave a start.  I have stopped looking for a vanished Anny.  It's this girl here, this fat girl with a ruined look who moves me and whom I love.

      "I have a sort of ... physical certainty.  I can feel that there are no perfect moments.  I can feel it even in my legs when I am walking.  I can feel it all the time, even when I'm asleep.  I can't forget it.  I have never had anything like a revelation; I can't say that on such and such a day, at such and such a time, my life was transformed.  But now I always feel a bit as if that had suddenly been revealed to me the day before.  I am dazzled, ill at ease, I can't get used to it."

      She says these words in a calm voice which retains a touch of pride at having changed so much.  She balances herself on the chest with extraordinary grace.  Not once since I came in has she looked so much like the Anny of the old days, the Anny of Marseille.  She has taken possession of me again, I have plunged back into her strange world, beyond absurdity, affectation, subtlety.  I have even rediscovered that little fever which always took hold of me when I was with her, and that bitter taste at the back of my mouth.

      Anny unclasps her hands and lets go of her knee.  She is silent.  It is a deliberate silence; as when, at the Opera, the stage remains empty for exactly seven bars of music.  She drinks her tea.  Then she puts down her cup and holds herself stiffly, leaning her clenched hands on the edge of the chest.

      Suddenly she puts on her superb Medusa face which I used to love so much, all swollen with hatred, twisted, venomous.  Anny scarcely ever changes expressions, she changes faces; as the actors of antiquity used to change masks: all of a sudden.  And each of these masks is designed to create an atmosphere, to give the key to what is going to follow.  It appears and stays in position without changing while she speaks.  Then it falls, detaches itself from her.

      She stares at me without appearing to see me.  She is going to speak.  I expect a tragic speech, raised to the dignity of her mask, a dirge.

      She says only a single phrase:

      "I am outliving myself."

      The tone doesn't correspond in any way to the face.  It isn't tragic, it is ... horrible: it expresses a dry despair, without tears, without pity.  Yes, there is something irremediably desiccated in her.

      The mask falls, she smiles.

      "I'm not at all sad.  I've often been surprised at that, but I was wrong: why should I be sad?  I used to be capable of rather wonderful passions.  I hated my mother passionately.  And as for you," she says defiantly, "I loved you passionately."

      She waits for a retort.  I say nothing.

      "All that is over, of course."

      "How can you tell?"

      "I know.  I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody that will inspire me with passion.  You know, it's quite an undertaking to start loving somebody.  You have to have energy, generosity, blindness....  There is even a moment, right at the start, where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don't do it.  I know that I shall never jump again."

      "Why not?"

      She looks at me ironically and doesn't answer.

      "Now," she says, "I live surrounded by my dead passions.  I try to recapture that splendid rage which hurled me out of a third-floor window, when I was twelve years old, one day my mother had whipped me."

      She adds, for no apparent reason, with a faraway look:

      "It isn't good for me either to stare at things too long.  I look at them to find out what they are, then I have to turn my eyes quickly away."

      "But why?"

      "They disgust me."

      I could almost swear.... In any case there are certainly similarities.  It has already happened once in London, we had both thought the same things about the same subjects, practically at the same time.  I should like so much to ... But Anny's mind takes a great many turnings: you can never be sure you've completely understood her.  I have to be absolutely sure.

      "Listen, I'd like to say something to you: you know that I never really understood what perfect moments were; you never really explained them to me."

      "Yes, I know, you made absolutely no effort.  You just existed beside me like a log."

      "Maybe.  But I know how much it cost me."

      "You deserved everything you got, it was all your fault; you annoyed me with your down-to-earth look, you seemed to be saying: I'm normal; and you set out to breathe health through every pore, you positively oozed moral wellbeing."

      "Still, I asked you a hundred times at least to explain to me what a ..."

      "Yes, but in what a tone of voice," she says angrily; "you condescended to inquire, that's what you did.  You asked your question in a kindly, absentminded way, like the old ladies who used to ask me what I was playing when I was a little girl.  Now I come to think of it," she says pensively, "I wonder whether you aren't the person I've hated most in my life."

      She makes an effort to compose herself, calms down and smiles, her cheeks still aflame.  She is very beautiful.

