All alone, René flexed his muscles. Oh, yes, less ugly, less skinny, less. .
On the horizon, the tiny dot of a car was growing larger. Suddenly there it was, stopped in front of René, even more luxurious than the one E. Blaye had driven out to pick up Anthony Mour.
René opened the trunk, gaily tossed his shameful suitcase inside.
He sat down in the front seat: as the car silently pulled away, he finally found the courage to turn his head and see who was holding the wheel.
And a horrified cry rose to his lips, and he pressed them violently together. Nothing escaped but a moan, a submissive whimper of dread and regret. her breath.
BRULARD'S DAY
So Brulard, Eve Brulard, slipped out of the Hotel Bellerive at the earliest possible hour, as if she knew with precision and certainty which way to set off.
She didn’t. So utterly didn’t she know that her right leg seemed intent on opposing her left leg’s decision to head toward the lake, and she stood walking in place for a few seconds before the veranda, shocked by the damp cold but still too stiff and sleepy to bother turning up the collar of her light jacket, and also vaguely telling herself, scarcely emerged from a dream: first thing this morning, if the money has come, I’ll go buy a coat. Then it occurred to her that any step she took to feel a tiny bit less cold in her jacket, turning up the collar or tugging down the sleeves, would misleadingly assure the forces guiding her luck that this little jacket was perfectly sufficient — and that, consequently, there was no need for the money. Better to act as though she didn’t even have a jacket to protect her.
It was so much colder here than where Brulard had come from.
It’s so much colder, she thought, and she gave a clenched little smile to the night clerk she could see through the glass door, preparing to make way for his daytime colleague, whose skeptical, scrutinizing gaze she studiously avoided whenever she passed by the front desk, her head high. From the start, she’d sensed that he thought her neither radiant nor carefree, despite all her efforts to seem just that. And so she’d taken to leaving her room at daybreak, heaving herself out of bed with difficulty and a dazed misery that filled her entire ill-rested body, so that she could breezily appear before the night clerk and exchange a few words on the color of the lake and the fog, painfully aware of the hurried, imprecise work she’d done on her face with foundation, tinted powder, and a shimmering lipstick up in her room, but hoping the night clerk would once again fail to see that she was still wearing the same black clothes as before, now a little shiny, and that her face, aspiring to a certain impersonal, indisputable harmoniousness with the help of the makeup, was in fact rumpled by an all-consuming exhaustion.
And so what if he did? Brulard asked herself out on the icy sidewalk, so what if the receptionist did notice that. . that what? She didn’t want to seem disreputable. She wanted people to think well of the woman she was, she wanted people to think her prosperous enough to pay for a few nights in a moderately luxurious hotel without troubling herself over it, she wanted to seem unique, casual, and proud. No one here had recognized Brulard. Neither the day clerk’s bored dubiousness nor the night clerk’s placid indifference suggested that they found Brulard’s face in any way familiar.
She told herself none of that mattered to her. Standing between the veranda and the road, shivering but, numbed as she was by fatigue, by a fatigue verging on stupor, not entirely aware that it really was her feeling cold, and not a cardboard cutout of her set up outside the hotel to publicize an exclusive engagement (but never had her unassuming fame propelled her to any such level of visibility, and now it never would), she limply decided to head for the lake. She stamped the ground to warm her feet, shod in brown tassel loafers. That she’d been reduced to wearing such shoes tormented and astonished her at the same time.
She sensed a presence above her, and, raising her eyes to the window of her second-floor room, she found Eve Brulard staring down at her with concern and benevolence, her elbows on the sill. The Eve Brulard at the window was at most twenty years old. What did she have to be concerned about? Irritated and stern, Brulard hissed through her teeth, tss tss, and, with a little cry of terror or derision, a strident plaint that drilled into Brulard’s eardrums, the young Eve Brulard evaporated into the fog that had rolled in from the lake. Thank goodness, she thought, no one but her ever heard the blood-curdling cries emitted by this shrieking snakewoman, who nevertheless always seemed to appear in a context of steadfast understanding and solicitude. Why, then, this look of concern on Eve’s youthful face, since Brulard had, in spite of everything, more reasons to rejoice than to worry? And was it not increasingly wearying to find the young woman she’d once been now showing up in all manner of circumstances and anywhere at all, anytime, never particularly wished for by Brulard, who never received from her any clear revelation on any subject whatever, who couldn’t even escape her by closing her eyes, who was forced to accept this friend’s sporadic company as one mutely endures a mysterious threat, as one passively accepts a message of regrets, of good wishes, of condolence? Brulard wished it would stop. Some days she encountered that figure so often that she forgot that her own face had changed, and, happening onto a mirror, momentarily wondered: who is that no-longer-very-young woman, and what’s she doing in my light?
She circled around the hotel and immediately found herself on the lakeshore. The water was gray that morning, and a thick fog hid the houses on the other side, giving Brulard, numb with fatigue, the disturbing feeling of an endless dawn, a suspended daybreak that would never stop spreading its cottony mists over a leaden lake for the sole purpose of wearing down her vital forces.
Because it was still far too early to seek some sort of escape. Where was there to go, what to do? Not even the cafés were open at this hour. As for the bank, the moment when Brulard could push open the double glazed doors, forcing herself to abandon all hope and pasting a stern, incensed look on her face, that moment still seemed so remote that she refused even to think about it, fearing her thoughts’ dizzying plunge into boredom, and the memory of all the boredom past, and all the wasted hours.
Nevertheless, she had more reasons to rejoice than to. . But how simply to get through these few days of solitude by the lake, Brulard couldn’t imagine.
She walked slowly, feeling the tassels on her shoes jump against the fine leather. Those shoes were an innocent presage of some subtly morbid change in her way of seeing things, for, in all her sometimes tangled and disappointing life, would she ever, at any time, have bought loafers of her own volition? Before last Saturday, when, alighting from the train, she saw lingering patches of muddy snow on the platform, realized she couldn’t stay here with only sandals to wear, entered the first shoe store she came to, and picked out these medium-heel slip-ons, before that April Saturday when she had, in a sense, fled her own house (as Brulard said to herself, not that she’d actually had to flee, not that anyone would have tried to hold her back or even thought of doing so, much less believed holding her back to be possible or desirable), before that Saturday her violent hatred of such shoes, so unmistakably designed for comfort, ease of mobility, and charitable deeds, was like a reflexive surge of free will in the teeth of the dictates of respectable taste. A Catholic lady’s shoes, thought Brulard, bewildered that she’d found it necessary, as punishment for deserting Lulu, to disguise herself in this way. But maybe that’s not what it was. Maybe she herself was becoming. .
Brulard felt the mountain behind her, watching. Still invisible, cloud-draped, the mountain sloped down to the lake. No matter which way she turned, Brulard felt the mountain nearby, and she sensed that this austere presence was only one of the many incarnations chosen by her mother, dead not long before, to weigh on Brulard’s conscience. But, oh, being watched didn’t scare her. She was on her way, resolutely, toward a new happiness.