Free The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir Page B

my reverses had not affected it, I observed, rather bitterly. He stopped the car at the edge of a terrace covered with blue and orange sunshades with people drinking pastis under them; the smell of aniseed wafted on the air. He ordered some for us. There was a long silence.
    “This is a cheerful little square.”
    “Very cheerful.”
    “You say that in a funereal voice. Are you sorry not to be in Paris?”
    “Oh, no. I don’t give a damn about places, just at present.”
    “Nor about people, either, I take it.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “You’re not very talkative.”
    “I’m sorry. I feel rotten. I had too much sun this morning.”
    “Usually you’re so tough.”
    “I’m getting old.”
    There was no friendliness in my voice. What had I expected from André? A miracle? That he should wave a wand and my book would become a good one and the reviews all favorable? Or that my failure should mean nothing anymore once I was with him? He had worked plenty of little miracles for me: in the days when he lived tensely reaching out toward his future his eagerness had given life to mine. He gave me confidence, restored my belief in myself. He had lost that power. Even if he had gone on believing in his own future, that would not have been enough to comfort me about mine. He took a letter out of his pocket.
    “Philippe has written to me.”
    “How did he know where you were?”
    “I telephoned him the day I left to say goodbye. He tells me you threw him out.”
    “Yes. I don’t regret it. I cannot love anyone I do not respect.”
    André looked at me hard. “I don’t know that you are being altogether honest.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “You are setting it all on a moral plane, whereas it is primarily on the emotional plane that you feel you have been betrayed.”
    “Both are there.”
    Betrayed, abandoned: yes. Too painful a wound for me to be able to talk about it. We relapsed into silence. Was it going to settle there between us for good? A couple who go on living together merely because that was how they began, without any other reason: was that what we were turning into? Were we going to spend another fifteen, twenty, years without any particular grievance or enmity but each enclosed in his own world, wholly bent on his own problem, brooding over his own private failure, words grown wholly useless? We had taken to living out of step. In Paris I was cheerful and he was gloomy. I resented his gaiety now that I had become low-spirited. I made an effort. “In three days we shall be in Italy. Do you like the idea?”
    “I like it if you do.”
    “I like it if you like it.”
    “Because you really don’t give a damn about places?”
    “It’s the same with you, often enough.”
    He made no reply. Something had gone wrong with our communication: each was taking what the other said amiss.Should we ever get out of it? Why tomorrow rather than today: why in Rome rather than here?
    “Well, let’s go back,” I said, after a pause.
    We killed the evening playing cards with Manette.
    The next day I refused to face the sun and the strident shrieking of the cicadas. What was the point? I knew that confronted with the palace of the popes, or the Pont du Gard, I should remain as unmoved as I had been at Champeaux. I invented a headache so as to stay at home. André had brought a dozen new books, and he plunged deep into one of them. I keep up to date and I knew them all. I looked through Manette’s library. The Garnier classics; some of the Pléiade collection we had given her as presents. There were many books there that I had not had an opportunity of going back to for ages and ages: I had forgotten them. And yet a feeling of weariness came over me at the idea of reading them again. As you read so you remember; or at least you have the illusion of remembering. The first freshness is lost. What had they to offer me, these writers who had made me what I was and should remain? I opened some volumes and turned