On each of the seven floors, the lift had brought back seven husbands to their seven wives, and now it was over. There was no longer the same noise in the building any more. Occasionally, a water pipe vibrated due to air pressure. The concierge had brought up the post. The maids had taken the dogs down to the pavement. Nothing more would happen until the distant hour when the milkman and the dustbins arrived. There would just be Pierre consulting his Archaeology. Through the wisps of smoke from all the cigarettes consumed, Pierre caught sight of his bed, the bed of a solitary man. This reminded him of his fiery, unpredictable life as a bachelor when he only went out when love summoned him. Out of habit, he got into bed, with nothing else to look at apart from the ceiling, which showed patches of damp. Above the ceiling was the terrace, with the summer garden. Every time they watered the flower beds in this garden, the water ran through the cement and also watered the furniture in his bedroom. So much for modern comfort.
“Hedwige must be having great fun right now with her mother and her sisters. This boarding-school atmosphere is ridiculous. They whisper secrets to each other from one bed to the other. What can they be talking about? What secrets? Are they at my expense? No, Hedwige probably isn’t having great fun: for her to leave me alone here, it must be something important. Let’s see: could I have taken marriage too seriously? I don’t believe in penning people in, of course, but that doesn’t mean to say I condone pick-pocketing when it’s a matter of bringing two people together. I told myself marriage was not a game, but a difficult and beautiful task to accomplish. Perhaps it’s not difficult; perhaps I made it so by imagining it to be so.”
Pierre waited a moment to fall asleep; the brass handles of the chest of drawers gleamed softly, the telephone stood outlined in black against the white wall as usual. The wickerwork pattern on the chair was so regular that merely looking at the cane latticework induced a drowsiness that made sleep very imminent. A slight nervous tremor kept Pierre on that gentle slope. He picked up his Beuchat: “The plateau of Bogota was the scene of an open struggle among the caciques. At the time when Belalcazar was exploring Columbia…” He switched off the light. Then the loneliness grew until it became intolerable. In the darkness, the suspension of time became appalling. Hedwige’s absence took on a huge importance.
“She’s had enough of me, it’s obvious. How was I not aware of it earlier?”
And Pierre, hurling his book away (he never put books down, he threw them across the room), started to delve into the problem once more.
“For after all, since I can’t be accused of hurrying or pestering Hedwige, since I wooed her stealthily… docilely, since I caused her no shock, since I approached her at the same pace she approached me and since nothing could have come between us given our perfect understanding, then it’s because I made a mistake in not hurrying her. Perhaps she was expecting to be taken straightforwardly and immediately; girls these days know very well what awaits them and that it’s not very pleasant the first time, and that it becomes more agreeable later on. It is we who persist in believing, through our foolishness, vanity and sadism, that we are going to hold in our arms shivering, terrified virgins who will get all worked up over this business.
“I must have been rather ridiculous and seemed fairly silly with my strategy of sitting there like a patient tom, night after night, in front of his pussycat! She thought me impotent, of that there can be no doubt. And my self-control must have won her over, I mean lost her.”
Pierre switched on the light again. He saw his shadow on the walclass="underline" it was a dispossessed, excommunicated shadow, a shadow embarrassed to be in the light, a shadow that would have preferred the shade. An unpleasant memory and one he always avoided came back to him and would not go away.
“And then… and then there was my wedding night.”
Pierre paused: he had smoked so much, and the tobacco was so hot that his tongue was burning. He searched in vain for a carafe of water; it irritated him to have to get up and see that lonely shadow on the white walclass="underline" he drank water that tasted like burnt rubber straight from his hot-water bottle. The bad memory came back to plague him: he recalled his failed evening a fortnight ago, the absurd Alavoine play, the hurried return home before the end of the last act, the sudden, premeditated and certainly clumsy way he had dived into Hedwige’s bed.
“Hedwige resisted me, why? To begin with, she was willing, no doubt about that; she wanted and was eager to know me. And I, I… well, I hesitated for ages. I was in awe of her; through her nakedness, I could see her fully dressed, proud, demure and beautiful, too beautiful.
“So I feared the worst and plunged into the water so as not to be left on the shore for good. She tensed up violently, recalcitrant, stubborn, frigid.”
He tossed and turned. Even normally, lying in a horizontal position infuriated and exhausted him; he only felt at ease when he was standing up; as soon as he lay down, unlike all other men, he could feel the weight of his body, his head heavier than a paving stone, his back sinking into the blanket, his pelvis and even his heels which hurt when they came into contact with the mattress. And he longed for the morning, to be getting up, to be upright, for the earth to be like a springboard on which he would at last regain the lightness that was his strength. He had chosen a bed that was so wide in order that he could do the scissors, possibly a cartwheel, and even pretend to himself that he was running, that he was swimming; but at the slightest nightmare he once again felt trapped in his sheets and dreamt that he was being thrown into some dark Bosphorus, sewn into a sack and powerless.
Through tossing and turning in his bed, Pierre has allowed the cold, satin bedspread to slip onto the floor; he is lying on frozen peaks, his sheets eventually fall off too, goodness knows where.
“I plunged into her as if she were some difficult obstacle, something forbidden that infuriated me; something that contradicted everything that I had originally loved and found passionate and sensitive about her. I can see her that evening in her bed, clad in white as though in mourning…
“I was insistent, I was aware of my clumsiness, but my overexcitement got the better of me. This Lucretia-like resistance infuriated me. I behaved like a hustling bully. I rushed things at the end… and what did I achieve? Total disharmony.”
And Pierre could still see his solitary, hasty self lying beside this tight-lipped woman looking as beautiful as she would in death.
“And there I was thinking I could create a work of art with my own hands: a fine outcome!”
Pierre fell back heavily on his pillow.
“Yet God is my witness that in all of this I acted sincerely and in good faith! I thought only of her! I should have been like all men and thought only of myself; you can’t save other people without saving yourself first. Sincere in my embarrassment, in my determination to act slowly, in my zealousness to keep still… then suddenly shooting off in one direction and behaving with a brutality that was unacceptable, I must certainly have struck her as loathsome, distorted and ridiculous.
“Conclusion: here I am this evening, victorious, holding my ground, but holding it alone.”
CHAPTER XVII
PIERRE WOKE UP in the morning feeling refreshed, rested and calmer; he felt ashamed of his nocturnal alarms. Would he not have done better just to have accepted Fromentine’s simple explanation: Hedwige was tired and it was past the time to return home, that was all…