The Mandarins. Simone Beauvoir de

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      ‘But what?’

      Paula considered. ‘Well, I think I’ll ring up my dressmaker and get her to take a look at those beautiful materials you brought back.’

      ‘And after that?’

      ‘Oh, I always manage to find something to do,’ she said gaily.

      ‘By that you mean you have nothing at all to do,’ Henri said. He looked at Paula severely. ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about you during the last month. I think it’s a crime for you to spend your days vegetating inside these four walls.’

      ‘You call this vegetating!’ Paula said. She smiled gently, the way she used to long ago, and there was all the wisdom of the world in that smile. ‘When you love someone, you’re not vegetating.’

      ‘But loving isn’t a vocation.’

      She interrupted him. ‘You’re wrong. For me, it is a vocation.’

      ‘I’ve been thinking over what I said to you on Christmas Eve,’ he said, ‘and I’m sure I was right. You’ve got to take up singing again.’

      ‘For years I’ve been living exactly the same way I do now,’ Paula said. ‘Why are you suddenly so concerned?’

      ‘During the war it was possible to be satisfied to just kill time. But the war is over now. Listen to me,’ he said authoritatively, ‘you’re going to tell old man Grépin that you want to go back to work. I’ll help you choose your songs; I’ll even try to write a few for you, and I’ll ask the boys if they’d care to try their hand at it, too. Come to think of it, that would be right up Julien’s alley! I’m sure he’d be able to write a few charming ballads for you, and Brugere could put them to music. Just wait and see the repertoire we’ll put together! Whenever you’re ready, Sabriro’ll give you an audition, and I guarantee he’ll get you star booking at the 45 Club. After that, you’re made!’

      He realized he had spoken too volubly, with too much enthusiasm. Paula gave him a look of startled reproach. ‘And then what?’ she said. ‘Will I mean any more to you if you see my name on posters?’

      He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don’t be foolish! Of course not. But it’s better to be doing something than to do nothing. I try to write, and you ought to sing because you’ve got a real gift for it.’

      ‘I’m alive and I love you. To me, that’s not nothing.’

      ‘You’re playing with words,’ he said impatiently. ‘Why don’t you want to give it a try? Have you become so lazy? Or are you afraid? Or what?’

      ‘Listen,’ she said in a voice suddenly grown hard, ‘even if all those vanities – success, fame – still meant something to me, I wouldn’t start out on a second-rate career at the ripe age of thirty-seven. When I sacrificed that tour in Brazil for you, it was a final retirement. I have no regrets. Let’s just forget the whole thing.’

      Henri opened his mouth to protest. Without consulting him, she had only too willingly decided to make that sacrifice, and now she seemed to be holding him responsible for it! He held his tongue and gave Paula a perplexed look. He had never been able to decide whether she really scorned fame or whether she was afraid of not being able to attain it.

      ‘Your voice is as beautiful as ever,’ he said. ‘And so are you.’

      ‘Not quite,’ she replied impatiently, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I know exactly how it would turn out. To make you happy, a handful of intellectuals would proclaim my genius for a few months. And then – good-bye. I might have been a Damia or a Piaf, but I missed my chance. Well, it’s too bad! Let’s drop it.’

      She could never become a great star now, no doubt about that. But it would take only some small success to make her lower her sights. In any event, her life would certainly be less wretched if only she took an active interest in something. ‘And it would be ideal for me!’ he said to himself. He knew only too well that the problem concerned his own life even more than Paula’s.

      ‘Even if you can’t take the world by storm, it would still be worth it,’ he said. ‘You have your voice, your special talent. Don’t you think it would be interesting to try to get all you can out of it? I’m certain you’d find life a lot more satisfying.’

      ‘But I find it satisfying enough as it is,’ she replied, a look of exaltation brightening her face. ‘You don’t seem to understand what my love for you means to me.’

      ‘I do understand! But,’ he continued cuttingly, ‘you won’t do, for love of me, what I ask you to do.’

      ‘If you had good reasons for asking, I’d do it,’ she said gravely.

      ‘Actually, of course, you prefer your reasons to mine.’

      ‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Because they’re better. You’ve been giving me a purely superficial point of view, worldly reasons that aren’t really your own.’

      ‘Well, as for your point of view, I honestly don’t see what it is!’ he said peevishly. He stood up; it was useless to continue the discussion. He would try instead to confront her with a fait accompli – bring her songs, make appointments for her. ‘All right, let’s drop it. But I’m telling you, you’re wrong.’

      She hesitated a moment, smiled, and then asked, ‘Are you going to go to work now?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘On your novel?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Good,’ she said.

      He climbed the stairs. He was anxious to get back to his writing, and he was happy at the thought that his novel, at least, wasn’t going to be the slightest bit edifying. He still had no exact idea of what he was going to do; the only assignment he had set himself was to enjoy himself fully in being sincere. He spread his notes in front of him – almost a hundred pages. It was good to have put them away for a month; now he would be able to reread them with a fresh eye. He plunged into them joyfully, happy to rediscover memories and impressions formed into careful and smooth-flowing sentences. But after a while he began to worry. What was he going to do with all this stuff? These scribblings had neither head nor tail, even though they did have something in common – a certain feeling, a climate, the climate of the pre-war era. And that suddenly bothered him. He had thought vaguely, ‘I shall try to give the flavour of my life.’ As if such a thing were a perfume, labelled, trade-mark-registered, always the same, year after year. But the things he had to say about travelling, for example, were all in terms of a young man of twenty-five, the young man he had been in 1935; they had nothing at all to do with what he had experienced in Portugal. The story of his affair with Paula was equally dated; neither Lambert, not Vincent, nor any of the boys he knew would have any similar reactions today. And besides, with five years of living under the German occupation behind her, a young woman of twenty-seven would be very different from Paula. There was one solution: deliberately to place the book around 1935. But he had no desire to write a ‘period’ novel recreating a world that no longer was. On the contrary, what he had hoped for in jotting down those lines was to throw himself life and whole on to paper. Well then, he would have to write the story in the present, transposing the characters and events. ‘Transpose – what an annoying word! what a stupid word!’ he said to himself. СКАЧАТЬ