hung on the wall. He laid a hand on her shoulder, “Let me see if I can change my ticket. There’s another train, in an hour.” He spoke with the station agent, passed some extra francs through the opening at the bottom of the grille—she knew how carefully he shepherded every sou—sent a telegram, no doubt to Sala, and took her arm, propelling her to a café. “This way, you will leave before me, and it’s always easier to be the one who leaves than the one who gets left behind.”
He was a trifle put out: he had planned on working on the manuscript in his valise during his hours on the train. (She rubbed lard into her hair before plaiting it. Her name was Bomfomtabellilaba, her name was Lalao, her name was Marie, her name was Anisoa…When I arrived at school I realized I should have given myself more than a perfunctory wash: her smell of pig-fat still clung to me.) Of course, he would still have the same number of hours on the train, but by ten in the evening his powers were spent. (In his thirties, he already had the unshakable patterns of a man well into middle-age: I must have black coffee first thing in the morning. I cannot do any real work—work that engages my intellect, that is—unless I have had a solid seven hours of sleep. Aubergines make my liver too heavy, I never eat them. After ten in the evening, I’m good for nothing but idle conversation, detective novels, or sex.)
Jacques had yet to publish his first book—the war, the excursion to Madagascar, the malarial lethargy with which he had returned home, the trials of his marriage to Sala had all served to thwart his literary output. Since he was no longer a young man, he could no longer produce a young man’s text, no rough diamond with brilliance despite its flaws. (His book, which situated itself on the frontier between several genres—it was a memoir, a traveler’s diary, a grammar of the Malagasy language, an anthropological exploration of the poetic jousts which the Madagascar natives practiced, a philosophical critique of the notion of originality—would be published some two years hence to respectful but hardly glowing reviews.) There would also be the necessity of lying to Sala—his telegram had said, “Unavoidably delayed. Back this evening.” In all likelihood there would be a scene, accusations, denials. Nonetheless, he had been moved enough by the girl’s plight that he had undertaken this action.
As soon as the waiter set their drinks before them, Simone said, “I should tell you. I have written to my husband.” She had in fact not yet been able to get up the courage to do so. She was lying to Jacques not so much to force his hand as to force her own.
He sighed. (How well she would come to know these sighs of his over the course of their lives together.) “Yes?” he said, already dreading the answer to his question.
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And?”
“And what did you say to your husband?”
“I told him everything.”
“Everything?”
“That I was here in Carcassonne, with you. That I was in love with you. That we had—consummated that love. That I had injected morphine…”
“Simone.” He dropped his head, supported it with his hands, as if it were too heavy to be held up by the mere muscles of his neck. “Simone, you oughtn’t to undertake these dramatic gestures. And certainly not without consulting me first.”
She had thought he would be proud of her, as he had been proud when she stood naked before Joë.
“What business is it of yours, how I choose to carry out my relations with my husband?” These words were false; she was trying to conjure another Simone out of the air. They both knew full well that there was nothing in her that was not his business.
“It is not unusual for such letters, written in angry passion, to get shown to solicitors, used as evidence. I do not know much about this husband of yours. But he is a solid member of the middle-classes, who views his wife as his property—a very special sort of property, but nonetheless his property—and he will not take it lightly, you being stolen from him.”
“I am not a thing. I can’t be stolen.”
Already, she was plotting her next lie: she would, after the passage of a week or two, tell him that Luc seemed never to have received the letter, that it must have gone astray. But then it would float through the air, threatening to land. Better to tell him she had forgotten, in her haste, to affix the proper postage, and it had been returned to her. Yes, but she would have to give it a few days, a week.
“It’s true, you’re not a thing. It might be better for you if you were. You are a living, breathing entity, you can’t simply be stuck on a shelf, you need a dwelling place, you need food and drink, you need to clothe yourself, you need to provide for your children—although your children may well be taken away from you, after what you have revealed.”
“I thought…I thought…”
“No. You didn’t think. Or rather, you had one thought, but you didn’t follow it through to its logical conclusion: if I take this action, there will be this corresponding reaction. Did you think that by this rash move you were going to put me under some obligation to you?”
“It seems you hate Sala for her excess of practicality…”
“And you thought I would love you for an excess of impracticality? Anyhow, I don’t hate Sala. I don’t know what I ever said that would make you think I hated her.”
“You speak of her so disdainfully.”
He jutted out his lower lip, inclined his head slightly to the right side. “Disdainfully? I think I see her rather clearly, as one sees anyone with whom one has such a long and daily acquaintance. I chafe at the yoke of marriage, it’s true—Ah, you needn’t pull that face, as if you have been seduced and abandoned. You were as eager for this connection as I was. More eager, I think.”
Three days later, after several glasses of wine, looking out at a crescent moon in the deep blue sky, she did indeed pick up a pen and write, “Dear Luc, I must tell you I have taken a lover…”
In the years that followed, Simone and Jacques would have many rows over his marriage to Sala, and the lugubrious pace of his extrication from it. (As later he would have quarrels with Dominique over Simone.)
Simone, her eyes welling with tears, pleaded, “Why did you marry her?”
Jacques responded with a shrug of his shoulders.
“I didn’t mean that as a rhetorical question. I really want to know: why on earth did you marry her?”
He gave yet another shrug of his shoulders.
“That is not an answer!” Simone screamed.
“It is an answer. Perhaps not a satisfactory one, but nonetheless it is an answer. The only one I have. You know full well I am dispassionate by nature. I feel about myself the way that I feel about rhubarb: I can take it or leave it. I recognize—”
“Oh, please! Not another one of your speeches!”
“You
