– us in our school caps and the girls in uniform – were just as suspect as the rest. Nonetheless, that’s where we decided to meet.
Robert knew the girls already. He insisted that it was them who had made the first move, and so he had resigned himself to speaking to them. Perri whispered in our ears that they had actually ‘picked them up’ on the boulevard one evening. Robert had been embarrassed, and talked about French literature. And the girls were enchanted.
Smiling and blushing, we met the girls on a secluded path near the Roman Arena. They introduced themselves, giving their names rather hesitantly. Despite their efforts to appear innocent and make us think that this was their first such rendezvous, they gave the impression of being dressmakers’ apprentices. They were wearing simple clothes, and had powdered cheeks, carefully arranged hair and a smattering of lipstick. I heard some wonderful opening gambits, along with silly ironies and encouraging laughter and affectations. But the girls seemed flattered with our company. We strolled along together, two girls and two boys. I was only listening to Robert, who was trying to start a conversation about love and women. The blatancy of Perri’s flirting was impressive. Dinu didn’t say very much to them, and stared into their eyes, smoking, waiting for his charm to take effect. With a coarse lock of red hair hanging over my forehead, I kept quiet.
It would be pointless to repeat the conversation. After half an hour the ice was broken. We wandered off in pairs, me with the sister of the girl that Robert liked: a brunette wearing a white hat, and with white cheeks and dark eyes. Every time I looked at her I was seized with the unsettling thought that I had already seen her in every group of girls who I had met at every lycée and school event. She was the shortest of the group, and possibly the best behaved. I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t lack courage. I told myself: ‘If I haven’t put my arm round her by the time I count to ten, then I’m a coward’. The girl kept on blushing more and more furiously. I was pale, gloomy. Talking, talking, talking. All the erotic anecdotes and double-entendres that I could think of were pouring from my lips. The girl, who didn’t always catch the hidden meanings, was totally lost. I strode along beside her, gripping her arm, thrilled by her trembling body, by the scent of her hair, her lips.
I said to myself: ‘You’ve got to kiss her!’ I counted to ten. I wasn’t brave enough. I scowled, blushed, I was confused and humiliated. The girl dared to say something. And then I forced myself to do it. She shuddered beneath my cold lips that were pressed against her cheek, her hair, her shoulder in its faded cloth.
But I had wanted it too much, and moved too fast. It was still daylight. The other couples could be seen and heard walking about. I made my companion sit next to me beside a spindly fir tree. After almost having to be dragged there, she sat down. She didn’t utter a word. She pushed me away with her eyes and hands. I was thinking about who-knows-what act of madness. The girl was terrified. When I kissed her on the lips she leapt up off the seat as if fired from a bow, quickly straightened her dress and rushed away, saying through her tears that she was going to find her sister. All of a sudden my foolish desire to prove that I was an uncouth, uneducated lout evaporated. I went over to her and reproached her for allowing me to kiss her. I don’t know what made me lie. I lied to her when I said that I had simply wanted to find out if she was ‘virtuous’, or if she was like her sister. I began to accuse her sister of all manner of things that made her blush, but it made me feel better. I spoke harshly, hatefully, cruelly about her sister – who I had only just met – insisting that I knew a great many compromising things about her. The girl was on the verge of tears. But I persisted. I told her that she needed to become ‘a virtuous girl’ again. I took pleasure in torturing her in this foolish way.
We all met up again at the far end of the Arena. The girls kissed and embraced my friends. Jean Victor was delighted. Dinu had perhaps already promised himself that he must do this again. All eyes were on us. I was deathly pale, while she was red-faced from crying. But who knows, maybe the others were jealous of us...
I was furious with myself. I couldn’t understand why I had said things that were so out of character, or why I had tormented her in such a ludicrous way, in the name of an overblown moral code that was repugnant as well as alien to my nature. I was completely baffled. It was like something from a nightmare.
On the way back, when I told Robert about my escapade he didn’t know what to believe. But after giving it some thought, he said that it was ‘interesting’, although not very. According to him I should have been much rougher with her, and gone even further. It’s odd how he failed to see that I was upset about what had happened.
Ever since that day, I never go with him to meet girls. He started a rumour that I was scared. Perhaps it wasn’t far from the truth.
Up till now I’ve said rather too little about this friend, who is supposed to be an important character in my novel. It’s possible that I don’t really know him. Robert reads whatever I tell him to, and talks constantly about the books he’s read. But – perhaps because of some hidden jealousy – his shallow rhetoric exasperates me. Robert exasperates me, because he’s sentimental, dull-witted and conceited. But since this notebook also acts as my Diary, shouldn’t I perhaps ask myself: am I not just as conceited? I shouldn’t be afraid of the answer. I realize that I consider myself superior to everyone. But I keep this hidden within me, and the novel won’t reveal it. Robert told me that his quest for glory is the only thing he lives for. I pretended not to understand. And then he began to tell me about D’Annunzio. I envy this Italian, the author of beautiful books, and whose memoires are full of beautiful women. But I’m in no hurry. Before I start craving such extraordinary things, I realize that I will have to work hard and suffer. That’s why I despise my friend: because he expects to achieve glory without working for it. Robert is no genius, of that I’m certain. He’s simply a beautiful boy, just like a girl, who loves going to the theatre and has plans to write three-act plays. One of his main characters will be based on me. He imagines me in my attic, in a coarse Russian shirt like the one I wear in the summer, with glasses and a disconsolate smile. I’ll be a sort of ‘raisonneur’. I’d love to know what Robert thinks of me; not just what he says to my face, but what he actually thinks. I know he’s very dismissive of me because he’s always saying that I know nothing of life, that I live among books. But he’s the one who wastes his time reading novels, and says that he ‘has a life’. He’s complex, because he has known more girls than I have, and because on Sundays he goes for a stroll along the boulevards. And I’m simple, because I regard these childish occupations as obstacles on the hard and bitter road that I have to travel.
When we get together with our many friends, Robert tells us about his dreams of glory. Sceptically, I ask him if he is doing any actual work to achieve this. He tells us that he reads Balzac, Ibsen, and Victor Eftimiu. We tease him unmercifully, because we both like and dislike Robert.
This is the difference between him and me: one dreams of happiness and waits for it, while the other torments himself to achieve it, without giving it too much thought. And that’s another foolish phrase I’ve just written, but I mustn’t cross it out: later on it will remind me how easy it is to draw clear distinctions at the age of seventeen.
In my novel, Robert will have to act and speak in order to make himself known to the reader. He lacks depth and is self-satisfied. I couldn’t resist the temptation to tell him about the major part he would play in the book about our adolescence. He listened with feverish anticipation. I said I was going to exaggerate his faults, make him look ridiculous, that I would gather together all the naïve and foolish nonsense with which he had regaled me and our friends over the past year, and put them in the novel. We sat up until well after midnight. Robert complained that I wasn’t really his friend, that I would expose myself as a liar if I only wrote bad things about him in the novel.
‘And what will you call me?’
‘Jean Victor Robert.’
He protested, crying out