      "I don't mind explaining to you what they are.  I'm old enough now to talk calmly to old women like you about my childhood games.  Come on now, talk, what do you want to know?"

      "Where they were."

      "I've told you about privileged situations, haven't I?"

      "I don't think so."

      "Yes I have," she says with assurance.  "It was at Aix, in that square whose name I've forgotten.  We were on the terrace of a café, out in the sun, under some orange parasols.  You don't remember: we were drinking lemonade and I found some dead flies in the sugar."

      "Ah yes, perhaps...."

      "Well, I talked to you about that in that café.  It came up in connexion with the big edition of Michelet's History, the one I had when I was little.  It was a lot bigger than this one and the pages were a pale colour, like the inside of a mushroom, and they smelt like mushrooms too.  When my father died, my Uncle Joseph got his hands on it and took all the volumes away.  That was the day I called him an old pig, and my mother whipped me, and I jumped out of the window."

      "Yes, yes ... you must have told me about that History of France ... didn't you use to read it in the attic?  You see, I remember.  You can see that you were unfair just now when you accused me of having forgotten everything."

      "Be quiet.  Yes, as you remember so well, I used to take those huge books up to the attic.  There were very few pictures in them, possibly two or three in each volume.  But each one had a big page all too itself, and the other side of the page was blank.  That made all the more of an impression on me in that on the other pages the text had been arranged in two columns to save space.  I had an extraordinary love for those pictures; I knew them all by heart, and when I re-read one of Michelet's books, I would wait for them fifty pages in advance; it always seemed a miracle to me to find them again.  And then there was an added refinement: the scene they showed never had any connexion with the text on the adjoining pages, you had to go looking for the relevant event some thirty pages further on."

      "I beg you, please tell me about the perfect moments."

      "I'm telling you about the privileged situations.  They were the ones shown in the pictures.  It was I who called them privileged, I told myself they must have been terribly important for people to agree to make them the subject of those rare pictures.  They had been chosen in preference to all the rest, you see: and yet there were a lot of episodes which had greater pictorial value, and others which had greater historical interest.  For example, there were only three pictures for the whole of the sixteenth century: one for the death of Henri II, one for the assassination of the Duc de Guise, and one for the entry of Henri IV into Paris.  Then it occurred to me that these events were of a special character.  Besides, the pictures confirmed that idea: they were very badly drawn, the arms and legs were never properly attached to the bodies.  But they were full of grandeur.  When the Duc de Guise was assassinated, for example, the onlookers showed their amazement and indignation by stretching their hands out and turning their heads away: it was very beautiful, like a chorus.  And don't imagine they didn't have any amusing, anecdotic details.  You could see pages falling to the ground, little dogs running away, jesters sitting on the steps of the throne.  But all these details were treated with so much grandeur and so much clumsiness that they were in perfect harmony with the rest of the picture: I don't think I've ever come across any pictures that had such a strict unity.  Well, it started there."

      "The privileged situations?"

      "The idea I formed of them.  They were situations which had a very rare and precious quality, a style if you like.  To be a king, for example, struck me as a privileged situation when I was eight years old.  Or else to die.  You may laugh, but there were so many people drawn at the moment of their death, and there were so many who uttered sublime words at that moment, that I honestly thought ... well, I thought that when you started dying you were transported yourself.  Besides, it was enough just to be in the room of a dying person: death being a privileged situation, something emanated from it and communicated itself to everybody who was present.  A sort of grandeur.  When my father died, they took me up to his room to see him for the last time.  Going upstairs, I was very unhappy, but I was also as it were drunk with a sort of religious ecstasy; I was at last going to enter a privileged situation.  I leaned against the wall, I tried to make the proper gestures.  But my aunt and my mother were there, kneeling by the bed, and they spoiled everything with their sobs."

      She says these last words angrily, as if the memory still hurt her.  She breaks off; her eyes staring, her eyebrows raised.  She is taking the opportunity to live the scene once more.

      "Later on, I developed all that; to begin with, I added a new situation, love (I mean the act of making love).  Look, if you've never understood why I refused ... certain of your demands, now's your chance to understand: for me, there was something to be saved.  And then I told myself that there were bound to be far more privileged situations than I could possibly count, finally I accepted the existence of an infinite number of them."

