The Mandarins

‘Why don’t you write?’ Scriassine asked.

‘There are enough books in the world.’

‘That’s not the only reason,’ he said, staring at me through small, prying eyes. ‘The truth is you don’t want to expose yourself.’

‘Expose myself to what?’

‘On the surface, you seem very sure of yourself, but basically you’re extremely timid. You’re one of those people who pride themselves on not doing things.’

I interrupted him. ‘Don’t try analysing me; I know every dark recess of myself. I’m a psychiatrist, you know.’

‘I know,’ he said smiling. ‘Do you think we could have dinner together one evening? I feel lost in this blacked out Paris; I don’t seem to know anyone any more.’

Suddenly, I thought, ‘Well, well! At least for him I have legs!’ I took out my note-book; I had no reason for refusing.

‘All right, let’s have dinner together,’ I said. ‘Can you make it the third of January?’

‘It’s a date. Eight o’clock at the Ritz bar. Does that suit you?’

‘Fine.’

I felt ill at ease. Oh, it isn’t that I cared much what he thought of me. No, not that. When I see my own likeness in the depths of someone else’s consciousness, I always experience a moment of panic. But it doesn’t last very long; I snap right out of it. What did bother me was having glimpsed Robert through eyes that weren’t mine. Had he really reached an impasse? I looked over at him and saw him take Paula by the waist and spin her around; with his other hand, he was drawing God only knows what in the air. Perhaps he was explaining something about the flow of time to her. In any case, they were both laughing; he didn’t give the least impression of being in danger. Were he in danger, he would surely have known it; Robert isn’t often mistaken and he never lies to himself. I went to the bay window and hid myself behind the red draperies. Scriassine had spoken quite a bit of nonsense, but he had posed certain questions I was unable to brush off so easily. During all these weeks, I had fled from questions. We’d been waiting so long for this moment – the liberation, victory – that I wanted to get all I could out of it. There would always be time enough tomorrow to think of the next day. Well, now I had thought of it, and I wondered what Robert thought. His doubts never produced a diminishing of activity, but on the contrary they stimulated him to excesses. Didn’t those long-drawn-out conversations, those letters, those telephone calls, those nocturnal debauches of work cover up a deep disturbance? He never hides anything from me, but sometimes he keeps certain worries temporarily to himself. And besides, I thought remorsefully, tonight he again repeated to Paula, ‘We’re at the crossroads.’ He said it often, and through cowardice I avoided giving those words their true weight. The crossroads. Therefore, in Robert’s eyes, the world was in danger. And he is the world for me. He was in danger! He spoke volubly as we were returning home, arm in arm, through the familiar darkness along the quays. But tonight his voice wasn’t enough to reassure me. He was bursting with what he had seen and heard, and he was very gay; when he has remained shut in for days and nights on end, the least occasion to go out becomes an event. When he spoke of the party, it seemed to me as if I had spent the evening with my eyes blindfolded and my ears stuffed with cotton. He had eyes all around his head and a dozen pairs of ears. I listened to him, but at the same time I continued questioning myself. He was never going to complete that journal he had kept so conscientiously all during the war. Why not? Was that a symptom? Of what?

‘Poor, unhappy Paula! It’s a catastrophe for a woman to be loved by a writer,’ Robert was saying. ‘She believed everything Perron told her about herself.’

I tried to concentrate on Paula. ‘I’m afraid the liberation went to her head,’ I said. ‘Last year, she had practically wiped out all her illusions. And now she’s beginning to play at being madly in love again. But she’s only playing.’

‘She wanted absolutely to make me say that time doesn’t exist,’ Robert said. ‘The best part of her life is behind her, and now that the war’s over she’s hoping to relive the past.’

‘Isn’t that what we were all hoping for?’ I asked. I thought I had spoken the words lightly, but Robert’s hand tightened around my arm.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘Not a thing; everything’s perfect,’ I said flippantly.

‘Come now! I know what it means when you start speaking in your worldly woman’s voice,’ Robert said. ‘I’m sure something’s churning in that little head of yours. How many glasses of punch did you have?’

‘Certainly less than you. And anyhow, the punch has nothing to do with it.’

‘Ah! You admit it!’ Robert said triumphantly. ‘Something is the matter and the punch has nothing to do with it. What is it then?’

‘Scriassine,’ I answered, laughing. ‘He explained to me why French intellectuals are done for.’

