The Age of Reason Read online

  ‘Here I am,’ said Sarah, ‘have I kept you waiting?’

  Mathieu looked up, and felt relieved: she was leaning over the banisters, a heavy, amorphous figure: an adult human being, ageing flesh that looked as though it had been lately pickled and not born at all: Sarah smiled at him and hurried downstairs, her kimono fluttering round her stocky legs.

  ‘Now then: what is the matter?’ she said eagerly.

  Her large clouded eyes were set on him insistently. He turned away, and said harshly: ‘Marcelle is going to have a baby.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Sarah looked really rather pleased: she added timidly. ‘So you — you —?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mathieu briskly. ‘We don’t want one.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘I see.’ She bent her head and remained silent. Mathieu was irritated by a distress that was not even a reproach.

  ‘I think the same thing happened to you some time ago. Gomez told me,’ he retorted, harshly.

  ‘Yes; some time ago.’

  Suddenly she looked up, and blurted out: ‘It’s nothing at all, you know, if it’s taken in time.’

  She would not allow herself to criticize him, she abandoned her reserves, uttered no word of reproach: her sole desire was to reassure him.

  ‘It’s nothing at all...’

  He must smile, he must view the future with confidence: she alone would lament that secret little death.

  ‘Look here, Sarah,’ said Mathieu angrily, ‘you must try to understand me. I won’t marry. It isn’t just selfishness: I regard marriage...’

  He fell silent: Sarah was married, she had married Gomez five years before: and he added after a pause: ‘Besides, Marcelle doesn’t want a child.’

  ‘She doesn’t like children?’

  ‘They don’t interest her.’

  Sarah seemed disconcerted.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes... very well then.’

  She took his hands. ‘My poor Mathieu, how worried you must be. I wish I could help you.’

  ‘Well, that’s just what you can do,’ said Mathieu. ‘When you were in the same sort of trouble, you went to see someone, a Russian, I think.’ ‘Yes,’ said Sarah. (Her expression altered.) ‘It was horrible.’

  ‘Indeed!’ said Mathieu in a strangled voice. ‘I suppose it’s... it’s very painful.’

  ‘Not particularly, but...’ And she went on with a piteous air: ‘I was thinking of the child. It was Gomez who wanted it done, you know. And when he wanted anything in those days... But it was horrible, I would never... if he went down on his knees to me now, I would never have it done again.’ She looked at Mathieu with agonized eyes.

  ‘They gave me a little parcel after the operation, and they said to me: “You can throw that down a drain.” Down a drain! Like a dead rat! Mathieu,’ she said, gripping his arm: ‘You don’t realize what you’re going to do.’

  ‘And when you bring a child into the world, do you realize what you’re going to do?’ asked Mathieu wrathfully.

  A child: another consciousness, a little centre-point of light that would flutter round and round, dashing against the walls, and never be able to escape.

  ‘No, but what I mean is — you don’t know what you’re asking of Marcelle: I’m afraid she may hate you later on.’ Mathieu had a vision of Marcelle’s eyes — round, hard, circled eyes.

  ‘Do you hate Gomez?’ he asked sharply.

  Sarah made a piteous, helpless gesture: she could not hate anyone, least of all Gomez.

  ‘In any case,’ she said with a blank look, ‘I can’t send you to that Russian, he’s still in practice, but he drinks nowadays: I no longer trust him. There was a nasty episode two years ago.’

  ‘And you don’t know anyone else?’

  ‘No,’ said Sarah slowly. But suddenly all her kindliness flooded into her face again, and she exclaimed: ‘Yes, I do: just the person — why didn’t I think of it before? Waldmann. You haven’t met him here? A Jew, a gynaecologist. He’s a sort of specialist in abortion: you would be quite safe with him. He had an immense practice in Berlin. When the Nazis came into power, he set up in Vienna. After that, there was the Anschluss, and he arrived in Paris with a suitcase. But he had sent all his money to Zurich long before.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll do it?’

  ‘Of course. I’ll go and see him this very day.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Mathieu. ‘I’m awfully glad. He isn’t too expensive, I hope.’

