A Singular Man Read online

  I drifted about freely in the big Compiègne house. I opened doors which, in the past, had been closed to me. I was a foreigner, but the years had worn many things away. We had come together despite the differences in the start we had each had, that start that you must not miss, as Madame Mobecourt used to say. I would wander up to the top floor, and Richard, if he ran into me, showed no surprise. They took a perhaps exaggerated interest in my tastes. I was struck by this, for I was not accustomed to lend them any importance. Richard still did not care for me, but he no longer disdained, as he has gone back to doing, the little satisfactions that my presence afforded to his pride. Among these was the favorable idea I was being given of daily life in Compiègne. If I needed some object, for example one which his wife happened to be using, he would insist that she hand it to me. It seemed that I might have some catching up to do in my material well-being.

  Every month Madame Dechatellux would fall ill. Because of her asthma she was not to stay in bed. She would begin her convalescence right away. She would walk inside the house, taking little steps. I would come across her sometimes, and I was struck by her look of concentration while performing so simple an exercise.

  Denise was still feverish, but I was not so afraid that something might happen to her. She had her family around her. For years she had declared that she would rather die than ask her family for anything. And yet she accommodated herself very nicely to this hospitality. She seemed happy. There was no glorying on anybody's part and nobody felt humiliated.

  Following her last attack Madame Dechatellux lingered in her convalescence for as long as possible. Is it not while convalescing that an ill person feels most sheltered? And long after her disease, in giving fresh signs of virulence, had shown that the period of quiet had passed, Marie-Antoinette Dechatellux still imagined she was deriving benefit from some sort of prescription and that it would be given to her to see the rose bushes come into flower out on the terrace. But death overtook her, depriving her of only this modest desire. She was sixty-eight years old. She had hoped to go to sleep and not wake up. Everyone had believed it would happen, she had become so frail and feeble. But her agony had lasted for forty-eight hours, and was horrible. Farewell seasons, carriage outings, picnics, farewell convalescences, the charming company of the children!

  Denise had been bedridden for two weeks. For the first time I had the impression that she might not get up again. We could have been so happy now.

  We looked at one another in church and we did not recognize one another. Upon returning from the cemetery I was introduced. Pressing my heels together, I performed a slight bow, something halfway civilian, halfway military. The colonel did likewise, with an added nuance of respect, warranted solely by the fact that I was the son-in-law of the deceased. After moving off I stopped and turned around. He did the same. Later on we found ourselves sitting together at the table.

  A sort of tightness in my chest prevented me not from breathing but from eating. The peacefulness descending from the cold blue sky I saw through the windows was hurting me. Nobody cared about the beautiful weather. It was two o'clock in the afternoon. I was unsettled. It was becoming harder and harder for me to stand away from my habits. We were unable to recognize one another. A human countenance does not remain engraved in the memory for fifteen years. The color of the hair, the shape of the face grow dim. Our eyes kept meeting more and more often, however. We would have liked not to be sitting across from each other in order to query our neighbors. Then, all of a sudden, we recognized each other.

  I was trembling now, my head lowered. My shoulders felt narrower. Was Colonel Laîsné going to speak? A day passed, he did not speak. Why? Was it because we attach little importance to the pain we have come to be acquainted with in the exercising of our profession?

  How I wished that Denise would get well, that we could escape from here! Is there a torture more awful than to remain bound to one's faults through the illness of a loved one? It was possible, after all, that the colonel had spoken, that it had been kept from me because the moment was grave.

  Denise was dead. Richard was keeping vigil, seated at her bedside. He held his head in his hands. He seemed to be sleeping. Both looked as if they were on a voyage. I stood motionless in the overheated room. I had not known that Denise was sick. For years I had lived with her and never suspected it. When she would cough, when she had a temperature, when she was obliged to stay in her room, I would take care of her, I would keep her company, I would entertain her, but I did not know she was sick. In the warning signs her illness gave off I saw nothing anticipatory of death, for to death I had never given a thought.

