Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

By seven o’clock, Hedwige had not returned from Saint-Germain.

“She’s not used to my car, let’s hope she hasn’t had an accident. Why do women always confuse the time of departure with the time of arrival? They obey some invisible clock; the proof is that they are consistently late; they keep to psychological time and not to the Observatoire time, that time that comes grating out of the radio, as if through a reed pipe.”

Pierre lit cigarettes, one after the other (he sometimes lit several at the same time).

“In actual fact, there are three types of time: exterior time, interior time and organic time, which is that of our body busy getting older, our body that knows, with the dreadful precision of the unconscious, how many heartbeats it has left before the grave. I still have black hair and flexible arteries, but underneath my black hair there must be an impatient white hair that knows that the hour it is to appear will chime.”

Pierre looked out of the window.

“Time likes to play a coconut shy game with us,” he thought. “It bombards us every second; when we are kids, we recover immediately; then, less and less quickly; the spring wears out, we stagger about more and more until the day that we tumble over for good and when, like an old worn-out doll, we leave an empty space between the nurse and the soldier. Ever since Metchnikoff, doctors have been bending over the human body trying to discover the secret of its longevity: why should a pigeon, which has the same cell structure as a crow, live twenty times less? If time is the same for all organisms, why do we heal at different speeds? If I heal in five days and Hedwige in two, won’t we find it difficult to adjust our bodies to the same speed? The years she lives will actually be fifteen or sixteen months long; whereas the years I live shall be of eight or nine months. Therefore Hedwige, having promised to be back by seven o’clock, is not late; even though it’s eight o’clock.”

She arrived enveloped in a large cape belonging to Angélique. Having set off in violet, she came back in grey. Even in the midst of grieving, she dressed up.

“I have mitigating circumstances…” she began.

“Get dressed quickly, we’re dining at the cabaret and we’re going to the theatre.”

“Will you stay until the end?”

“I promise.”

“I’m already dressed,” said Hedwige. “Just a little powder, but… why are you making your bed already?”

“Precisely because I intend staying until the end of the show.”

While she was powdering herself, Pierre brought in the chair on which he would lay his clothes that evening when he got back, filled the glass from which he would drink water, laid out the nightshirt he would put on, and took out the suit he would wear next day from the cupboard.

“You’re exaggerating,” said Hedwige affectionately, sadly.

When Pierre thought about the future in her presence, it was nothing much more than a state of mind, but when he lived it, dashing around with orchestrated movements, it induced a manic automatism in him that was really rather tiresome. He opened one drawer, closed the other with his foot, put on a glove with his teeth so that he didn’t have to lay down the pen he was using to make notes.

“You need ten hands,” she said.

“Get a move on, instead of making fun of me. We’re in a hurry…”

“The house is not on fire.”

On his hands and knees, Pierre was now spreading out the foam-rubber mat upon which he would do his exercises when he woke up. He went to look for his dressing gown. He sharpened his razor, doing so himself because he worried overly about the servants delaying everything.

“I’m ready.”

Hedwige went to her bedroom, sat down at her dressing table and hastily set out a few veils on a pale background so that she could make her choice.

“From the moment a woman says she is ready,” thought Pierre, “a great deal of time elapses before she leaves the house, and even when she has left, there is the ‘How silly of me, I almost forgot…’ that causes her to go back inside.”

“I was trying to move too quickly,” said Hedwige. “I wanted to please you. One of the buttons of my sleeve has got caught in the netting of the veil. Pierre, don’t get impatient. I can’t see what I’m doing. Be kind and untangle it for me. It won’t come out.”

“Hurry up, hurry up!”

“Release me, please don’t allow me to be upset any more, dear husband.”

When Hedwige put things in this way, tenderly, emphasizing her own incompetence, exaggerating her own foolishness, Pierre immediately relaxed.

“If I’m made the scapegoat, then it will have served you right!” he said. “Anyway, no one’s thinking of complaining. And rightly so.”

“You haven’t invited anyone else, I hope?” said Hedwige affectionately. “Rushing around must be so enjoyable for you that one doesn’t really feel guilty for having made you wait,” she concluded, tying her hat veil into a knot as if putting a full stop at the end of the sentence.

At the restaurant, Pierre once again skipped the rituals. He refused to put his coat in the cloakroom. He went straight over and raided the cold buffet; he came back, his plate loaded with cold meats, jellied eggs, and with some oranges in his pockets. People used to say that every time he went to a restaurant, Pierre would create a fuss.

“Not so much bread, darling…”

“I can’t stand slow table service. I feel I want to eat my neighbour’s helping. So I go and serve myself.”

“You swallow without chewing. On the fireplace in our dining room I shall have engraved—”

“ You must…? ”

“No. The remark Brillat-Savarin liked most of all and which they used to say to me all the time at boarding school: ‘You’re eating too quickly.’’’

“When I was little, Mother used to say that I didn’t suck my feeding bottle, I hurled myself at it. When I was older, I used to go to an automat bar on the boulevards, near the Parisiana. I was never as happy as when I was there. I gobbled everything down; I became dyspeptic (they had to dose me with pigs’ gastric juices). It was wonderful, that bar: one click and piles of sandwiches would descend straight into your mouth…”

Hedwige was fiddling nervously with the corner of the tablecloth.

“You don’t eat, you swallow your plate! And look at those stains on your tie!”

“Would monsieur like some strawberries? They’re the early crop.”

The maître d’hôtel presented them to him in their packaging, rather like a nurse presenting you with your appendix after an operation.

“Strawberries in January! They’re not the early crop, they’re late strawberries from last year!” Pierre replied.

Coffee was brought, together with hygienically wrapped sugar lumps. Pierre tossed them into his cup without unwrapping them.

“You really are impossible, my love! It’s as though things didn’t belong to you, as though you were stealing them.”

“Because the paper will end up floating on top of its own accord!”

At the theatre, Pierre bought two stalls seats, 85 and 87. They set off, following the usherette.

“85 and 87 are already occupied,” said the usherette.

“Any more of this and I’ll jump onto the stage!”

“Wait on these folding seats until the interval, monsieur. They must have put the people in 185 and 187 in 85 and 87…”

“Then let’s sit in 185 and 187,” said Pierre peremptorily.

“Unfortunately, 185 and 187 are occupied.”

“There’s nothing in the world slower and more foolish than an usherette,” groaned the man in a hurry.

And supporting himself on the partition of a groundfloor box, he stepped into it, fell inside it with a great deal of noise, and refused to leave. Amid much murmuring, Hedwige came and sat beside him.