  ‘He used to charge up to 2,000 marks.’

  Mathieu grew pale: ‘10,000 francs!’

  ‘But that was sheer robbery,’ she added quickly. ‘He was exploiting his reputation. No one knows him here, I’m sure he’ll be reasonable: I shall suggest 3,000 francs.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mathieu between clenched teeth: he was wondering where he would find the money.

  ‘Look here,’ said Sarah, ‘why shouldn’t I go this very morning? He lives in the Rue Blaise-Desgoffes — quite near. I’ll slip on some clothes and go along. Will you wait for me?’

  ‘No — I’ve got an appointment at half past ten. Sarah, you’re a treasure,’ said Mathieu.

  He took her by the shoulders, and shook her, smiling as he did so. She had for his sake sacrificed her deepest repulsions, she had — in the kindness of her heart — become his accomplice in an act she loathed: she was beaming with delight.

  ‘Where will you be about eleven o’clock?’ she asked.

  ‘I shall be at the Dupont-Latin, Boulevard Saint-Michel. I could stay there till you ring me up.’

  ‘At the Dupont-Latin? Right.’

  Sarah’s wrap had slipped back, exposing her clumsy breasts. Mathieu clasped her in his arms, in real affection, and also to avoid looking at her body.

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Sarah, ‘good-bye, my dear Mathieu.’

  She raised her kind, ill-favoured face to his. There was in that face an intriguing, almost voluptuous humility that evoked a mean desire to hurt her, to crush her with shame. ‘When I look at her,’ Daniel used to say, ‘I understand Sadism.’ Mathieu kissed her on both cheeks.

  ‘Summer!’ The sky flooded the street with spectral effluence: the people hovered in the sky, and their faces were aflame. Mathieu breathed a green and living perfume, a youthful dust: he blinked, and smiled. ‘Summer!’ He walked a few paces: the black, melting asphalt, flecked with white, stuck to the soles of his shoes: Marcelle was pregnant — it was no longer the same summer.

  She slept, her body swathed in the enveloping darkness, and as she slept she sweated. Her lovely brown and mauve breasts lay loose upon her, and their tips, salty and white as flowers, were encircled with oozing drops of moisture. She slept. She always slept until midday. But the pustule deep within her did not sleep, it had no time to sleep: it found nourishment and grew: time passed with abrupt and fateful jerks. The pustule expanded and time passed. ‘I must find the money in forty-eight hours.’

  The Luxemburg, warm and white, statues and pigeons, children. The children ran about, the pigeons flew away. Racing children, white flashes, tiny turmoils. He sat down on an iron chair: ‘Where shall I find the money? Daniel won’t lend me any. I’ll ask him, all the same...and then, as a last resort, I can always try Jacques.’ The grass rippled up to his feet, the youthful stone posterior of a statue caught his eye, the pigeons — birds of stone — were cooing: ‘After all, it’s only a matter of a fortnight, this Jew fellow will surely wait until the end of the month, and on the 29th, I shall get my pay.’

  Mathieu stopped abruptly: he saw himself think, and he loathed himself: ‘At this same hour, Brunet is walking through the streets, enjoying the sunshine, light-hearted because he can look ahead, he walks through a city of threaded glass that he will soon destroy, he feels strong, he is walking with rather a mincing, cautious gait because the hour has not yet come to smash it all; he waits, he hopes. And what about me? Marcelle is with child. Will Sarah manage to get round that Jew? Where is the money to come from? That’s what I think!
’ Suddenly he again saw once more two close-set eyes beneath black brows: ‘Madrid. I wanted to get there. And that’s the truth. But it couldn’t be fixed.’ And suddenly he thought: ‘I’m getting old.’

