La Cigale was only surprised for a moment. He wants to follow them, she decided; and he is afraid to do it alone. Poor fool, his case is bad.
They had to go slowly because La Cigale was unable to do otherwise. It was strange how, despite all the outward marks of it, she often made one forget her age. Automatically it was she who acted as guide to their direction. They walked down the street and around the corner. She jerked her head.
“They go in there,” she said.
Simon looked at the little bar in front of which a high-wheeled and blackened cart proclaimed the coal dealer. At that moment the man himself came out, opening the door wide so that Simon could see the whole interior of the café. “There’s no one in there,” he said.
La Cigale shrugged and glanced up at the hotel next door whose small, dingy sign seemed trying to avoid attention. “But sometimes we like to take a walk,” she said slyly. “Down by the river.”
Late summer had already turned over the leaves of the trees near the Seine so that the pale undersides of them caught the light. They fluttered and twisted, making, even above the sound of traffic, a murmur of their own, lively and yet sad. Dusk was coming and another night whose chilly winds would dry their sap yet further. The cool sun was but a sham. Thus they spoke, one leaf to another, softly, desperately, asking no doubt the riddle of death which is always asked in vain.
Simon, hearing the wind in the trees and seeing the sun sparkle on the river, felt a revolt against the obscurity of his intentions. The old woman and the young man leaned together on the parapet between bookstalls. “Do you know that editing your article will finish my work on Jouvence?” he asked.
“You writers!” said La Cigale. “You act as if you want to write a person’s own life for them. I know what happened. I know who was more famous than who despite what you say now. They just kept their banknotes or else they married the rich pigs who bought them champagne. I spent all and I lived my life for myself and for my loves. Why I remem—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” he broke in, “don’t tell me about your disgusting affairs. I don’t see that the oily gigolo is any better than the rich pigs you scorn.”
“Who is speaking of oily gigolos?” she cried hoarsely. “Why he was an artist too—as beautiful as the morning—as beautiful as you’ll never be—as you’ll never know.”
Neither of them spoke for a while after that and Simon, looking at his companion’s eyes, saw them grow black with concentration. At length, in another tone, languid almost and dreamy, she said, “As beautiful as he is to her.”
Something in the fixity of her regard (which at first he had mistaken for introspection) now arrested Simon and he turned his head to follow her gaze. About twenty paces off, the stone arch of the pont Neuf shadowed the lower quay beneath them and deep within that shadow a pair of lovers were locked in each other’s arms. The girl was leaning against the wall and the boy, hardly taller than she, had his head bent across her face. As they kissed, her hand showed white on his hair. They had in their attitude a passionate, a desperate tenderness as if they hoped in penetrating each other’s bodies to find another secret there than lust.
“As beautiful as he is to her,” repeated La Cigale.
A sweet flow of saliva in his mouth made Simon fear he might be sick. But can I be sure that it is really she, he wondered, with her body fitted to his like water? And what about him with his knee raised like that? It’s as though he were taking the temperature of her surrender.
Then the girl threw back her head and showed to the pale sky the deeper glitter of her irises. Simon moved quickly back from his post and, taking hold of the old woman’s arm, took her with him. For an instant they looked silently at each other. Then La Cigale spoke.
“I’ll tell you something,” she said, “something that I have discovered. I didn’t think I knew it until now, but I must have.” She paused to put her thought into words for the first time. “You see,” she went on “your Rose doesn’t remember. That’s her trick. I told you there was a trick. She remembers but she doesn’t remember.”
“Doesn’t remember what?” Simon felt his brains like chips of glass in his head.
“Why, her other life, that’s what,” said La Cigale. “Whichever life she’s living at the moment is the only one that seems real. That’s how she bears it, a milksop like her. That’s the only way she can stand it.” Then the old woman put up a gray finger to her nose and winked. “But you, Monsieur Simon, could force both lives to come together—and we’d see what we would see.”
TWENTY-THREE
Journal:
I read in a magazine that in some place or other they have a two-headed turtle and the turtle is perfectly healthy except that one head controls the right side and the other the left. The two heads don’t think alike. They want to go different ways. So perhaps it’s like that with me. Perhaps each side of my head wants me to tell about something else than the other side.
I keep thinking about one time when I was standing on the lower part of the quay not long ago. I was standing under a bridge, but it’s hard to remember why. Was I alone, for instance? What nonsense! Of course I wasn’t. You know it too. Anyway I do remember the feeling of damp stone at my back. And then I looked up and saw Simon staring at me. I could only see his head and part of his neck. It was as though the rest of his body were a broomstick; a head set up on a broomstick to confound me. I was dazed by it. I had a feeling like when one eats an unripe persimmon, but not only in my mouth—all over.
It was from that day on that I knew if I didn’t get things clear by myself, someone else would do it for me and that would be worse than death itself.
Worse than death itself! You see what kind of phrases I use. How do I know what would be worse or better than that?
