Simone Beauvoir - The Mandarins

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you know what you’re writing?’

‘I’m planning to surprise myself,’ he said with a laugh.

Paula shrugged her shoulders. As a matter of fact, what he said was quite true; he really didn’t want to know. Without any semblance of order, any basic plan, he jotted down odds and ends of his life, and it amused and pleased him, and he could ask for nothing more.

The evening he went to meet Nadine, he left his writing regretfully. He had told Paula he was going out with Scriassine; during the last year he had learned to be more discreet. To have said ‘I’m going out with Nadine’ would have brought on so many questions, so many misinterpretations, that he chose not to say it. But it was really absurd to hide the fact that he was meeting that awkward girl whom he had always looked upon as a sort of niece. It was even more absurd to have made the appointment in the first place. He pushed open the door to the Bar Rouge and walked over to her table. She was sitting between Lachaume and Vincent.

‘No fights tonight?’

‘No,’ Vincent said peevishly.

Young men and women crowded into that red cellar not primarily to be among friends, but rather to confront adversaries. Every conceivable shade of political opinion was represented there, and Henri often came there to spend a few pleasant moments talking with his friends. He would have liked to sit down now and chat casually with Lachaume and Vincent while he watched the crowd in the room. But Nadine got up at once.

‘Are you taking me to dinner?’

‘That’s what I’m here for.’

Outside, it was dark; the sidewalk was covered with dirty slush. What in the world, he wondered, would he be able to do with Nadine?

‘Where would you like to go?’ he asked. ‘To the Italian place?’

‘To the Italian place.’

She wasn’t difficult to please. She let him choose the table and ordered the same things as he – peperoni and osso bucco. She approved of everything he said with a delighted air which somehow seemed rather suspect to Henri. The truth was that she wasn’t listening to him; she was eating greedily and quietly, smiling into her plate. He let the conversation lapse and Nadine appeared not to notice it. Having swallowed the last mouthful, she wiped her lips with a broad gesture.

‘And now where do you plan to take me?’

‘You don’t like jazz and you don’t like dancing?’

‘No.’

‘Well, we can try the Tropic of Cancer.’

‘Can we have any fun there?’

‘Why? Do you know some place we can have some fun? The Tropic isn’t a bad place for a quiet talk.’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Public benches are all right, too, for talking.’ Her face lit up. ‘As a matter of fart, there are some places I do like – the ones where you see those naked women.’

‘Really? That sort of thing amuses you?’

‘Oh, yes. Of course, the Turkish baths are better, but the cabarets aren’t bad.’

‘You wouldn’t by any chance be just a little bit perverted, would you?’ Henri asked, laughing.

‘It’s possible,’ she said dryly. ‘Have you anything better to suggest?’

It was impossible to imagine anything more incongruous than going to see naked women with this tall, awkward girl who was neither a virgin nor yet a woman. But Henri had taken it upon himself to entertain her and he had no idea of how to go about it. They went to Chez Astarte and sat down at a table in front of a champagne bucket. The room was still empty; at the bar, the house girls were chattering to each other. Nadine studied them carefully.

‘If I were a man,’ she said, ‘I’d take a different woman home with me every night.’

‘If you had a different woman every night, they’d all seem the same after a while.’

‘You’re wrong. Take that little brunette over there, and the redhead with those pretty falsies, for example. You wouldn’t find the same thing at all under their dresses.’ She rested her chin in the palm of her hand and looked steadily at Henri. ‘Aren’t you interested in women?’

‘Not in that way.’

‘How then?’

‘Well, I like looking at them when they’re pretty, dancing with them when they’re grateful, or talking to them when they’re intelligent.’

‘For talk men are better,’ Nadine said. She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘why did you ask me to go out with you? I’m not pretty, I dance badly, and I’m a poor conversationalist.’

Henri smiled. ‘Don’t you remember? You were reproaching me for not asking you?’

‘And I suppose every time someone reproaches you for not doing something, you immediately do it?’

‘All right,’ Henri asked, ‘why did you accept my invitation?’

She gave him such a naïve and inviting look that he was suddenly upset. Was it true, as Paula claimed, that she couldn’t see a man without offering herself to him?

‘One must never refuse anything,’ she said sententiously.

For a moment she silently stirred her champagne. Then they started to talk idly again. But from time to time Nadine would abruptly stop talking to stare insistently at Henri, a look of astonished reproof on her face. ‘One thing is sure,’ he told himself. ‘I can’t very well make a pass at her.’ She only half-appealed to him; he knew her too well; she was too easy; and besides, it would have embarrassed him because of the Dubreuilhs. He tried to fill the silences, but twice she yawned deliberately in his face. He, too, found that time passed slowly. A few couples were dancing, mostly Americans and their girls, and one or two pairs of lovers from the provinces. He decided to leave as soon as the dancers had done their number and he felt relieved when they finally came on. There were six of them, in sequin-studded panties and brassieres, wearing top hats on which the French tricolour or the American stars and stripes were painted. They danced neither well nor badly, they were homely but not excessively so. It was an uninteresting show, a show that never got off the ground. What was it then that made Nadine look so delighted? When the girls took off their brassieres, uncovering their wax-firmed breasts, she cast a sly glance at Henri and asked, ‘Which one do you like best?’

‘They’re all the same.’

Nadine silently examined the women with an expert, rather blase look. After they had backed out of the room, waving their panties in one hand and holding their red-white-and-blue hats over their genitals with the other, Nadine asked, ‘Do you think it’s more important to have a pretty face or a good figure?’

‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On the woman, on your taste.’

‘Well, how do you rate me?’

‘I’ll tell you in three or four years,’ he said, looking her over carefully. ‘You’re still unfinished.’

‘You’re never finished until you’re dead,’ she said angrily. Her eyes wandered around the room and came to rest on the blonde dancer, who was now wearing a tight black dress and sitting at the bar. ‘You know, she really does look sad. Why don’t you ask her to dance?’

‘That certainly won’t cheer her up much.’

‘All her friends have men. She looks like a leftover. Ask her; what can it cost you?’ she said with a sudden burst of vehemence. Then her voice softened, and pleadingly she added, ‘Just once.’

‘If it means that much to you,’ he said.

The blonde followed him unenthusiastically on to the dance floor. She was a silly, ordinary-looking thing; he couldn’t see why Nadine took such an interest in her. To tell the truth, Nadine’s whims were beginning to get on his nerves. When he returned to the table, he noticed she had filled two champagne glasses and was looking at them meditatively.