  Denise died at the age of thirty-three. She did not seem like a victim. Her destiny was wanting in not one of life's principal events, those at least whose dates are given by biographers. She had been born, she had known a happy childhood, youth, love, marriage, and she had died. Yet there she lay, in front of me, as though she had not lived.

  All the ceremonies of existence, she had celebrated them, and she wanted to keep on living.

  I wept. The nurse looked at me. Until that day, like her, I had looked at the unhappiness of others. Today, for the first time, I was looking at it no longer. It was I who was being looked at.

  My legs were ready to give way. I sank into an armchair. By now I was alone in the bedroom. I contemplated Denise. The feeling of release lay upon her features. The paraphernalia used in caring for her was still there, without purpose. I did not take my eyes off Denise's face. In that serenity no place existed for me. This afforded me an immense relief. Heaven had spared me the greatest grief of all, that of seeing a loved one struggle against death, not in order to live, but in order to remain near you. Once Denise's state had worsened she had ceased to recognize me.

  I got to my feet. I walked out of the room. I had been there with Denise the whole night. I was not able to remain with her any longer, at least I was not able to in the view of other humans. Long ago I had noticed that they are very quick to judge us at the end of our strength. I could have remained there beside Denise, I could have left her only after she was placed inside her coffin, I could have not let go of the corner of the sheet I had been clutching in my hand for hours. What was the use? I hid those four words away in the depths of me. Had people read them in my face, what would they have not imagined? I am a monster. I have never loved Denise. And I am escorted with no end of consideration into another room.

  Now I remember that I had cried forth from pain as I have cried only three or four times in my life. As I did so was I thinking about Denise? Had I wished that they leave me to myself, had I wished, to the contrary, that others gather round me? I found myself in a room I had never entered before. Every one of the things I had done in my life seemed to me unworthy of Denise. I slipped away without anyone noticing. Was it not extraordinary that I be able to do it such a short time after having been the object of so much attention? I headed for the forest as I had ten years earlier after having spent the night with Denise. I was surprised to be walking, to be wearing clothes. My life as of now had no further aim. So many important events had come to pass, had kept me occupied, and of them no trace remained. But a day is a long time. I distanced myself from my pain by dint of thinking. I wondered whether Denise had known that Colonel Laîsné knew me. I imagined that through generosity Richard had kept still. A secret between men. No, Denise had not known. She would never know, unless, once dead, you know all there is to know about the living. In this case, she knew many other things too.

  Night was falling, the darkness made me afraid. I was unable to remain alone any longer. I retraced my steps. I walked up and down in front of the gate. Lights were visible through the slits of the metal shutters. Cars were parked in the garden. I did not dare go inside. I felt I had become a stranger. I thought about Denise. If she could see me, how she would understand my diffidence! I could hear her saying to me (she had said it to me so many times), "For heaven's sake, Jean, come inside." And I started t
o cry again.

  The initial hours of immobility had passed. Denise was at rest. Her family hung about her, and as for me, I had abandoned her, I had been coward enough to wish that everything might end as quickly as possible, in order that I be spared the other sufferings, the formalities, the removal of the body.

  One whole day spent in wandering had left such marks on my face that I could feel them. I felt the hollowness of my cheeks, the protrusion of my nose, the circles under my eyes, the creases of my wrinkles. Richard understood my distress, his family did too. However, they exchanged knowing glances. They did not blame my grief for being conspicuous, but for existing and for being sincere. That was more than they could stand. In their view, suffering was a further way of seducing. In this instance I was not an actor, that would be too vulgar, but a man who, because he lived intensely, had always succeeded in shuffling his sorry condition off into the background.

