Actually, Magdalena cannot be evicted — not just like that. She has no family, and nowhere to go. Her continued existence is seen by the hospital as a bit of a swindle. They accepted her in the first place only because she was expected to die quite soon, releasing the bed.
“Your broken nose is a mistake,” she said to me the other day.
My face was damaged in the same wartime accident that is supposed to give me priority seating rights in public transport. “It lends you an air of desperate nerve, as if a Malraux hero had wandered into a modern novel and been tossed out on his face.”
Now, this was hard on a man who had got up earlier than usual and bought a selection of magazines for Magdalena before descending to the suburban line, with its flat, worrying light. A man who had just turned sixty-five. Whose new bridge made him lisp. She talks the way she talked in the old days, in her apartment with the big windows and the sweeping view across the Seine. She used to wear white, and sit on a white sofa. There were patches of red in the room — her long fingernails and her lipstick, and the Legion of Honour on some admirer’s lapel. She had two small, funny dogs whose eyes glowed red in the dusk.
“I heard you speaking just the other day,” she went on. “You were most interesting about the way Gide always made the rounds of the bookstores to see how his work was selling. Actually, I think I told you that story.”
“It couldn’t have been just the other day,” I said. “It sounds like a radio program I had in the nineteen-fifties.”
“It couldn’t have been you, come to think of it,” she said. “The man lisped. I said to myself, ‘It might be Édouard.’ ”
Her foreign way of speaking enchanted me when I was young. Now it sharpens my temper. Fifty years in France and she still cannot pronounce my name, “Édouard,” without putting the stress on the wrong syllable and rolling the “r.” “When you come to an ‘r,’ “ I have told her, “keep your tongue behind your lower front teeth.”
“It won’t stay,” she says. “It curls up. I am sorry.” As if she cared. She will accept any amount of petulance shown by me, because she thinks she owes me tolerance: she sees me as youthful, boyish, to be teased and humoured. She believes we have a long, unhampered life before us, and she expects to occupy it as my wife and widow-to-be. To that end, she has managed to outlive my second wife, and she may well survive me, even though I am fourteen years younger than she is and still on my feet.
Magdalena’s Catholic legend is that she was converted after hearing Jacques Maritain explain Neo-Thomism at a tea party. Since then, she has never stopped heaping metaphysical rules about virtue on top of atavistic arguments concerning right and wrong. The result is a moral rock pile, ready to slide. Only God himself could stand up to the avalanche, but in her private arrangements he is behind her, egging her on. I had to wait until a law was passed that allowed divorce on the ground of separation before I was free to marry again. I waited a long time. In the meantime, Magdalena was writing letters to the Pope, cheering his stand on marriage and urging him to hold firm. She can choose among three or four different languages, her choice depending on where her dreams may have taken her during the night. She used to travel by train to Budapest and Prague wearing white linen. She had sleek, fair hair, and wore a diamond hair clip behind one ear. Now no one goes to those places, and the slim linen suits are crumpled in trunks. Her mind is clear, but she says absurd things. “I never saw her,” she said about Juliette, my second wife. “Was she anything like me?”
“You did see her. We had lunch, the three of us.”
“Show me her picture. It might bring back the occasion.”
“No.”
They met, once, on the first Sunday of September, 1954 — a hot day of quivering horizons and wasps hitting the windshield. I had a new Renault — a model with a reputation for rolling over and lying with its wheels in the air. I drove, I think, grimly. Magdalena was beside me, in a nimbus of some scent — jasmine, or gardenia — that made me think of the opulent, profiteering side of wars. Juliette sat behind, a road map on her knee, her finger on the western outskirts of Fontainebleau. Her dark hair was pulled back tight and tied at the nape of her neck with a dark-blue grosgrain ribbon. It is safe to say that she smelled of soap and lemons.
We were taking Magdalena out to lunch. It was Juliette’s idea. Somewhere between raspberries-and-cream and coffee, I was supposed to ask for a divorce — worse, to coax from Magdalena the promise of collusion in obtaining one. So far, she had resisted any mention of the subject and for ten years had refused to see me. Juliette and I had been living together since the end of the war. She was thirty now, and tired of waiting. We were turning into one of those uneasy, shadowy couples, perpetually waiting for a third person to die or divorce. I was afraid of losing her. That summer, she had travelled without me to America (so much farther from Europe then than it is today), and she had come back with a different colouration to her manner, a glaze of independence, as though she had been exposed to a new kind of sun.
I remember how she stared at Magdalena with gentle astonishment, as if Magdalena were a glossy illustration that could not look back. Magdalena had on a pale dress of some soft, floating stuff, and a pillbox hat tied on with a white veil, and long white gloves. I saw her through Juliette’s eyes, and I thought what Juliette must be thinking: Where does Magdalena think we’re taking her? To a wedding? Handing her into the front seat, I had shut the door on her skirt. I wondered if she had turned into one of the limp, pliant women whose clothes forever catch.
It was Juliette’s custom to furnish social emptiness with some rattling anecdote about her own activities. Guests were often grateful. Without having to cast far, they could bring up a narrative of their own, and the result was close to real conversation. Juliette spoke of her recent trip. She said she was wearing an American dress made of a material called cotton seersucker. It washed like a duster and needed next to no ironing.
For answer, she received a side view of Magdalena’s hat and a blue eye shadowed with paler blue. Magdalena was not looking but listening, savouring at close quarters the inflections of the French Protestant gentry. She knew she was privileged. As a rule, they speak only to one another. Clamped to gearshift and wheel, I was absolved of the need to comment. My broken profile had foxed Magdalena at first. She had even taken me for an impostor. But then the remembered face of a younger man slid over the fraud and possessed him.
Juliette had combed through the Guide Michelin and selected a restaurant with a wide terrace and white umbrellas, set among trees. At some of the tables there were American officers, in uniform, with their families — this is to show how long ago it was. Juliette adjusted our umbrella so that every inch of Magdalena was in shade. She took it for granted that my wife belonged to a generation sworn to paleness. From where I was sitting, I could see the interior of the restaurant. It looked cool and dim, I thought, and might have been better suited to the soft-footed conversation to come.
I adjusted my reading glasses, which Magdalena had never seen, and stared at a long handwritten menu. Magdalena made no move to examine hers. She had all her life let men decide. Finally, Juliette wondered if our guest might not like to start with asparagus. I was afraid the asparagus would be canned. Well, then, said Juliette, what about melon. On a hot day, something cool followed by cold salmon. She broke off. I started to remove my glasses, but Juliette reminded me about wine.