The Age of Reason Page 5

  ‘You’re tickling me.’

  They kissed. A moment passed, Lola took Boris’s hand and laid it on her body, against the tuft of reddish hair: she always had odd caprices, and Boris had to protect himself sometimes. For an instant or two he let his hand hang inert against Lola’s thighs, and then slid it gently upwards to her shoulders.

  ‘Come,’ said Lola, pulling him on to her, ‘come, I adore you — come, come!’

  She was beginning to moan, and Boris thought, ‘Now I’m for it.’ A clammy thrill ran up his body from waist to neck. ‘I won’t,’ said Boris, and he clenched his teeth. But then he had a sudden sense of being picked up by the neck, like a rabbit, and he sunk upon Lola’s body, lost in a red, voluptuous dazzlement of passion.

  ‘Darling.’

  She let him gently slip aside, and got out of bed. Boris remained prostrate, his head on the pillow. He heard Lola open the bathroom door, and he thought: ‘When this is over, I don’t want any more affairs. I loathe making love. No — to be honest, that isn’t what I loathe most, it’s the entanglement of it all, the sense of domination; and besides, what’s the point of choosing a girl friend, it would be just the same with anyone, it’s physiological.’ And he repeated with disgust ‘physiological’. Lola was getting ready for the night. The water ran into the basin with a pleasant, limpid gurgle which Boris rather enjoyed. Men suffering from the hallucinations of thirst, in the desert, heard just such sounds, the sound of running water. Boris tried to imagine that he was under a hallucination. The room, the red light, the splashes, these were hallucinations, he would soon find himself in the middle of the desert, lying on the sand with a cork helmet over his eyes. Mathieu’s face suddenly appeared to him: ‘It’s fantastic,’ he thought: ‘I like men better than girls. When I’m with a girl I’m not half as happy as with a man. And yet I wouldn’t dream of going to bed with a man.’ He cheered himself with the thought: ‘A monk, that’s what I’ll be when I’ve left Lola.’ He felt arid and austere. Lola jumped into the bed, and took him in her arms.

  ‘My dear,’ she said. ‘My dear.’

  She stroked his hair, and there was a long moment of silence. Boris could already see stars circling when Lola began to speak. Her voice sounded unfamiliar in that crimson night.

  ‘Boris, I’ve got no one but you, I’m alone in the world, you must love me, I can’t think of anyone but you. If I think of my life, I want to throw myself into the river, I have to think of you all day. Don’t be a beast, darling, you must never hurt me, you’re all I have left I’m in your hands, darling, don’t hurt me: don’t ever hurt me — I’m all alone.’

  Boris awoke with a start, and surveyed the situation with precision.

  ‘If you are alone, it’s because you like to be so,’ he said, speaking in a clear voice, ‘it’s because you’re proud. Otherwise you would love an older man than me. I’m too young, I can’t prevent you from being alone. I believe you chose me for that reason.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lola. ‘I love you to distraction — that’s all I know.’

  She flung her arms wildly round him. Boris heard her once more saying, ‘I adore you,’ and then he fell fast asleep.

  CHAPTER 3

  SUMMER. The air was warm and dank. Mathieu was walking in the middle of the road, under a lucid sky, swinging his arms, and thrusting his way through heavy golden tapestries. Summer. Other people’s summer. For him a black day was beginning, which would move on a slow and tortuous course until the evening, like a funeral procession in the sunshine. An address. Money. He would have to run all over Paris. Sarah could provide the address, Daniel would lend the money. Or Jacques. He had dreamt that he was a murderer, and something of his dream still lurked in the depth of his eyes, crushed beneath the dazzling pressure of the light .16 Rue Delambre, here it was: Sarah lived on the sixth floor, and the lift was of course out of order. Mathieu walked upstairs. Behind closed doors, servants were at their housework, clad in aprons and with dusters knotted round their heads: for them, too, a day had started. What day? Mathieu was slightly out of breath when he rang, and he thought, ‘I ought to do some physical exercises,’ and he also thought with annoyance: ‘I say that to myself every time I walk upstairs.’ He heard a faint patter of footsteps: a short, bald man, with light eyes, opened the door with a smile. Mathieu recognized him, it was a German, a refugee, he had often seen him at the Dôme, ecstatically sipping a cup of café-crême, or brooding over a chessboard, and licking his thick lips.

  ‘I want to see Sarah,’ said Mathieu.

  The little man grew grave, bowed and clicked his heels: he had violet ears.

