The Age of Reason Read online

  ‘Good morning,’ said she.

  Her face was largely hidden by her fair curls, which she had brought right forward to her nose, and her fringe reached down to her eyes. In winter the wind blew her hair about, and exposed her large, pallid cheeks, and the low forehead that she called ‘my Kalmuck forehead’ — revealing a broad face, pale, girlish, and sensual, like a moon between clouds. Today Mathieu could see no more than an artificially narrow and ingenuous countenance which she wore like a triangular mask over the real one. Mathieu’s young neighbours eyed her: they were obviously thinking: What a pretty girl. Mathieu looked at her affectionately: he was the only one among all those people who knew that Ivich was plain. She sat down, composed and gloomy. She was not made up, because make-up spoiled the skin.

  ‘And what will Madame have?’ asked the waiter.

  Ivich smiled at him, she liked being called Madame: then she turned to Mathieu with a hesitant air.

  ‘Have a peppermint,’ said Mathieu, ‘you know you like it.’

  ‘Do I?’ she said with amusement ‘All right. What is it?’ she asked, when the waiter had gone, ‘It’s green mint.’

  ‘That green, gluey stuff I drank the other day? Oh, I don’t want that, it makes my mouth all sticky. I always take what I’m given, but I oughtn’t to listen to you, we haven’t got the same tastes.’

  ‘You told me you liked it,’ said Mathieu, rather irritably.

  ‘Yes, but then I remembered the taste.’ She shuddered, ‘I’ll never touch it again.’

  ‘Waiter!’ cried Mathieu.

  ‘No, no, never mind, he’ll bring it, and it’s nice to look at. I won’t touch it, that’s all: I’m not thirsty.’

  She said no more. Mathieu did not know what to say to her: so few things interested Ivich: besides he didn’t feel like talking. Marcelle was there: he could not see her, he did not utter her name, but she was there. Ivich he saw, he could call her by her name or touch her on the shoulder: but she was out of reach, with her frail figure and her fine, firm throat: she looked painted and varnished, like a Tahitian woman on a canvas by Gauguin, and not meant for use. Sarah would be telephoning very soon. The commissionaire would call out, ‘Monsieur Delarue’. And Mathieu would hear a dark voice at the end of a wire: ‘He won’t take a penny less than ten thousand francs.’ Hospital, surgery, the reek of ether, money difficulties. Mathieu made an effort and turned towards Ivich; she had closed her eyes, and was passing a finger lightly over her eyelids. She opened her eyes again: ‘I have the feeling that they keep open by themselves. But I shut them now and again when they get tired. Are they red?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s the sun. I always have trouble with my eyes in summer. On days like this one oughtn’t to go out until it gets dark: otherwise one gets into a wretched state, the sun pursues you everywhere. And people’s hands are so clammy.’

  Mathieu felt the palm of his own hand under the table: it was quite dry. No doubt the tall shiny-haired young man had clammy hands. He looked at Ivich without emotion: he felt both remorseful and relieved because he was less attracted by her.

  ‘Are you annoyed because I made you come out this morning?’

  ‘I couldn’t have stayed in my room, anyhow.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Mathieu in astonishment.

  Ivich looked at him impatiently.

  ‘You don’t know what a woman students’ hostel is like. The young ladies are very thoroughly looked after, especially at examination time. Besides the superintendent has taken a fancy to me, she invents all sorts of pretexts for coming into my room, and she strokes my hand: I loathe being touched.’

  Mathieu was scarcely listening to her: he knew that she was not thinking of what she was saying. Ivich shook her head with an air of irritation.

  ‘The old party at the hostel likes me because I’m fair. But it makes no difference, she’ll detest me in three months: she’ll say I’m sly.’

  ‘So you are,’ said Mathieu.

  ‘I daresay...’ she said in a drawling voice, which somehow seemed to go with her sallow cheeks.

  ‘And in the end everyone notices how you hide your cheeks, and drop your eyes, as though butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth.’

