The elderly maid brought a cheese tray, which Malan ogled out of the corner of his eye. “I knew a man,” he said, “who after he had lived with his wife for thirty years …” Cormery paid close attention: whenever Malan began with “I knew a man who …” or “a friend …” or “an Englishman who was traveling with me …” you could be sure he was talking about himself … “who didn’t like pastries and his wife never ate them either. Well, after twenty years of living together, he caught his wife in the pastry shop, and by keeping an eye on her he found out that she went there several times a week to stuff herself with coffee éclairs. Yes, he thought she didn’t like sweets while in fact she loved coffee éclairs.”
“So,” said Cormery, “we never know anyone.”
“If you will. But it might perhaps be more accurate, it seems to me, in any case I think I would prefer to say, but blame it on my inability to state anything positively—yes, suffice it to say that if twenty years of living together are not enough to know a person, then an inquiry that is bound to be superficial forty years after a man’s death, runs the risk of bringing you only limited information, yes, one can say information with limited meaning about this man. Although, in another sense …”
He lifted a knife and, with a fatalistic air, brought it down on the goat cheese. “Excuse me. Won’t you have some cheese? No? Still so abstemious! It’s a hard job pleasing you!” Again there was a mischievous gleam in his half-closed eyes.
Cormery had known his old friend for twenty years now (add here why and how), and he accepted his irony with good humor. “It’s not a matter of pleasing me. Eating too much makes me heavy, and I sink.”
“Yes, and then you no longer soar over the rest of us.”
Cormery gazed at the handsome rustic furniture that filled the low-ceilinged dining room with its whitewashed beams. “My friend,” he said, “you’ve always thought I was arrogant. I am, but not always or with everyone. With you, for example, I’m incapable of arrogance.”
Malan looked away, which in him was a sign of emotion. “I know that,” he said. “But why is it?”
“Because I love you,” Cormery said quietly.
Malan pulled the bowl of chilled fruit toward him. He said nothing.
“Because,” Cormery went on, “when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone—you remember, in Algiers?—you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.”
“Oh, you were gifted.”
“Of course. But even the most gifted person needs someone to initiate him. The one that life puts in your path one day, that person must be loved and respected forever, even if he’s not responsible. That is my faith!”
“Yes, yes,” Malan said blandly.
“I know you find that hard to believe. Mind you, do not think that my affection for you is blind. You have great, very great faults, at least in my eyes.”
Malan licked his thick lips. Suddenly he seemed interested. “What faults?”
“For example you are, let us say, thrifty. Not out of avarice, it’s true, but out of fear, fear of going without, and so forth. All the same, it’s a serious fault, one that I generally dislike. But, above all, you cannot help suspecting others of ulterior motives. You are instinctively unable to believe that anyone has disinterested opinions.”
“Look here,” said Malan as he finished his wine, “I shouldn’t have coffee, and yet …”
But Cormery kept his self-possession.b “For example, I’m sure you couldn’t bring yourself to believe me if I told you that if you were just to ask, I would immediately give you everything I have.”
Malan hesitated, and now he was looking at his friend. “Oh, I know. You’re generous.”
“No, I am not generous. I’m stingy with my time and my energy, with anything that tires me, and that disgusts me. But what I said is true. You—you don’t believe me, and that is a fault in you, that is where you are really helpless, even though you are a superior man. Because you’re wrong. One word from you, right now, and everything I have is yours. You have no need of it and it’s only an example. But I didn’t choose it arbitrarily. Truly, everything I have is yours.”
“Thank you, really,” Malan said, his eyes half closed. “I am very touched.”
“All right, I’m embarrassing you. You don’t like people to speak too openly. I just wanted to tell you that with all your faults I love you. I love or revere very few people. As for the rest, I’m ashamed of my indifference to them. But for those I love, nothing and no one, neither I nor certainly they themselves, can ever make me stop loving them. It took me a long time to learn that; now I know it. That being said, let’s go on with our conversation: you don’t approve of my trying to find out about my father.”
“No—that is to say, I do approve. I was just afraid you’d be disappointed. A friend of mine who was very attracted to a young woman and wanted to marry her made the mistake of asking others about her.”
“A bourgeois,” Cormery said.
“Yes,” Malan said, “I was the one.” They both burst out laughing. “I was young. I collected such contradictory opinions about her that my own view of her became confused. I wasn’t sure whether or not I loved her. In short, I married another woman.”
“I can’t find myself a second father.”
“No, and luckily so. One is enough, if I can go by my own experience.”
“All right,” said Cormery. “Anyhow, I have to go see my mother in a few weeks. That gives me an opportunity. I spoke to you about it particularly because I was disturbed a while back by that difference in age in my favor. Yes, in my favor.”
“Yes, I understand.”
Cormery looked at Malan.
“Tell yourself he never grew old,” Malan said. “He was spared that suffering, and it is long.”
“Along with a certain number of pleasures.”
“Yes, you love life. You have to, since that’s all you believe in.” Malan seated himself heavily in a cretonne-covered easy chair, and suddenly a look of inexpressible melancholy came over his face.
“You’re right,” said Cormery. “I’ve loved life, I’m hungry for it. At the same time, life seems horrible to me, it seems inaccessible. That is why I am a believer, out of skepticism. Yes, I want to believe, I want to live, forever.” Cormery fell silent.
“At sixty-five, every year is a stay of execution,” Malan said. “I would like to die in peace, and dying frightens me. I have accomplished nothing.”
“There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.”
“Yes, and they die,” Malan said.
They were silent, and the wind blew a little harder around the house.
“You’re right, Jacques,” said Malan. “Go find out. You no longer need a father. You brought yourself up alone. Now you could love him as you know how to love. But …” he said, and he hesitated. “Come back to see me. I don’t have much time left. And forgive me …”
“Forgive you?” said Cormery. “I owe everything to you.”
“No, you don’t owe me very much. Just forgive me for sometimes not knowing how to respond to your affection.”
Malan gazed at the antique lamp hanging over the table, and his voice was hollow when he said what a few minutes later Cormery, alone in the wind in the deserted neighborhood, would keep on hearing over and over:
“There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts …”c
a. Chapter to be written and deleted.
- This and the two preceding paragraphs are crossed out.
b. I often lend money that I know I’ll never get back, to people I don’t care about. It’s just that I don’t know how to say no, and that exasperates me.
c. Jacques / I tried to find out for myself, from the start, when I was a child, what was right and what was wrong—because no one around me could tell me. And now that everything is leaving me I realize I need someone to show me the way and to blame me and praise me, by right not of power but of authority, I need my father.
I thought I knew it, and that I had myself in hand, I don’t [know?] any longer.
4 : The Child’s Games
A gentle short swell was making the ship roll in the July heat. Jacques Cormery, lying half naked in his cabin, watched the fragmented reflection of the sunlight on the sea dancing on the copper rim of the porthole. He jumped to his feet to turn off the fan that was drying the perspiration in his pores before it even began to trickle down his chest; it was better to sweat.
Then he relaxed on his bunk, narrow and hard as he liked a bed to be. Now the dull sound of the engines rose from the depths of the ship in muffled vibrations, like an enormous army forever on the march. He liked the sound these big steamers made, night and day, and the sensation of walking on a volcano, while
