The Mandarins. Simone Beauvoir de
Nadine brought it to her lips the blood drained from her face. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘My stomach just isn’t used to it any more,’ she added apologetically. But it wasn’t her stomach that had rebelled; she had suddenly thought of something – or someone. He did not question her.
Crisp, fresh cretonne curtains hung in their hotel room; in the bathroom there was hot water, real soap, and soft, fluffy terry-cloth robes. All of Nadine’s gayness came back to her. She insisted upon rubbing Henri with a rough bath-glove, and when his skin was red and burning from head to foot she laughingly tumbled him on to the bed. And she made love with such high spirits that it seemed as if she actually enjoyed it. The next morning they went to the shopping district, and her eyes shone as she fingered the rich silks and wools with her rough hands.
‘Were there ever such beautiful shops in Paris?’
‘Much more beautiful. Don’t you remember?’
‘I never went to the expensive shops. I was too young.’ She looked hopefully at Henri. ‘Do you think we’ll have them again some day?’
‘Some day, maybe.’
‘But how are they so rich here? I thought Portugal was a poor country.’
‘It’s a poor country, with some very rich people.’
For themselves and for their friends in Paris, they bought materials, stockings, underclothes, shoes, sweaters. They lunched in a basement restaurant the walls of which were covered with colourful posters of mounted picadors defying furious bulls. ‘Meat or fish – even they have their shortages!’ Nadine said laughingly, as they ate steaks the colour of cinders. Afterwards, in their supple, thick-soled, blatant yellow shoes, they wandered along cobblestoned streets which rose towards the working-class quarters. At one street corner barefoot children were solemnly watching a faded puppet show. The sidewalks became narrow, the fronts of the houses scaly.
A shadow darkened Nadine’s face. ‘It’s disgusting, this street. Are there many like this?’
‘There are.’
‘It doesn’t seem to upset you.’
He was in no mood for indignation. In fact, it even gave him a twinge of pleasure to see again the multi-coloured wash drying at sun-drenched windows above the streets’ shadowy crevasses. They walked down a passageway in silence. Suddenly, Nadine stopped in the middle of the greasy, stone stairway. ‘It’s disgusting!’ she repeated. ‘Let’s get out of it.’
‘Let’s go on just a little farther,’ Henri said.
In Marseilles, Naples, Piraeus, in Chinatowns of many cities, he had spent hours wandering through these same squalid streets. Of course, then as now, he wished that all this misery could be done away with. But the wish remained an abstract thing. He had never felt like running away, and the overpowering human odour of these streets went to his head. From the top of the hill to the bottom, the same swarming multitudes, the same blue sky burning above the roof tops. It seemed to Henri that from one moment to the next he would rediscover his old joy in all its intensity. That was what he sought from street to street. But it wouldn’t come back. Barefooted women – everyone here went barefooted – were squatting before their doors frying sardines over charcoal fires, and the stench of stale fish mingled in the air with the smell of hot oil. In cellar apartments opening on to the street, not a bed, not a piece of furniture, not a picture; nothing but straw mats, children covered with rashes, and from time to time a goat. Outside, no happy voices, no laughter; only sombre dead eyes. Was misery more hopeless here than in the other cities? Or instead of becoming hardened to misfortune, does one grow more sensitive to it? The blue of the sky seemed cruel above the unhealthy shadows; he began to share Nadine’s silent dismay. They passed a haggard-looking woman dressed in black rags who was scurrying through the street with a child clinging to her bare breast, and Henri said abruptly, ‘You’re right; let’s get out.’
But the next day, at a cocktail party given at the French Consulate, Henri found that it was useless to have tried to flee from that wretched hill. The table was laden with sandwiches and rich cakes, the women were wearing dresses in colours he had long ago forgotten, every face was smiling, all were speaking French, and the Hill of Grace, for a time, seemed far off, in a completely foreign country whose misfortunes were no concern of his. He was laughing politely with the others when old Mendoz das Viernas came and led him off to a corner of the drawing-room. He was wearing a stiff collar and a black tie; before Salazar’s dictatorship, he had been a cabinet minister. He looked at Henri suspiciously.
‘What is your impression of Lisbon?’ he asked.
‘It’s a very beautiful city,’ Henri answered. He saw das Viernas’ face darken and he hastily added with a smile, ‘I must say, though, I haven’t seen very much of it.’
‘Usually, the French who come here somehow manage to see nothing at all,’ das Viernas said bitterly. ‘Your Valéry, for example. He admired the sea, the gardens, but for the rest – a blind man.’ The old man paused a moment. ‘And you? Do you also intend to blindfold yourself?’
‘On the contrary!’ Henri said. ‘I intend to keep my eyes as wide open as I can.’
‘Ah! From what they have told me of you, that is what I had hoped,’ das Viernas said, his voice gentler now. ‘We shall make an appointment for tomorrow and I shall then show you Lisbon. A beautiful façade, isn’t it? But you will see what is behind it!’
‘I’ve already taken a walk on the Hill of Grace,’ Henri said.
‘But you did not go into the houses! I want you to see for yourself what the people eat, how they live. You would not believe me if I told you.’ Das Viernas shrugged his shoulders. ‘All that writing about the melancholy of the Portuguese and how mysterious it is. Actually it’s ridiculously simple: of seven million Portuguese, there are only seventy thousand who have enough to eat.’
It was impossible to get out of it. Henri spent the following morning visiting a series of wretched hovels. At the end of the afternoon, the former cabinet minister gathered his friends for the sole purpose of having them meet him. It was impossible to refuse. All of them were wearing dark suits, stiff collars, and bowlers; they spoke ceremoniously but every now and then a look of hatred crossed their sensitive faces. They were mostly former cabinet members, former journalists, former professors who had been crushed because of their obstinate refusal to rally to the new régime. All of them were poor and trapped, many had relatives in France who had been deported. Those who stubbornly continued to take what action they could knew that the Island of Hell awaited them. A doctor who treated poverty-stricken people without remuneration, who tried to open a clinic or introduce a little hygiene into the hospitals, was immediately suspect. Whosoever dared organize an evening course, whosoever made a generous gesture, or simply a charitable one, was branded enemy of both Church and State. And yet they doggedly persisted. They wanted to believe that the destruction of Nazism would somehow bring to an end this hypocritical fascism, and they dreamed constantly of overthrowing Salazar and creating a National Front like the one which had been formed in France. But they knew they were alone: the English capitalists had large interests in Portugal and the Americans were negotiating with the government for the purchase of air bases in the Azores. ‘France is our only hope,’ they repeated over and over. ‘Tell the people of France the truth,’ they begged. ‘They do not know; if they knew they would come to our rescue.’
They imposed daily meetings on Henri, overwhelmed him with facts, figures, statistics, took him for walks through the starving villages surrounding Lisbon. It wasn’t exactly the kind of holiday he had dreamed of, but he had no choice. He promised that he would wage a campaign in the press in order to get the facts to the people. Political tyranny, economic exploitation, police terror, the systematic brutalization of the masses, the clergy’s shameful complicity – he would tell everything. ‘If Carmona knew that France was willing to support us, he would join our ranks,’ das Viernas said. Years ago he had known Bidault, and he was thinking of suggesting to him a kind of secret treaty: in exchange for France’s backing, the future Portuguese government would be able to offer advantageous trade concessions