  ‘Weymüller,’ said he in a formal tone.

  ‘Delarue,’ said Mathieu unemotionally.

  The little man resumed his genial smile. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said. ‘She’s below, in the studio: she will be delighted.’

  He ushered him into the hall and trotted off. Mathieu pushed open the glazed door, and went into Gomez’s studio. On the landing of the inner staircase, he stopped, dazzled by the glare that flooded through the great, dusty skylights: Mathieu blinked, his head began to ache.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Sarah’s voice. Sarah was sitting on the divan, in a yellow kimono, he could see her skull under the thin, stiff hair. Opposite her — a flaming torch: a red-haired brachycephalic...‘It’s Brunet,’ thought Mathieu with annoyance. He had not seen him for six months, but he wasn’t at all pleased to run into him again at Sarah’s. It was embarrassing, they had too much to say to each other, their fading friendship lay between them. Besides, Brunet brought with him an air of out-of-doors, a whole healthy universe, an abrupt and stubborn world of revolt and violence, of manual labour, of patient effort, and of discipline: he would not be interested in the shameful little bedroom secret which Mathieu was about to confide to Sarah. Sarah looked up and smiled: ‘Good morning, good morning,’ she said.

  Mathieu returned her smile: he looked down upon that flat, ill-favoured countenance, marred by much benevolence, and beneath it, the large slack breasts, half-emerging from the kimono. And he hurried down.

  ‘What good wind brings you here?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ said Mathieu.

  Sarah’s face flushed greedily, ‘Anything you like,’ she said. And she added, gleefully: ‘See who is here!’

  Mathieu turned to Brunet and shook his hand. Sarah sat looking at them with a brooding, sentimental eye.

  ‘How are you, my old Social-traitor?’ said Brunet.

  Mathieu was glad to hear that voice. Brunet was vast and solid, with a slow, bucolic face. He did not look particularly amiable.

  ‘How are you?’ said Mathieu. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  Brunet laughed, but did not reply.

  ‘Sit down here beside me,’ said Sarah eagerly. She was going to do him a service, she knew that: for the moment, he was her property. Mathieu sat down. Little Pablo was playing with building blocks under the table.

  ‘And Gomez?’ asked Mathieu.

  ‘Just the same as usual. He’s at Barcelona,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Have you had any news of him?’

  ‘Last week. A full account of his exploits,’ said Sarah ironically.

  Brunei’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘You know he’s a Colonel now?’

  Colonel. Mathieu thought of the man of yesterday, and his heart contracted. Gomez had actually gone. One day he had read of the fall of Irun, in Paris Soir. He had paced up and down the studio for a long while, running his fingers through his black hair. And then he went out, bare-headed and without an overcoat, as though he were going to buy cigarettes at the Dôme: and he had not returned. The room had remained exactly as he had left it: an unfinished canvas, a half-cut copperplate on the table, among phials of acid. The picture and the etching were of Mrs Stimson. In the picture she was naked. Mathieu saw her in his mind’s eyes, resplendently tipsy on Gomez’s arm and singing raucously. And he thought: ‘He was a
beast to Sarah all the same.’

  ‘Did the Minister let you in?’ asked Sarah gaily.

  She did not want to talk about Gomez. She had forgiven him everything, his treacheries, escapades, and cruelty. But not that. Not his departure to Spain: he had gone away to kill men: he had killed men by now. For Sarah, human life was sacred.

  ‘What Minister?’ asked Mathieu in astonishment.

  ‘The little red-eared mouse is a Minister,’ said Sarah with naïve pride. ‘He was a member of the Socialist Government in Munich in ’22. At present he is down and out’

  ‘And you rescued him, of course.’

  Sarah began to laugh.

  ‘He came along here with his suitcase. No; seriously,’ said she, ‘He has nowhere else to go. He was turned out of his hotel because he couldn’t pay the bill.’

  Mathieu reckoned on his fingers: ‘Annia, Lopez, and Santi, that makes four pensioners for you,’ said he.

  ‘Annia is leaving soon,’ said Sarah, with an apologetic air. ‘She’s got a job.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Brunet.

  Mathieu started, and turned towards him. Brunet’s indignation was ponderous and placid; he eyed Sarah with his most bucolic air and repeated: ‘It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘What? What is ridiculous?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sarah briskly laying her hand on Mathieu’s arm. ‘You must stand by me, my dear Mathieu!’

  ‘But what’s the trouble?’

