February 19th 1998, Thursday
I spend most of my time sitting at my desktop, enjoying my computer. I don’t like socializing, attending parties or going out with acquaintances. I’ve got a full-time permanent, non-stressing job. I’ve got very good friends, live in quite a pretty house in a warm and beautiful city with a sea. Up to the moment, I’m healthy. I usually drive at a moderate speed and seldom read Spanish newspapers. And yet I feel my life’s risky.
February 18th 1998, Wednesday
Today I’m distressed. These last two days have been emotionally intense. The sister of a beloved friend of mine has died, all of a sudden. It’s been a shock for everybody. We’ve tried hard to find answers, but it seems to me that pain needs no excuses —it comes when it comes and don’t ask for permission to go in. I need to relax a bit. I can’t concentrate myself. When I first knew of her death, I felt anger, then pain. Now I’m worried. Worried for Angel. I do hope he’ll be able to go ahead —and not only to survive, as he pointed; I’m confident, and hopeful, he’ll learn whatever he has to learn of all this and use it to fully launch and enrich his life. You know, he and I used to have lunch together, in a cheap and dingy restaurant in Moncloa, Madrid. He usually treated me badly but —gee, I don’t know why I took a fancy to him, but I certainly did!
February 15th 1998, Sunday
Something I've been reading these days has touched me. It's a fragment of Somerset's Maugham's novel The Razor's Edge. After coming back home a hero from war, young Larry refuses every job he's offered. Isabel, her fiancée, doesn't want to put pressure on him —she thinks that all he needs is some time to readapt to the city life. After a year, though, things get harder. All their common friends are either in college or working in any of the promising ventures Chicago is offering in the 1920's, while he's wasting his time, and her love. He finally agrees with Isabel he'll spend two years in Paris, the time he thinks he needs to come in terms with himself. When the two years' time are almost over, Isabel and her mother go to Paris to stay all the summer season in her uncle Elliott's home. There they meet again, and this conversation takes place (my comments in italics):
[...] 'All right then, let's go and sit in the gardens.'
'No, I don't want to do that either. I want to go and see where you live.'
'There's nothing to see. I live in a scrubby little room in a hotel.'
'Uncle Elliott says you've got an apartment and are living in sin with an artist's model.'
'Come on then and see for yourself,' he laughed. 'It's only a step from here. We can walk.'
He took her through narrow, tortuous streets, dingy notwithstanding the streak of blue sky that showed between the big houses, and after a while stopped at a small hotel with a pretentious facade.
'Here we are.'
Isabel followed him into a narrow hall, on one side of which was a desk and behind it a man in shirt-sleeves, with a waistcoat in thin black and yellow stripes and a dirty apron, reading a paper. Larry asked for his key, and the man handed it to him from the rack immediately behind him. He gave Isabel an inquisitive glance that turned into a knowing smirk. It was clear that he thought she was going to Larry's room for no honest purpose.
They climbed up two flights of stairs, on which was a threadbare red carpet, and Larry unlocked his door. Isabel entered a smallish room with two windows. They looked out on the grey apartment house opposite, on the ground floor of which was a stationer's shop. There was a single bed in the room, with a night table beside it, a heavy wardrobe with a large mirror, an upholstered but straight-backed armchair, and a table between the windows on which were a typewriter, papers, and a number of books. The chimney-piece was piled with paper-bound volumes.
'You sit in the armchair. It's not very comfortable, but it's the best I can offer.'
He drew up another chair and sat down.
'Is this where you live?' asked Isabel
He chuckled at the look on her face.
'It is I've been here ever since I came to Paris'
'But why?'
'It's convenient. It's near the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Sorbonne.' He pointed to a door she had not noticed. 'It's got a bathroom. I can get breakfast here and I generally dine at that restaurant where we had lunch.'
'It's awfully sordid.'
'Oh no, it's all right. It's all I want.'
'But what sort of people live here?'