‘He’d like that!’

‘I know, but he frightened me anyhow.’

‘A great big girl like you who lets herself be frightened by the first prophet who comes along! I get a big kick out of Scriassine; he’s restless, he rambles on, boils up, makes you know he’s there. But you shouldn’t take him seriously.’

‘He said that politics will eat you up, that you’ll stop writing.’

‘And you believed him?’ Robert said gaily.

‘Well, it is true you’re not showing any sign of finishing your memoirs,’ I replied.

Robert paused for a second and then said, ‘That’s a special case.’

‘But why?’

‘There are too many weapons in those memoirs that can be used against me.’

‘That’s precisely why the thing is worth what it’s worth,’ I said spiritedly. ‘It’s so rare to find a man who dares to come out in the open! And when he does accept the dare, he invariably wins in the end.’

‘Yes,’ Robert said, ‘after he’s dead.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now that I’m back in politics I have a lot of enemies. Do you realize how delighted they’d be the day those memoirs appeared in print?’

‘Your enemies will always find weapons to use against you, the ones in the journal or others,’ I said.

‘Just imagine those memoirs in the hands of Lafaurie, or Lachaume, or young Lambert. Or in the hands of any journalist, for that matter,’ Robert said.

Cut off completely from politics, from the future, from the public, not even knowing whether his journal would ever be published, Robert had rediscovered in its writing the adventure of the explorer venturing into an unnamed wilderness at random, without a trail to follow, without signs to warn him of its dangers. In my opinion, he had never written anything better. ‘If you become involved in politics,’ I said impatiently, ‘then you no longer have the right to write sincere books. Is that it?’

‘No, you can write sincere books but not scandalous ones,’ Robert replied. ‘And you know very well that nowadays there are a thousand things a man can’t speak about without causing a scandal.’ He smiled. ‘To tell the truth there isn’t much about any individual that doesn’t lend itself to scandal.’

We walked a few steps in silence and then I said, ‘You spent three years writing those memoirs. Doesn’t it bother you to leave them lying in the bottom of a drawer?’

‘I’ve stopped thinking about them. I have another book on my mind now.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘I’ll tell you all about it in a few days.’

I looked at Robert suspiciously. ‘And do you really believe you’ll find enough time to write?’

‘Of course.’

‘It doesn’t seem that certain to me. At the moment you don’t have a minute to yourself.’

‘In politics, it’s the beginning that’s the hardest. Afterwards you can take it easier.’

His voice sounded too confident. ‘And what if it doesn’t become easier?’ I persisted. ‘Would you get out of politics or would you stop writing?’

‘You know, it really wouldn’t be a great tragedy if I stopped writing for a little while,’ Robert answered with a smile. ‘I’ve scribbled a lot of words on a lot of paper in my life!’

I felt a wrench at my heart. ‘Just the other day you were saying your best works are still ahead of you.’

‘And I still think so. But they can wait a while.’

‘How long? A month? A year? Ten years?’ I asked.

‘Listen,’ Robert said in a conciliatory tone of voice, ‘one book more or less on earth isn’t as important as all that. And the political situation at present is extremely stimulating; I hope you realize that. This is the first time the left has ever held its fate in its own hands, the first chance to try to organize a group independent of the Communists without running the risk of serving the cause of the right. I’m not going to let this opportunity slip by! I’ve been waiting for it all my life.’

‘For my part, I think your books are more important,’ I said. ‘They bring people something unique and different. But when it comes to politics, you’re not the only one about who can become involved in it.’

‘But I’m the only one who can steer things in the direction I want them to take,’ Robert said cheerfully. ‘You of all people ought to understand me. The vigilance committees and the Resistance were useful, all right, but they were negative things. Today, it’s a question of building, and that’s much more interesting.’

‘I understand you very well, but your writing interests me more.’

‘Haven’t we always agreed that one doesn’t write just for the sake of writing?’ Robert said. ‘At certain times, other forms of action become more urgent.’

‘Not for you,’ I replied. ‘First and foremost, you’re a writer.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ Robert said reproachfully. ‘For me, the revolution comes first.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but you can best serve the revolution by writing your books.’

Robert shook his head. ‘That depends on the circumstances. We’re at a critical moment of history just now; first we have to win the political battle.’

‘And what happens if we don’t win it?’ I asked. ‘Do you really believe there’s a chance of a new war?’

