Winter of artifice; three novelettes (4 page)

Inside of the being there is a defective mirror, a mirror distortei. by the fog of solitude, of shyness, by the climate inside of this particular being. It is a personal mirror, lodged in every subjective, interiorized form of life.

Stella received a letter from Laura, her father's second wife. "Come immediately. I am divorcing your father."

Her father was an actor. In Warsaw he had achieved fame and adulation. He had remained youthful and the lover of all women. Stella's mother, whose love for him had encompassed more than the man, permitted him great freedom. It was not his extravagant use of this freedom which had killed her feeling for him, but his inability to make her feel at the center of his life, feel that no matter what his peripheries she remained at the center. In exchange for her self-forgetfulness he had not been able to give anything, only

to take. He had exploited the goodness, the largeness, the voluntary blindness. He had dipped into the immense reservoir of her love without returning to it an equal flow of tenderness, and so it had dried. The boundlessness of her love was to him merely an encouragement of his irresponsibility. He thought it could be used infinitely, not knowing that even an infinite love needed nourishment and fecundation; that no love was ever self-sustaining, self-propelling, self-renewing.

And then one day her love died. For twenty years she had nourished it out of her own substance, and then it died. His selfishness withered it. And he was surprised. Immensely surprised, as if she had betrayed him.

She had left with Stella. And another woman had come, younger, a disciple of his, who had taken up the burden of being tlie lover alone. Stella knew tlie generosity of the second wife, the devotion. She knew how deeply her father must have used this reservoir to empty it. How deeply set his pattern of taking without giving. Again the woman's love was emptied, burnt out.

"He threatens to commit suicide," wrote Laura, "but I do not believe it." Stella did not believe it either. He loved himself too well.

Stella's father met her at the station. In his physical appearance there was clearly manifested the fact that he was not a man related to others but an island. In his impeccable dress there was a touch of finite contours. His clothes were of an insulating material. Whatever they were made of, they gave the impression of being different materials from other people's, that the weU pressed lines were not intended to be disturbed by hmnan hands. It was sterilized elegance conveying his uniqueness, and his perfectionism.

If his clothes had not carried this water-repellent, feeling-repellent quahty of perfection, his eyes would have accomplished this with their expression of the island. Distinctly, the person who moved toward him was an invader, the ship which entered this harbor was an enemy, the human being who approached him was violating the desire of islands to remain islands. His eyes were isolated. They created no warm bridges between them and other eyes. They flashed no signal of welcome, no Ught of response, and above all they remained as closed as a glass door.

He wanted Stella to plead wdth Laura. "Laura suspects me of having an affair with a singer. She has never minded before. And this time it happens not to be true. I dislike being . . . exiled unjustly. I cannot bear false accusations. Why does she mind now? I can't understand. Please go and tell her I will spend the rest of my life making her happy. Tell her I am heartbroken." (As he said these words he took out his silver cigarette case and noticing a small clouded spot on it he carefully polished it viath his handkerchief.) "I've been unconscious. I didn't know she minded. Tell Laura I had nothing to do with this woman. She is too fat."

"But if you had," said Stella, "wouldn't it be better to be truthful this Hme? She is angry. She will hate a lie now more than anything. Why aren't you sincere with her? She may have proofs."

At the word proof his neat, alert head perked, cool, collected, cautious, and he said: "What proofs? She can't have proofs. I was careful. . . ."

He is still lying, thought Stella. He is incurable.

She visited Laura, who was small and childlike. She was like a child who had taken on a maternal role in a game, and found it beyond her strength. Yet she had played this role for ten years.

Almost like a saint, the way she had closed her eyes to all his adventures, the way she had sought to preserve their life together. Her eyes always believing, diminishing the importance of his escapades, disregarding gossip, blaming the women more often than him.

