The scraps of her plaint were borne off by the wind, the engine snorted more vigorously, and the last remnants went down with me in the roar of a far-off, formidable lullaby.
I soon awoke. Still bemoaning her lot, with the same phrase, it seemed to me, always at the same point. She went on with such bitter persistence that in the end you couldn't help learning her story by heart. I did at any rate. The two women kept looking at each other—shadowy vis-à-vis—the younger one far from the other, far from us, far from everything, rooted in her life, in her square garden, in her thirty years. It was as if she were talking aloud for the first time.
I listened. Each detail revealed a year, a corner of the house, an important event. I felt a dull rage fermenting in me instead of the timidity and compunction one usually experiences in trespassing upon another's inmost recesses.
Why? Perhaps because I, a stranger, had not the power to interpose and hold the secret of this trouble so as to remedy it.
Ah, I no longer need to listen nor need to know the man in order to feel that he is right to lose himself in his business and be merely a good father who sees in his wife nothing but the mother of his children and shrugs his shoulders when she heaves with sighs.
The evening air was blowing in cooler through the upper half of the window. We were entering a plain where the green of the meadows was deepening into mauve. Two rows of trees, which had been a profile against the sky when seen from afar, turned into a black curtain suddenly drawn. Here and there houses stood out as though groping in the dark—faces blotted out as soon as arisen—one field swallowed up the next; the ragged line of a hedge came and went; an embankment followed, its slope daubed with brown, unwholesome stains, its top dressed with tufted grass and straggling bushes, which moved their arms like signals.
The young woman's brows were drawn. She was questioning the obscure flickering stretch of space. I read the questions in her face: Why does he merely graze her forehead when he comes back in the evening? Why does he keep her out of everything? Why does he never feast on her presence or heed her advice? How did he love her? She had been right a short while before when she had said bitterly: "A little less than a prostitute, a little more than a servant."
The woman was certainly suffering and calling upon a God who could not answer. At night when the close jealous house is asleep, she undoubtedly falls to her knees in secret and wrings her barren hands and invokes misery, love, grief, as if the sacred words were for the whole world. Thou, God whom she implores, Thou knowest well the reason of her trouble, a simple reason, brutal, elementary. Why dost Thou let her hunt for others?
I threw myself back because I both wanted and feared that my face might betray me.
The Midi was beginning, the first olive trees were rounding off the landscape, the night sky was already smiling in the rosy light of dawn.