'Oh, I don't know. Up in the attics a few students. Two or three old bachelors in government offices and a retired actress at the Odeon; the only other room with a bath is occupied by a kept woman whose gentleman friend comes to see her every other Thursday; I suppose a few transients. It's a very quiet and respectable place.'
Isabel was a trifle disconcerted and because she knew Larry noticed it and was amused she was half inclined to take offence.
'What's that great big book on the table?' she asked
'That? Oh, that's my Greek dictionary.'
'Your what?' she cried.
'It's all right. It won't bite you.'
'Are you learning Greek?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'I thought I'd like to.'
He was looking at her with a smile in his eyes and she smiled back at him.
'Don't you think you might tell me what you've been up to all the time you've been in Paris?'
'I've been reading a good deal. Eight or ten hours a day. I've attended lectures at the Sorbonne. I think I've read everything that's important in French literature and I can read Latin, at least Latin prose, almost as easily as I can read French. Of course Greek's more difficult. But I have a very good teacher. Until you came here I used to go to him three evenings a week.'
'And what is that going to lead to?
The acquisition of knowledge,' he smiled.
'It doesn't sound very practical.'
'Perhaps it isn't and on the other hand perhaps it is. But it's enormous fun. You can't imagine what a thrill it is to read the Odyssey in the original. It makes you feel as if you had only to get on tiptoe and stretch out your hands to touch the stars.'
My god, enormous fun.
He got up from his chair, as though impelled by an excitement that seized him, and walked up and down the small room.
'I've been reading Spinoza the last month or two. I don't suppose I understand very much of it yet, but it fills me with exultation. It's like landing from your plane on a great plateau in the mountains. Solitude, and an air so pure that it goes to your head like wine and you feel like a million dollars.'
'When are you coming back to Chicago?'
'Chicago? I don't know. I haven't thought of it.'
I'm especially fond of that "Chicago?", as she had asked him when he was going to come back to the moon [g].
'You said that if you hadn't got what you wanted after two years you'd give it up as a bad job.'
'I couldn't go back now. I'm on the threshold. I see vast lands of the spirit stretching out before me, beckoning, and I'm eager to travel them.'
'What do you expect to find in them?'
'The answers to my questions.' He gave her a glance that was almost playful, so that except that she knew him so well, she might have thought he was speaking in jest. 'I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it's the end.'
Isabel gave a little gasp. It made her uncomfortable to hear Larry say such things, and she was thankful that he spoke so lightly, in the tone of ordinary conversation, that it was possible for her to overcome her embarrassment.
'But Larry,' she smiled. 'People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they'd have been answered by now.'
Larry chuckled.
'Don't laugh as if I'd said something idiotic,' she said sharply.
'On the contrary I think you've said something shrewd. But on the other hand you might say that if men have been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can't help asking them and have to go on asking them. Besides, it's not true that no one has found the answers. There are more answers than questions, and lots of people have found answers that were perfectly satisfactory for them. Old Ruysbroek for instance.'
'Who was he?'
'Oh, just a guy I didn't know at college,' Larry answered flippantly.
Isabel didn't know what he meant, but passed on.
'It all sounds so adolescent to me. Those are the sort of things sophomores get excited about and then when they leave college they forget about them. They have to earn a living.'
This comment strikes me as cruel and shrewd, but Larry replies with a candor that turns it harmless.
'I don't blame them. You see, I'm in the happy position that I have enough to live on. If I hadn't I'd have had to do like everybody else and make money.'
'But doesn't money mean anything to you?'
'Not a thing,' he grinned.
'How long d'you think all this is going to take you?'
'I wouldn't know. Five years. Ten years.'
'And after that? What are you going to do with all this wisdom?'
'If I ever acquire wisdom I suppose I shall be wise enough to know what to do with it.'
Isabel clasped her hands passionately and leant forwards in her chair.
'You're so wrong, Larry. You're an American. Your place isn't here. Your place is in America.'