  ‘I’m getting old. Here I am, lounging in a chair and believing in nothing. And yet I also wanted to set out for a Spain of mine. But it couldn’t be fixed. Are there many Spains? I am there, absorbing the ancient taste of blood and iron-tainted water; — I am my own taste, I exist. That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst. Thirty-five years. For thirty-five years I’ve been sipping at myself and I’m getting old. I have worked, I have waited, I have had my desire: Marcelle, Paris, independence: and now it’s over. I look for nothing more.’ He gazed at that familiar garden, always new, always the same, just like the sea, swept for a hundred years by the same wavelets of colours and of sounds. Here it all was: scurrying children, the same for a hundred years past, the same sunshine on the broken-fingered plaster queens, and on all the trees; Sarah and her yellow kimono; Marcelle pregnant; money. All this was so natural, so normal, so monotonous, it was enough to fill a life, it was life. All the rest — the several Spains, the castles in Spain, was — what? ‘A tepid little lay religion for my benefit? A discreet and seraphic accompaniment to my real life? An alibi? That’s how they view me — Daniel, Marcelle, Brunet, Jacques: the man who aspires to be free. He eats, he drinks, like everybody else, he is a government official, not interested in politics, he reads L’Œuvre, and Le Populaire, he is worried about money. Only, he wants to be free, just as other people want a collection of stamps. Freedom, that is his secret garden: a little scheme with himself as sole accomplice... An idle, unresponsive fellow, rather chimerical, but ultimately quite sensible, who has dexterously constructed an undistinguished but solid happiness upon a basis of inertia, and justified himself from time to time on the highest moral grounds. Is that what I am?’

  When he was seven years old he had been at Pithiviers, staying with his Uncle Jules, the dentist, and one day when all alone in the waiting-room, he had played at ceasing to exist: the idea was to try not to swallow, as though he were holding on his tongue a drop of icy liquid by refraining from the little jerk of deglutition which would send it down his gullet. He had succeeded in completely emptying his head. But that emptiness still had a savour of its own. It had been a silly sort of day: the country round him sweltering in a haze that smelt of flies, indeed he had just caught one and had torn its wings off. He had noticed that its head resembled the sulphured tip of a kitchen match, so he had fetched the scraper from the kitchen and rubbed it against the fly’s head to see if it would catch fire. All this in an idle sort of mood; the feeble, lackadaisical sport of a bored little boy, who knew quite well that the fly would not catch fire. On the table there were some tattered magazines, and a handsome Chinese vase, green and grey, with handles like parrots’ claws. Jules had told him that the vase was three thousand years old. Mathieu had gone up to the vase, his hands behind his back, and stood, nervously a-tiptoe, looking at it: how frightening it was to be a little ball of breadcrumb in this ancient fire-browned world, confronted by an impassive vase three thousand years old. He had turned his back on it, and stood grimacing and snuffling at the mirror without managing to divert his thoughts; then he had suddenly gone back to the table, picked up the vase, which was a heavy one, and dashed it on the floor — it had just happened like that, after which he had felt as light as gossamer. He had eyed the porcelain fragments in amazement: something had happened to that three-thousand-year-old vase within those fifty-year-old walls, under the ancient light of summer, something very disrespectful that was not unlike the air of morning. He had thought to himself: ‘I did it,’ and felt quite proud, freed from the world, without ties or kin or origins, a stubborn little excrescence that had burst the terrestrial crust.

  He was sixteen, a raffish youth, lying on the sand at Arcachon, looking at the long, flat ocean waves. He had just thrashed a lad from Bordeaux, who had thrown stones at him, and he had forced him to eat sand. Seated in the shade of the pines, out of breath, his nostrils filled with the odour of resin, he felt somehow like a little explosive entity suspended in the atmosphere, spherical compact, mysterious. He had said to him self: ‘I will be free,’ or rather he hadn’t said anything at all, but that was what he wanted to say and it was in the nature of a bet: he had made a bet with himself that his whole life should be cast in the semblance of that unique moment. He was twenty-one, he was reading Spinoza in his room, on a Shrove Tuesday, gaily-painted carts were passing down the street laden with cardboard figures: he had looked up and again made his bet, with that philosophic emphasis which Brunet and himself had recently assumed: he had said to himself: ‘I shall achieve my salvation!’ Ten times, a hundred times, he had made that same bet. The words changed as his age increased, to suit his intellectual attitudes, but it was one and the same bet: and Mathieu was not, in his own eyes a tall rather ungainly fellow who taught philosophy in a public school, nor Jacques Delarue the lawyer’s brother, nor Marcelle’s lover, nor Daniel and Brunets friend: he was just that bet personified.