  ‘Oh well, I suppose you like people to know what sort of person you are,’ she added with a faint contempt. ‘It’s true you aren’t susceptible to that sort of thing. And as for looking people in the face,’ she went on, ‘I just can’t do it. My eyes begin to smart at once.’

  ‘You used often to annoy me in early days,’ said Mathieu. ‘You used to look at me above the forehead, just at the level of the hair, and I’ve always been so nervous of getting bald... I thought you had noticed a thinning patch and couldn’t take your eyes off it.’

  ‘I look at everyone like that.’

  ‘Yes — or sideways: so...’

  He flung a sly, quick glance at her. She laughed, amused and angry: ‘Stop! I won’t be imitated.’

  ‘I wasn’t being rude.’

  ‘No, but it frightened me to see you put on my expressions.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Mathieu, with a smile.

  ‘You don’t look as if you did. However handsome you were, the effect on me would be just the same.’ And she added in an altered voice: ‘I do wish my eyes didn’t hurt me so.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Mathieu. ‘I’ll go to a chemist and get you a cachet. But I’m waiting for a telephone call. If anyone asks for me, would you mind telling the commissionaire that I’ll be back in a few minutes, and that the caller is to ring again.’

  ‘No, don’t go,’ she said coldly. ‘Thank you very much, but nothing would do me any good, it’s the sun.’

  They fell silent. ‘I’m getting bored,’ thought Mathieu with a strange, grinding thrill of pleasure. Ivich was smoothing out her skirt with the palms of her hands, lifting her fingers a little as though she were about to strike the keys of a piano. Her hands were always rather red, because she had a poor circulation: she usually held them up and waved them to make them pale. They scarcely served her to take hold of anything: they were two small crude idols at the extremities of her arms: they fluttered over the surfaces of objects, feeling their shapes, instead of picking them up. Mathieu looked at Ivich’s nails, long and tapering and loudly painted, almost in the Chinese manner. Indeed these awkward, fragile adornments made it plain that Ivich could make no use of her ten fingers. One day, one of her nails had dropped off by itself, she kept it in a little casket, inspecting it from time to time with a blend of disgust and satisfaction. Mathieu had seen it: it had retained its varnish, and looked like a dead beetle. ‘I wonder what is on her mind: never have I known her so tiresome. It must be her examination. Well, as long as she doesn’t get bored with me; after all, I’m a grown-up, so to speak.’

  ‘I suppose this isn’t how blindness starts,’ said Ivich suddenly, with a dispassionate air.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Mathieu smiling. ‘You know what the doctor at Laon told you: you’ve got a touch of conjunctivitis.’

  He spoke gently, he smiled gently: with Ivich it was essential to smile, and use slow, gentle gestures: ‘Like Daniel with his cats.’

  ‘My eyes hurt me so much,’ said Ivich. ‘The merest trifle is enough...’ She hesitated. ‘I... the pain is at the back of my eyes: right at the back. Wasn’t that the beginning of that nonsense you were telling me about?’

  ‘That affair the other day?’ asked Mathieu. ‘Look here, Ivich, last time it was your heart, you were afraid of a heart attack. What an odd little creature you are, you almost seem as if you wanted to torment yourself: and then another time you suddenly announce that you’re as hard as nails: you must make up your mind.’

  His voice left a sugary taste in his mouth.

  Ivich looked darkly at her feet.

  ‘Something must be going to happen to me.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mathieu; ‘your line of life is broken. But you told me you didn’t really believe in that sort
of thing.’

  ‘No, I don’t really... But it is a fact that I just can’t picture my future. It’s a blank.’

  She said no more, and Mathieu eyed her in silence. Without a future... suddenly he was conscious of a bad taste in his mouth, and he realized how deep was his attachment to Ivich. It was true that she had no future: Ivich at thirty, Ivich at forty, didn’t make any sense. There was nothing ahead of her. When Mathieu was alone or when he was talking to Daniel or Marcelle, his life stretched out before him, plain and monotonous: a few women, a few holidays, a few books. A long and gentle slope, Mathieu was moving slowly — slowly down it, indeed he often found himself wishing that the process could be speeded up. And suddenly, when he saw Ivich, he felt as though he were experiencing a catastrophe. Ivich was a voluptuous and tragic little embodiment of pain, which had no morrow: she would depart, go mad, die of a heart attack, or her parents would keep her close at Laon. But Mathieu could not endure to live without her. He made a timid movement with his hand: he longed to grasp Ivich’s arm above the elbow and squeeze it. ‘I loathe being touched.’ Mathieu’s hand fell back: and he said quickly: ‘That’s a very nice blouse you’re wearing, Ivich.’