  Towards ten o'clock I no longer had the strength to remain in that house. I should not have kept silent but spoken in a whisper like everyone else. I should have sought comfort among those presumably suffering as much as I. I had not been up to it. I had been thinking how I would never go back up to my room again. I was unable to leave. We do not spend years using certain objects without their finally having the look of belonging to us. I did not want to take any of them away with me, neither my brief case, nor the ashtray in Bohemian crystal Denise had given me, nor my tortoise shell combs and brushes, nor the accessories I had on my desk, nor my cuff links. I wanted nothing. The taking of any one object would have given me the temptation to take others. I wanted nothing, nothing, not even a handkerchief, not even a tie. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Yet I could not make up my mind to leave. In the end I went up to the third floor. My bedroom door stood facing me. Once I opened it, would I do the opposite of what I had decided? In the past, I would not have hesitated. I would have told myself that to go back on a decision was of no importance. I would have acted without regard for my original will. This time it did not happen that way. I went back down without having touched the doorknob. At last I perceived the light that is diffused in us by the feeling of having performed a fine deed. I was going to return to Paris, not only without taking anything with me, but without changing what I had been wearing.

  I headed toward the station. Never in my life had I felt so strong. A fine rain sprinkled my clothes. So as not to run into anyone I took a roundabout way. Denise had not yet left the closed room where she lay. Yet leave it she must. No plea on earth could keep her there, and I did not wait until she was gone. The automobiles, all their lights turned off, stood in a row before the front steps, so spaced as not to impede each other. Slivers of light were coming through the joints between windows. And I was running away. I imagined the family, stupefied at first, then triumphant when they realized what I had done. I sensed that there were elementary rules that I was not abiding by. But it was too late, today, for me to turn into a man like the others. However, God knew how I abhorred making myself conspicuous, the efforts I had made to merit the consideration of my fellows. I had done a good deal of thinking in the course of recent weeks. I had tried to understand in what way I had sinned in order to be so unhappy. The world was having its way with me. I was beginning to hold a place in society. It was far indeed from resembling the one I had dreamt of! Be that as it may, I had become, it seems, a definable man. I had had the misfortune to be born under an unlucky star. I had not had a good upbringing. But I had married and, thanks to my wife's salutary influence, I had finally understood that if I did not aim at winning any special esteem, if I contented myself with my lot, I could occupy an honorable rank in the world. But Denise had died. I yet see her face on which life, as it withdrew, had left a mute understanding, a deep understanding of all the things human beings do. Would she reproach me at present for so lightly renouncing this honorable rank? As if there were someone forever stationed behind me to ascertain that I was playing a role, that I had never loved anyone, that it was self-interest that had dictated everything I had done, I murmured: "O Denise!"

  I lay stretched out on my back, fully clothed. The corners of my eyes were moist as though I had just been reading. I got up for I had to walk. I felt about to break into tears. I flung myself back on the bed I had just risen from in order to hide my face. I was idling my time away, I was living and Denise was dead. All at once I turned over. This room—I was not acquainted with it. How had I been able to do so many things, to know so many people, and to be, today, so alone! I had left the light on when I got into bed. I fell asleep. Then dawn awoke me like broad daylight. Night had faded away without rendering me different. I went out a little later. I had not washed, done anything. I was still in the same shirt. It was seven in the morning. Was it that I wanted to be able to be present at the burial if the desire came over me suddenly? When an event in which we do not want to participate is imminent, should we proceed in such a way that it transpires without our noticing, or should we revise our attitude? I thought about Richard. Had he just lost his wife, oh! he would not be asking himself such a question! He loved his wife. They were an exemplary couple. Authority, work on the husband's part; affection, fidelity on the wife's. But why would the grief he felt be true, human, measured, whereas mine was turning into panic?

