So then: I left my bedroom, ready for action, even if I felt totally at a loss. I remember taking my watch out in the passage, as I tiptoed along, and saying like Stendhal’s Soreclass="underline" “This woman must be mine in the next three minutes.”
I came to a halt in front of her door, and while I listened I put my hand on the key that was in the key-hole. It was on the outside. She’d left it there. So, the door was open. All I had to do was turn the key and walk in. I heard a soft sound inside. The moment was ripe. A small push …
I went so far as to wrap my fingers round the key. Perhaps I even made the effort to turn it. Perhaps I just thought I did. My heart thudded. My wide-open eyes almost touched the wood as a thousand things flashed through my head. I’d been upset by what she said about her husband and it was paralyzing me. The fact I was standing there for exactly the same reasons anyone else might have stood there stopped me in my tracks. I was tortured by vanity. Only fear of acting the fool led me on. However, unfortunately, on that occasion, it wasn’t strong enough to induce a state of semi-consciousness and drive me on. I didn’t turn the key. I looked at my watch. I heard her getting into bed. Five minutes passed. I took my hand away from the keyhole and wiped my forehead. Then returned to my bedroom with a parched mouth.
The following morning we met in the hotel restaurant. When I appeared, I thought she gave me look of surprise.
“Did you sleep well?” she asked with a smile.
“Very well, and how about yourself?”
“I slept very little. I wrote a letter to my husband.”
“A long one?”
“A very long one.”
“A love letter?”
“A bit of everything.”
“Are you happy? Have you seen how wonderful the weather is?”
“Very.”
“If only we could have this weather in Paris!”
We caught the local train to Le Dorat at two o’clock. We were alone in the compartment. Leaning back on my shoulder, smoking her scented cigarettes, she recounted her life story. I don’t remember the detail. It was a warm, bright, beautiful day. I listened to her in a state of wonder. I alighted at one station and made a bouquet with roses that were growing on a border and gave it to her. The whole journey was enchanting. When she laughed, I laughed. When she told me of her sorrows, my eyes moistened — genuinely.
I have a very vague memory of Le Dorat. When we reached the town, we went our different ways. She said she had two hour’s business at the notary’s. She mentioned a restaurant on a square that I have forgotten. We agreed we’d meet at seven for supper. I wandered through the town at random. I’d lost my taste for the peace and tranquility of the countryside and felt overjoyed. The fresh air stung my face. The town seemed almost dead. I skirted round the church, walked down three or four deserted streets, then stopped to breathe in the smell of the hayricks, of lucerne, and hay in the stables. A dark, gloomy building stood outside the town: it was an abandoned monastery. A low, long wall enclosed a meadow with short grass behind the monastery. Ten or twelve mares, horses, and colts were grazing there. The colts were jumping, running, and pointing their noses at the sky and then cavorting on the ground. One mare had a bell around her neck that rang sweetly. Glistening dark green giant chestnut trees towered over the far end of the meadow. I leaned on the wall and contemplated the enclosure for a long time, amazed by the beauty of the land I seemed to be rediscovering and by the ineffable sounds of twilight.
The restaurant was a real find. I was so hungry! We ate an omelet, chicken legs, and a slice of ripe Brie. We downed a bottle of Burgundy — the best in the world. Then we drank the restaurant’s own cognac, with chasers.
A poorly lit train that took us back to Limoges. The movement of our carriage was lulling us to sleep. For one last time she placed her head on my chest.
“This is really nice …” she said, her eyes half-closed.
“Are you sleepy?”
“I feel really wonderful …”
A moment later I could hear her breathing deeply and see her chest swelling like the belly of a bird. She had dozed off.
We had to dash out of the waiting room in Limoges. The Paris train had just arrived.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her by the door. “I didn’t find the time to ask you your name …”
“Don’t worry. Just forget me.”
“Why?”
“We’ve spent a pleasant day together. What else do you want?”
“You’re selfish …”
“Why try to complicate life? Do you really think it’s worth it?”
“Won’t we see each other ever again?”
“Who can know?”
“Bon voyage.”
“You too …”
I stayed in love with that woman for over a year. Then, everything gradually faded and her memory disappeared in the gray mists of weeks, months, and years.
A Case Study
It must be some fifteen years since I lost touch with my friend, Romaní, I mean my writer friend Romaní, who once had quite a reputation in Barcelona, a reputation that has been completely lost today. But lo and behold I discovered not long ago that he was a consul living far from the high life in a town in a South American republic. I wrote to him recalling our old friendship and the hours we spent in Paris, dreaming, chatting, being foreign correspondents, and engaging in other notional employment. I even asked him to tell me about his wife, the divine Olga Johansen of my youth, and her love for Romaní that I had the pleasure of witnessing in that now remote era. Romaní’s reply was both lengthy and disturbing. Here you have it:
“My dear, long-forgotten friend, I received your kind letter. I thank you for your good wishes and invitation to tell you about aspects of my life. On various occasions I’ve felt tempted to commit to paper the ins and outs of my dreadful dramas if only to clear my own mind. I’ve tried a hundred and one times and never succeeded. I don’t know if this fresh attempt will be more fortunate. I’m not optimistic. You should know from the outset that my marriage to Olga Johansen lasted barely three months; we’ve not seen each other for fourteen years and I don’t know where she is now.
I was thirty when I first met Olga. By then the whole panoply of feelings and inhibitions, vanity and fear, deceit and truth that make up what is called character had crystallized into a definitive shape. I was a man of unmistakable, clearly delineated traits. Previous years had nurtured this process of personal development, and one could say that everything had conspired over time to make me a man who was allergic to social life, without a scrap of bonhomie.
By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, first constantly, then sporadically, I began to experience the pressurized though highly fragile nature of family life in our country.
My father was a trader. He was totally obsessed with making money. The only thing that really made him happy — the one and only thing! — was buying and selling. Speculation, in a word. He himself would say that nothing else existed in the world worth wasting his time on. As he was investing in turbulent times — the years of the First World War — he was affected by the considerable ups and downs in the situation. When things were wonderful, he became eloquent, chatty, was cocksure as a rooster on a haystack and ingratiatingly pleasant. Money flowed through our home like water, and we spent with never a thought for tomorrow. It was obnoxious.