  What bet? He passed his hands over his eyes, now wearied by the light: he no longer really knew: he was subject — more and more often now — to long moments of exile. To understand his bet, he had to be feeling exceptionally alert.

  ‘Ball, please.’

  A tennis ball rolled up to his feet, a little boy ran towards him racquet in hand. Mathieu picked up the bail and threw it. He was certainly not particularly alert: he sweltered in that depressing heat, he could do no more than submit to the ancient and monotonous sensation of the daily round: in vain he repeated the once inspiring phrases: ‘I must be free: I must be self-impelled, and able to say: “I am, because I will: I am my own beginning.”’ Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.

  He got up. An official got up, an official who was worried about money and was going to visit the sister of one of his old pupils. And he thought: ‘Are the stakes all set? Am I now just an official and nothing more?’ He had waited so long: his latter years had been no more than a stand-to. Oppressed with countless little daily cares, he had waited: of course he had run after girls all that time, he had travelled, and naturally he had had to earn his living. But through all that, his sole care had been to hold himself in readiness. For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence. He had never been able to engage himself completely in any love-affair, or any pleasure, he had never been really unhappy: he always felt as though he were somewhere else, that he was not yet wholly born. He waited. And during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they had grasped him from behind: thirty-four of them. He ought to have taken his decision at twenty-five. Like Brunet. Yes, but at that age one doesn’t decide with proper motivation. One is liable to be fooled: and he didn’t want to act in that way. He thought of going to Russia, of dropping his studies, of learning a manual trade. But what had restrained him each time on the brink of such a violent break, was that he had no reasons for acting thus. Without reasons, such acts would have been mere impulses. And so he continued to wait...

  Sailing-boats sped over the Luxemburg pond, lashed from time to time by falling water from the fountain. He stopped to look at the miniature regatta. And he thought: ‘I’m no longer waiting. She is right: I have cleared myself out, sterilized myself into a being that can do nothing but wait. I am now empty, it is true, but I am waiting for nothing.’

  Near the fountain, a little boat was in distress, and a laughing crowd looked on as a small boy tried to rescue it with a boat hook.

  CHAPTER 4

  MATHIEU looked at his watch. ‘Twenty to eleven; she’s late.’ He did not like her to be late, he was always afraid that she might have inadvertently died. She forgot everything, she evaded herself, she forgot herself from one minute to the next, she forgot to eat, she forgot to sleep. One day
she would forget to breathe, and that would be the end. Two young men had stopped beside him: they eyed a table with a disdainful air. ‘Sit down,’ said one, in English.

  ‘I will,’ said the other: they laughed and did so. They had delicate hands, hard faces, and smooth skins. ‘Lousy little beasts,’ thought Mathieu irritably. Students or school lads: young males, surrounded by grey females, looking like glittering, insistent insects. ‘Youth is fantastic,’ thought Mathieu: ‘so vivid on the surface, but no feeling inside it.’ Ivich was conscious of her youth, and so was Boris, but these were exceptions. Martyrs of youth. ‘I never knew I was young, nor did Brunet, nor did Daniel. We were only aware of it afterwards.’

  He reflected without much pleasure that he was going to take Ivich to the Gauguin exhibition. He liked to show her fine pictures, fine films, and fine things generally, because he was himself so unattractive; it was a form of self-excuse. Ivich did not excuse him: that morning, as on all occasions, she would look at the pictures with her wild, maniacal air: Mathieu would stand beside her, ugly, persistent, and forgotten. And yet he would not have liked to be good-looking — she was never more alone than when confronted with something to admire. And he said to himself: ‘I don’t know what I want from her.’ At that very moment he caught sight of her: she was walking down the boulevard beside a tall, shiny-haired young man in spectacles, she raised her face to his, and offered him her brilliant smile: they were deep in animated talk. When she saw Mathieu, the light went out of her eyes, she parted from her companion with a brief good-bye, and crossed the Rue des Ecoles with a drowsy air. Mathieu got up: ‘Glad I am to see you, Ivich.’