  I was now walking more slowly. I had gone up to the Etoile. I was coming back down the Champs-Elysées. "To the Bois de Boulogne. To the Gare de Lyon," I used to say to the taxi driver when we wanted to be alone, Denise and I. I had just said to myself: "To Concorde." The streets were full of life. But there already was place de la Concorde. I headed into the little streets behind the Chambre des Députés. This time I forgot to set myself a destination. I was thinking of all the good Denise had done for me. How consoling it would have been had she not had only my interest in mind! I remembered those stormy days when I had seemed not to exist. Denise had been fighting for her happiness, and I experienced the delightful feeling of not being the sole cause of this struggle. I left all the struggling up to her, and it never entered her head to reproach me for this. She found it natural that the difficult tasks fall to her. I now wondered whether, deep down inside her, she had not been waiting for me to show more heart. I had believed that my inertia went unnoticed. I was no longer so sure of it. While walking along, I told myself that I ought to have spoken up, guided her, prevented her from doing certain things, instead of going into hiding, passing for weaker and more irresponsible than I was. People's attitudes, their remarks, their antipathy were becoming clearer. They were right. But how had they been able to ask a man like me to know that there are circumstances in which you must not just lie back and let yourself be loved?

  Four days had gone by. The little money I had had on me was spent. It really required that I have no other choice for me to return to our little bank on rue Cambon, a street which leads, precisely, into boulevard de la Madeleine. Oh that quarter, how I hated it! It was the one where Richard and I had had lunch with an appraiser, where Denise's friends had their offices, where I had been out on the prowl during the war, because it was then the center of Paris, because a so very special odor having nothing of the odor of cooking used to come from restaurants, because I admired the tailors, the shirtmakers, the cafés, because, listening to the waltzes the public phonographs were playing, I would think back with nostalgia to a brilliant past that I however had never known. I was young and I was weeping for a bygone era!

  And there I stood once again on rue Cambon. I recalled a day when I had been waiting for Denise. She had gone to the bank with her brother. He did not know that she was to rejoin me. To kill time I was walking up and down boulevard de la Madeleine. Suddenly I beheld brother and sister heading my way. What should I do? Cross the street? Simulate a chance encounter? But Denise called out to me. "We were looking for you everywhere," she said. "Where in the world were you?" She was not embarrassed. Richard had not shown the least surprise, but I had turned crimson with shame.

  A third tim
e I got to where the bank stood, identified on the outside by no sign or plaque. I made up my mind to enter. How much cash remained in our account? Denise had insisted that her account be in my name as well. "A joint account," the banker had observed. But legally, now that she was dead, did I have the right to withdraw the money in it? I did not pause to inquire. I would find out soon enough. I had lost all vanity. The thought that they perhaps did not know that Denise was dead was able to enter my mind without revolting me. I knew that it was for the last time I was standing in this bank. I loathed the place. I remembered those waits in the lounge when, without a penny to our names, we had asked for an advance against some unquoted stocks. Granting it to us, the director, René Poiret, had acted without due thought. However, he had later asked us to stop in. When we did he announced that to his great regret it was materially impossible for him to allow us this advance, since the stocks we had given him as security were not quoted. "You knew that!"

  "Yes, quite, but in my mind we were dealing with the 1924 issue." I remembered the painful scene that had broken out a little while later on this very same rue Cambon. How naive Denise had been! She had sought to persuade me that if I went back to see René Poiret by myself, he would not dare to refuse me this advance because I was a man! He had refused only because she, Denise, had been present. Now wasn't that adorable? For Denise I was a man like other men. Neither my birth nor my behavior had made her change her opinion. And I had yielded. I had gone back the next day to see René Poiret. I was ushered into his office just as he was on his way out the door to the Stock Exchange. "Come back at five o'clock," he had told me. He pretended, out of friendship for Denise, whom he had once courted, not to see the eccentric side to her marriage and to treat me like his other clients. I had returned at five. "So very, very sorry, but as I told Denise in front of you, I cannot allow you this advance." Amiableness had led him so far as to say that he had done some inquiring that afternoon. I had persisted. I had appealed to his friendship for us, even to his kindheartedness, so strongly aware was I of Denise's desire that I succeed. I was so ill-acquainted with men that, because he had listened to me politely, I thought I had swayed him. And then all at once he had interrupted me with this sentence which, simple though it was, seemed to me to be coming from another world: "You should disoblige me were you to press the matter any further."