      "Yes, but what were they?"

      "But I've told you," she says in amazement, "I've been explaining to you for the last quarter of an hour."

      "Yes, but was the most important thing for people to be in a great passion, carried away with hatred or love, for example; or was it the external appearance of the event which had to be great, I mean: what you could see of it...."

      "Both ... it all depended," she answers sulkily.

      "And the perfect moments?  Where do they come in?"

      "They come afterwards.  First there are some annunciatory signs.  Then the privileged situation, slowly, majestically, enters into people's lives.  Then the question arises whether you want to make a perfect moment out of it."

      "Yes," I say, "I understand.  In each privileged situation, there are certain acts which have to be performed, certain attitudes which have to be assumed, certain words which have to be said - and other attitudes, other words are strictly prohibited.  Is that it?"

      "If you like...."

      "In other words, the situation is the raw material: it has to be treated."

      "That's it," she says.  "First you had to be plunged into something exceptional and feel that you were putting it in order.  If all these conditions had been fulfilled, the moment would have been perfect."

      "In fact, it was a sort of work of art."

      "You've already said that," she says in irritation.  "No: it was a ... duty.  You had to transform privileged situations into perfect moments.  It was a moral question.  Yes, you can laugh if you like: a moral question."

      I am not laughing at all.

      "Listen," I say to her spontaneously, "I'm going to recognize my shortcomings too.  I never really understood you, I never sincerely tried to help you.  If I had known ..."

      "Thank you, thank you very much," she says sarcastically.  "I hope you don't expect any gratitude for these tardy regrets of yours.  In any case, I don't hold any grudges against you; I never explained anything to you clearly, I was all tied up, I couldn't talk to anybody about it, not even to you - especially not to you.  There was always something which rang false about those moments.  So I was all at sea.  Yet I had the impression that I was doing everything I could."

      "But what had to be done?  What actions?"

      "What a fool you are.  I can't give you any more examples, it all depends."

      "But tell me what you tried to do."

      "No, I don't want to talk about it.  But if you like, there's a story which made a great impression on me when I was at school.  There was a king who had lost a battle and had been taken prisoner.  He was there in a corner in the victor's camp.  He saw his son and daughter go by in chains.  He didn't weep, he didn't say anything.  Next he saw one of his servants go by, likewise in chains.  Then he started groaning

and tearing his hair.  You can make up your own examples.  You see: there are times when you mustn't cry - or else you'll be unclean.  But if you drop a log on your foot, you can do what you like, groan, sob, or jump about on the other foot.  The idiotic thing would be to be stoical all the time: you'd wear yourself out for nothing."

      She smiles:

      "At other times, you had to be more than stoical.  Naturally, you don't remember the first time I kissed you, do you?"

      "Yes I do, very clearly," I say triumphantly, "it was in Kew Gardens, on the banks of the Thames."

      "But what you never knew was that I was sitting on some nettles: my dress was hitched up, my thighs were covered with stings, and every time I made the slightest movement I was stung again.  Well, stoicism wouldn't have been enough there.  You didn't excite me at all, I had no particular desire for your lips, the kiss I was going to give you was much more important, it was an engagement, a pact.  So you see, that pain was irrelevant, I wasn't at liberty to think about my thighs at a moment like that.  It wasn't enough not to show that I was suffering: it was necessary not to suffer."

      She looks at me proudly, still surprised at what she had done:

      "For more than twenty minutes, all the time you were insisting on having that kiss which I was quite determined to give you, all the time I was keeping you waiting - because I had to give it to you with proper formality - I managed to anaesthetize myself completely.  Yet heaven knows that I have a sensitive skin: I felt nothing until we got up."

      That's it, that's it exactly.  There are no adventures - there are no perfect moments ... we have lost the same illusions, we have followed the same paths.  I can guess the rest - I can even speak for her and say myself what she still has to tell:

      "So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man or something else to spoil your effects?"

      "Yes, naturally," she says unenthusiastically.

      "Isn't that it?"

      "Oh, you know, I might have managed to resign myself in the end to the clumsiness of a red-headed man.  After all, it was good of me to take an interest in the way in which other people played their parts.... No, it's rather that ..."

      "That there are no privileged situations?"