  ‘It doesn’t concern Mathieu,’ said Brunet to Sarah, with a look of annoyance.

  She was no longer listening.

  ‘He wants me to turn my Minister out,’ she said pathetically.

  ‘Turn him out?’

  ‘He says it’s criminal of me to keep him.’

  ‘Sarah exaggerates,’ said Brunet mildly.

  He turned to Mathieu and explained with something of an effort. ‘The fact is that we have had disquieting reports about the fellow. It seems that six months ago he was to be found hanging about the German Embassy. There’s no need to be unduly malicious to guess what a Jewish refugee might be up to in such a place.’

  ‘You have no proofs,’ said Sarah.

  ‘No, we haven’t any proofs. If we had, he wouldn’t be here. But even though there are only presumptions, Sarah is madly imprudent to have taken him in.’

  ‘But why? Why?’ asked Sarah, passionately.

  ‘Sarah,’ said Brunet affectionately, ‘you would blow up the whole of Paris to prevent anything unpleasant happening to your protégés.’

  Sarah smiled weakly. ‘Not the whole of Paris,’ she said, ‘but it’s quite certain I’m not going to sacrifice Weymüller to your Party intrigues. A Party is so... so abstract.’

  ‘Just what I was saying,’ said Brunet.

  Sarah shook her head vigorously. She had flushed, and her large, green eyes had dimmed.

  ‘The little Minister,’ she said with indignation. ‘You saw him, Mathieu, could he hurt a fly?’

  Brunet’s serenity was enormous. It was the serenity of the ocean: suave and yet exasperating. He never appeared to be one sole person: he embodied the slow, silent murmurous life of a crowd. He went on to explain: ‘Gomez sometimes sends us emissaries. They come here, and we meet them at Sarah’s place: you can guess that the messages are confidential. Is this the place to house a fellow who has the reputation of being a spy?’

  Mathieu did not answer. Brunet had used the interrogative form, but with purely rhetorical intent: he was not asking advice: indeed it was a long time since Brunet had ceased taking Mathieu’s advice on anything whatever.

  ‘Mathieu, you shall decide: if I send Weymüller away, he will throw himself into the Seine. Can one really drive a man to suicide for a mere suspicion?’ she added desperately. She was sitting upright, her ugly face aflame with kindliness. She inspired in Mathieu the rather squalid sympathy one feels for people who have been run over and hurt in an accident, or are suffering from boils and ulcers.

  ‘Do you mean it?’ he asked. ‘He’ll throw himself in the Seine?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Brunet. ‘He’ll go back to the German Embassy, and try to sell himself outright.’

  ‘It comes to the same thing,’ said Mathieu. ‘In any case he’s done for.’

  Brunet shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ he said indifferently.

  ‘Listen to him, Mathieu,’ said Sarah, eyeing him with distress. ‘Well? Who is right? Do say something.’

  Mathieu had nothing to say. Brunet did not ask his advice, he had no use for the advice of a bourgeois, a dirty intellectual, a watch-dog. ‘He will listen to me with icy courtesy, he’ll be quite immovable, he’ll judge me by what I say, that’s all.’ Mathieu did not want Brunet to judge him. There had been a time when, as a matter of principle, neither of the pair judged the other. ‘Friendship doesn’t exist to criticize,’ Brunet used then to say: ‘It’s function is to inspire confidence.’ He still said so, perhaps, but at the moment he was thinking of his comrades of the Party.

  ‘Mathieu,’ said Sarah.

  Brunet leaned towards her, and touched her knee.

  ‘Listen, Sarah,’ he said quietly. ‘I quite like Mathieu and I think highly of his intelligence. If it were a question of explaining a passage in Spinoza or Kant, I should apply to him. But this is a silly business, and I assure you I don’t want any outside opinion, even from a teacher of philosophy. I’ve made up my mind.’

  Obviously, thought Mathieu, obviously. He felt sick at heart, but not in the least angry with Brunet. ‘Who am I to give advice? And what have I done with my life?’ Brunet had got up.

  ‘I must hurry away,’ he said. ‘You will, of course, do as you like, Sarah. You don’t belong to the Party, and you have already done a great deal for us. But if you keep him, I would merely ask you to come to my place when Gomez sends any news.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Sarah.

  Her eyes were shining, as though a burden had been lifted from her.

  ‘And don’t leave anything lying about. Burn everything,’ Brunet added.

