Pierre placed a fur-trimmed hat on his wife’s head, wrapped her up in an ocelot fur coat that he had just bought her and that made her look like a maenad (a maenad with her entire head), and whisked her outside.
“Fancy not knowing how to go downstairs on the banister at your age, Hedwige! What, not even on your stomach?”
He lifted her up, making her jump from one landing to another. Hedwige deliberately pressed herself heavily against him. She admired him for always being out in the open, free, daring, tall and quick.
“When I was little, I learnt a La Fontaine fable,” she said. “An eagle that was carrying a tortoise through the air… I remember it very welclass="underline" the tortoise falls and is about to smash into someone’s skull which the eagle, from up above, took for a pebble.”
“Yes, the skull was that of Aeschylus if I remember correctly. Having a tortoise land on your head! Yet another who would have been killed by slowness,” Pierre sighed.
He hugged Hedwige passionately, much more tightly than was necessary. But Hedwige did not notice, she thought that without him she would fall. In the arms of her husband, it seemed to her that she was flying as in dreams. As she went down the steps, at that very moment, she was dreaming… The eagle in the fable was Pierre; he was taking her, in his talons, on a long hunting trip; she was a poor, bleeding creature beneath his wingspan; he, in a high, audacious, sustained flight, was drawing spirals above the earth, similar to the curves of the labyrinth.
Through the windows of the stairwell, she could see the ground very far away in the distance and the pavement, very far below. She snuggled against him in joyful silence, anticipating some scratches from his royal bird’s claws; she was happy. All she lacked was an injury. Once more the bloody image returned, and remained with her until the foot of the stairs.
CHAPTER XV
THE MAN IN A HURRY had decided to hurry up at last. He would have Hedwige that very night. For almost six weeks he had been deferring the moment. It was over. He would descend onto that fertile plain. He would talk as a prince does; he would help himself to the harvest; he would control, with the full span of his domination, with all the power of his possession, that huge treasure that was Hedwige herself.
Pierre had chosen his moment, chosen it well. The timing was not merely lawful, but legitimate. Hedwige was not only contracted, but bound to him; she appeared loving and willing. She would certainly give of herself entirely: an essential condition of a great friendship, without which marriage is a bedroom as easy of access as prostitution, or a society — a polite society — game.
Pierre was looking forward to this evening, barely a few hours away.
“I’m going to take Hedwige to a restaurant, to a nice restaurant, like the last time. (I hope it will be better than the first time.) Afterwards, we shall go to the theatre. After our unfortunate experience at the cinema, we must give the theatre a chance. There must be some young playwrights who write lively dialogue… Let’s see, what’s showing?… Michel Strogoff… Le Chapeau de paille d’Italie… Tosca… Le Bossu… Les Burgraves… Paris is certainly the centre of a great dramatic renaissance! Ah, here’s something better: La Planche à plonger, at the Mathurins. There must be some activity there. ‘Madly energetic’, say the adverts.”
By seven o’clock, Hedwige had not returned from Saint-Germain.
“She’s not used to my car, let’s hope she hasn’t had an accident. Why do women always confuse the time of departure with the time of arrival? They obey some invisible clock; the proof is that they are consistently late; they keep to psychological time and not to the Observatoire time, that time that comes grating out of the radio, as if through a reed pipe.”
Pierre lit cigarettes, one after the other (he sometimes lit several at the same time).
“In actual fact, there are three types of time: exterior time, interior time and organic time, which is that of our body busy getting older, our body that knows, with the dreadful precision of the unconscious, how many heartbeats it has left before the grave. I still have black hair and flexible arteries, but underneath my black hair there must be an impatient white hair that knows that the hour it is to appear will chime.”
Pierre looked out of the window.
“Time likes to play a coconut shy game with us,” he thought. “It bombards us every second; when we are kids, we recover immediately; then, less and less quickly; the spring wears out, we stagger about more and more until the day that we tumble over for good and when, like an old worn-out doll, we leave an empty space between the nurse and the soldier. Ever since Metchnikoff, doctors have been bending over the human body trying to discover the secret of its longevity: why should a pigeon, which has the same cell structure as a crow, live twenty times less? If time is the same for all organisms, why do we heal at different speeds? If I heal in five days and Hedwige in two, won’t we find it difficult to adjust our bodies to the same speed? The years she lives will actually be fifteen or sixteen months long; whereas the years I live shall be of eight or nine months. Therefore Hedwige, having promised to be back by seven o’clock, is not late; even though it’s eight o’clock.”
She arrived enveloped in a large cape belonging to Angélique. Having set off in violet, she came back in grey. Even in the midst of grieving, she dressed up.
“I have mitigating circumstances…” she began.
“Get dressed quickly, we’re dining at the cabaret and we’re going to the theatre.”
“Will you stay until the end?”
“I promise.”
“I’m already dressed,” said Hedwige. “Just a little powder, but… why are you making your bed already?”
“Precisely because I intend staying until the end of the show.”
While she was powdering herself, Pierre brought in the chair on which he would lay his clothes that evening when he got back, filled the glass from which he would drink water, laid out the nightshirt he would put on, and took out the suit he would wear next day from the cupboard.
“You’re exaggerating,” said Hedwige affectionately, sadly.
When Pierre thought about the future in her presence, it was nothing much more than a state of mind, but when he lived it, dashing around with orchestrated movements, it induced a manic automatism in him that was really rather tiresome. He opened one drawer, closed the other with his foot, put on a glove with his teeth so that he didn’t have to lay down the pen he was using to make notes.
“You need ten hands,” she said.
“Get a move on, instead of making fun of me. We’re in a hurry…”
“The house is not on fire.”
On his hands and knees, Pierre was now spreading out the foam-rubber mat upon which he would do his exercises when he woke up. He went to look for his dressing gown. He sharpened his razor, doing so himself because he worried overly about the servants delaying everything.
“I’m ready.”
Hedwige went to her bedroom, sat down at her dressing table and hastily set out a few veils on a pale background so that she could make her choice.
“From the moment a woman says she is ready,” thought Pierre, “a great deal of time elapses before she leaves the house, and even when she has left, there is the ‘How silly of me, I almost forgot…’ that causes her to go back inside.”
“I was trying to move too quickly,” said Hedwige. “I wanted to please you. One of the buttons of my sleeve has got caught in the netting of the veil. Pierre, don’t get impatient. I can’t see what I’m doing. Be kind and untangle it for me. It won’t come out.”