‘I don’t believe a new war is going to start tomorrow,’ Robert replied. ‘But what has to be avoided at all cost is the creation of a situation in the world which might easily lead to war. If that happens, then we’ll sooner or later come to blows again. And we also have to prevent this victory from being exploited by capitalism.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘There are a lot of things that have to be prevented before one can afford to amuse oneself writing books that no one might ever read.’

I stopped dead in the middle of the street. ‘What? Do you believe that too? That people will lose interest in literature?’

‘Believe me, they’ll have a lot of other things to keep themselves busy with,’ Robert said in a voice that again seemed to me too reassuring.

‘The prospect doesn’t seem to bother you at all,’ I said indignantly. ‘But a world without literature and art would be horribly sad.’

‘In any event, there are millions of men at this very moment to whom literature means absolutely nothing,’ Robert replied.

‘Yes, but you always expected that to change.’

‘I still expect it to. What makes you think I don’t?’ Robert asked. ‘But that’s precisely it,’ he went on without waiting for me to answer. ‘If the world decides to change, there’s no doubt we’ll go through a period in which literature will be almost completely out of the picture.’

We went into the study and I sat down on the arm of one of the leather chairs. Yes, I had certainly drunk too much punch; the walls were spinning crazily. I looked at the table on which Robert had been writing night and day for twenty years. He was sixty now, and if this period of political upheaval dragged on for very long he ran the risk of never seeing the end of it. He couldn’t possibly be as indifferent to such a prospect as he tried to appear.

‘Let’s look into this thing a little,’ I said. ‘You believe your major works are still ahead of you and just five minutes ago you said you were going to begin a new book. That implies that you believe there are people around who want to read what you’ve written …’

‘Oh, I suppose that’s more than likely,’ Robert said. ‘But the opposite view can’t be rejected out of hand.’ He sat down next to me in the chair. ‘It’s not really as horrible as you might think,’ he added cheerfully. ‘Literature is created for men and not men for literature.’

‘It would be sad for you,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t be happy if you stopped writing.’

‘I don’t know,’ Robert replied with a grin. ‘I have no imagination.’

But he has. I remember how worried he was the night he said to me, ‘My major works are still ahead of me!’ He’s determined that those works shall have weight, permanence. It’s useless for him to protest; above all else he’s a writer. At first perhaps he had dreamed only of serving the revolution; literature was just a means. But it soon became an end; he loved it for itself and all his books prove it, especially those memoirs he doesn’t want published. He wrote them purely for the pleasure of writing. No, the truth is that he simply doesn’t want to talk about himself, and that reluctance isn’t a good sign.

‘As for me,’ I said, ‘I have plenty of imagination.’

The walls were spinning, but I was thinking very lucidly, much more lucidly than I do in the morning before breakfast. In the morning before eating, you’re on the defensive, you manage somehow not to know things you really do know. Suddenly I saw everything with perfect clarity. The war was ending and a new history in which nothing was guaranteed was beginning. And Robert’s future wasn’t guaranteed; it was perfectly possible for him to stop writing and even for all his published works to be swallowed up into nothingness.

‘What do you really think?’ I asked. ‘Do you think things will turn out good or bad?’

Robert began to laugh. ‘I’m not a prophet! But one thing is certain,’ he added. ‘We’re holding a lot of trumps.’

‘But what are the chances of winning?’

‘Shall I look into my crystal ball? Or would you like me to read your tea leaves?’

‘You don’t have to make fun of me,’ I said. ‘I have a right to ask a few questions from time to time.’

‘I ask myself a few, too, you know,’ Robert said.

Yes, he does ask himself questions, and graver ones than I do. Personally, I rarely act on my beliefs; that’s why I so easily become unhappy. I realize I’m wrong being that way, but with Robert it costs so little to be wrong.

‘But you only ask yourself those questions you’re able to answer,’ I said.

He laughed again. ‘Preferably, yes. The others don’t serve much purpose.’

‘That’s no reason not to ask them,’ I said. My voice was rising, but I wasn’t angry with Robert. I was angry with myself, with my blindness during these past weeks. ‘I’d still like to have some idea of what’s going to happen to us,’ I persisted.

‘Don’t you think it’s rather late?’ Robert asked. ‘We’ve both had a lot of punch to drink, and our minds will be a lot clearer tomorrow morning.’

