The stars multiply, separate, and scatter. Everything comes to an end and then starts again. Suddenly, the moon’s cheerful face smiles in the naked sky. No, she’s not in the sky. She promenades between sky and earth. Alone like me. She smiles. She carries out her lunar duties with bliss. She accepts her lot. She is at peace.
I continue to take care of Félicia and the child. I am the one who bathes them, I am the one who prepares their meals. I live in their room more than in mine. Jean Luze comes and goes, uses the bathroom, changes his shirt, paying me no mind. All they talk about is Jean-Claude. They talk about that larva as if it were a human being. When Félicia says “our son,” Jean Luze looks up at her adoringly. Larva or not, for them he exists. And that’s what matters.
Mme Audier also came with a gift for Félicia. She wiggles about like an old monkey under Jean Luze’s impassive gaze.
“All is well now. Jules told me so. Isn’t that wonderful?”
She always feels the need to imply that her husband is a miracle worker.
The way her eyes are darting around, she must suspect something. She can’t contain herself any longer.
“And what about our lovely Annette? I don’t see her anymore.”
“But she’s at work right now,” I answer.
She smiles hypocritically. How has Dr. Audier managed to live with this woman for so long? And what can you expect from such a man? Despite all the respect I have for him, I can see why Jean Luze snubs him. He sets an example of caution, resignation and cowardice for the younger generation. I feel like shouting this at his wife. She is watching for Félicia’s reaction as she speaks. She talks up Annette’s beauty, mentions her flings with an angelic little attitude in contrast with her wrinkled, cunning old devil-eyes.
“She’s just a stylish girl who isn’t made for provincial life. If she didn’t make an effort of some kind, she would mildew with age! She is right to shake off her yoke…”
She laughs but her laugh rings false. One can feel how she is embittered by old age. How she must hate Annette for her youth! With her dwarfish legs, she has always looked like a vile jointed doll. Jean Luze is in the way. As long as he is there, she will hold back her venom. Is she completely tactless, or is she intentionally talking about Annette hoping to see Félicia snap? But she will not get such satisfaction. I know my sister. She will submit to torture before betraying herself. We try to wash our dirty laundry only among family. I will do my part to disappoint Mme Audier and save face. Jean Luze leaves, and she starts in on Jane Bavière.
“She’s a disgrace. She has no shame. There she is now, parading her kid right under the noses of decent folk. What a pity you were not able to attend mass Sunday! Father Paul’s sermon was clearly directed at her…”
If the things happening in this town haven’t changed this old woman, well then we are truly lost.
In any case, I can’t imagine Jane prattling about Mme Audier, watching her every move. She must not even remember that she exists: you attack your neighbor to mask your own envy, but what could Jane envy her for?
Just to shock her, I want to praise Violette, the prostitute, but I dare not. Confident I share her opinions, she calls on me as her witness. The strength of habit! I am unable to loosen my tongue and speak my mind.
Tonight, I hold a mannequin in my arms the size of Jean Luze. A mannequin so perfect it would appease Messalina’s ardor. [16] I close my eyes, offering my naked body. My imagination rages! The hand stroking mine is his. I am taut as a bow. Gasping for air, I whisper his name. My head roils on the pillow. I am no longer seeing him but another. Who is it? I don’t dare comprehend. Despite my efforts, a feeling of frustration lingers. I come with lassitude, with regret and remorse, as if my body disapproved of this duality.
Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can’t reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cézanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn’t I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can’t define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever.
Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. I have even broken with Annette. Her mediocre taste repels me. I aspire to find some kind of happiness beyond myself. Now I want our fates to be independent of each other. I don’t like this boy who paws her in the evening on the veranda, this Paul Trudor who’s been after her since the ball.
“She’s about to make a bad match,” Félicia confessed to me warily. “Try and speak to her.”
And why should I be against it, personally? He’s the man she needs. He’ll whittle away until her fire dies down. I hear Annette laughing. Her old waterfall of laughter. It’s over, Jean Luze will never be able to turn her head again. She brushes right past him, undulating in her tight skirt, and blows a mouthful of smoke in his face.
“You know,” she says to him, “I can’t make up my mind about your son; he’s so small that I can’t tell whether he’s handsome or ugly.”
Jean Luze laughs. He shakes Paul Trudor’s hand and watches them as they leave, entwined around each other…
I can’t help it, I like his reactions. Even looking at him through others’ eyes, he does not disappoint me. Or maybe I can’t be objective when it comes to him. I know passion blinds, that one lends people and things whatever color one wishes. That’s how one day I got it into my head to water a pretty plant Annette had brought back from Bob Charivi’s, marveling at how it seemed to revive with cool water. I only realized my idiocy when I heard my sister laughing because the plant was in fact artificial.
“No doubt my eyesight is going,” was the excuse I tried to make.
By what miracle had I seen this plant sparkle at the touch of water? Ideas are powerful, mysteriously so. Doesn’t everything, good and bad, have its own smell? I have always compared people to pure or rancid things, depending on what I associate them with. I have to admit that when it comes to Jean Luze the comparisons are more and more flattering Temperaments made of whole cloth displease me. I don’t like the born killer or the long-suffering saint. There is both violence and gentleness in this man, strength and weakness. Could he, frail and pure as he is, appease this swamp of desires that at times reduces me to a sordid little beast?