  It was a tactless remark: Ivich bent her head stiffly, and tapped her blouse with an air of constraint. She regarded compliments with disgust, they made her feel as though a rather blatantly alluring image of herself were being hacked out with a hatchet, and she was afraid of being deluded by it. She alone could think with due propriety about her own appearance. And she did so without the use of words, with a sort of affectionate certitude, a caress. Mathieu looked diffidently at Ivich’s slender shoulders, the straight, round neck. She often said: ‘I have a horror of people who are not conscious of their bodies.’ Mathieu was conscious of his body, but rather as though it were a large and embarrassing parcel.

  ‘Do you still want to go and see the Gauguins?’

  ‘What Gauguins? Oh yes, the exhibition you were talking about. Well, we might go.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you wanted to.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But if you don’t want to, Ivich, you must say so.’

  ‘But you want to go.’

  ‘I’ve been already, as you know. I would like to show it to you, if it would amuse you, but if you don’t care about it, I’m no longer interested.’

  ‘Very well then, I would sooner go another day.’

  ‘But the exhibition closes tomorrow,’ said Mathieu in a disappointed tone.

  ‘I’m sorry for that,’ said Ivich indifferently: ‘but it will come back.’ And she added briskly: ‘Things like that always come back, don’t they?’

  ‘Ivich,’ said Mathieu, kindly but with some irritation, ‘that’s just like you. You had better say you no longer want to go, you know quite well that it won’t come back for a long tune.’

  ‘Oh well,’ she said amiably: ‘I don’t want to go because I’m upset about this examination. It’s hell to make us wait so long for the results.’

  ‘Aren’t they to come out tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s just it.’ And she added, touching Mathieu’s sleeve with the tips of her fingers: ‘You mustn’t mind me today, I’m not myself, I’m dependent on other people, which is so degrading; I keep on seeing a vision of a little white paper stuck to a grey wall. I just can’t help it. When I got up this morning, I felt as if it was tomorrow already: today isn’t a day at all, it’s a day cancelled. They’ve robbed me of it, and I haven’t so many left.’ And she added in a low, rapid voice: ‘I made a mess of my Botany Prelim.’

  ‘I can well understand that,’ said Mathieu.

  He wished he could discover in his own recollections a time of trouble that would enable him to understand what Ivich was enduring. The day before his Diploma test, perhaps. No, that wasn’t really the same thing. He had lived a placid sort of life, one that involved no risks. At present he felt precarious, beset by a menacing world, but that sensation was reflected through Ivich.

  ‘If I qualify,’ said Ivich, ‘I shall have a few drinks before going to the oral.’ Mathieu did not reply. ‘Just a few,’ repeated Ivich.

  ‘You said that in February, before going up for the Intermediate, and you know what happened, you drank four glasses of rum and you were completely tight.’

  ‘However, I shan’t qualify.’

  ‘No doubt, but if, by chance, you do?’

  ‘Well, I won’t drink anything at all.’

  Mathieu did not insist; he was sure that she would turn up drunk at the oral. ‘I wouldn’t have done such a thing, I was much too careful.’ He was annoyed with Ivich, and disgusted with himself. The waiter brought a stemmed glass, and half filled it with green mint.

  ‘I’ll bring you the ice-bowl right away.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Ivich.

  She looked at the glass, and Mathieu looked at her. A violent and undefined desire had taken possession of him: a desire to be for one instant that distracted consciousness so pervaded by its own odour, to feel those long slender arms from within, to feel, at the hollow of the elbow, the skin of the forearm clinging like a lip to the skin of the arm, to feel that body and all the discreet little kisses it so ceaselessly imprinted on itself. To be Ivich, and not cease to be himself. Ivich took the bowl from the waiter’s hand and dropped a cube of ice into her glass.

