grows woody; in others one goes bad: never does one grow ripe.” My body was letting me down. I was no longer capable of writing: Philippe had betrayed all my hopes, and what grieved me even more bitterly was that the relationship between André and me was going sour. What nonsense, this intoxicating notion of progress, of upward movement, that I had cherished; for now the moment of collapse was at hand! It had already begun. And now it would be very fast and very slow: we were going to turn into really old people.
When I went down again the heat had lessened: Manette was reading at a window that opened onto the garden. Agehad not taken her powers away; but deep inside her, what went on? Did she think of death? With resignation? With dread? I dared not ask.
“André has gone to play boules,” she said. “He’ll be back directly.”
I sat down opposite her. Whatever happened, if I were to reach eighty I should not be like her. I could not see myself calling my solitude freedom and peacefully drawing all the good from each succeeding moment. As far as I was concerned life was gradually going to take back everything it had given me: it had already begun doing so.
“So Philippe has given up teaching,” she said. “It wasn’t good enough for him: he wants to become a bigwig.”
“Yes, alas.”
“The youth of today believes in nothing. And I must say you two don’t believe in much either.”
“André and I? Oh, but we do.”
“André is against everything. That’s what’s wrong with him. That’s why Philippe has turned out badly. One has to be
for
something.”
She has never been able to resign herself to the fact that André will not join the Party. I did not want to argue about it. I told her about our morning’s walk, and I said, “Where have you put the photos?”
It is a rite: every year I look through the old album. But it is never in the same place.
She put it down on the table, together with a cardboard box. There are not many very old photographs. Manette on her wedding day, in a long, severe dress. A group: she and her husband, their brothers, their sisters: a whole generation of which she is the only survivor. André as a child, looking stubborn and determined. Renée at twenty,between her two brothers. We thought we should never get over her death—twenty-four, and she looked forward to so much from life. What would she have got out of it in fact? How would she have put up with growing older? My first meeting with death: how I wept. After that I wept less and less—my parents, my brother-in-law, my father-in-law, our friends. That’s something else that aging means. So many deaths behind one, wept for, forgotten. Often, reading the paper, I see that someone else has died—a writer I liked, a colleague, one of André’s former associates, a political fellow worker, a friend we had lost touch with. It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world.
“You’re looking at the photos?” André leaned over my shoulder. He leafed through the album and pointed out a picture that showed him at the age of eleven with other boys in his form. “More than half of them are dead,” he said. “Pierre, the one here—I saw him again. And this one too. And Paul, who is not in the photo. It’s a good twenty years since we met. I scarcely recognized them. You would never imagine they were exactly my age. They have turned into really old men. Much more worn out than Manette. It gave me a jar.”
“Because of the life they’ve led?”
“Yes. Being a peasant in these parts destroys a man.”
“You must have felt young in comparison with them.”
“Not young. But odiously privileged.” He closed the album. “I’ll take you to Villeneuve for a drink before dinner.”
“All right.”
In the car he told me about the games of boules he had just won; he was making great progress since he had comedown. His mood seemed to be at set fair;