The Mandarins. Simone Beauvoir de
advantage of it.’ It was true she had no weapons to fight back with, not even the most ineffectual. But her defencelessness was itself a trap; it left Henri no choice but to become either the hangman or the hanged. He had no desire to play the hanged, but the trouble was that neither was he a hangman.
The night he met Nadine on one of the platforms of the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had a gnawing, uneasy feeling inside him.
‘You’re not early,’ she grumbled.
‘I’m not late, either.’
‘Let’s hurry and get on. If the train should leave …’
‘It won’t leave ahead of schedule.’
‘You can never tell.’
They boarded the train and chose an empty compartment. With a perplexed look on her face, Nadine stood motionless for a long moment between the two seats. Then she sat down next to the window, her back to the locomotive. After a moment, she opened her suitcase and began preparing for the night with the meticulous care of an old maid. She slipped on a bathrobe and slippers, wrapped a blanket around her legs, and propped a pillow under her head. From a small basket that served her as a purse, she took a stick of chewing gum. Then she remembered that Henri was present and smiled at him engagingly.
‘Did she moan very much when she saw you were dead set on taking me?’
Henri shrugged his shoulders. ‘Naturally, she wasn’t overjoyed.’
‘What did she say?’
‘It’s none of your business,’ he said dryly.
‘But I’d really like to know.’
‘And I really don’t want to tell you about it.’
She took a garnet-coloured piece of knitting from her basket and began clicking the needles together while chewing her gum. ‘She’s laying it on too thick,’ Henri thought peevishly. Perhaps she was annoying him on purpose because she suspected his remorse and felt that he was still, in spirit, in the red apartment. Actually Paula had kissed him good-bye without tears. ‘Have a nice trip,’ she had said. But at this very moment, he knew she would be weeping. ‘I’ll write to her as soon as I get there,’ he promised himself.
The train got under way and sped through the sad dusk of the Parisian suburbs. Henri opened a detective story and glanced quickly at the sullen face opposite him. At the moment, he could do nothing about Paula’s unhappiness, but there was no point in spoiling Nadine’s pleasure, too. He made an effort and said cheerfully, ‘Tomorrow at this time we’ll be passing through Spain.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re not expecting me so soon in Lisbon. We’ll have two whole days all to ourselves.’
Nadine did not answer. For a moment or so, she continued to knit diligently, and then she stretched herself out on the seat, stuffed a ball of wax in each ear, tied a kerchief around her eyes and turned her back on Henri. ‘And I was hoping Nadine’s smiles would make up for Paula’s tears!’ he said to himself. He closed the book and turned out the lights. The blue paint that had covered the train windows during the war had been scraped off, but the fields outside were completely black under the starless sky. Inside the compartment, it was cold. Why, he wondered, was he in this train, opposite that almost total stranger who was breathing heavily in her sleep? Suddenly, it seemed impossible that the past would really be waiting for him in Lisbon.
‘She could at least be a little more agreeable!’ he said to himself angrily the next morning as the train made its way towards the border. When they had changed trains at Hendaye, where a light breeze and the warm sun played against their skins, Nadine hadn’t so much as smiled; instead, she yawned unrestrainedly while their passports were being checked. Now she was walking in front of him with her long boyish strides as he struggled with their two heavy suitcases, growing hotter by the minute under the unaccustomed sun. He looked with distaste at her strong, rather hairy legs; her socks underlined their ungracious bareness. Behind them, a barrier closed; for the first time in six years he was walking on soil that wasn’t French. Another barrier rose before them and he heard Nadine cry out unbelievingly: ‘Oh!’ It was an impassioned sound, a sound he had tried in vain to wring from her with his caresses.
‘Oh! Look!’
Alongside the road next to a burned-out house was a stand covered with oranges, bananas, chocolate. Nadine rushed over to it, grabbed two oranges and handed one to Henri. At sight of this carefree joy, so completely cut off from France by only a little over a mile, he felt that hard black thing inside his chest, that thing which for four years had taken the place of his heart, suddenly become soft wax. He had looked unflinchingly at pictures of Dutch children starving to death; now, at the sight of that sudden burst of joy, he felt like sitting down at the edge of the road, his head in his hands, and never moving again.
Nadine’s good humour came back. She gorged herself on fruits and candies all across the Basque countryside and the Castilian desert, looked smilingly at the clear Spanish skies. They spent one more night stretched out on the dusty seats. In the morning they followed the course of a pale blue stream which wound its way among countless olive groves. Gradually the stream turned into a river and finally a lake. And then the train stopped. They were in Lisbon.
‘All those taxis!’ Nadine exclaimed.
A line of taxis was waiting in the driveway of the station. Henri checked the suitcases in the baggage room, got into a cab with Nadine, and said to the chauffeur, ‘Drive us around.’ Nadine gripped his arm and cried out in terror as they plummeted down steep streets at a speed that seemed dizzying to them; they had forgotten what it was like to ride in a car. Henri laughed along with Nadine and held her arm tightly. He turned his head rapidly from side to side, joyful and yet incredulous. The past was there to meet him; he recognized it. A southern city, a fresh, hot city with its ancient clanking streetcars, and on the horizon the promise of salty winds and the sea beating against high walls. Yes, he recognized it, and yet it astonished him more than ever had Marseilles, Athens, Naples, Barcelona. Because now everything new, everything unknown, was a thing to be marvelled at. It was beautiful, that capital, with its quiet heart, its unruly hills, its houses with pastel-coloured icing, its huge white ships.
‘Let us off somewhere in the centre of town,’ Henri said. The taxi stopped at a large square surrounded by cinemas and cafés. Seated at tables in front of the cafés were men in dark suits. No women sat there. The women were busily moving along the shop-lined street which led down to the estuary. Suddenly Henri and Nadine stopped dead simultaneously.
‘Will you please look at that!’
Leather! real thick, supple leather! You could almost smell it through the shop window. Cowhide suitcases, pigskin gloves, tawny-coloured shoes you could walk in without squeaking, without getting your feet wet. Real silk, real wool, flannel suits, poplin shirts! It suddenly occurred to Henri that he looked rather seedy in his suit of ersatz cloth and his cracked shoes with their upturned tips. And alongside the women in their furs and their silk stockings and hand-made pumps, Nadine looked like a rag picker.
‘Tomorrow we’re going to buy things,’ he said. ‘A lot of things!’
‘It just doesn’t seem real!’ Nadine exclaimed. ‘I wonder what everyone in Paris would say if they saw all this!’
‘Exactly what we’re saying,’ Henri replied, laughing.
They stopped before a pastry shop, and this time it wasn’t a look of greed, but rather one of shock which appeared on Nadine’s face. Henri, too, stood there for a moment, frozen in unbelief. Then, ‘Let’s go in,’ he said, nudging Nadine.
Except for an old man and a little boy, there were only women seated around the tables, women with oily hair, weighed down with furs, jewels, and fat, religiously performing their daily gorging. Two little girls with black braided hair, wearing blue sashes across their chests and a lot of religious medallions around their necks, were sitting quietly at a table casually sipping thick hot chocolate overflowing with whipped cream.
‘Do