A Singular Man Page 15

  I had supposed I was luckier than my mother, had advanced to the edges of a more sterling world than hers. I am of a mind to offer some advice. I let it be understood that even if a lofty ambition causes us to look disdainfully upon down to earth matters, we ought, if only for the sake of our loved ones, to hold to a minimum of decency. André is a good and sweet-tempered person. Perhaps it is hard on him to live in such uncomfortable surroundings.

  My mother does not seem to understand what authorizes me to speak to her this way. She has always looked with distrust upon the class of people I lived amidst. Listening to me it is as though they were talking. She changes the conversation. But you are always misconstruing people. I had believed that my mother resented me for having grown up where she had been so badly treated. I had believed she was strong, and now I suddenly realize that she fears me. She fears lest my counsels have more influence upon André than her own. She fears subtleties. She fears that André will let himself be seduced, that he will get the idea there are other means to succeed besides work. Work however is the only means she is sure of, and from it you must not deviate under any pretext. She fears lest her son come under my sway, lest he change, lest he move away from her. She can retain her authority only by remaining intransigent. If she departs from her line of conduct, if she agrees to intriguings and recommendations, she knows she will become an obstacle to success instead of being its architect.

  Seen in perspective, I recognize that there was not just disinterestedness in my love for Denise. Now that I am leading an independent life, that I am beholden to no one, the past is becoming clearer. The most insignificant incidents are the ones which open our eyes. Lucette's father wanted to meet me. He paid me a call. We had a chat together. Facing him, I had the feeling of being a man. Self-possessed, I alone was master of my words, of my actions. The unbounded exhilaration we feel when we are truly free! Whatever promise I made, I could keep it. Whatever I chose to hide, no one could disclose it. Altogether ordinary though that man was, I experienced a magnificent hour in his company. How had I managed for so long to put up with the tutelage of Denise? Had I not exaggerated to myself my love for her out of shame over my material dependence?

  Have I a changeable character? Behold me today thinking of confiding in Madame Vallosier as though to a woman I were in love with! Behold me, realizing that I am alone, that I am in need of tenderness and, naturally, of protection! Behold me as I hesitate, not because I perceive the fancifulness of my intention, but because, as in the past, I fear lest my effusiveness today be to my detriment in the future! And behold me referring to a "future" for which I don't care a fig! And behold me now wanting to say to Madame Vallosier that I am unhappy, that I need to be loved, understood!

  I sometimes ask myself whether I am not crazy. When I started out in life, my dream was to complicate things for myself in order to be able to find pride later on in the obstacles I had overcome. I trust that I am not about to go through that all over again today.

  I have another half-brother, a shoemaker in Buttes-Chaumont. My mother has just informed me of this. Since I now go to see her from time to time, it is something I should know. This revelation has had a considerable impact upon me. Thus, at the very moment I have the desire to live an open life, one in which I would not mind taking along some such person as Richard on a visit to my mother, I am told that I have a brother who makes shoes. I too easily imagine that I have got rid of pride. It is useful that a piece of news like this, by wounding me in my very depths, serve to show me that I am ever the same. "Marcel would like very much to get to know you," my mother told me. I went to see him. He is in his thirties. He talked to me. There were, I saw, a good many analogies in our two lives. Raised in a working-class suburb by an old woman, he had regarded his mother, whom he seldom saw, as a marvelous being. That was my story with Jacqueline. But he was less lucky than I. His mother came less and less often. He stayed on in his working-class neighborhood. He went through the local elementary school, was apprenticed. And he became a shoemaker. He introduces me to his wife, to his children. The eldest boy is already ten. He looks at me, his big blue eyes full of wonder. Am I in my turn a personage able to strike a young imagination? And the wife also looks at me wonderingly. So he's a relative, a brother of my husband and André! Proudly they show the shop to me, then the living quarters. They waited four years before they could rent it. Before, they lived a few houses away, in lodgings that were much smaller. "You see," my brother told me, "you should never lose hope."

  I go on my way. Marcel and I know our mother, but neither he nor I knows our father. We are brothers. And yet how far apart we are! I cannot believe that the man I have just left has suffered as much as I have. But, after all, what do I know? Slowly I walk back down from Buttes-Chaumont. The sun is setting. The air is cold. I think that my difference from Marcel may possibly be very slight. Oh, how I wish Denise were here! Only a woman who loves us can say reassuring things to us at such times. "Why no, you have absolutely nothing in common," Denise would tell me. She would persuade me. She would prove it to me.

  Everybody knew that my father was a man of the world. I had lived in an environment that could not be compared to the one Marcel had lived in. But Denise is no more. And after considering my life coolly, I feel that there is not so much difference between my brother and me.

  Albeit off in a remote part of Paris, I do not look for a bus. I walk past the terminal from which buses go to Compiègne. No memory arises in my mind. I am sad. To have come all this way in order to wind up in front of this bus station! I am today nothing more than the man I would have been had nobody ever concerned himself with me, had I never met Denise, had I done as my mother had advised after my discharge and quietly found myself a niche in some branch of the administration (assuming they would have accepted me). As I was doing today, I would be returning from Buttes-Chaumont where I would have visited my brother. A place in society would belong to me. Like Marcel I would envy what my mother was doing for André.