Tomorrow morning the walls will stop spinning, the furniture and books will be in their proper places, always the same places. And my ideas, too, will fall back into place, and I’ll begin to live again from day to day, without turning my head, looking just so far and no farther into the future. I’ll stop paying attention to that discordant clatter in my heart. I’m tired of that diet. I looked at the cushion by the fireplace on which Diego used to sit. ‘A Nazi victory doesn’t enter into my plans,’ he had said. And then they had killed him.

‘Ideas are always too definite!’ I said. ‘The war is won. There’s a definite idea for you. Well, in my opinion we went to a very peculiar party tonight, with all the dead who weren’t there.’

‘There’s quite a difference between saying that their deaths served some purpose and none at all,’ Robert said.

‘Diego’s served no purpose at all,’ I retorted. ‘And what if it had?’ I added irritably. ‘It’s fine for the living, this system by which everything leads to something else. But the dead stay dead and we’re constantly betraying them; they don’t lead to anything.’

‘We don’t betray them by choice,’ Robert protested.

‘We betray them when we forget them and when we use them,’ I said. ‘Regret has to be useless or else it’s not really regret.’

Robert thought for a moment and then, with a perplexed look on his face, said, ‘I suppose I’ve no great talent for regretting. I don’t bother myself much with questions I can’t answer, things I can’t change.’ He paused a moment and added, ‘I don’t say I’m right about that.’

‘And I don’t say you’re wrong. In any case, the dead are dead and we go on living. All the regretting in the world won’t change that.’

Robert took my hand. ‘Don’t go looking for things to make you remorseful,’ he said. ‘We’ll also die, you know; that brings us very close to them, doesn’t it?’

I withdrew my hand; at that moment I was the enemy of all friendly feelings. I didn’t want to be consoled, not yet.

‘Your damned punch has really gone to my head,’ I said. ‘I’m going to bed.’

‘Yes, go to bed now. And tomorrow we’ll ask each other all the questions you want, even those that serve no purpose,’ Robert said.

‘And you? Aren’t you coming to bed?’

‘No, I think I’ll have a shower and do some work.’

‘There’s no doubt Robert is better armed than I against regrets,’ I thought, getting into bed. He works, acts; the future is more real to him than the past. And he writes. All the things that fall outside his normal course of life – misfortune, defeat, death – he puts into his books and considers himself rid of them. But I have no recourse; whatever I lose I can never regain, and there’s nothing to redeem my infidelities. Suddenly I began to weep. ‘These are my eyes that are weeping,’ I thought. ‘He sees everything, but not through my eyes.’ I was weeping, and for the first time in twenty years I was alone, alone with my remorse, my fear. I fell asleep and dreamed I was dead. I woke up with a start, and the fear was still there. And death continues to prowl silently in the room. I switch on the lights, turn them off; if Robert sees the ray of light under my door, he’ll worry. It’s useless; tonight he can’t help me. When I wanted to talk to him about himself, he evaded my questions. He knows he’s in danger; I’m afraid for him. Up to now I’ve always had the fullest confidence in him; I’ve never tried to measure him. For me the measure of all things was Robert. I’ve lived with him as I’ve lived with myself, no distance separating us. But, suddenly, I’ve lost all confidence – in everything. No fixed stars, no milestones. Robert is a man, a fallible, vulnerable man of sixty whom the past no longer protects and the future menaces. I lean back against the pillow, my eyes wide open. To see him better I’ve got to step backwards, far enough back to blot out the view of those twenty years of unquestioning love I’d given him.

