The Mandarins

Suddenly, Paula’s smile vanished and a look of fear appeared on her face. ‘Promise me one thing,’ she murmured.

‘What?’

‘That you’ll never live with another woman.’

‘What an idiotic notion! Don’t be a fool! Of course I promise.’

‘Then I suppose you can go back to your cherished old habits,’ she said with resignation.

He studied her curiously. ‘Why did you make me promise that?’

Again a look of panic appeared in Paula’s eyes. She was silent for a moment. ‘Oh, I know that no other woman could ever take my place in your life,’ she finally said. There was a false calmness in her voice. ‘But I cling to symbols, you know.’ She started to get up, as if she dreaded hearing any more. He stopped her.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I want to be completely frank with you. I’ll never live with another woman. Never. But I have an urge to do things, meet new people, have a few little affairs. I think it’s because of these four years of austerity we’ve just gone through.’

‘But you are having an affair now, aren’t you?’ Paula said calmly. ‘With Nadine.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You don’t lie very well.’

At times she was so completely blind – and at times so clear-sighted! He was disconcerted. ‘I was an idiot not to talk to you about it,’ he said embarrassed. ‘I was afraid of hurting you. But there’s absolutely no reason for you to feel hurt; practically nothing has happened, and it won’t last long, in any case.’

‘Don’t let it upset you. I’m not one to be jealous of a child, especially Nadine!’ She walked over to Henri and sat down on the arm of his chair. ‘On Christmas Eve I told you a man like you isn’t subject to the same laws as other men. I still believe that. There’s a commonplace form of faithfulness that I’ll never demand of you. Have a good time with Nadine, and anyone else you like.’ She ruffled Henri’s hair. ‘You see how much I respect your freedom!’

‘Yes,’ he said. He was both relieved and disappointed; his too-easy victory led him nowhere. He felt he had to carry it at least to its conclusion. ‘As a matter of fact, Nadine doesn’t have a shadow of feeling for me. All she wants is for me to take her along. But it’s completely understood that we’ll stop seeing each other just as soon as we get back.’

‘Take her with you?’

‘Yes, she’s going to Portugal with me.’

‘No!’ Paula exclaimed. Suddenly her serene mask shattered into a thousand pieces and Henri saw before him a face of flesh and bones, with trembling lips and eyes glistening with tears. ‘You said you couldn’t take me!’

‘You didn’t seem anxious to go, so I didn’t try very hard.’

‘I wasn’t anxious! I’d have given an arm to go with you! Only I thought you wanted to be alone. I’m perfectly willing to sacrifice myself to your beloved solitude,’ she cried out in revolt, ‘but not to Nadine! No!’

‘It doesn’t make much difference whether I take Nadine or whether I go alone, since you say you’re not jealous of her,’ he said bitingly.

‘It makes all the difference in the world!’ she replied, her voice breaking with emotion. ‘Alone, I would still be with you, in a way; we would still be together. The first trip since the war! You haven’t any right to take someone else.’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘if you see any sort of symbolism in this trip, you’re completely wrong. Nadine simply wants to see something of the world. She’s just an unhappy kid who’s never had a chance to see anything, and it would make me feel good to give her this pleasure. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘If that is really all there is to it,’ Paula said slowly, ‘then don’t take her.’ She looked at Henri pleadingly. ‘I ask it of you in the name of our love.’

They looked at each other silently for a moment. Paula’s whole face was a longing plea. But suddenly Henri grew stubborn. He felt as if he were facing an armed torturer rather than a woman at her wits’ end. ‘You have just told me that you respected my freedom,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she replied fiercely. ‘But if you wanted to destroy yourself I’d try to stop you. And I’m not going to let you betray our love.’

‘In other words, I’m free to do as you please,’ he said ironically.

‘How can you be so unfair!’ she said, sobbing. ‘I’d take anything from you, anything! But I know inside me I mustn’t take this. No one but I should be going with you.’

‘That’s your opinion,’ he said.

‘But it’s obvious!’

‘Not to me.’

‘Because you’re blind, because you want to be blind. Listen,’ she said, forcing her voice to be calm, ‘you’re really interested in that girl, and you see how much you’re hurting me. Please don’t take her.’

Henri was silent for a moment. There wasn’t very much he could say in answer to that argument, and he resented it as much as if Paula had used physical force to stop him.

‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘I won’t take her!’ He got up and walked towards the stairway. ‘Only don’t talk to me any more about freedom!’

Paula followed him and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Does your freedom have to make me suffer?’

He shook off her hand. ‘If you suffer when I do what I want to, then I’ll have to choose between you and my freedom.’

He took a step away from Paula, and she cried out to him anxiously. There was panic in her eyes. ‘Henri,’ she pleaded, ‘what do you mean by that?’

‘Just what I said.’

‘You’re not going to destroy our love on purpose, are you?’

He turned and faced her. ‘All right!’ he said. ‘Since you insist on it, let’s have it out once and for all!’ He was irritated enough by now to want to get to the very heart of the matter. ‘There’s a basic misunderstanding between us. We don’t have the same conception of love …’

‘There’s no misunderstanding,’ Paula said quickly. ‘I know what you’re going to say – my love is my whole life and you want it to be only a part of yours. I know, and I agree.’

‘Yes, but with that as a start, there are other questions that have to be answered,’ Henri said.

‘Oh, no,’ Paula said. ‘It’s all so stupid,’ she added in an agitated voice. ‘You’re not going to question our love just because I’ve asked you not to take Nadine!’

‘I’m not taking her. That part is settled. But there’s something entirely different involved.’

‘Listen,’ Paula said abruptly, ‘let’s get it over with. If you absolutely must take her with you to prove you’re free, then take her with you. I don’t want you to think of me as a tyrant.’

‘I certainly will not take her if you’re going to eat your heart out the whole time I’m away.’

‘I’d eat my heart out even more if you chose to destroy our love out of spite.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You’re capable of doing it too. Your least little whims are so important to you!’

She looked at him imploringly, hopefully waiting for him to say, ‘I hold no grudge against you.’ She could wait a long time for him to say it. She sighed. ‘You love me,’ she said, ‘but you’re never willing to sacrifice anything for our love. It always has to be me who gives everything.’

‘Paula,’ he said amicably, ‘if I make that trip with Nadine, I repeat to you again that when we get back I’ll stop seeing her, and nothing will be changed between you and me.’

Paula remained silent. ‘I’m blackmailing her, that’s just what it amounts to,’ Henri thought. ‘It’s rather disgraceful.’ And the ugliest part of it was that Paula was aware of it, and would play at being the generous one, knowing all the time that she was accepting a rather sordid bargain. But what of it! You want what you want. And what he wanted was to take Nadine.

‘Do as you please,’ Paula said with a sigh. ‘I suppose I give too much importance to symbols. Really, it makes hardly any difference whether the girl goes with you, or not.’

‘It makes no difference whatsoever,’ Henri said emphatically.

During the days that followed, Paula didn’t mention the matter again. Except that with each of her gestures, with her every silence, she was saying, ‘I’m defenceless, and you’re taking 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 you want one?’ Henri asked.

Nadine nodded. A few minutes later, a waitress placed a cup of chocolate before her, but when 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 in connection with the African colonies. It would have been difficult to explain to him, without being brutal, how completely fantastic his project was!