Paul Morand - The Man in a Hurry

“Pierre,” says Hedwige, “come and sit down beside me on the sofa. See how soft this velvet is and I’ll put this batiste cushion behind your head, which will refresh you. You’re flushed and your eyes are all feverish. What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong, I’m thinking of the little one. I’m happy to know he’s inside you. For him as for me you’re a wonderful mother; he’ll have your beauty, your balanced mind. Later on, when the years have hardened him, he can if he wishes take something from me. Just think, Hedwige, he’s going to be thrown among a million men, all naked, with his horoscope under his arm!”

Pierre is bent over the abyss of coming days and distant years. He sees a large-limbed little boy, moving very nimbly between four escape routes and entering the increasingly narrow corridor of the sequence of time. He sees him as a Peter Pan running beneath the tall trees. He attaches this still corpuscular fate to his own destiny.

Will he or she be dark or fair? Punctual or late? Nestlé’s milk or breast-fed? Boarder or half-day? The lycée or a religious institution? Dim or gifted? Latin or Greek? German studies or English? Sacré-Coeur or Sciences politiques ? Infantry or artillery? Will he make women suffer or will they dominate him? When he’s twenty, who will be declaring war on whom? What will the world be like? What shape will hats and ideas have?

If you want to escape from your own self, there is no better means than a child.

“Hedwige, have you thought of ordering the baby clothes? And the nursery furniture that hasn’t yet been chosen! We haven’t planned a thing. I’m going to buy the baby clothes.”

“Five months beforehand!” said Hedwige, who could not help laughing.

“From baby clothes to bare knees and from bare knees to trousers, it’s no time at all…”

He doesn’t want to anticipate the long journey from the first cry to the alphabet, from crawling games to the first tottering steps that look like a drunkard walking, from standing up and holding on to the bedcovers to running. Good heavens, what an eternity exists between the eyes of the mole and the fleeting glance of the lynx!

“Pierre le Bref,” said Hedwige sweetly, “I can see you’re bored, you’ve still got your hands clenched in your pockets. Why don’t you go out? Go and do your shopping.”

And Pierre went out to stretch his legs.

He talked to himself as he strode through the streets.

“Ah! If it were me in that baby’s place, I’d soon be bursting through the hoop and marching head first into the future!”

PIERRE WAS PACING up and down the drawing room. Hedwige’s face had turned a magnificent golden-green colour.

“Listen, Hedwige, be reasonable. You need some fresh air. Ten days by the sea will do us both good. We’re leaving tomorrow. The tickets are bought, the rooms are booked…”

Hedwige closed her eyes; when Pierre had gone past she opened them again, but there was a moment when he was briefly silhouetted against the light, when he glided between her and the window, that was so painful to her that she shut her eyelids tightly so that she would not see him. It was tiresome, this striding up and down, as if he were riding on a swing after lunch. Hedwige glanced at her husband out of the corner of her eye, ready to avoid his trajectory. In contrast, all this commotion drove her back towards her mother as if to a lost paradise, making her nostalgic for the solid Boisrosé bed.

“You don’t want to? But why, for goodness’ sake, why?”

Her feeling of giddiness only grew. With his comings and goings, Pierre was dragging her into a waltz without music. It was a choppy passage that made her stomach feel empty and gave her a headache and an intensification of the feelings of nausea due to pregnancy.

“Oh, I know very well why. I’ve known for a long time that you’d prefer to die and make me pine away here than to be without your mother for ten days.”

Pierre’s pacing to and fro was becoming unbearable. The furniture now seemed to be rolling about, the piano was shaking and the pictures were shuttling back and forth on the walls, which were also swirling. Even though she was sitting down, Hedwige could not understand why the rug under her feet appeared to be rising upwards while the paintings were obeying some invisible gyratory impulse.

“What’s the matter? You’re very pale,” Pierre exclaimed all of a sudden, seeing Hedwige’s cheeks lose their colour and turn a shade of banana. “Have I upset you? Have I displeased you?”

Hedwige was unable to reply.

She waved her hand in a wide gesture and ran to the bathroom.

She returned a few moments later, her hair back in place, her face re-powdered, her eyes shining. She sat down next to Pierre and put her arm through his.

“My Pierre,” she said gently, “don’t criticize me for loving my family. Does it prevent me from loving you? Would you prefer it if I spent my time running around dressmakers’ shops and going to tea parties instead of frolicking innocently in that warm tropical bath that is my family? A poor little family adrift in France, which goes largely unnoticed, which lives on its own and which does no harm to anyone. But if you wanted to drag them away, you would find you could not shift them. When I think of us Boisrosés, I’m always reminded of our mangrove trees. Have you ever seen any? No? A mangrove looks like a bundle of dead wood drifting from the shore into the sea. When we were children, paddling around at Anse à Banane, we used to try and take these bits of wood home, but our hands would immediately start bleeding and we couldn’t pick anything up. Mangroves are the most resistant things in the world; they have claw-like fingers that for millions of years have clung to the earth, driven up by the tides. We were taught that we owed the fact that we were walking on firm ground to the mangrove trees. Ever since then, I’ve always thought that nations should be grateful to mangrove families rather like ours, to women who collectively, without any other strength apart from their fingers, endured wars, flooding, bankruptcy, revolutions, men’s failures, and all the calamities.”

“You don’t have to behave like a mangrove tree with me,” said Pierre, “I’ll never let you go. Think of me as an extra root.”

Hedwige pressed her warm cheek to her husband’s.

“Very well, but you must do one little favour for me: buy a trinket from Uncle Rocheflamme.”

“Ah, no! That would be a dangerous precedent! I don’t like antiques, I only like antiquities. On the other hand, you can go and buy all his stuff if you’d like, on condition that I don’t see it… The cloister is going to be sold; all that remains is to exchange signatures; the money is yours.”

“Mine!” Hedwige repeated in amazement. “But Pierre, it’s your only capital. You know very well that apart from the Mas Vieux and the cloister, all you have is what you earn.”

“Yes,” Pierre said simply, “it’s my only capital and that’s why it must belong to you.”

Pierre threw his coat on a chair, removed his collar and flopped down on the bed, his legs spread wide; he had just returned from his morning shopping and was sweating profusely; this exceptionally warm June weather made him feel on edge and the “Year 1000 Exhibition” that he had agreed to organize was causing him problems, meetings, discussions and a great deal of work he could have done without.

“Would I not do better,” he thought, “to devote my days to Hedwige? She must still be there waiting for me as she is every morning. It’s at least two weeks since I last had my coffee with her.”

He stood up, ready to run round to see his wife, he imagined her bustling calmly around the small breakfast table; he knew in advance that he wanted to experience that peace that only she could provide him with. To his surprise, he was overcome with a drab and lethargic sense of aversion. No, he did not wish to go and call on Hedwige: why? Ideas flitted around his head and he watched them developing without trying to marshal them; he enjoyed this shifting monologue in which absurd images — cruel, tender and bitter — jostled with one another.