Today as she received Stella, for whom she had always had a strong affection, these same believing eyes were changed. There is nothing clearer than the mark of a wound in believing eyes. It shows clear and sharp, the eyes are lacerated, they seem about to dissolve with pain. The soft faith was gone. And Stella knew instantly that her pleading was doomed.

"My father's unfaithfulness meant nothing. He always loved you above all others. He was light, but his deep love was for you. He was irresponsible, and you were too good to him, you never rebelled."

But Laura defended her attitude: "I am that kind of person. I have great faith, great indulgence, great love. For that reason if someone takes advantage of this I feel betrayed and I cannot forgive. I have warned him gently. I was not ill over his infidehties but over his indehcacies. I wanted to die. I hoped he would be less obvious, less insolent. But now it is irrevocable. When I added up all his selfish remarks, his reckless gestures, the expression of annoyance on his face when I was ill, his indifferences to my sadness, I cannot beheve he ever loved me. He told me such impossible stories that he must have had a very poor idea of my judgment. Until now my love was strong enough to blind me . . . but now, understand me, Stella, I see everything. I remember words of his he uttered the very first day. The kind of unfaithfulness women can forgive is not the kind your father was guilty of. He was not unfaith-

ful by his interest in other women, but he betrayed what we had together: he abandoned me spiritually and emotionally. He did not feel for me. Another thing I cannot forgive him. He was not a natural man, but he was posing as an ideal being. He covered acts which were completely selfish under a coat of altruism. He even embroidered so much on this role of ideal being that I had all the time the deep instinct that I was being cheated, that I was living with a man who was acting. This I can't forgive. Even today he continues to lie. I have definite proofs. They fell into my hands. I didn't want them. And then he was not content with having his mistress live near me, he still wanted me to invite her to my house, he even taunted me for not liking her, not fraternizing with her. Let him cry now. I have cried for ten years. I know he won't kill himself. He is acting. He loves himself too much. Let him now measure the strengtli of this love he destroyed. I feel nothing. Nothing. He has killed my love so completely I do not even suffer. I never saw a man who could kill a love so completely. I say a man! I often think he was a child, he was as irresponsible as a child. He was a child and I became a mother and that is why I forgave him everything. Only a mother forgives e%erything. The child, of course, doesn't know when he is hurting the mother. He does not know when she is tired, sick; he does nothing for her. He takes it for granted that she is willing to die for him. The child is passive, yielding, and accepts everything, giving notliing in return but afiFection. If the mother weeps he will throw his arms around her and then he will go out and do exactly what caused her to weep. The child never thinks of the mother except as the all-giver, the all-forgiving, the indefatigable love. So I let my husband be the child.... But he, Stella, he was not even tender like a child, he did

not give me even the kind of love a child has for the mother. There was no tenderness in him!" And she wept. (He had not wept.)

As Stella watched her she knew the suffering had been too great and that Laura's love was absolutely broken.

When she retxuned to her father carrying the word "irrevocable" to him, her father exclaimed: "What happened to Laura? Such a meek, resigned, patient, angeUcal woman. A little girl, full of innocence and indulgence. And then this madness. . . ."

He did not ask himself, he had never asked himself, what he must have done to destroy such resignation, such innocence, such indulgence. He said: "Let's look at our house for the last time."

Until now it had been their house. But in reality the house belonged to Laura and she asked her husband not to enter it again, to make a hst of his belongings and she would have them sent to him.

They stood together before the house and looked up at the window of his room: "I will never see my room again. It's incredible. My books are still in there, my photographs, my clothes, my scrap books, and I . . ."

At the very moment they stood there a shght earthquake had been registered in Warsaw. At that very moment when her father's life was shaken by the earthquake of a woman's rebelhon, when he was losing love, protection, faithfulness, luxury, faith. His whole life disrupted in a moment of feminine rebelhon. Earth and the woman, and this sudden rebelhon. On the insensitive instrument of his egoism no sign had been registered of this coming disruption.

