Which of them? It is easy to imagine her: they are all alike. She laughs, I am certain, and expands her budding breasts; her beaded tunic sparkles and strikes a rivulet of light against her pretty legs; she has glossy hair faultlessly dressed and when she turns round in the mazurka, you see she has one of those plump, discreet faces over which feelings slide without leaving a mark.
But I am forgetting. Mother had to take part in the dance too, as it was the only one she knew and it unrolled tender memories. She braced herself, then started off, her features gently composed, leaning on my father, who accommodated his step to hers while seeming to guide her. "Let's see, that's not it ..." and they set out again—one, two, three, four—heavy, both of them, with their reputation as a happy, united couple, and laden with the looks that follow them.
If one knew....
The engaged couples have disappeared, swallowed up by the nearest dark corners, where passion is of scarlet and nothing exists but arms and lips and bodies surmised. When the music will have finished and they will have reappeared, the chatter and the sharp raw laugh of the young fiancée will be heard; she will open her eyes wide, like this; her childish mouth will be seen, and her slim figure, which retains an air of awkward shyness. "How unsophisticated she is," they will say in gratitude to her for being an example of the velvety purity of the young girls.
The last measures. They are all perspiring, out of breath, soberly triumphant, and as they go back to their chairs each man gives a last squeeze of the slender arm he is about to relinquish.
My father is entirely engrossed in his guests; he has led mamma, dizzy, back to her chair, and has moved off. As she sits there with her eyelashes fluttering, you would think she has returned from a wonderful long journey. "I am happy, happy," she is reflecting. "I have such a good husband." The wounds of every day are closed—they have to be overlooked—and if any cloud darkens the horizon, it is that she is thinking of me: "But that is what marriage means, my little daughter; you'll see, it is just a big renunciation: you will change, you too, and do like the rest; look at me; am I unhappy?"
No, you are not unhappy, my poor little mother, with your injured voice, your charitable eyes, and your lifeless gestures; you are dead; it is twenty years since you have had a will of your own, a desirous look, a single manifestation of impatience, a stray impulse, an hour, anything you can call your own; it is twenty years since you renounced. But your husband never goes out, he has his wife and children, he earns your living, a comfortable living; everyone respects him, and "one cannot have everything."
As for you, you can live contentedly with a twenty-year-old unhappiness upon your shoulders; you breathe, you go about; the women around you have the same fate, and this sustains you. But we, mother, who are different, the daughters of my generation, we who have sensual hearts, reasoning minds, new energies—I, who have done nothing, I cannot, I tell you, and if a future is given me, I want to snatch whatever it holds.
The music has stopped; I cannot hear them any more.... It is as if my heart were beginning to live.
The tangible darkness of the room deepens little by little. Its peace, its solitude. I can distinguish the walls, or rather the vaporous shadows of walls, the windows where the cold light of the garden is paling, the indistinct rectangle which stretches along the ceiling ... and in that silence in which God is rooted is the hunted soul returning to its place.