And my body played out its instinctive games towards their end, while my soul turned away in shame and muttered:
“This is not me. I have no connection with this angry person sitting here on the bench.”
Now that it was absolutely unstoppable, I did what was required and fulfilled my duty as a man, all the while thinking how good it would be the following afternoon in the Bibliothèque nationale, where the formaldehyde-permeated air hints at the eternal and sublime purity of scholarship, and where I would sit enthroned among the sweet-smelling productions of the sixteenth century, immersed in textual problems arising from Montaine’s critical essays, high above every kind of base filth.
As I gazed numbly at her face, asking myself how it could for so long have seemed beautiful to me, I couldn’t suppress another question — one I would have done anything rather than ask a Frenchwoman:
“Why did you let me, if you don’t love me?”
“Pour te faire plaisir,” she said simply and decisively. I had had three and a half months to learn this much about French women — that they could pronounce such a sentence as if it were completely self-explanatory, and not give it a second thought.
Dull of soul, I accompanied Marcelle back to the veranda. It was now perfectly clear to me that, with a bit more courage and the right occasion, I could have got to this point with her long before, and it wouldn’t have taken a Casanova-like daring or her wonderful Day of Judgement clearance sale. The impressive Latin clarity of mind with which she had given herself to me — the way she might have offered me a peanut — had killed every feeling of ecstasy and pleasure. My heart was wan and lustreless as the dawn clouds tearing across the sky, and I was left with only one burning desire — to forget the whole thing, to write the whole business off. Because by now it had become just a business, and Marcelle, the wonderful Marcelle, my beloved, was now just one more Parisienne among all the others whom I did not love.
I do not love coquettes. I can’t help it — I just don’t like them. According to Flaubert this is one of the chief characteristics of the bourgeoisie. But I don’t believe him. I don’t feel free to speak ill of one of the dead lions of literature before he is rehabilitated… but my thoughts run the opposite way. The people who love coquettes are precisely the managers of smaller banks and the fathers of families, because for them the coquette stands for some secret, disturbing, alternative world in whose darkness the atavistic lust of the male for the Mysterious Woman can find a home. But in my view the coquette is no more mysterious than an actress or an eminent ecclesiastical lawyer: all three life forms are akin to my own. Whenever, in those long evenings spent in coffee houses, I have found myself talking with my friends’ girlfriends about the more worrying financial problems in their lives (it’s rather like talking to a civil servant about the differences between mystically graduated levels of staff remuneration), or again when, simply ignoring the ladies’ presence, I have taken up the ongoing debate with my friends about whether or not Jóska Erdélyi is a great poet, I have often thought that if in the course of some naturally occurring process people were divided into two sorts, the coquettes and the intellectuals would both end up on the same side, the side of those who have no faith in God. I love coquettes as my fellow creatures, and sometimes as personal friends, like shadowy younger sisters — but that I don’t like them as women, as hidden secrets, or indeed as enemies, is not a question.
Meanwhile day had broken, with deep colours invading the sky, if rather pallid on people’s faces as they set off shivering towards their beds. By this stage most of us were completely sober, and our mutual farewells contained some embarrassing memories. I shook hands with M. Robinet and whispered in his ear: “You’re a real pimp, old fellow”—which pleased him immensely. I said a few simple words to the elderly Russian Duchess about humility and suffering, and sent my greetings via the English girls to their uncles the majors. I assured the little Scottish girl that ‘my heart was in the Highlands, my heart was (indeed) not there’.
So far, so easy. It was only when I found myself facing the young girl, now standing serenely beside the Highland Scot, that the pain wrenched my guts. The lies I had told, my drunkenness, Marcelle, my bad conscience, everything fell away. I became unusually human as I asked her, in the rising dawn wind:
“Shall I see you again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t be angry with me,” I said, struggling painfully to find the right voice for the occasion without betraying my deep emotion. “I’m willing to make any sacrifice for you. I’ll learn to play bridge, and I won’t go to the Bibliothèque nationale for a whole month.”
“It’s still not possible,” she said sadly.
“Never?”
“Nevermore.”
“But why?”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Where for?”
“Home. Wellington. New Zealand.”
New Zealand!
The stupendous vastness of the planet, the immense oceans dividing its separate worlds, the journey that takes so long it seems to symbolise death, trains that we watch helplessly in our very worst dreams, and the terrible utterance of Ananke, Goddess of Fate, with her voice of brass, all plunged into my soul like the damned in Michelangelo’s paintings. The sense of universal malice that seconds before had been so doggedly asleep was now up on its hind legs, shrieking and dancing with impotent rage, while my neurotic fears stood by, whimpering. Love, like a trapped bird, hurled itself frantically around inside my breast, while pale-fingered Grief dropped tears in my eyes… producing the sort of orchestrated chaos inside me you would might expect if a disorderly adolescent male were left to wander freely in a girls’ hostel, at bathtime.
And there was nothing to be done. As the cosmic void opened out before me I came face to face with the Not and the Never — all that was left of my imaginary paradise of love. I embraced her, for the first and last time; now it would have made no difference had I simply killed her.
And then, at the very last moment, with the locomotive of fate already blowing its whistle, I remembered that none of this was true. I wasn’t embracing her for the first time, and more had happened between our bodies than just the present tearful moment. Every woman’s body, as I said, has a quite different feel in a man’s hand. These subtle differences cannot be approached through words, or at best, only through similes. There are women whose touch is like holding a flower in your hands; others are more like a solid mass that suddenly explodes; others seem to be on fire. There are those who remind you of ham on buttered bread, and others, the vast majority, who evoke nothing at all.
The New Zealand girl was a vision of touch, if I might coin a phrase. She was entirely of a piece with the girl I had kissed in the depth of that night of song. She was the unknown goddess, the dark lady of the sonnet. She, whom, alas, I would never see again.
Now I shall be silent for a while. The great poets convey the most truly significant moments with the fewest words. “And all my pretty ones?” cries Shakespeare’s Macduff, when he learns that, as was the practice of the time, his wife and babes have been murdered.
A little later, I took Marcelle back through the Parc de St Cloud to Ville-d’Avray on the far side, where we all three (including Pilaszanovits) lived in the same boarding house. On the way I observed a bitter silence, but Marcelle rattled on about one of the waiters, from Cigogne, who had accidentally drunk some petrol instead of an aperitif, after which the poor fellow had to sound a horn if anyone crossed the road in front of him.