'I shall come back when I'm ready.'
'But you're missing so much. How can you bear to sit here in a backwater just when we're living through the most wonderful adventure the world has ever known? Europe's finished. We're the greatest, the most powerful people in the world. We're going forward by leaps and bounds. We've got everything. It's your duty to take part in the development of your country. You've forgotten, you don't know how thrilling life is in America today. Are you sure you're not doing this because you haven't the courage to stand up to the work that's before every American now? Oh, I know you're working in a way, but isn't it just an escape from your responsibilities? Is it more than just a sort of laborious idleness? What would happen to America if everyone shirked as you're shirking?'
"Are you sure you're not doing this because you haven't the courage to stand up to the work that's before every American now? Oh, I know you're working in a way, but isn't it just an escape from your responsibilities?". This is a gruesome but relevant argument —I’m familiar with it. When I decided not to complete my doctorate studies and began studying mathematics instead, a good friend of mine spoke to me in those terms. It disturbed me, I can tell you. But I’m grateful to him, because it’s a question you must honestly face. I was told the same again when I said to my friends I didn’t want to have any children. Again, I’m grateful to them.
'You're very severe, honey,' he smiled. 'The answer to that is that everyone doesn't feel like me. Fortunately for themselves, perhaps, most people are prepared to follow the normal course; what you forget is that I want to learn as passionately as —Gray, for instance, wants to make pots of money. Am I really a traitor to my country because I want to spend a few years educating myself? It may be that when I'm through I shall have something to give that people will be glad to take. It's only a chance, of course, but if I fail I shall be no worse of than a man who's gone into business and hasn't made a go of it.'
Larry misses the point here, don’t you think? Perhaps he’s too young to be more cynical and self-centered. And even his reply, "'The answer to that is that everyone doesn't feel like me" has deep and rich implications. By stating that, we affirm our way without completely and radically renounce to our social bounds. It’s a back door, a false escape; it’s like saying "call me if you’re in trouble, but let me alone in the meantime".
'And what about me? Am I of no importance to you at all?'
'You're of very great importance. I want you to marry me.'
'When? In ten years?'
'No. Now. As soon as possible.'
'On what? Mamma can't afford to give me anything. Besides, she wouldn't if she could. She'd think it wrong to help you to live without doing anything.'
'I wouldn't want to take anything from your mother,' said Larry. 'I've got three thousand a year. That's plenty in Paris. We could have a little apartment and abonne à tout faire. We'd have such a lark, darling.'
'But, Larry, one can't live on three thousand a year.'
'Of course one can. Lots of people live on much less.'
'But I don't want to live on three thousand a year. There's no reason why I should.'
'I've been living on half that.'
'But how!'
[g]
She looked at the dingy little room with a shudder of distaste.
'It means I've got a bit saved up. We could go down to Capri for our honeymoon and then in the fall we'd go to Greece. I'm crazy to go there. Don't you remember how we used to talk about travelling all over the world together?'
'Of course I want to travel. But not like that. I don't want to travel second-class on steamships and put up at third-rate hotels, without a bathroom, and eat at cheap restaurants.'
'I went all through Italy last October like that. I had a wonderful time. We could travel all over the world on three thousand a year.'
'But I want to have babies, Larry.'
'That's all right. We'll take them along with us.'
'You're so silly,' she laughed. 'D'you know what it costs to have a baby? Violet Tomlinson had one last year and she did it as cheaply as she could and it cost her twelve hundred and fifty. And what d'you think a nurse costs?' She grew more vehement as one idea after another occurred to her. 'You're so impractical. You don't know what you're asking me to do. I'm young, I want to have fun. I want to do all the things that people do. I want to go to parties, I want to go to dances, I want to play golf and ride horseback. I want to wear nice clothes. Can't you imagine what it means to a girl not to be as well dressed as the rest of her crowd? D'you know what it means, Larry, to buy your friends' old dresses when they're sick of them and be thankful when someone out of pity makes you a present of a new one? I couldn't even afford to go to a decent hairdresser to have my hair properly done. I don't want to go about in street-cars and omnibuses; I want to have my own car. And what d'you suppose I'd find to do with myself all day long while you were reading at the Library? Walk about the streets window-shopping or sit in the Luxembourg Garden seeing that my children didn't get into mischief? We wouldn't have any friends.'