      "That's it, I used to think that hate, love, or death descended on us like tongues of fire on Good Friday.  I used to think that one could radiate hate or death.  What a mistake!  Yes, I really thought that 'Hate' existed, that it settled on people and raised them above themselves.  Naturally, I am the only one, I am the one who hates, I am the one who loves.  And that 'I' is always the same thing, a dough which goes on stretching and stretching ... indeed, it looks so much like itself that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names and making distinctions."

      She thinks as I do.  I feel as if I had never left her.

      "Listen carefully," I say, "for the last few minutes I've been thinking of something which pleases me much more than the role of a milestone which you generously allotted to me: it's that we have changed together and in the same way.  I like that better, you know, than seeing you going further and further away and being condemned to mark your starting-point for ever.  Everything you've told me, I had come to tell you - though admittedly in other words.  We meet at the finishing-post.  I can't tell you how much pleasure that gives me."

      "Really?" she says, softly but with a stubborn look, "well, I'd still have liked it better if you hadn't changed; it was more convenient like that.  I'm not like you, it annoys me rather to know that somebody has thought the same things as I have.  Besides, you must be mistaken."

      I tell her about my adventures.  I talk to her about existence - perhaps at too great length.  She listens intently, her eyes wide open, her eyebrows raised.

      When I finish, she looks relieved.

      "Well, you don't think the same things as I do at all.  You complain because things don't arrange themselves around you like a bunch of flowers, without taking the trouble to do anything.  But I have never asked as much as that: I wanted to do things.  You know, when we used to play at being adventurers, you were the one who had adventures, I was the one who made them happen.  I used to say: 'I'm a man of action.'  You remember?  Well, now I simply say: 'One can't be a man of action'."

      I suppose I can't look convinced, for she gets excited and goes on more insistently:

      "And then there are lots of other things I haven't told you, because it would take too long to explain.  For example, I would have had to be able to tell myself, at the very moment I did something, that what I was doing would have ... fatal consequences.  I can't explain that to you very well...."

      "But there's no need to," I say somewhat pedantically.  "I've thought that too."

      She looks at me suspiciously.

      "You seem to imagine that you've thought about everything in exactly the same way as I have: you surprise me."

      I can't convince her, I would only irritate her if I went on.  I keep quiet.  I want to take her in my arms.

      All of a sudden she looks at me anxiously:

      "But if you really have thought about all that, what can we do?"

      I bow my head.

      "I ... I am outliving myself," she repeats dully.

      What can I say to her?  Do I know any reasons for living?  I don't feel the same despair as she does, because I never expected very much.  I am rather ... astonished at this life which is given to me - given for nothing.  I keep my head bowed, I don't want to see Anny's face at this moment.

      "I travel," she goes on in a gloomy voice; "I've just come back from Sweden.  I stopped in Berlin for a week.  There's that fellow who's keeping me ..."

      Should I take her in my arms?  What good would it do?  I can do nothing for her.  She is alone like me.

      She says to me, in a gayer voice:

      "What are you muttering about?"

      I raise my eyes.  She is looking at me tenderly.

      "Nothing.  I was just thinking about something."

      "Oh mysterious person!  Well, talk or shut up, but do one thing or the other."

      I tell her about the Rendez-vous des Cheminots, about the old rag-time I get them to play for me on the gramophone, about the strange happiness it gives me.

      "I was wondering whether we couldn't find something in that direction, or at least look for it...."

      She doesn't answer, I don't think she was very interested in what I've been telling her.

      Still, after a moment, she goes on - and I don't know whether she is following her own train of thought or whether it is an answer to what I have just been saying .

      "Pictures, statues can't be used: they're beautiful facing me.  Music ..."

      "But at the theatre ..."

      "Well, what about the theatre?  Are you going through all the fine arts one by one?"

      "You used to say that you wanted to act because on the stage it must be possible to obtain perfect moments!"

      "Yes, I've obtained them: for other people.  I was in the dust, in the draughts, under glaring lights, between cardboard sets.  I usually played opposite Thorndyke.  I think you've seen him at Covent Garden.  I was always afraid of bursting out laughing in his face."

      "But weren't you ever carried away by your part?"

