Free Climates by André Maurois

jealous, he comes only with a certain receptiveness that predisposes him to contract this illness), but Odile, by her very nature and without meaning to, constantly aroused my curiosity. Things that happened, the events of one day, were for me and for all my relations precise facts and needed only to be described scrupulously for each sentence, each element of the account to slot in perfectly with all the others, leaving no room for doubt. But when they were filtered through Odile’s mind they became a hazy, muddled landscape.
    I would not like to give the impression that she deliberately dissimulated. It was far more complex. Whathappened was that, to her, words and sentences had little value; just as she had the beauty of a character in a dream, she spent her life in a dream. I have said that she lived mostly in the present moment. She invented the past and the future as and when she needed them, and then forgot what she had invented. If she had wanted to mislead, she would have made a concerted effort to coordinate what she said, to give it at least an air of truthfulness; I never saw her go to that trouble. She could contradict herself within a single sentence. On my return from a trip to the factory in Limousin, I asked her, “What did you do on Sunday?”
    “Sunday? I don’t remember … Oh, yes, I was very tired. I stayed in bed the whole day.”
    Five minutes later we were talking about music and she suddenly cried, “Oh! I forgot to tell you: at the concert last Sunday I heard Ravel’s
Waltz
you told me about. I really liked—”
    “But, Odile, do you realize what you’re saying? It’s lunacy … Surely you must know whether you were at a concert or in bed on Sunday … and you don’t think I could possibly believe both.”
    “I’m not asking you to believe that. When I’m tired I talk complete nonsense … I don’t even listen to what I’m saying myself.”
    “All right, but now, try to think of a precise memory: what did you do last Sunday? Did you stay in bed or did you go to the concert?”
    She looked perplexed for a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t remember now. You get me all confused when you behave like the Inquisition.”
    I emerged from this sort of conversation very unhappy: anxious, agitated, and unable to sleep. I spent hours trying to reconstruct how she had actually spent her day, from the tiniest scraps she had let slip. I then reviewed all the worrying male friends whom I knew had filled Odile’s life as an unmarried woman. As for Odile, she had the same capacity for forgetting these scenes as everything else. I could leave her sulky and uncommunicative in the morning and find her jubilant that evening. I would arrive home prepared to say, “Listen, darling, this can’t go on. We’ll have to think about a separation. It’s not what I want, but you really will have to make an effort, you need to behave differently,” only to be greeted by a girl in a new dress who kissed me and said, “Guess what! Misa called and she has three tickets for the theater, and we’re going to see
A Doll’s House
.” And, out of weakness and love, I would accept this unrealistic but consoling fiction.
    I was far too proud to let my suffering show. My parents in particular had, at all costs, to be unaware of it. In that first year only two people seemed to have guessed what was going on. The first was my cousin Renée, and this surprised me all the more because we saw her so little. She led an independent existence, a fact that had irritated our family for some time, at least as much as my marriage. While my uncle Pierre was staying in Vittel where he went to take the waters every year, she had met a Paris doctor and his wife and grew fond of this couple. Renée had always been a fairly rebellious girl and, since her adolescence, had been very hostile to Marcenat ways. She got into the habit of making longer and longer visits to her new friends in Paris. This Doctor Prud’homme, who