Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

He was put out by his desire for Elsa, but not in the way you might think. He didn’t say to himself: ‘I’m going to deceive Anne and that must mean that I love her less.’ What he thought was: ‘It’s a nuisance, my wanting Elsa. I’d better get it over with quickly, otherwise I’m going to have complications with Anne.’ What’s more, he loved Anne, he admired her; she made a change from that succession of shallow, rather silly women with whom he had kept company over the previous few years. She satisfied at one and the same time his vanity, his sensuality and his sensibility, for she understood him and she offered him her intelligence and experience against which to match his own. I am less sure now that he realized how deeply she cared for him. He saw her as the ideal mistress for him and the ideal mother for me. But did he think of her as ‘the ideal wife’, with all the obligations which that entails? I do not believe so. I am sure that, from Cyril and Anne’s standpoint, he was, like me, abnormal where emotions were concerned. That did not prevent him from leading a highly charged life, because he did not consider such a life to be out of the ordinary and he brought all his vitality to bear on it.

I was not thinking of him when I formulated my plan to banish Anne from our lives. I knew that he would get over it, as he got over everything. A break-up would be less painful to him than having to live a well-ordered life. He was only truly disturbed and undermined, as I was myself, by things being repetitive and foreseeable. We were of the same tribe, he and I; sometimes I told myself we belonged to a pure, noble tribe of nomads, and at other times I told myself it was to a poor, washed-up tribe of pleasure-seekers.

Just then he was really suffering, or at least he was becoming intensely irritated. Elsa had come to symbolize for him a life that was past, she had come to symbolize youth and in particular his own youth. I sensed that he was longing to say to Anne: ‘Sweetheart, excuse my absence for one day. I have got to go and prove to myself with that girl that I’m not an old buffer. To be at peace with myself I have got to be reminded how tired I am of her physically.’ But he couldn’t say that to her, not because Anne was jealous or fundamentally prudish or uncompromising in that regard, but because she must have agreed to live with him on the understanding that the days of casual dissipation were over, that he was no longer a schoolboy but a man to whom she was entrusting her life and that consequently he had to behave himself properly and not like some pathetic individual who was a slave to his impulses. You couldn’t blame Anne for reckoning like that, it was perfectly normal and sound as an approach, but it did not prevent my father from desiring Elsa. And he was gradually coming to desire her more than anything else, and to do so with that doubly strong desire that you have for forbidden fruit.

At that point I could probably have made it all come right. I only had to tell Elsa to consent to his wishes and on some pretext or other I would have got Anne to go to Nice with me for the afternoon, or anywhere else for that matter. On our return we would have found my father relaxed and imbued with a fresh devotion to legitimized love, or love that was due at least to become so in the autumn. That was another thing about Anne: she would never put up with the idea of having been merely a mistress like the others, a temporary fixture. How difficult she made life for us, with her sense of dignity and her self-esteem!

But I did not tell Elsa to consent, nor did I tell Anne to come with me to Nice. I wanted that desire in my father’s heart to get the better of him and cause him to commit a blunder. I could not endure the contempt which Anne heaped on our past life, that casual disdain she displayed towards everything that, for my father and me, had represented happiness. I was not setting out to humiliate her, but to make her accept our view of life. She had to know that my father had been unfaithful to her and she had to see that infidelity for what it actually was, a purely physical whim, not an attack on her personal worth or dignity. If she wanted at all costs to be in the right, she had to allow us to be in the wrong.

I even pretended to know nothing of the torment my father was going through. It was essential that he should not confide in me, nor should I be forced by him to become his partner in crime by speaking to Elsa on his behalf or getting Anne out of the way.

I had to pretend to believe that his love for Anne, and Anne herself, were sacrosanct. And I must say that I had no difficulty in doing so. The idea that he might deceive Anne and then face up to her filled me with terror and a sense of awe.

In the meantime the days passed happily for us. I found repeated opportunities to get my father worked up over Elsa. I had stopped feeling remorseful at the sight of Anne’s face. I sometimes thought that she would accept the deed and that we would subsequently have a life with her that suited our tastes as much as hers. Furthermore I was seeing a lot of Cyril and we were carrying on our love affair in secret. There was the scent of the pines, the sound of the sea, the feel of his body … He was beginning to torture himself with remorse: the role that I was making him play was as disagreeable to him as it could possibly be and he continued with it only because I persuaded him that it was necessary for our love. This all added up to a lot of duplicity and keeping quiet, but it involved very little effort and surprisingly few lies (and, as I have said, the only things that forced me into passing judgement on myself were actual deeds).

I am passing rapidly over this period, for I’m afraid that, if I examine it too closely, I could lapse back into memories that might overwhelm me. As it is, I only have to reflect on Anne’s happy laughter and on her kindness to me for something to land me a nasty, low, painful punch. I’m winded. I get so close to having what people call a bad conscience that I have to resort to certain activities such as lighting a cigarette or putting on a record or phoning a friend. Then eventually I think of something else. But I don’t like having to take refuge in my faulty memory and my superficiality instead of combatting these traits. I don’t like to recognize them for what they are, not even to the extent of being very glad that I possess them.

Ten

It’s funny how fate likes to choose faces to represent it which are unworthy or second-rate. That summer it had selected Elsa’s face. Call it, if you will, a very lovely face, but it was really merely alluring. She also had an extraordinary laugh, one that was hearty and infectious, the kind of laugh that only rather stupid people have.

It hadn’t taken long for me to notice the effect that laugh of hers had on my father. I told Elsa to make maximum use of it whenever we were due to ‘come across’ her with Cyril. I would say: ‘Whenever you hear me approach with my father, don’t say anything, just laugh.’ And then, whenever my father heard that exaggerated laughter, I would see his face cloud over with fury. My role in directing these events never ceased to enthral me. I never missed the mark, for whenever we saw Cyril and Elsa together, openly engaged in a relationship that, although imaginary, was perfectly imaginable, my father and I would both go pale, the blood draining from my face as it did from his, sucked away by a desire for possession which was worse than pain. Cyril, Cyril bending over Elsa … that was the image that ravaged my heart and yet it was an image that I helped them to bring to perfection without realizing its potency. Words are easy, companionable things, but whenever I saw the outline of Cyril’s face and his smooth, suntanned neck bent over Elsa’s upturned face, I would have given anything for that not to be. I kept forgetting that it was I myself who had willed it.