Françoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse and a Certain Smile

Happiness is a flat expanse without landmarks. Hence I have no precise memory of that period in Cannes, apart from those few unhappy moments and Luc’s laughter and, in the room at night, the faint, beseeching fragrance of summer mimosa. Perhaps, for people like me, happiness is no more than a kind of absence, an absence of worry, a reassuring absence. It was an absence I was now familiar with, and I was familiar too with sometimes meeting Luc’s gaze and having the impression that all was in fact well: he was facing up to the world on my behalf. He would look at me and smile. I knew why he smiled and I wanted to smile too.

I remember a moment of elation one morning. Luc was lying on the sand. I had been diving from a kind of raft, then I climbed up to the topmost of the diving boards. I saw Luc and the people on the beach, and the sea that awaited me obligingly. I was going to fall and bury myself in it. I was going to fall from a great height and I would be alone during my fall, mortally alone. Luc was watching me. He made a gesture of pretending to be afraid and I let myself go. The sea fluttered up towards me; when I hit the surface I hurt myself. I got back to the shore and came and collapsed against Luc, showering him with water. Then I laid my head on his dry back and kissed his shoulder.

‘Are you mad, or just very sporty?’ said Luc.

‘I’m mad.’

‘That’s what I thought, and I was proud of you. When I said to myself that you were diving from so high up to come back to me, I was very happy.’

‘Are you happy? I am happy. At least I must be, because I am not asking myself whether I am or not. It’s a well-known maxim, isn’t it?’

I was speaking without looking at him directly because he was lying on his stomach and I could only see the back of his neck. It was firm and tanned.

‘I’m going to return you to Françoise in good shape,’ I said jokingly.

‘You cynic!’

‘You are much less cynical than we are. Women are very cynical. You are just a little boy compared to Françoise and me.’

‘You’re pretentious!’

‘You are much more pretentious than us. Women who are pretentious immediately look ridiculous. But it gives men a false appearance of manliness which they cultivate in order to …’

‘Have you nearly finished with your maxims? Talk to me about the weather. It’s the only subject permitted on holiday.’

‘It’s a lovely day,’ I said. ‘It’s a really lovely day …’

And, turning over on my back, I went to sleep.

When I woke up, the sky was overcast, the beach was deserted and I felt exhausted, with a dry mouth. Luc was sitting next to me on the sand, dressed again. He was smoking and looking out to sea. I watched him for a moment without letting him know I was awake; for the first time I was watching him with a purely objective curiosity: ‘What can this man be thinking about?’ What can any human being think about on an empty beach, faced with an empty sea, beside someone who is asleep? I imagined him to be so crushed by these three absences, and so alone, that I stretched my hand out towards him and touched his arm. He wasn’t even startled. He was never startled, he was rarely astonished by anything and even more rarely did he utter expressions of surprise.

‘Are you awake?’ he said idly. And he stretched regretfully. ‘It’s four o’clock.’

‘Four o’clock!’ I sat up. ‘Have I been asleep for four hours?’

‘Don’t panic,’ said Luc. ‘We have nothing to do.’

Those words sounded ominous to me. It was true that there was nothing for us to do together, we had no work nor any friends in common.

‘Do you regret that?’ I asked.

He turned to me, smiling.

‘I love it. Put on your sweater, darling, you are going to be cold. We’ll go and have tea at the hotel.’

La Croisette was sinister and sunless and its old palm trees were swaying slightly in a listless wind. The hotel slumbered. We had tea sent up. I had a hot bath and came back to lie alongside Luc, who was reading on the bed, from time to time flicking the ash from his cigarette. We had closed the shutters because the sky was so gloomy, so there wasn’t much light in the room and it was warm. I was lying on my back, with my hands clasped on my stomach, like a corpse or a fat man. I closed my eyes. Only the sound of Luc turning the pages interrupted the far-off breaking of the waves.

I said to myself: ‘There. I’m near Luc, I’m beside him, I have only got to stretch my hand out to touch him. I know his body, his voice and the way he sleeps. He’s reading, I’m getting a little bored, it’s not unpleasant. We’ll presently go for dinner, then we’ll go to bed together and in three days’ time we’ll part. Things will probably never again be as they are just now. But this moment is here, it’s ours; I don’t know whether it’s love or just an understanding we have; that’s not important. We are each of us alone. He doesn’t know that I’m thinking about him; he’s reading. But we are together, and next to me I have whatever warmth he may feel for me and his indifference too. In six months, when we have gone our separate ways, it won’t be the memory of this moment that will come back to me, but other foolish, involuntary memories. And yet it’s probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.’ I reached out and picked up The Fenouillard Family , 24which Luc often reproached me for not having read, and I began to laugh, so that Luc wanted to join in, and we pored over the same page, cheek to cheek and, before long, mouth to mouth, with the book eventually falling to the floor, while pleasure cascaded over us and night descended over the rest of the world.

Eventually the day of our departure arrived. Out of a hypocrisy largely based on fear – fear on his part that I would become emotional and fear on my part that, conscious of how he felt, I would indeed end up becoming emotional – we had not alluded to it the previous day, during what was our last evening. But in the night I had woken up several times, seized by a kind of panic, and I had sought Luc out with my forehead and my hand, to make sure that our sweet togetherness in shared sleep was still there. And every time, as if he had been on the look-out for those fears and had been sleeping very lightly, he had taken me in his arms, held the back of my neck firmly in his hand and murmured: ‘There, there,’ in a strange voice, as if he were comforting an animal. It was a confused night full of whisperings, heavy with the scent of the mimosa that we would be leaving behind, and with half-sleep and balminess. Then morning had come, and breakfast, and Luc had done his packing. I did mine at the same time, while talking to him about the route and the restaurants along it and so on. I was rather irritated by my artificially calm and courageous tone, for I didn’t feel courageous and I didn’t see why I should. I felt nothing, except perhaps vaguely helpless. For once we were putting on an act for each other, but I thought it safer to stick to it, for things could well end up with my having to suffer before parting from him. It was best to be restrained in manner and in one’s actions and appearance.

‘Well, that’s us ready,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll ring for the luggage to be collected.’

I became fully alert again.

‘Let’s lean over the balcony one last time,’ I said melodramatically.

He looked at me anxiously, then, seeing my expression, began to laugh.

‘You are a hard little thing, a real cynic. I like you.’

He had taken me in his arms in the middle of the room and was shaking me gently.

‘You know, it’s a rare thing to be able to say to someone: “I like you” after a fortnight of cohabiting with them.’