Simone Beauvoir - The Mandarins

‘You’re nice,’ she said, looking at him tenderly. Suddenly she smiled and asked, ‘Do you get funny when you’re drunk?’

‘When I’m drunk I always think I’m very funny.’

‘And other people, what do they think?’

‘When I’m drunk, I don’t worry very much about what other people think.’

She pointed to the bottle. ‘Let’s see you get drunk.’

‘Champagne isn’t what’ll do it.’

‘How many glasses can you drink without getting drunk?’

‘Quite a few.’

‘More than three?’

‘Of course.’

She looked at him doubtfully. ‘That’s something I’d like to see! Do you mean to say you could gulp these two glasses down and it wouldn’t do anything to you?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Let’s see you try.’

‘Why?’

‘People are always bragging; sometimes you have to call their bluff.’

‘After that, I suppose you’ll ask me to stand on my head,’ Henri said.

‘After that, you can go home and go to bed. Drink up; one after the other.’

He swallowed the contents of one of the glasses and felt a sudden shock in the pit of his stomach.

‘Now the second,’ Nadine said, handing him the other glass.

He drank it down.

He woke up stretched out on a bed, naked, alongside a naked woman who was holding him by the hair and shaking his head.

‘Who are you?’ he mumbled.

‘Nadine. Wake up, it’s late.’

He opened his eyes; the lights were on. He was in a strange room, a hotel room. Yes, he remembered the desk clerk, the stairway. Before that, he had been drinking champagne. His head ached.

‘What happened? I don’t understand.’

‘That champagne you drank was spiked with brandy,’ Nadine replied, laughing.

‘You spiked my champagne with brandy?’

‘I did. It’s a little trick I often play on the Americans when I have to get them drunk. Anyhow,’ she said, still smiling, ‘it was the only way to have you.’

He carefully touched his head. ‘I don’t remember a thing.’

‘Oh, there was nothing much to it.’

She got out of bed, took a comb from her purse, and, standing nude before a full-length mirror, began combing her hair. How youthful her body was! Had he really held that lithe, slender form, with its softly rounded shoulders and small breasts, against him? Suddenly she realized that he was studying her. ‘Don’t look at me like that!’ she said. She grabbed her slip and hastily put it on.

‘You’re very pretty!’

‘Don’t be silly!’ she said haughtily.

‘Why are you getting dressed? Come over here.’

She shook her head and Henri, suddenly worried, asked, ‘Did I do something I shouldn’t have? I was drunk, you know.’

She walked over to the bed and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You were very nice,’ she told him. ‘But I don’t like starting all over again,’ she added, walking away. ‘Not the same day, anyhow.’

It was annoying not being able to remember anything. He watched her putting on her socks and suddenly he felt uneasy, lying there naked between the sheets. ‘I’m getting up. Turn round.’

‘You want me to turn round?’

‘Please.’

She stood in a corner, her nose to the wall and her hands behind her back, like a schoolgirl being punished. In a moment, she asked mockingly, ‘Time enough?’

‘Ready,’ he answered, buckling his belt.

Nadine looked at him critically. ‘You are complicated!’

‘Me?’

‘You make quite a fuss about getting into bed and about getting out of it.’

‘What a head you’ve given me!’ Henri said.

They left the hotel, walked towards the Gare Montparnasse, and went into a little café which was just opening up for the morning. They sat down at a table and ordered two ersatz coffees.

‘I’d like to know why you were so set on sleeping with me,’ he said lightly.

‘I wanted to get to know you.’

‘Is that always the way you get to know people?’

‘When you sleep with someone, it breaks the ice. It’s better being together now, isn’t it?’

‘The ice is certainly broken,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But why is it so important for you to know me?’

‘I want you to like me.’

‘But I do like you.’

She gave him a look that was both malicious and embarrassed. ‘I want you to like me enough to take me to Portugal with you.’

‘Oh, so that’s it!’ He put his hand on her arm. ‘I’ve already told you it’s impossible.’

‘Because of Paula? But since she’s not going with you anyhow, there’s no reason why I can’t.’

‘No, you just can’t. It would make her very unhappy.’

‘Don’t tell her.’

‘That would be too big a lie.’ He smiled and added, ‘Besides she’d know about it anyhow.’

‘So just to spare her a little pain, you’d deprive me of something I want more than anything in the world.’

‘Do you really want to go that much?’

‘A country where there’s sun and plenty to eat? I’d sell my soul to go.’

‘You were hungry during the war?’

