Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

BUT TO RETURN to the first day of this “liaison.” When I came back to my rooms I was wild with delight; I remembered that the barriers placed by my imagination between Marguerite and myself had disappeared; that I was her lover and occupied, more or less, all her thoughts; that I had in my pocket the key of her room, and the right of making use of that key; and I was glad to live, proud of myself, and pleased with my lot in this world.

On a certain day a young man passes through a street; he brushes against a young woman, looks at her, turns round, and passes on; he does not know this woman; she has pleasures, passions, sorrows, which he does not share. He does not exist for her, and perhaps if he spoke to her she would make fun of him as Marguerite had made fun of me. Weeks, months, years flow on, and all at once, after they have each followed their destiny in various directions, the logic of fate brings them again face to face. Then this woman becomes the mistress of this man and loves him. How? Why? Their two existences now make but one; their intimacy had scarcely begun when it appears to them to have always existed, and every other event that happened before is effaced from the memory of this pair of lovers. We must acknowledge that this is strange.

As for me, I no longer remembered how I had lived before the preceding day. My whole being was steeped in joy at the recollection of the words exchanged during the first night. Either Marguerite was clever at deceiving, or she felt for me one of those sudden passions revealed in the first kiss, and which sometimes die as suddenly as they arise.

The more I reflected on it the more I said to myself that Marguerite had no cause to feign a passion which she did not feel; I also said to myself that women have two ways of loving, which may spring from one another: they love with the heart and with the senses. A woman often takes a lover, impelled to it by her temperament; and, without having expected it, she learns the mystery of immaterial love, and no longer lives except through her feelings; often a young girl who imagines marriage only to be the union of two pure affections receives the sudden revelation of physical love; this energetic conclusion of the most chaste impressions of the soul.

I fell asleep while occupied with these thoughts. My servant woke me and handed me a letter from Marguerite which contained the following words:

* * *

“THESE ARE my commands: Come this evening to the ‘Vaudeville,’ between the third and fourth acts — M.G.”

* * *

I LOCKED the note in one of the drawers of my table, so as always to have the reality at hand, and as a proof that I was not dreaming, as I sometimes fancied I was.

She did not tell me to come and visit her in the daytime, so I did not dare to present myself at her house; but I was so anxious to meet her before the evening that I went to the Champs-Elysées where, as on the day before, I saw her pass and get out of her carriage.

I was at the “Vaudeville” at seven.

Never before had I entered a theatre so early.

All the boxes became gradually occupied except one on the grand tier near the stage, which remained empty.

The third act had begun. The door of this box, on which I kept my eyes almost constantly fixed, opened, and Marguerite appeared.

She immediately advanced to the front, glanced at the stalls, saw me, and thanked me with a look.

She seemed wonderfully handsome that evening.

Was I the cause of her looking so well? Did she love me enough to believe that the more beautiful she looked the happier I should be? I was not yet aware of it, but if such had been her intention she completely succeeded: for when the audience saw her they whispered among themselves, and the actor who was then on the stage gazed at the woman who had disturbed the spectators by her mere appearance. And I had the key of her apartment, and in another three or four hours she would again be mine.

People blame men who ruin themselves for actresses and demireps. What astonishes me is that men do not commit twenty times more follies for them …

THE THEATER OF the Piazza San Marco photograph was not a show put on by Maurice, but the essential embodiment of his true nature, what he considered to be his true nature, which he wanted to share with the mother. The place to which he wanted to bring her, the Piazza San Marco, was the recognition and acknowledgment of his true nature. How he had looked forward to it, made preparations: he changed his hotel room for a suite, hired a girl beforehand to look after the child, borrowed money from the whole world, and told the whole world about “my wife and daughter.” “The whole world” consisted of four or five journalists from foreign agencies he had met in Geneva, when he worked as a translator in the United Nations. He wanted everything to slide smoothly into this expansiveness, into the grand gestures; he wanted to persuade her at last of the truth of his world — the grandeur and the craving for grandeur — to “bring her back,” as Nona said, to a place where she had never really been.

They apparently arrived in winter or autumn, judging by the fine coats that they put on and took off in the warm air of the fine restaurants, the heated lobbies of the hotels where he held his meetings. He took her and the child to his meetings: the mother nodded, sat with her thighs pressed together in their silk stockings that rubbed against the hem of the mohair coat, which she only took off when she started to sweat. He had bought her the silk stockings. For the child he bought a ballerina dress with a skirt of ivory-colored lace.

But the child screamed all the time. The entire seven and a half days of Italy she screamed. “She never stopped crying, kept them on their feet and never gave them a moment’s peace,” said Corinne, who didn’t get to go to Italy, with relish. They left her at home with Sammy, who wouldn’t leave her alone: he pursued her with his one good eye, her and the boys who gave her rides on their bicycles, sitting in front on the crossbar.

NONA SAID: “FROM morning to night on your feet, in the end you’ll fall. Who’ll pick you up when you fall?” She said: “Only God will. Everybody’s on their feet, not only me.” Nona said: “What do I care about everybody? It’s you I pity.” She said: “Don’t pity me. Keep your pity for the wretched of the earth.” Nona said: “And who will take pity if not the mother? Will the wretched take pity? Those who are not pitied have no pity.” She said: “Are you trying to say that I have no pity? Is that what you’re trying to say?” Nona said: “I didn’t mean you. I meant the world, elaalam .”

THERE WAS NO room because of the mother’s “day-to-day,” and because “ elbani-adam has to know his day-to-day,” and because when she said “ elaalam ” it described the immensity of a self-contained whole from which nothing could be broken off, which eluded the grasp of thought or imagination, impossible to contain or conquer, crush or defeat.

This, more or less, was elaalam , all the space beyond the open door of the Nona’s quarter-shack — because they always talked with the doors open wide to elaalam —in which floated shrouded things that did not announce themselves and had no exact address, and probably expected no one or nothing, because one way or another only elbani-adam himself, said Nona, had the duty of expectation and hidden hope, only he had eyes, according to Nona, that were stuck in the back of his head, looking backward, to the past, at what had perhaps once been and what “would be,” and to a future that was conditioned on patience and time, patience and time, “ elsabr wa’elzaman ,” because that was what elaalam required, only that, but it was the only attitude unavailable to the mother and Maurice who refused, who wanted to skip forward; they skipped and fell, and failed the test of elaalam , because they had neither patience nor time, said the Nona, not to anyone in particular but to elaalam itself, which was the voices coming from the radio, and the voices behind the voices of the radio, which were Maurice himself— elaalam itself in its absence.