Paul Nizan: The Conspiracy

— I think so too, said Laforgue.

Pauline stood up and took off her dress, a dress the colour of dead leaves that actually made a dry little rustle like dead leaves; she was wearing a mauve slip with broad strips of ochred lace running across her bosom and her legs.

‘This woman has no taste,’ Philippe said to himself: he liked women to wear either virginal underwear or the extravagant artifices of the tarts at the Madeleine or the Opéra.

She had a rather skinny torso and shoulders, but fairly heavy legs and hips for which Philippe had a sufficient liking to forgive her her underwear. She stretched out on the divan and spread her dress over her knees; Laforgue, lying alongside that moist body, was thinking he ought to have drawn the curtain, what with all that sun they had full in their eyes and which was highlighting the freckles on Pauline’s white skin above the broad hem of her stockings; but he was beginning to purr and couldn’t face getting up. Pauline was not a woman with whom there was any question of going all the way; she used to defend herself with a stubborn presence of mind that scarcely hampered her pursuit of pleasure. She closed her eyes; the make-up disappeared from her cheeks; the movement of her belly was reminiscent of the spasmodic, dreamy throbbing of an insect’s abdomen; she was alone, absolutely enclosed within herself and the strange concentration of pleasure; her heart beat strongly throughout this intense labour; Laforgue remembered that he had not shaved that morning, and that Pauline would get red spots round her mouth and pink patches in the hollow of her shoulder — but since he was thinking about this alien being with resentment, he congratulated himself on that. These caresses, these movements, these jerky exhalations involved a mute and shifting torpor, a blind urgency, a grimness that seemed never-ending. Suddenly, however, Pauline clenched her teeth, opened her eyes again, and Laforgue was furious to see that distraught look — that anguish of the runner who has given his all — and the girl’s body grew taut, her thighs locked with incredible force upon Laforgue’s wrist, while he himself achieved a dubious pleasure.

Pauline sank back, laying one hand on her breast:

— We’re crazy, she sighed.

She stretched, closed her eyes again. Later, she raised herself on one elbow, took a mirror from her handbag and looked at herself:

— I do look a sight! she exclaimed.

— A sorry sight, said Philippe.

She was dishevelled, beads of sweat still bedewed her temples, her nostrils, the roots of her hair, after the hard begetting of pleasure. Laforgue looked at those pale lips:

‘Love doesn’t suit women,’ he said to himself.

— Wipe your mouth, said Pauline. If your friends saw all that lipstick. .

She covered her breasts, which were set rather low, then stood up to slip on her dress. Pauline accomplished with admirable promptitude the difficult transition from the disorders of pleasure to life in society: with her clean face, her smooth hair, her ankle-length dress, nobody would have dreamed of showing her insufficient respect. She wanted to talk: idle chatter was one of the last echoes of pleasure for her. She read the titles of the books lying about everywhere; Laforgue had just finished a Greek year, the books were austere, on his table there were the Politics, the Nicomachean Ethics and Simplicius’ Commentary. Pauline sat down again on the divan. Her dress revealed the great silken beaches of her stockings; she looked at Philippe with a killing smile intended to speak volumes.

‘That’s quite enough for today,’ thought Laforgue. ‘We’re not accomplices on the strength of so little.’

— How exciting it must be, all that Greek wisdom! she exclaimed.

— As if I didn’t know! replied Laforgue.

— So much more exciting than a woman like me, isn’t that so? sighed Pauline. A woman of no importance. .

— No comparison, said Philippe, telling himself: ‘She’s simpering, this is the limit.’ But you remind me, I was busy working when you arrived. It was one of my good days, would you believe. .

— Which must mean, replied Pauline, that I might perhaps now relieve you of my presence.

Laforgue shrugged his shoulders slightly, but Pauline smiled: it was over, she was dressed again, she knew she could not demand of men any passionate gratitude for what she gave them.

Laforgue accompanied her to the Rue d’Ulm door, she went off in the direction of the gate and the porter’s lodge.

‘One’s really too polite,’ he thought. ‘This time I should have had that girl.’

Bloyé arrived at the foot of the portico steps, he was returning from the gardens. Laforgue said to him, rather loudly:

— Bloyé, do you see that lady? Well, she doesn’t go all the way!

Pauline turned round and cast an angry glance at them. Laforgue told himself ashamedly that the insult would not prevent her from returning, that she was not so proud — and he went back inside to wash his hands.

This is how some of their love affairs used to pass off: it will perhaps be understood why these young men generally spoke of women with a crudity full of resentment. This department of their lives was not in order.

At parties, at dances, during the holidays, they would meet girls whose lips before too long they could almost always taste, whose breasts and nerveless legs they could caress; but these brief strokes of luck never went very far, and left them irritating memories that engendered rage more than love. They thought with fury about how the girls were waiting for older men than they to marry them: how they were reserving their bodies. Philippe, when he danced with them, would sniff them with an animal mistrust; he preferred the insolent perfume of the tarts with whom he used to form easy liaisons on Boulevard Montparnasse or Boulevard Saint-Michel. Those gaudy women would permit silent relations, free from the theatricals of language and protocol; they were labourers in an absent-minded eroticism denuded of anything resembling an unlawful complicity.

Rosenthal did not breathe a word about any women he might know. Bloyé used to go once a month to a house in Boulevard de Grenelle, from which he would hear, in the furthest bedroom, the trains roaring past on the elevated track where it entered the La Motte-Picquet Métro station. Jurien was sleeping with the maid from a little bar in Rue Saint-Jacques, a red and tawny woman with a missing incisor. Pluvinage’s lady friend was a tall, mannish girl who worked in an office.

‘What a dreadful creature!’ thought Laforgue in his bed that evening, mulling over Pauline’s visit before falling asleep and thinking with some distress that he really should have had her. ‘I don’t like this little war of escapes, these solitary pleasures. Let’s hurry up and be done with onanism for two.’

He is a bit quick to generalize his own experiences. The fact is, he knows only whores or young girls, no women: which amounts to saying he knows nothing about anything. As yet, he has access only to that desert of solitude and bitterness through which a young man shapes his course towards love; of pleasure itself, he knows only a kind of organic wrench. He has never met a woman who has said to him dreamily after lovemaking:

— How painful it must be for you too!

He hopes to discover that love is a suspension of hostilities when, for a split second, a man and a woman escape from hatred and from themselves; when they forget themselves like two wartime soldiers fraternizing between the lines around a well or the burial of the dead.

‘When I know that,’ he said to himself, ‘will it be much more fun?’

Half-way through November and with the interminable family holidays now over, Civil War made its appearance, with Pluvinage’s machine-gun, which they had finally adopted, in black on the blue cover. They were all rather proud of themselves because of their names in capitals on the contents page and Serge’s machine-gun.