The Woman Destroyed Read Free Page A

should ever worry about my weight. Yet here I am! The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I look after it with bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting old friend who needed my help.
    André brought a bottle of Mumm, and I put it to cool; we talked for a while and then he telephoned his mother. He often telephones her. She is sound in wind and limb, and she is still a furious militant in the ranks of the Communist Party; but she
is
eighty-four and she lives alone in her house at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. He is rather anxious about her. He laughed on the telephone; I heard him cry out and protest; but he was soon cut short—Manette is very talkative whenever she has the chance.
    “What did she say?”
    “She is more and more certain that one day or another fifty million Chinese will cross the Russian frontier. Or else that they will drop a bomb anywhere, just anywhere, for the pleasure of setting off a world war. She accuses me of taking their side: there’s no persuading her I don’t.”
    “Is she well? She’s not bored?”
    “She will be delighted to see us; but as for being bored, she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.”
    She had been a schoolteacher with three children, and for her retirement was a delight that she has not come to the end of yet. We talked about her, and about the Chinese, of whom we, like everybody else, know so verylittle. André opened a magazine. And there I was, looking at my watch, whose hands did not seem to be going around.
    All at once he was there: every time it surprises me to see his face, with the dissimilar features of my mother and André blending smoothly in it. He hugged me very tight, saying cheerful things, and I leaned there with the softness of his flannel jacket against my cheek. I released myself so as to kiss Irène: she smiled at me with so frosty a smile that I was astonished to feel a soft, warm cheek beneath my lips. Irène. I always forget her: and she is always there. Blond; gray-blue eyes; weak mouth; sharp chin; and something both vague and obstinate about her too-wide forehead. Quickly I wiped her out. I was alone with Philippe as I used to be in the days when I woke him up every morning with a touch on his forehead.
    “Not even a drop of whiskey?” asked André.
    “No, thanks. I’ll have some fruit juice.”
    How sensible she is! She dresses with a sensible stylishness; sensibly stylish hairdo—smooth, with a fringe hiding her big forehead. Artless makeup; severe little suit. When I happen to run through a woman’s magazine I often say to myself, “Why, here’s Irène!” It often happens too that when I see her I scarcely recognize her. “She’s pretty,” asserts André. There are days when I agree—a delicacy of ear and nostril: a pearly softness of skin emphasized by the dark blue of her lashes. But if she moves her head a little her face slips, and all you see is that mouth, that chin. Irène. Why? Why has Philippe always gone for women of that kind—smooth, standoffish, pretentious? To prove to himself that he could attract them, no doubt. He was not fond of them. I used to think that if he fell in love… I used to think he would not fall in love; and one evening he said to me, “I have great news for you,” with the somewhat overexcited air of a birthday child who has been playing too much, laughing too much, shouting too much. There was that crash like a gong in my bosom, the blood mounting to my cheeks, all my strength concentrated on stopping the trembling of my lips. A winter evening, with the curtains drawn and the lamplight on the rainbow of cushions, and this suddenly opened gulf, this chasm of absence. “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in