'Oh, Isabel,' he interrupted.
'Not the sort of friends I'm used to. Oh yes, Uncle Elliott's friends would ask us now and then for his sake, but we couldn't go because I wouldn't have the clothes to go in, and we wouldn't go because we couldn't afford to return their hospitality. I don't want to know a lot of scrubby, unwashed people; I've got nothing to say to them and they've got nothing to say to me. I want to live, Larry.' She grew suddenly conscious of the look in his eyes, tender as it always was when fixed on her, but gently amused. 'You think I'm silly, don't you? You think I'm being trivial and horrid.'
'No, I don't. I think what you say is very natural.'
He was standing with his back to the fireplace, and she got up and went up to him so that they were face to face.
'Larry, if you hadn't a cent to your name and got a job that brought you in three thousand a year I'd marry you without a minute's hesitation. I'd cook for you, I'd make the beds, I wouldn't care what I wore, I'd go without anything, I'd look upon it as wonderful fun, because I'd know that it was only a question of time and you'd make good. But this means living in a sordid beastly way all our lives with nothing to look forward to. It means that I should be a drudge to the day of my death. And for what? So that you can spend years trying to find answers to questions that you say yourself are insoluble. It's so wrong. A man ought to work. That's what he's here for. That's how he contributes to the welfare of the community.'
'In short it's his duty to settle down in Chicago and enter Henry Maturin's business. Do you think that by getting my friends to buy the securities that Henry Maturin is interested in I should add greatly to the welfare of the community?'
'There must be brokers and it's a perfectly decent and honourable way of earning a living.'
'You've drawn a very black picture of life in Paris on a moderate income. You know, it isn't really like that. One can dress very nicely without going to Chanel. And all the interesting people don't live in the neighbourhood of the Arc de Triomphe and the Avenue Foch. In fact few interesting people do, because interesting people generally don't have a lot of money. I know quite a number of people here, painters and writers and students, French English American, and what not, whom I think you'd find much more amusing than Elliott's seedy marquises and long-nosed duchesses. You've got a quick mood and a lively sense of humour. You'd enjoy hearing them swap ideas across the dinner table even though the wine was only vin ordinaire and you didn't have a butler and a couple of footmen to wait on you.'
'Don't be stupid, Larry. Of course I would. You know I'm not a snob. I'd love to meet interesting people.'
'Yes, in a Chanel dress. D'you think they wouldn't catch on to it that you looked upon it as a sort of cultured slumming? They wouldn't be at their ease, any more than you would, and you wouldn't get anything out of it except to tell Emily de Montadour and Gracie de Château-Gaillard afterwards what fun you'd had meeting a lot of weird bohemians in the Latin Quarter.'
Isabel slightly shrugged her shoulders.
'I dare say you're right. They're not the sort of people I've been brought up with. They're not the sort of people I have anything in common with.'
'Where does that leave us?'
'Just where we started. I've lived in Chicago ever since I can remember. All my friends are there. All my interests are there. I'm at home there. It's where I belong and it's where you belong. Mamma's ill and she's never going to get any better. I couldn't leave her even if I wanted to.'
'Does that mean that unless I'm prepared to come back to Chicago you don't want to marry me?'
Isabel hesitated. She loved Larry. She wanted to marry him. She wanted him with all the power of her senses. She knew that he desired her. She couldn't believe that when it came to a showdown he wouldn't weaken. She was afraid, but she had to risk it.
'Yes, Larry, that's just what it does mean.'