  ‘I promise’

  Brunet turned to Mathieu: ‘Well, good-bye, my dear fellow’. He did not hold out a hand, he eyed him narrowly, with a hard expression, like Marcelle’s last evening, and with the same remorseless astonishment. He felt naked beneath that scrutiny, a tall and naked figure, moulded out of dough. Clumsy, too. Who was he to give advice? He blinked: Brunet looked hard and knotty. And I bear my futility written on my face. Brunet spoke: not at all in the voice that Mathieu expected.

  ‘You’re looking pretty rotten,’ he said gently. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Mathieu had got up also: ‘I’m... rather worried. Nothing serious.’

  Brunet laid a hand on his shoulder, and looked at him doubtfully.

  ‘It’s idiotic. I’m on the go all the time and everywhere, and never have a moment for my old friends. If you die, I should only hear of your death a month afterwards, and by accident.’

  ‘I’m not going to die yet awhile,’ said Mathieu with a laugh.

  He felt Brunet’s fist on his shoulder: he thought: ‘He’s not judging me,’ and was filled with a sense of humble gratitude.

  Brunet remained serious. ‘No,’ said he, ‘not yet awhile. But...’ He seemed to make up his mind at last. ‘Are you free about two o’clock? I’ve got a few minutes, I would look in on you and we might have a little talk, like old times.’

  ‘Like old times; I’m quite free, I shall expect you,’ said Mathieu.

  Brunet smiled genially. He had kept his frank and vivid smile. He swung round and walked towards the staircase.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Sarah.

  Mathieu followed them with his eyes. Brunet ran up the stairs with surprising agility. ‘All is not lost,’ he said to himself. And something stirred inside his chest, something warm and homely, something that suggested hope. He stepped forward. The door slammed above his head. Little Pablo was eyeing him gravely. Mathieu picked u
p an etching-needle from the table. A fly which had alighted on the copperplate flew away. Pablo was still looking at him. Mathieu felt uneasy, without quite knowing why. He had the sense of being engulfed by the child’s eyes. ‘Children are greedy little devils,’ he thought, ‘all their senses are mouths.’ Pablo’s expression was not yet human, and yet it was already more than alive: the little creature had not long emerged from a womb, as indeed was plain: there he was, hesitant, minute, still displaying the unwholesome sheen of vomit: but behind the flickering humours that filled his eye-sockets, lurked a greedy little consciousness. Mathieu toyed with the etching-needle. ‘How hot it is today,’ he thought. The fly buzzed round him: in a pink room, within a female body, there was a blister, growing slowly larger.

  ‘Do you know what I dreamt?’ asked Pablo.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I dreamt I was a feather.’

  ‘And what did you do when you were a feather?’

  ‘Nothing. I slept.’

  Mathieu flung the etching-needle back on to the table: the frightened fly buzzed round and round and then alighted on the copperplate between two tiny grooves representing a woman’s arm. There was no time to lose, for the blister was expanding, at that very moment: it was making obscure efforts to emerge, to extricate itself from darkness, and growing into something like that, a little pallid, flabby object that clung to the world and sucked its sap.

  Mathieu took a few steps towards the staircase. He could hear Sarah’s voice. She had opened the street door, and was standing on the threshold, smiling at Brunet. What was she waiting for? Why didn’t she come down again? He half turned, he looked at the child and he looked at the fly. A child. A bit of thinking flesh that screams and bleeds when it is killed. A fly is easier to kill than a child. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m not going to kill anyone. I’m going to prevent a child from being born.’ Pablo was playing with his bricks once more: he had forgotten Mathieu. Mathieu reached out a hand and touched the table with his finger. And he repeated to himself with a sense of astonishment: ‘Prevent it being born...’ It sounded as though there existed somewhere a completed child, awaiting the hour to come out into the open, into the sunlight, and Mathieu was barring its passage. And indeed, that was more or less the fact: there was a tiny human creature, conscious, furtive, deceitful, and pathetic, with a white skin, wide ears, and tiny flesh-marks, and all manner of distinctive signs such as are stamped on passports, a little man who would never run about the streets with one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter: eyes, green like Mathieu’s, or black like Marcelle’s, which would never see the vitreous skies of winter, nor the sea, nor any human face, hands that would never touch the snow, nor the flesh of women, nor the bark of trees: an embodiment of the world, ensanguined, luminous, sullen, passionate, sinister, full of hopes, an image populous with houses and gardens, tall delightful girls and horrible insects: and a pin would pierce it and explode it like a toy balloon.