  I walk along boulevard de la Chapelle. I used to think that a familiarity with bourgeois life, its ways, its prejudices, was an acquisition. At present I doubt this. I lived only for the space of a twenty-day leave in this part of Paris. Yet memories spring up from all sides. Here I am on rue Pajol where I found a place to stay from midnight on, here is the big cinema which seemed so expensive. How it has aged! There is the café where I met a woman who gave me such an awful scare. I had left. I was unable to see her again. And she wrote to me from the hospital! Was I too going to fall ill? She was apologizing to me, I think. I am no longer able to remember. When memories are sharp, they already affect us emotionally. But when they are vague like this one, they can be overwhelming. At that time, Marcel was growing up in his working-class suburb. How far we were from each other! Today, for an outsider with an eye exclusively for the facts, we have been reunited.

  I wend my way homeward. What a home! I would like to stop, rent a room in one of these streets that mount toward some side or other of Sacré-Coeur, and never show my face at my hotel again. Nobody is lying lifeless in my room. Just as I left Compiègne, so I would like to leave porte Maillot. But in the evening it is nice to go back to where there are people you know even if you do not care for them, to be greeted by someone, be it in an unfriendly manner, just so long as nobody looks up and asks who you are. I would have done it in former times. I would have walked into the first hotel I saw. Before stepping back out, I would have marked my place by leaving my overcoat behind, regardless of the cold weather, and I would have roamed around all evening, and all night too, in my search for a woman. The next morning, I would have gone to the public bath and waited for my evening date. And if no one turned up, I would have gone out looking again. And if my expeditions proved fruitless, I would have gone to bed so late that I would have fallen asleep at once. I felt pride in everything, in the simplest acts, like eating a sandwich at a café counter.

  Brothers, my own as well as other people's, hold i
n my life an importance that surprises me. Now it turns out that Madame Vallosier has a brother. Why, I wonder, did she desire that I make his acquaintance? Is it to show she trusts me, or that in the event of danger she would not, like Germaine, be alone? Is she as fond of him as she says? She maintains that he is younger than she and that she has remained his big sister.

  So I met this younger brother. After what I had heard about him, I was expecting to be introduced to a distinguished young man, considerate, discreet, admiring of his sister. He turns out to be a hulking big fellow who seems to do everything grudgingly, and whose elegance evokes that of a pimp. How can Madame Vallosier have failed to realize that such a brother is damaging to the idea she wishes to give of herself? How does she not see that he renders her quite as suspect as Marcel would render me suspect in her eyes were I to present Marcel to her? I shall answer these questions right away. He is her real brother. They grew up together under the same roof. He cannot make her ashamed of him, however unlike the paths they have chosen. True family spirit, is it not this acceptance of human beings such as they are, with all their defects, is it not this indifference about anything in them that could redound to our discredit?

  Pale winter-time sunlight enters my room. From my bed I can see it settle over the roofs of buildings. A similar kind of sunlight accompanied me when I returned to Compiègne after Denise's death, when I started out on rue du Château-d'Eau for a stroll through the better parts of town.

  I get out of bed. The day will be so long that I dawdle about while dressing. Shall I be, when lunch is over, the sort of customer who arrives with people who are in a hurry, who orders his coffee when they do, but who then rests his forearms on the table, pushes back his chair for room to cross his legs, and lingers after the others have gone?

  The chambermaid brings me my breakfast, to which three pats of butter and a teaspoon of jam give a falsely copious air. She asks me when I plan on going out, for she wants to do the room. The previous evening has left me with such a feeling of disgust that I grope for some way of avoiding another like it. That is when the idea occurs to me of coming back to my room after lunch. It will be two o'clock. In my absence, a fire will have been lit in the fireplace. At four o'clock, tea and little cakes will be brought up to my room without my having to ring. In the evening I shall be brought something light, cold cuts. My shutters will be closed, the curtains drawn before nightfall. I shall have given the electric switch two turns to light the four bulbs of the overhead fixture. The bedside lamp will shed unnecessary light on my pillow. I try to interest the chambermaid in all these preparations by asking her for suggestions. I shall buy some newspapers, a deck of cards, maybe a book. I shall play a few hands of solitaire. It so happens that today is the day they iron the bed-linen downstairs. I shall leave my door ajar. The fact that I have been able to put so much intimacy into an afternoon at the hotel is a source of relief.

  I take a short walk. The one objectionable thing is that the weather is good. But the finest winter day always turns gray after lunch.

  Therefore I come back at two o'clock. Everything has been prepared as I had asked. A pleasant surprise awaits me. I am not the only one who has organized his time in his room. Another door is open. I see a big man in his shirt sleeves, sitting on the edge of his bed. He is watching the chambermaid close the shutters. Unlike myself, he has not given any instructions. He has made no arrangements at all. However he seems to have more solid reasons than I do for remaining in his room—correspondence, perhaps accounting to attend to. I hear him ask for ink, for paper, for another pen. Somewhat later, in a casual way, as though surprised that someone else has decided to stay indoors for the rest of the day, I say to the chambermaid: "He has the right idea. It's still when you are in your own place that you're best off."