As he stood there looking at his house for the last time the bowels of the earth shook. Laura was quietly weeping while his hfe

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cracked open and all the lovingly collected possessions fell into an abysm. The earth opened under his perpetually dancing feet, his waltzes of courtship, his contrapuntal love scenes.

In one instant it swallowed the colorful ballet of his lies, his pointed foot evasions, his vaporous escapes, the stage hghts and halos widi which he surrounded and disguised his conquests and appetites. Everything was destroyed in the tumult. The earth's anger at his hghtness, his audacities, his leaps over reahty, his escapes. His house cracked open and through the fissures fell his rare books, his collection of paintings, his press notices, the gifts from his admirers.

But before this happened the earth had given him so many warnings. How many times had he not seen the glances of pain in Laiu^a's eyes, how many times had he overlooked her loneliness, how many times had he pretended not to hear the quiet weeping from her room, how many times had he failed in ordinary tenderness .. . before the revolt.

"And if I get sick," he said, walking away from his house, "who will take care of me? If only I could keep the maid LucQle. She was wonderful. There never was anyone like her. She was the only one who knew how to press my summer suits. With her all my problems would be solved. She was silent and never disturbed me and she never left the house. Now I don't know if I will be able to afford her. Because if I have her it will mean I will have to have two maids. Yes, two, because Lucille is not a good enough cook."

Sadly he walked down the street with Stella's arm under his. And then he added; "Now that I won't have the car any more, I will miss the Fete des Narcisses at Montreux, and I am sure I would have got the prize this year."

••^9

While he balanced himself on the tight rope of his delusions, Stella had no fear for him. He could see no connection between his behavior and Laura's rebelhon. He could not see how the most trivial remarks and incidents could accumulate and form a web to trap him. He did not remember the trivial remark he made to the maid who was devotedly embroidering a night gown for Laura during one of her illnesses. He had stood on the threshold watching and then said with one of his characteristic pirouettes: "I know someone on whom this nightgown would look more beautiful. . . ." This had angered the loyalty of the maid and later influenced her to crystallize the proofs against him. Everyone around liim had taken the side of the human being he overlooked because they could see so obviously the enormous disproportion between her behavior towards liim and his towards her. The greater her love, almost, the greater had grown his irresponsibility and devaluation of this love.

What Stella feared was a moment of lucidity, when he might see that it was not the superficial aspect of his life which had destroyed its basic foundation, but his disregard of and undermining of the foundation.

For the moment he kept himself balanced on his tight-rope.

In fact he was intently busy placing himself back on a pedestal. He was now the victim of an unreasonable woman. Think of a woman who bears up with a man for ten years, and then when he is about to grow old, about to grow wise and sedentary, about to resign from his lover's career, then she revolts and leaves him alone. What absolute illogicahty!

"For now," he said, "I am becoming a little tired of my love affairs. I do not have the same enthusiasms."

After a moment of walking in silence he added: "But I have you, Stella."

The three loves of his life. And Stella could not say what she felt: 'Tou killed my love too."

Yet at this very moment she remembered when it happened. She was then a httle girl of twelve. Her father and mother were separated and hved in opposite sections of the city. Once a week Stella's mother allowed her to visit her father. Once a week she was plunged from an atmosphere of poverty and struggle to one of luxury and indolence. Such a violent contrast that it came with a shock of pain.

Once when she was calling on her father she saw Laura there for the first time. She heard Laura laugh. She saw her tiny figure submerged in furs and smelled her perfume. She could not see her as a woman. She seemed to her another little girl. A httle girl dressed and hairdressed hke a woman, but laughing, and believing and natural. She felt warmly towards her, did not remember that she was the one replacing her mother, that her mother would expect her to hate the intruder. Even to this child of twelve it was clear that it was Laura who needed the protection, that she was not the conqueror. That in the suave, charming, enchanting manners of her actor father there lurked many dangers for human beings, for the vulnerable ones especially. The same danger as had struck her mother and herself: danger of abandon and loneliness.