      "A little, now and then: never very strongly.  The main thing, for all of us, was the black hole just in front of us, at the bottom of which there were people we couldn't see; to them we were obviously presenting a perfect moment.  But, they didn't live in it; it unfolded in front of them.  And do you think that we, the actors, lived inside it?  In the end it wasn't anywhere, either on one side of the footlights or the other, it didn't exist; and yet everybody was thinking about it.  So you see, my dear," she says in a drawling, almost vulgar tone of voice, "I dropped the whole thing."

      "I tried to write this book ..."

      She interrupts me.

      "I live in the past.  I recall everything that has happened to me and I rearrange it.  From a distance, like that, it doesn't do any harm, it might almost take you in.  Our story is all quite beautiful.  I add a few touches here and there and it makes a whole string of perfect moments.  Then I close my eyes and I try to imagine that I'm still living in it.  I've got some other characters too.  You have to know how to concentrate.  You know what I've read?  Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.  I've found that very useful.  There's a way of setting the scene first of all, and then bringing on the characters.  Sometimes you can really see," she adds with a mad look.

      "Well," I say, "that wouldn't satisfy me at all."

      "Do you think it satisfies me?"

      We remain silent for a moment.  Dusk is falling; I can scarcely make out the pale patch of her face.  Her black dress merges into the shadows which have invaded the room.  I automatically pick up my cup, which still has a little tea in it, and I raise it to my lips.  The tea is cold.  I should like to smoke, but I don't dare.  I have the painful impression that we have nothing left to say to each other.  Only yesterday, I had so many questions to ask her: where had she been, what had she done, whom had she met?  But that interested me only in so far as Anny had given herself wholeheartedly.  Now I have no curiosity: all those countries, all those cities she had passed through, all those men who have courted her and whom perhaps she has loved - all of that left her cold, all of that was fundamentally unimportant to her: little flashes of sunlight on the surface of a cold, dark sea.  Anny is sitting opposite me, we haven't seen each other for four years, and we have nothing left to say to each other.

      "You'll have to go now," Anny says all of a sudden.  "I'm expecting somebody."

      "You're expecting...?"

      "No, I'm expecting a German, a painter."

      She starts laughing.  This laughter sounds strange in the dark room.

      "Now there's somebody who isn't like us - not yet.  He acts, he exerts himself."

      I get up reluctantly.

      "When shall I see you again?"

      "I don't know, I'm leaving for London tomorrow evening."

      "Via Dieppe?"

      "Yes, and I think I'll go to Egypt after that.  I may be back in Paris next winter, I'll write to you."

      "I shall be free all day tomorrow," I tell her timidly.

      "Yes, but I've got a lot to do," she answers in a dry voice.  "No, I can't see you.  I'll write to you from Egypt.  Just give me your address."

      "All right."

      In the semi-darkness I scribble my address on the back of an envelope.  I shall have to tell the Hôtel Printania to forward my letters when I leave Bouville.  In my heart of hearts, I know very well that she won't write.  Perhaps I shall see her again in ten years' time.  Perhaps this is the last time I shall see her.  I am not just terribly depressed at leaving her; I am terribly frightened of going back to my solitude.

      She gets us; at the door she kisses me lightly on the mouth.

      "That's to remind me of your lips," she says, smiling.  "I have to rejuvenate my memories, for my 'Spiritual Exercises'."

      I take her by the arm and I draw her towards me.  She doesn't resist, but shakes her head.

      "No, that doesn't interest me anymore.  You can't begin again ... and then, for what you can do with people, the first good-looking fellow who comes along is just as good as you."

      "But what are you going to do then?"

      "I've told you, I'm going to England."

      "No, I mean ..."

      "Nothing!"

      I haven't let go of her arm, I tell her softly:

      "Then I must leave you after finding you again."

      Now I can see her face clearly.  All of a sudden it becomes pale and drawn.  An old woman's face, absolutely horrible; I'm quite sure that she didn't put that face on deliberately: it is there, unknown to her, or perhaps in spite of her.

      "No," she says slowly, "No.  You haven't found me again."

      She pulls her arm away.  She opens the door.  The corridor is ablaze with light.

      Anny starts laughing.

      "Poor fellow!  He never has any luck.  The first time he plays his part well, he gets no thanks for it.  Go on now, be off with you."

      I hear the door close behind me.