  I have so many hours ahead of me that I do not take off my overcoat right away, or close the door. I do not interrupt the chambermaid. I wait for her to finish with my neighbor. I am in no hurry at all. Every now and then I take a few steps down the hallway, then come back as if I had changed my mind. A little later I repeat the same thing. This is when I discover a detail that delights me no end. Even though their work is done, the employees are supposed to stay on, to keep busy. The door to the linen room stands open. A pile of sheets comes up in the elevator, which is against the rules. They are not immediately picked up and removed. The maids are having a chat. And even though it is daytime, all the lights are on.

  Finally the moment comes when I cannot do otherwise than shut myself in my room. Among my morning purchases is a pair of red leather slippers which, by the way, were rather expensive. I have taken off my jacket, my vest, but kept on my collar and tie. I maintain appearances just for myself. Nothing can happen, but you never know. I sit down in an armchair, near the fireplace. The deck of cards, the book, the newspapers are within hand's reach. Now all that remains for me to do is not be bored. Yet I get up from time to time to shift the position of some object. Nothing must offend my eye. Above all I must postpone the moment when everything will be done.

  Four o'clock strikes. My tea is brought to my room as I have ordered. But why are they using the same cups, the same jars of jam, the same tray they used this morning? This isn't tea, it is yet another breakfast. I feel a small satisfaction. It requires a certain refinement to notice such a detail.

  "The same cup?" I ask the chambermaid, a faint irony in my voice.

  She looks at me in surprise.

  "Never mind, never mind," I conclude, in the manner of a man who knows that others are not going to understand him.

  How ridiculous this is! Oh, how I wish I were somewhere else! But where? I get up to serve myself. The dangerous hour is now upon me. I fight the urge to open the curtain. In the end I cannot keep from doing it. Night has fallen and in the darkness the lights are shining. Daylight disappeared only a brief moment ago and they have a special freshness. Women stop in front of the tall window of a flower shop. Nowhere do flowers smell better than in Paris. I feel like going out. I gaze into the fireplace with the hope that the fire will detain me. Indeed I have just put on two new logs. They lie amid the flames without having yet begun to burn and I have got to go out.

  It's Sunday. I am expected for lunch at Lucette's parents'. When she invited me, the look I had from her hinted that my acceptance caused her a pleasure that went beyond that of simply spending the day with me. As so many other people have done, she must have spoken about me in such a way as to imply that she stood nearer to those she was speaking to than to me. I accepted because I knew that I would be received with great kindness. I have never cooked or kept house, but I take a petty bourgeois pleasure in going to places where I won't have to lift a finger, where everything will be done for me. That is how it will be at the home of Lucette's parents. Having company, for those fine people, means sparing your guest even the trouble of shifting a chair.

  The morning creeps slowly by, for nowadays I wake up early, at seven o'clock, at six, even at five. I know that they are glad to be having me, and my thoughts stray from this lunch.

  At eleven o'clock, I take the stairs down. I have just walked out of room number thirty, like the thirty on my desk at the lycée. The staircase is padded in soft carpet. Now my thoughts are on this lunch. I do not enjoy the feeling that preparations are under way. I did not have my café au lait brought to my room, which was in order to save, I believe, seven francs. Let it be noted that I do not know what amount I have economized. I am generous. I spend without thinking, as they say. But I contracted habits in the wake of the Dechatelluxes. I learned, not to appreciate the value of money, but to keep an eye on doings likely to bring on expenditures. And of this habit I am still proud.

  It is a gray Sunday. The deserted avenue has the look of a cordoned-off area an hour before the ceremony. Everything is ready. The officials are going to arrive. I stop and chat with the man you buy the tickets from. I like to joke with the persons who would not joke if I owed them something. Then I walk up
to the Etoile, saving myself one fare. I feel none the worse for having gone without breakfast and a stretch on the bus, and in my pocket I have an extra eight francs, or thereabouts. If I don't watch out I may acquire a taste for these exercises and come to resemble still further the overcautious mouse I picture in my imagination. I shall try to diminish myself, to shrink, instead of trying like everyone else, like Lucette, like Lucette's parents, to magnify, to enlarge myself.

  I must buy a cake. I absolutely must. Nevertheless I hesitate. "At present I have the position of a man in life," I end up telling myself, "and I'll just do it, I'll buy a cake without thinking about it, because there isn't anything more natural." I shall arrive cake in hand. But shall I buy it at Boissier's, for instance, or around Barbès-Rochechouart? For several minutes I stew over the matter. I decide on Boissier's. I shall look as though it had never so much as crossed my mind to buy it elsewhere. It costs twenty francs instead of twelve. But everyone will taste the difference. They won't say anything, but they will recognize the value.

  I spy my cake in a pastry shop on rue Rodier. But it is not the same. The decoration is less delicate. The swirls of cream suggest a peasant hand. Such are the differences to which I attach so much importance.