An Evening with Claire

Claire was ill. For whole evenings I would sit up with her, and, each time I
left, I would invariably miss the last Métro and end up going on foot from
rue Raynouard to the place Saint-Michel, in the vicinity of which I lived. I
would pass by the stables of the École Militaire; from there I could hear the
clanging of the chains to which the horses were tethered and smell that
thick equine aroma so uncommon in Paris; then I would walk along the
long and narrow rue de Babylone, and at the end of this street, in a
photographer’s shop window, by the dim light of a distant street lamp, the
face of some famous writer, composed entirely of slanting planes, would
gaze out at me; those omniscient eyes behind horn-rimmed European
spectacles would follow me for half a block—until I crossed the glittering
black strip of boulevard Raspail. At length, I would arrive at my pension.
Industrious old women dressed in rags would outstrip me, tottering on
feeble legs. Over the Seine myriad lights would burn brightly, drowning in
the darkness, and as I watched them from a bridge, it would suddenly seem
to me as if I were standing above a harbour and the sea were covered in
foreign ships emblazed with lanterns. Taking one last look at the Seine, I
would go up to my room, lie down to sleep and sink instantaneously into
the unfathomable gloom where trembling bodies stirred, not always quite
managing to take on the form of images familiar to my eyes and thus
vanishing without ever having materialized. And even in sleep’s embrace I
lamented these disappearances, sympathized with their imaginary,
unintelligible sorrow, and so I lived and slumbered in an ineffable state,
which I shall never understand in waking. This fact ought to have grieved
me, but in the morning I would forget what I had seen in my dreams, and
my abiding memory of the foregoing day would be the recollection that I
had again missed the Métro. In the evening I would set out again for
Claire’s. Several months previously her husband had left for Ceylon, leaving
us alone together; and only the maid, who brought in tea and biscuits on a
wooden tray decorated with a finely drawn image of a gaunt Chinaman, a
woman of around forty-five who wore a pince-nez (and hence didn’t at all
look like a servant) and who was forever lost in thought—she would
always forget the sugar tongs, or the sugar bowl, or else a saucer or a
spoon—only she would interrupt our ménage, coming in to ask whether
madame needed anything. Claire, who for some reason was sure that the
maid would be offended if she didn’t ask her for something, would say: yes,
please bring the gramophone and some records from monsieur’s study—
although the gramophone was quite superfluous and, once the maid had
gone, would remain in the very spot where she had left it, while Claire
would immediately forget all about it. The maid would come and go around
five times during the course of an evening; and when I once remarked to
Claire that while her maid looked remarkably well preserved for her years,
and though her legs still possessed a positively youthful indefatigability, all
the same, I wasn’t too sure that she was quite all there—either she had a
mania for locomotion or else her mental faculties had just imperceptibly
but unquestionably attenuated in connection with the onset of old age—
Claire looked at me pityingly and replied that I should do better to exert my
singular Russian wit on others. Besides, as she saw it, I ought to have
remembered that only the previous day I had shown up again in a shirt
with mismatching cufflinks, and that I couldn’t, as I had done the day before
that, simply throw my gloves down on her bed and take her by the
shoulders, something that wouldn’t pass for a proper greeting anywhere on
earth, and that if she wanted to enumerate all my violations of the
elementary rules of propriety, then she would have to go on for… at this
point she paused in thought and said: five years. She uttered these words
with a look of severity; I began to feel sorry that such trifles could irk her so
and wanted to ask her forgiveness, but she turned away, her back began to
convulse, and she raised a handkerchief to her eyes—and when at last she
turned to look at me, I saw that she was laughing. She told me that the maid
was seeing out the latest in a series of romantic liaisons, and that a man
who had promised to marry her now refused bluntly. That was why she
was so lost in thought. “What’s there to think about?” I asked. “So he’s
refused to marry her. Does one really need so much time to grasp such a
simple thing?”
“You always put things much too plainly,” said Claire. “Women do.
She’s thinking because it’s a pity for her. How is it that you can’t
understand this?”