‘Hungry? And bear in mind that when it came to scrounging for food, no one could beat Mother. She’d ride her bike fifty miles out into the country just to bring us back a couple of pounds of mushrooms or a chunk of meat. But that still didn’t keep us from being hungry. I literally went mad over the first American who plunked his rations in my arms.’

‘Is that what made you like Americans so much?’

‘That, and at first they used to amuse me.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Now, they’re too well organized; it’s not fun any more. Paris has become sinister again.’ She gave Henri an imploring look. ‘Take me with you.’

He would have enjoyed giving her that pleasure; nothing could be more gratifying than to make someone truly happy. But how could he ever convince Paula to accept a thing like that?

‘You’ve had affairs before,’ Nadine said, ‘and Paula put up with them.’

‘Who told you that?’

Nadine smiled slyly. ‘When a woman talks about her love affairs to another woman, it gets about pretty fast.’

Yes, Henri had admitted to a few infidelities, for which Paula had magnanimously forgiven him. But the difficulty now was that an explanation would inexorably lead him either to an entanglement of lies – and he wanted no more lies – or to abruptly demanding his freedom. And he had no stomach for that.

‘But going away together for a whole month,’ he murmured, ‘is something else again.’

‘But we’ll leave each other as soon as we get back. I don’t want to take you away from Paula,’ Nadine said with an insolent laugh. ‘All I want to do is get away from here for a while.’

Henri hesitated. To wander through strange streets and sit in outdoor cafés with a woman who laughed in your face, to find her warm, young body in a hotel room at night, yes, it was tempting. And since he had already decided to break off with Paula, what did he gain by waiting? Time would never patch things up; just the opposite.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I can’t promise you anything. Just remember, this isn’t a promise. But I’m going to try talking to Paula, and if it seems possible to take you, well … I will.’

I looked at the little sketch, and I was discouraged. Two months earlier I had said to the child, ‘Draw a house,’ and he had drawn a cottage with a roof, a chimney, smoke; but not a window, not a door, and surrounding the house was a tall black fence with pointed bars. ‘Now, draw a family,’ and he had drawn a man holding a little boy by the hand. And today again he had sketched a house without a door, surrounded by pointed black bars. We were getting nowhere. Was it a particularly difficult case, or was it I who didn’t know how to handle it? I put the drawing into his file. Didn’t I know how? Or didn’t I want to? Perhaps the child’s resistance merely reflected the resistance I felt in myself. It horrified me to have to drive that stranger, who had died two years earlier at Dachau, from his son’s heart. ‘If that’s the way it is, I ought to give up the case,’ I said to myself, standing silently beside my desk. I had two full hours ahead of me which I could have used to sort and file my notes, but I couldn’t make up my mind to get down to it. It’s true I’ve always been the kind to ask myself a lot of questions. Why does healing so often mean mutilating? What value does personal adjustment have in an unjust society? But nevertheless, it has always fascinated me to devise solutions for each new case. My objective isn’t to give my patients a false feeling of inner peace; if I seek to deliver them from their personal nightmares, it’s only to make them better able to face the real problems of life. And each time I succeeded, I felt I had accomplished something useful. The task is huge, it requires everyone’s co-operation. That’s what I thought yesterday. But it’s all based on the premise that every intelligent being has a part to play in a history that is steadily leading the world towards happiness. Today I no longer believe in that beautiful harmony. The future escapes us; it will shape itself without us. Well then, if we have to be content with the present, what difference does it make whether little Ferdinand once more becomes carefree and happy like other children? ‘I shouldn’t be thinking such things,’ I told myself. ‘If I go on like this, it won’t be long before I’ll have to close up my office.’ I went into the bathroom and brought back a bowl of water and an armful of old newspapers. In the fireplace, balls of paper were burning dully; I knelt down, moistened the printed sheets, and began crumpling them up. This sort of task was less distasteful to me than it used to be; with Nadine’s help and an occasional hand from the concierge’s wife, I kept the apartment in fairly good shape. At least while I was crumpling those old newspapers, I knew that I was doing something useful. The trouble was that it kept only my hands busy. I did succeed in driving little Ferdinand, as well as all thoughts of my profession, from my mind. But I gained little by it – once more the record began turning insistently in my head: There aren’t enough coffins left in Stavelot to bury all the children murdered by the SS . We had escaped; but elsewhere it had happened. They had hastily hidden the flags, buried their guns; the men had fled into the fields the women had barricaded themselves behind their doors. And in the streets abandoned to the rain, the sound of their raucous voices could be heard. This time they hadn’t come as magnanimous conquerors; they had returned with hate and death in their hearts. And then they went off again, leaving nothing behind of the festive village but burned-out houses and heaps of little bodies.