Paul Morand - Tender Shoots

“So, it’s you,” she said, looking at me without surprise.

Passively, she let me come in.

More than anything else, her expression had changed. Set in a look of fearful stupor, it only came to life to quiver beneath my gaze, refusing to meet it and take it to the core of a heart that one assumed was rotten like a fruit. Following Delphine, I made my way into the studio where a livid light completely divested a woman with greasy, discoloured, almost tomato-red hair, with a bent back, enveloped in shantung, with stockings half pulled up and old slippers. Her rolled up sleeve revealed an arm scattered with pink, blue or black patches. She anticipated my reproaches.

“I’ve been very ill. I had boils, and then I was blind for twenty-four hours last week. They’re hatching plots against me …”

Delphine looks at herself in the mirror, pulls at her cheeks, rubs her forehead.

“I look like an ecchymosis towards the fourth day.”

“In the old days you always refused to be a victim.”

“I can no longer remember the old days, it’s funny, for some time now I’ve completely lost my memory.”

Her sentences faltered. She could see in my eyes that I clearly thought her mad. Pulling herself together, she made an effort to choose her words.

“It’s a strange thing,” she said, “to be in a milieu. You don’t know how it starts, although afterwards, you have the impression that it was planned beforehand, through mysterious forces. You’re taken somewhere, you come back the next day and it’s a magic circle that snaps shut. You live in the intimacy of people you don’t know and whom you would never have chosen. It’s a time when you have a great deal of fun, when companionship, a general good mood, the exchange of life forces, turn the group into a useful entity for which you gradually neglect, on a variety of pretexts, everything that is not a part of it. Then, cracks appear. The less good elements seem naturally to gain the upper hand. You are bound together by repulsion, by enmities, not to mention affection. In the end, you want, if not to withdraw, then at least to put some space between yourself and the others. There isn’t time. A contact is born, absolute, tacit. You want to fight on your own, to travel, to enjoy yourself; but the group is there, watching; by way of injunctions, circumstances, it finds you again, waits for you at home, recaptures you; everything outside of it seems unacceptable, out of reach. You don’t communicate any more except among the initiated, through strange words which are a language. All of this would still be nothing if one day, under the influence of dangerous or more hardened elements, which one imagines stem from other groups that are now dispersed, you did not arrive at a complete revision of the facts of consciousness, at a calling into question of everything, to the verge of nothingness.”

“But who brought you to this?”

“Like everywhere else, I’ve been involved with decent people and with some very bad people, the former led by the latter. And then, it’s so odd here … in Paris, there are limits. In London, you have no bearings.”

“But what about me?” I said, moving closer to her, “Am I not here to help you?”

She was not listening, exhausted by the effort she had made to think, to speak.

“Come with me, Delphine, I can’t leave you like this. I’m going back to Paris tomorrow; would you like me to book you a ticket?”

“I won’t be able to.”

“Steel yourself.”

“I can’t anymore.”

She sneezed, her mucous membranes swollen, her eyelids red.

“Leave me alone. I need neither your advice nor your criticism. I won’t tolerate that from anyone. Besides, everything you to say to me is tainted with selfishness and spite. You’d do better to let me rest. Every day, at the same time, I have a temperature. Don’t examine those bottles like that; it’s none of your business. Have you come here to spy on me? Don’t expect to make enquiries of the servants. None of them was willing to stay with me …”

She listens.

“Do you hear that nibbling sound? It’s the mice again; I’m infested.”

She sees me looking incredulous.

“I’m a sick woman, am I not? Do you take pleasure in humiliating me now that I have let myself go, that I have dyed hair, dirty nails and look coarse? It’s a steep decline, I’m well aware. You have observed the regression while taking care not to intervene; from now on I beg you not to involve yourself at all. Have you not aroused my avidity sufficiently in the past? Nowadays I obey a system of loose living; I feel at ease there. Your superior manner annoys me. Go away.”

“My dear Delphine, calm yourself. I am not pitiless, I assure you. Let’s try to find a way out of all this together.”

She weakens, lays her forehead on my hand and suffers excessively. Her joints crack; she claws her nails into the palms of her hands.

I detach myself from where she is lying, get to my feet and search for reasons for her to resist, for excuses.

“Everything that happens to me,” she says, “is due to pride.”

I was expecting this dreadful word which all women have on their lips and by which they define their humility.

Delphine had arranged to meet me in Regent’s Park. I had been to check in my luggage beforehand, for the train leaves for France in one hour. All around me the park, worn away by the drilling of recruits over five years, is recovering again. A soldier in peacetime uniform walks by, glowing like a red pepper in a jar of pickles. Dropped by an invisible squirrel, a nut falls from branch to branch and breaks open on the ground.

I cannot say that the visit to Ebury Street the previous day has upset me. Rather, it has offended me. Delphine was suffering, discontented, attached to her misfortune, prey to a disconcerting vulgarity. Then she came out with words from a cheap novel, and a fainting fit managed to ruin everything. But as soon as I was on my own, the rigorous, resolute image of earlier days returned to me, out of which, reproduced as if on a tracing, the recollection of her recent disorder still grimaced from time to time. It pained me. Not that Delphine’s happiness was precious to me, but it grieved me to see this character, whom neither pleasure nor misfortune had managed to destroy until now, so weighed down. I had reckoned her to be incapable of changing for the better, but also resistant to contagion. Her proud integrity had often been intolerable to me, but no less tiresome was this sudden appropriation of her whole being by a pointless destiny.

I then experienced an upheaval of feelings, and thought only of devoting myself to her. All night I wore myself out with worry, and ardently I longed for the joy of rescuing her. Overwhelmed with emotion, I almost got up and went to wake her …

Time goes by, Delphine does not come. London no longer gives back what is given to it. Like a loose net, it receives and retains everything. There are, in this gamut of houses, many creatures like her, who are not living there because of a grief or specific pleasures, but who do not know how to leave. Without chewing them up, between neat quays, London swallows up in its marine oesophagus all the products of the globe which, continuously, remain there when the ships’ toil is ended.

She won’t come. In the zoo nearby, the roaring of the lions makes the reinforced concrete caverns quiver. Macaws gash the evening with their cries. I remain alone with a heart full of charity.

THE WINDOW OPENS onto a courtyard, where morning has not yet reached the far end. Above me, the worn sheet of the sky, studded with stars, with splashes of acid already in the east. Atrocious morning for an execution. The courtyard is an echoless in-draught. It is too narrow for a dull silence — this one is vertical, as in drainpipes.