Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

‘I don’t know much about Bertrand’s way of suffering …’

‘You haven’t had time. I’ve been married for ten years, so I’ve seen Françoise suffer. It is very unpleasant.’

We sat quite still for a moment. We were both probably imagining Françoise suffering. I visualized her with her face to the wall.

‘This is stupid,’ said Luc at length. ‘But, you understand, it’s not as simple as I had thought.’

Lifting his whisky, he threw back his head and gulped it down. I felt as if I were watching something at the cinema. I tried telling myself that this was not the time to be detached from things but I had the impression of living in a state of total unreality. Luc was there, he would decide, everything was fine.

He leant forward slightly with his empty glass in his hands, swirling the ice round in a regular movement. He talked without looking at me.

‘I’ve had affairs, of course I have. Mostly Françoise hasn’t known about them, except in a few unfortunate instances. But they were never really serious.’

He straightened up in a kind of rage.

‘And it’s not very serious with you either. Nothing is very serious. Nothing is of any value when set against Françoise.’

I don’t know why, but I was listening to what he said without experiencing any distress at all. It was as if I were sitting in a philosophy class that was of no relevance to me.

‘But this is different. To begin with I desired you, the way a man of my type can desire any young girl who is feline and stubborn and difficult. Besides, I’ve told you already, I wanted to tame you. I wanted to spend the night with you. I never thought …’

All of a sudden he turned towards me, took my hands in his and spoke to me gently. I studied his face close up, I could make out all the lines in it, I listened, enthralled, to what he was saying, I was finally capable of perfect concentration, liberated from myself and my little inner voice.

‘I never thought that I could hold you in esteem. I esteem you greatly, Dominique, and I like you a lot. I shall never love you “really and truly”, as children say, but we are alike, you and I. I no longer want just to sleep with you, I want to live with you, to go away on holiday with you. We would be very happy and very loving. I would teach you things about the sea and about money and about a certain kind of freedom. We would be less bored. So there you are.’

‘I would like that too,’ I said.

‘Afterwards I would go back to Françoise. What risk do you run? The risk of becoming attached to me and of suffering afterwards? So what? It’s better than being bored. You prefer to be happy and unhappy than for there to be just nothingness, don’t you?’

‘Obviously,’ I said.

‘What risk do you run?’ repeated Luc, as if to convince himself.

‘And then, when it comes to suffering,’ I went on, ‘one mustn’t exaggerate. I’m not as sensitive as all that.’

‘Good,’ said Luc. ‘We’ll see, we’ll think about it. Let’s talk about something else. Would you like another drink?’

We drank our health. What was becoming clearer to me was that we were perhaps going to go off in the car together, just as I had pictured but had not believed possible. I would manage perfectly well not to become attached to him, knowing that I had burnt my boats in advance. I was not that crazy.

We went for a walk along the quays. Luc laughed and talked. I laughed as well and said to myself that you always had to laugh when you were with him and I felt quite disposed to do so. ‘Laughter is a distinguishing feature of love’, as Alain said. 17But it wasn’t a question of love, merely of something we had agreed on. And then, in fact, I felt quite proud: Luc thought about me, he held me in esteem, he desired me. I was able to think of myself as being quite amusing and worthy of esteem and desirable. The petty little official that was my conscience and that, as soon as I thought about myself, cast back at me a pathetic picture of myself, was perhaps too hard on me and too pessimistic.

When I left Luc I went into a bar and had another whisky with the four hundred francs 18that had been earmarked for my evening meal. After ten minutes I felt marvellous, I felt tender-hearted, kind and agreeable. What I needed was to meet someone who could benefit from this and to whom I could explain all the difficult, sweet, painful things I knew about life. I could have talked for hours. The barman was nice enough, but uninteresting. So I went to the café in Rue Saint-Jacques, where I met Bertrand. He was alone, surrounded by a few empty saucers. I sat down next to him and he seemed really glad to see me.

‘I was just thinking about you. There’s a new bebop band at the Kentucky. What do you say to going along? It’s ages since we’ve been dancing.’

‘I haven’t a bean,’ I said pitifully.

‘My mother gave me ten thousand francs the other day. Let’s have a few more drinks and then let’s go.’

‘But it’s only eight o’clock,’ I objected. ‘It doesn’t open till ten.’

‘We’ll have several drinks,’ said Bertrand cheerfully.

I was delighted. I really loved dancing the fast bebop movements with Bertrand. The jukebox was playing a jazz melody that made me move my legs to the rhythm. When Bertrand paid the bill, I realized that he must have had quite a lot to drink. He was quite merry. Anyway, he was my best friend, he was a brother to me, I loved him dearly.

By the time ten o’clock came we had taken in five or six bars. In the end we were completely drunk. We were ridiculously merry but not sentimental with it. When we got to the Kentucky the band had begun to play, there was almost nobody there and we had the dance floor more or less to ourselves. Contrary to what I had expected, we danced very well together; we were very relaxed. I loved that music more than anything. I loved the rush it gave me, and the pleasure my whole body had in keeping up with it. We only sat down when we wanted to have a drink.

‘Music,’ I said in a confidential tone to Bertrand, ‘jazz music, equates to freedom from care, speeded-up.’

He stopped in his tracks.

‘That’s exactly what it is! Very, very interesting. An excellent formulation. Well done, Dominique!’

‘That’s right,’ I said.

‘The whisky’s vile at the Kentucky. But the music’s good. Music equals freedom from care. But care about what?’

‘I don’t know. Listen, there’s the trumpet. It isn’t just carefree, it’s philosophically necessary. It had to go to the very end of that note, didn’t you sense that? It was necessary. It’s like love, you know, physical love. There’s a moment when you’ve got to … when it just can’t be other than what it is.’

‘Exactly. Very, very interesting. Shall we dance?’

We spent the night drinking and swapping high-flown pronouncements. By the end there was a dizzying whirl of faces and feet and Bertrand’s arm sending me spinning far away from him and the music hurling me back towards him and the incredible heat and the incredible suppleness of our bodies.

‘They’re closing up,’ said Bertrand. ‘It’s four a.m.’

‘It’s closed at my place too,’ I remarked.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

It was true that it didn’t matter. We were going to go back to his place, we were going to lie down on his bed and it would be perfectly normal for me to feel Bertrand’s weight on me that night, just as all through the winter, and for us to be happy together.

Eight

In the morning I lay up close to him while he slept, his hip against mine. It must have been early. I couldn’t get back to sleep and I said to myself that I was not really there at all, any more than he was, sunk in his dreams. It was as if my true self were somewhere very far away, far beyond the houses in the suburbs, far beyond trees or fields, further back than childhood, motionless at the end of a path. It was as if that girl, bending over that sleeping form, were only a pale reflection of the calm, inexorable self whom I was in any case already stepping aside from, in order to live. It was as if I had chosen to have a life rather than an immutable self and had left that statue at the end of a path, in the half-light, with all the lives that it might have had, but had refused, perched on its shoulders like so many birds.