  ‘It’s not to drink,’ she said, ‘but it’s prettier like that.’

  She screwed up her eyes a little and smiled a girlish smile. ‘How pretty it looks.’

  Mathieu eyed the glass with irritation, he set himself to observe the thick, ungraceful agitation of the liquid, the turbid whiteness of the ice-cube. In vain. For Ivich, it was a little viscous delight that made her sticky down to her finger-tips: for him it was nothing. Less than nothing: a glass full-of mint. He could think what Ivich felt, but he never felt anything: for her, objects were oppressive, insinuating presences, eddies that entered into her very flesh, but Mathieu always saw them from a distance. He flung a glance at her and sighed: he was behindhand, as usual. Ivich was no longer looking at the glass, she wore a sad expression, and was nervously tugging at one of her curls.

  ‘I should like a cigarette.’

  Mathieu took a packet of Goldflake out of his pocket and handed it to her.

  ‘I’ll give you a light.’

  ‘Thank you, I prefer to light it myself.’

  She lit the cigarette, and took a few whiffs. She held her hand close to her mouth, and with a sort of crazily intent expression amused herself by making the smoke trickle along her palm. And she said, by way of explanation to herself: ‘I wanted the smoke to look as though it came out of my hand. It would be funny to see a hand smouldering.’

  ‘It isn’t possible, the smoke moves too quickly.’

  ‘I know, it’s tiresome, but I can’t help trying. I can feel my breath tickling my hand, right through the middle, as though it were divided by a wall.’

  She laughed lightly and fell silent, still breathing on her hand with a sort of peevish persistence. Then she threw her cigarette away and shook her head: the smell of her hair reached Mathieu’s nostrils. A smell of cake, and of vanilla-flavoured sugar, from the egg-yolks which she used to wash her hair: but that pastried perfume left a fleshy taste behind it.

  Mathieu began to think about Sarah.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Ivich?’ he asked.

  She sat for a moment with her mouth open, disconcerted, then she resumed her meditative air and her face again became impenetrable. Mathieu found himself tired of looking at her, the corners of his eyes began to smart.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ he repeated.

  ‘I...’ Ivich shook herself. ‘You’re always asking me that. Nothing definite. Things that can’t be expressed, there are no words for them.’

  ‘Still — what?’

  ‘Well, I was looking at that fellow coming towards us, for instance. What do you want me to say? I should have to say: “He’s fat,
he’s wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, he’s wearing a made-up tie” — it’s funny you should force me to tell you all this,’ she said, in sudden disgust and indignation, ‘it isn’t worth saying.’

  ‘Yes it is — for me. If I could be granted a wish, it would be that you should be compelled to think aloud.’

  Ivich smiled involuntarily.

  ‘That’s morbid,’ she said. ‘Words aren’t meant for that.’

  ‘It’s fantastic, you’ve got a savage’s respect for words: you apparently believe that they were made simply for announcing deaths and marriages, and saying Mass. Besides, you don’t look at people, Ivich, I’ve been watching you. You looked at your hand and then you looked at your foot. Anyway, I know what you’re thinking.’

  ‘Then why ask? You don’t need to be very clever to guess: I was thinking of the examination.’

  ‘You’re afraid of being ploughed, is that it?’

  ‘Of course I’m afraid of being ploughed. Or rather — no, I’m not afraid I know I’m ploughed.’

  Mathieu again sensed the savour of catastrophe in his mouth: ‘If she is ploughed, I shan’t see her again.’ She would certainly be ploughed: that was plain enough.

  ‘I won’t go back to Laon,’ said Ivich desperately. ‘If I go back to Laon after having been ploughed, I’ll never get away again. They told me it was my last chance.’

  She fell to tugging at her hair again.

  ‘If I had the courage —’ she faltered.

  ‘What would you do?’ asked Mathieu anxiously.

  ‘Anything and everything rather than go back to that place, I won’t spend my life there. I just won’t!’