He struck a match on the chimney-piece, one of those old-fashioned French sulphur matches that fill your nostrils with an acrid odour, and lit his pipe. Then, passing her, he went over and stood by one of the windows. He looked out. He was silent for what seemed an endless time. She stood as she had stood before, when she was facing him, and looked in the mirror over the chimney-piece, but she did not see herself. Her heart was beating madly and she was sick with apprehension. He turned at last.
'I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It's illimitable. It's such a happy life. There's only one thing like it, when you're up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You're intoxicated by the boundless space. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn't exchange it for all the power and glory in the world. I was reading Descartes the other day. The ease, the grace, the lucidity. Gosh!'
'But Larry,' she interrupted him desperately, 'don't you see you're asking something of me that I'm not fitted for, that I'm not interested in and don't want to be interested in? How often have I got to repeat to you that I'm just an ordinary, normal girl. I'm twenty, in ten years I shall be old, I want to have a good time while I have the chance. Oh, Larry, I do love you so terribly. All this is just trifling. It's not going to lead you anywhere. For your own sake I beseech you to give it up. Be a man, Larry, and do a man's work. You're just wasting the precious years that others are doing so much with. Larry, if you love me you won't give me up for a dream. You've had your fling. Come back with us to America.'
'I can't, darling. It would be death to me. It would be the betrayal of my soul.'
'Oh, Larry, why d'you talk in that way? That's the way hysterical, highbrow women talk. What does it mean? Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.'
'It happens to mean exactly what I feel,' he answered, his eyes twinkling.
'How can you laugh? Don't you realize this is desperately serious? We've come to the cross-roads and what we do now is going to affect our whole lives.'
'I know that. Believe me, I'm perfectly serious.'
She sighed.
'If you wont listen to reason there's nothing more to be said.'
'But I don't think it's reason. I think you've been talking the most terrible nonsense all the time.'
'I?' If she hadn't been so miserable she would have laughed. 'My poor Larry, you're as crazy as a coot.'
"My poor Larry, you’re as crazy as a coot"
She slowly shipped her engagement ring off her finger. She placed it on the palm of her hand and looked at it. It was a square-cut ruby set in a thin platinum band and she had always liked it.
'If you loved me you wouldn't make me so unhappy.'
'I do love you. Unfortunately sometimes one can't do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.'
She stretched out her hand on which the ruby was resting and forced a smile to her trembling lips.
'Here you are, Larry.'
'It's no good to me. Won't you keep it as a memento of our friendship? You can wear it on your little finger. Our friendship needn't stop, need it?'
'I shall always care for you, Larry.'
"Then keep it. I should like you to.'
She hesitated for an instant, then put it on the finger of her right hand.
'It's too large.'
'You can have it altered. Let's go to the Ritz bar and have a drink.'
'All right.'
She was a trifle taken aback that it had all gone so easily. She had not cried. Nothing seemed to be changed except that now she wasn't going to marry Larry. She could hardly believe that everything was over and done with. She resented a little the fact that they hadn't had a terrific scene. They had talked it all over almost as coolly as though they had been discussing the taking a house. She felt let down, but at the same time was conscious of a slight sense of satisfaction because they had behaved in such a civilized way. She would have given a lot to know exactly what Larry was feeling. But it was always difficult to know that; his smooth face, his dark eyes were a mask that she was aware even she, who had known him for so many years, could not penetrate. She had taken off her hat and laid it on the bed. Now, standing before the mirror, she put it on again.
'Just as a matter of interest,' she said, arranging her hair, 'did you want to break our engagement?'
'No.'
'I thought it might be a relief to you.' He made no reply. She turned round with a gay smile on her lips. 'Now I'm ready.'
Larry locked the door behind him. When he handed the key to the man at the desk he enveloped them both in a look of conniving archness. It was impossible for Isabel not to guess what he thought they had been up to.
'I don't believe that old fellow bet much on my virginity,’ she said. [...]
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