Anyway I went home and I started this journal or whatever you want to call it. I’ve tried to reread it entirely several times, but I can’t. I guess I’m supposed to wait until the end. It did bring out a thread though, didn’t it, just like I said? And I don’t have to reread to remember every bit of that thread, like the bugler. He was the beginning, of course, and he is the spool and the thread unwinds and unwinds from around him—and the gypsies and the juggler and La Cigale and the saltimbanques on the fourteenth of July, even a little girl I kept seeing on the beach when Pierre and I were on our vacation.
Oh I can hold the thread all right. I feel it running through my hand, softly, softly, and I advance further and further into this labyrinth of my choice. And now my heart beats fast because everything is said, or almost all, or all I can think of, and soon I’ll come out into an open space—I picture it round—and I’ll discover the monster.
Perhaps you’d like to know more about things, but there’s really nothing more to tell. Or you’d like me to clear up the question of La Cigale or of Simon. I wish I could. Do people become one’s enemies just to divert themselves? Or is it because one disturbs them slightly in a way one couldn’t possibly foresee and which, in the end, has only to do with themselves?
Last time I looked in the mirror I had a strange experience. There was something odd about my outline—a sort of haze; an aura would be a better definition. It eased my strict lines as with the grace of another softer, more voluptuous flesh. Then I looked at my eyes with that new heaviness they have and that ocher color on their lids. Where had I seen them before? And I recalled my mother’s Oriental eyes that glistened always as though with a million unshed tears. Yes, mine were like that too and it was her body clasping my own in shadowy embrace!
Of course that’s all an illusion and even if it weren’t what would be the good? What good for the curse, the creative blood, to come out in the child? It doesn’t stay pure through the generation. It only brings trouble. And if one denies it that’s worse. I know. Certainly there’s been a betrayal somewhere, but by whom? Against whom?
A while ago I heard a tune. I loathe the accordion, you know, but it hypnotizes me. The tune says, “In a little while you must rise up and go.” And when the times comes around I obey. I rise up and I go. I can’t help it. It’s as though I were a puppet, a doll. There, you see—I told you there was a doll in all this! Perhaps I placed the doll wrong. I put it in Pierre’s bed, did I not? Yet it’s me that’s here in this flat so it must be me in Pierre’s bed too. No, the doll goes out to that other bed.
It’s all very confusing. It’s like those things you see best out of the corner of your eye. When you look at them straight on, you don’t see them anymore. I have to go beside the point to make it even a little clear. If I went at it directly it wouldn’t exist. You couldn’t understand it at all.
Tomorrow I swear I’m going to read everything I’ve written—perhaps I’ll read it aloud too—and then I’ll throw this journal in the fire because I won’t need it any more. Will I?
ROSE ceased writing. Somewhere a bell had rung. She recoiled visibly like one of those sea flowers that fold when the enemy approaches. Hurriedly, almost furtively, she went to the door and listened. But it was not to the Flamand apartment that a visitor had come for she could hear no stir on the landing.
Nonetheless the bell had left an echo inside her. An urgent need of haste made her wring her hands and turn around once or twice.
“I’ll be late,” she murmured in the distressed tones of one who is kept from an appointment. But there was nothing to keep her.
Outside it was cold and dark. A fine, icy drizzle fell on her hair and sought her neck inside the collar of her raincoat. She shivered. I didn’t say goodbye to Bernice, she thought with a foolish stab of dismay. Yes, she distinctly recalled the servant standing there with arms wet to the elbow and watching her as she put on her coat. She felt that if she had only had time to decipher it, Bernice’s glance would have held a message of importance. The blue glint in it had almost spoken.
When she reached the bar she saw that it was crowded, with coal men for the most part. Exhilarated by the warmth and the wine, they were arguing together with seeming fierceness. Their pale eyes were agleam in their black faces, their red lips were darkened by the coarse red wine. Rose sat down at her usual place and ordered a brandy and soda. Everybody looked at her as she did this for such an order was rare here. The patron, who was also the chief coal vendor, brought it over anxiously as though handling an unknown composition that might explode. At her command he also brought a small bottle of Perrier soda water. The idea of anybody using real Perrier instead of the ordinary charged water in the siphon impressed him.
“Mademoiselle is celebrating?” he suggested. It was a part of his discretion, when she came in thus, to call her Miss instead of the Madame Flamand he knew her to be and to whom he delivered wood and coal.
Rose shook her head. She had thrown off her coat and was wearing a thin silk shirt cut like a man’s and opened low on her bosom. From its opening her breath seemed to struggle eagerly up the stages of her lungs and just at the base of her throat her skin was blotched faintly with excitement and anticipation. She drank thirstily.
There was no sign of Jason, but today for some reason she was not displeased by this and felt so certain of his entrance in a few minutes that it was as though she were already in his presence. So sure was she in fact that when the door opened she did not even look up.
