A few yards lay between me and the door. All I had to do was walk straight ahead on the cleared ground, uncluttered now by any pail, wheelbarrow, or basket.
Suddenly my gaze fell on the walls whose thickness I could see in the embrasures, on the objects made of wood and iron, on the bench, the shovel, the stones of the well and, for a second, on the chickens moving about at my feet. A clear voice rose from all that. I did not understand the meaning of what it was saying. My ears buzzed. I stiffened. One by one my calm, my strength, my will abandoned me. A groan escaped my throat. Because of the stables nearby, and a dog sleeping on the warm sand, it drew no attention.
I took another step. I waited, my body bathed in sweat, my chest heavy. As in a dream, I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt as though I had collapsed, that I was lying on the ground, that my feet were as close to the sky as my head.
I could not bear anymore. Even if I had continued moving forward, I would not have seen the door, I would have crashed into a wall. I was incapable of going any farther. I took a step backwards, without taking my eyes off the house. My breath returned to normal. Relief flooded my body. The chickens, more active now, pecked. The ground, in the shade, was slowly cooling off. A bird tried to carry off a wisp of straw. A sudden calm fell over the garden, the courtyard, the house, as if all I had to do was move away for the calm to return.
Slowly I reached the road. My dusty shoes had been wiped clean by the grass. I was coming back to life. Without turning around, I headed toward the village. The sun was setting behind me. It stayed with my parents’ house. My long shadow preceded me. I spared it from colliding with the trees, the piles of stones. I was calm. I tried not to think.
On the hill, when I reached the spot where the house had appeared to me when I arrived, I turned around.
The house rose between the two trees already dark against the blue sky. One window was closed. A single pane flashed. The day was coming to an end in the same peacefulness as the previous day. I felt guilty for having almost disturbed it.
A puff of warm air that the insects followed enveloped me. I looked one last time at the countryside that had not changed, that surrounded the house I was leaving forever, and I went on my way.
IS IT A LIE?
When the clock struck ten, Monsieur Marjanne began to worry. For the third time, he called the maid.
“Irene, madame didn’t tell you anything?”
“Honestly, no, monsieur!”
“Did you see her go out? How was she dressed? Did she have her suede purse?”
Monsieur Marjanne had noticed that whenever she went to a friend’s house or to the theater, his wife preferred her suede purse to any of the others.
“I didn’t see madame go out.”
Once alone, Robert Marjanne paced in the living room for a few minutes, then went into his wife’s bedroom. Everything was locked. He had never managed to get her to leave the drawers unlocked when she went out. “I don’t need the servants reading the letters you used to write to me. That’s nobody’s business,” she would respond whenever he said “What an odd habit you have of locking everything up like this!” It was useless for him to point out that Irene did not know how to read. The drawers he could open contained only insignificant things. He remained for a moment in the room, looking for something abnormal, then, returning to the living room, sat down in an armchair.
Robert Marjanne was a short, very well-proportioned man. Had he been stooped or deformed, he would have been ugly and his intelligence would perhaps have seemed surprising, whereas short and well built, he was oversensitive, and his misanthropy was such that it verged on neurasthenia. When asked his age, he answered like those people who pretend not to know where they are in their lives: “I was born in ’64. You do the math!” But he did not leave them time to obey this injunction, turning the conversation to other subjects. The only child of rich storekeepers, he had grown up surrounded by a great deal of care and attention so that once he had come of age, he had only a vague idea of life in general; until late middle age he had dreamed—and he kept this dream as hidden as a teenager might keep his knowledge of lovemaking—of a woman who would be an artist of some kind, of traveling, of the high life.
When he turned fifty, he had an abrupt change of heart. His parents had died. His commercial enterprises were running on their own steam. He wanted to live. As if audacity had come with age, he decided to move toward—but in his own way, that is, very slowly—what seemed to be his ideal. He had countless moments of leisure. It was during one such moment that he met a young woman, Claire Paoli, the daughter of an engineer. She was so beautiful that soon he confused her in his mind with the woman he had dreamed of marrying his whole life.
Some years earlier, Claire had left her family to be with a young man who had just finished medical school, but who did not have enough money to open his own practice. They had lived together for three years on rue Gay-Lussac using the money from a few private lessons he gave to young boys who always resided on the opposite side of Paris. Then they separated, and Monsieur Paoli had taken his daughter back solely, it seemed, to heap criticism on her day after day. So when Monsieur Marjanne offered to marry her, she accepted immediately.
From that moment on, Robert Marjanne lived as if in a dream. He couldn’t do enough to make his wife happy. He was attentive to her every need. Not like a man in his twilight years who uses all his past experience in order to continue to please, but like a man who had wasted his youth and had never been attentive to anyone before.
And Claire became attached to him. Every day, she cheered him up with little jokes, gave him serious advice that she did not believe and that would change a few hours later. Due to her poor treatment by her parents and the medical student, she found her husband’s thoughtfulness charming and no amount of pride could lead her to reject it. Nonetheless, she intended to retain a degree of independence. She had demanded to have her own bedroom. She always refused to give the slightest details about her schedule for the day. Once lunch was finished, she would go out and not reappear until dinnertime.
* * *
That evening, however, for the first time, Monsieur Marjanne waited for her in vain. He continually went to the window in the hope of seeing her step out of a taxi in front of the house. A few times he had even gone out to be at her side more quickly when she arrived. Then, suddenly, fearing she had come in without his seeing her, he climbed back up hurriedly and found himself in the empty apartment in front of the table, covered in a frosty white tablecloth, that had been set for dinner. Slowly time passed. The clock chimed ten, and Claire had still not come home.
After letting his mind wander for several minutes, Robert Marjanne got up again. For an instant he remained motionless. What could he do? Pace back and forth, sit down again, go out walking in front of the house once more, lean out the window? But how would any of that make his wife appear more quickly? He was in the most painful state of anxiety, the state in which, because the anxiety has lasted for so long, the weary mind seeks explanations, begins to try to reason, and, because there is nothing to be done, ends up becoming annoyed with itself.
“I’m just too tense,” he thought. “It’s ridiculous to get in such a state. She has been delayed. Why always look on the dark side? Everything seems complicated, but I’m sure it’s very simple. Naturally, because I am by myself, I have come up with all the conjectures one can come up with. By myself, the truth escapes me. Right now, I have no more grounds for thinking the worst than thinking the best. She was delayed. That’s undeniable. Everything else is just my imagination. Still, she could have found a minute to phone me.”