It’s not easy. There was a time I did see him from a distance, but I was too young. I looked at him from too far off. Friends had pointed him out to me at the Sorbonne; they spoke of him a great deal, with a mixture of admiration and disapproval. It was whispered that he drank and frequented brothels. If that had been true, I think it would have attracted rather than repelled me; I was still rebelling against my pious childhood. In my mind, sin was a touching manifestation of the absence of God, and if someone had told me that Dubreuilh raped little girls I’d have taken him for a saint of sorts. But his vices were minor and his too-well-established fame irritated me. When I began taking his courses, I had already made up my mind that the ‘great man’ was a charlatan. Of course, he was different from all the other professors. He would come rushing into the room like a gust of wind; he was always four or five minutes late. He would survey us for a moment with his large, crafty eyes, and then he would begin speaking in either a very amiable or a very aggressive voice. There was something provocative in his surly face, his violent voice, his bursts of laughter which sometimes seemed to us a little insane. He wore very white shirts, his hands were always carefully manicured, and he was impeccably shaven; it was impossible, therefore, to attribute to negligence his zipper jackets, his pullovers, his clumsy shoes. He preferred comfort to decency with such an obvious lack of restraint that I thought it affected. I had read his novels and didn’t like them at all; I expected them to bring to me some inspiring message, and all they ever spoke to me of were indifferent people, frivolous sentiments, and a lot of other things that didn’t seem to me the least bit essential. As for his courses, they were interesting all right, but he never really said anything worthy of a genius. And he was always so cocksure of being right that I had an irresistible desire to contradict him. Oh, I was convinced, too, that the truth was to the left; ever since my childhood I had sniffed an odour of stupidity and lies in bourgeois thinking, a very foul-smelling odour. And then I had learned from the Gospel that all men are equal, are brothers; that’s one thing I continue to believe in with an unshakable faith. But spiritually, after I had been for so long crammed full of absolutes, the void left in the heavens made a mockery of all morality I had been taught. But Dubreuilh believed there could be salvation here on earth. I let him know where I stood in my first essay. ‘Revolution, fine,’ I said, ‘but what then?’ When he gave me back my paper a week later as we were leaving the classroom, he ridiculed my efforts. According to him, my absolute was the abstract dream of a petty bourgeoise incapable of facing reality. Of course I couldn’t hold my own against him, and he won every round. But that didn’t prove anything, and I told him as much. We resumed our discussion the following week and this time he tried to convince me, rather than overwhelm me. I had to admit that in private discussion he didn’t at all seem to feel that he was a great man. He began chatting with me, rather often after classes, sometimes he walked home with me occasionally taking a longer route than was necessary. And then we began going out together in the afternoons, the evenings. We stopped talking about morality and politics and other lofty subjects. He told me about the people he knew and the things he did, and most of all he would take me for walks, show me streets, squares, quays, canals, cemeteries, suburbs, warehouses, vacant sites, little cafés, and a hundred corners of Paris that were completely new to me. And I began to realize that I had never really seen things I believed I had always known; with him everything took on a thousand meanings – faces, voices, people’s clothing, a tree poster, a neon sign, no matter what. I reread all his novels. And I soon realized I had completely misunderstood them the first time. Dubreuilh gave the impression of writing capriciously, for his own pleasure, completely without motivation. And yet on closing the book, you felt yourself overwhelmed with anger, disgust, revolt; you wanted things to change. To read certain passages from his works, you would take him for a pure aesthete; he has a feeling for words, and he’s interested in things for themselves, in rain and clear skies, in the games of love and chance, in everything. Only he doesn’t stop there; suddenly you find yourself thrown in among people, and all their problems become your concern. That’s why I’m so determined for him to continue writing; I know through my own experience what he can bring to his readers. There’s no gap between his political ideas and his poetic emotions. Because he himself loves life so much, he wants all men to be able to share it abundantly. And because he loves people, everything that’s part of their lives interests him deeply.

I reread his books, listened to him, questioned him; I was so taken up with this new life of mine that I didn’t even think of asking myself why, exactly, he enjoyed being with me. I was already so involved that I had no time to discover what was happening inside my own heart. When one night he took me in his arms in the middle of the Jardins du Carrousel, I was offended. ‘I will only kiss a man I love,’ I said coldly. ‘But you do love me!’ he answered calmly. And when he said it, I knew it was true. I hadn’t been aware of it; it had all happened too fast. With Robert, everything happened so fast! In fact, that was precisely the quality in him that had captivated me at first. Other people were so slow, life was so slow. He burned up time and pushed everything out of his way. From the moment I knew I loved him, I followed him eagerly from surprise to surprise. I learned that one could live without furniture and without schedules, skip lunches, not go to bed at night, sleep in the afternoon, make love in a wood as well as in bed. It seemed a simple and joyous thing to me to become a woman in his arms; when the pleasure was frightening, his smile would reassure me. A single shadow lay over my heart – term was nearly over and the thought of being separated from him terrified me. Robert obviously realized that. Was that why he suggested we get married? The idea had never even crossed my mind; at nineteen, it seems as natural to be loved by the man with whom you’re in love as by doting parents or all-powerful God.