The Selected Stories

THE RED BLOUSE

I’ll tell you a story about my student days.

My desk stood by the window that looked out onto the street. My field of vision was limited by the house in front. Its third-floor window was directly opposite mine, and the blinds had been painted green. On the windowsill sat geraniums and a birdcage with a bird that never sang, although it escaped one day. A neighbor had shouted the news from her window to my concierge. One afternoon I saw beds, chairs, tables, a piano being lowered to the street: the people opposite were moving. I was gazing absentmindedly at the furniture swinging in the air at the end of a rope and listening to the movers shouting at the woman driver. I was slowly growing lethargic. The first signs of a precocious spring had appeared, filling me with a lingering melancholy that one encounters at the age of nineteen when a chance event can highlight the ephemeral. At that point in my life, I would have wished to fix each moment of my existence, making it definitive, so that I might continue to exist among objects that were meant to remain there forever. I don’t even know what I wanted! Those dusty pieces of furniture, the parcels and trunks being removed, one after the other: all of it would now belong to the past, out of sight, leaving me with a bitter taste of uncertainty.

By the time I realized the apartment was occupied again, the days had grown long and the sun was predicting an implacable summer.

The window must have been closed for many days, because when I noticed a girl opening it wide one afternoon, I was struck by the vivid impression of the inescapable passing of time. I slowly became aware of two curious things: the girl raised the blinds every afternoon at the same time, and a bit later a young man — more or less like me — closed it.

On my birthday I received a parcel from home. My mother had sent me clothes and books, my sister — in a separate box — half a dozen red gladiolas from our garden and six packs of the best cigarettes. I put the flowers in a vase on the desk — half a dozen flaming swords — and, enveloped by smoke, set to work with a warm sense of comfort.

She must have been attracted by the flowers. Perhaps I had placed them there on purpose. When she raised the blinds, she would lean on the ledge and gaze about. She was pretty. Very pretty, decidedly so. The color of summer. One of my favorite words when I think of a girl is siren. The next is nymph. But my favorite is siren, together with all the others associated with it: ocean, mariner, nostalgia, lichen, island, sail, ship, beach. She was wearing a low-cut red blouse. At that time it was the color I least liked (influenced, I suppose, by my sister, who hated it). It was a color that exasperated me, whether the entire dress was red or only some accessory, and I classified everyone who wore it as unworthy of my attention. Yet, paradoxically, a red blouse — furiously, insultingly red — would cause me many sleepless nights and many painfully restless days.

Soon I came to live in hope that the girl would appear. I dreamed about her, sweet and remote as a princess. I sketched her in the margins of my books, in notebooks, and I carved her into the top of the desk, using a penknife. None of my drawings resembled her. This irritated me in a sad sort of way and always led me to start over.

They kissed one day with the window wide open. I stood up so I wouldn’t see them. Why did they have to kiss like that—“shamelessly” was the word I used to criticize them — in front of me? They kissed for a long time, as if the world had been created precisely to witness the spectacle of their happiness. I decided to move my desk, but I missed their presence. I was attracted to what, for me, was morbid and unwholesome. I was obsessed by the vision of the two of them embracing. At night in my dark room, I would conjure up the girl, her blouse, the kisses, her dark, moist eyes that shone like water, all the tenderness that I would have wished for me. I wanted to hold the girl in my arms, naked as a flower, her hair fanned out on my pillow. That girl, not another. I would have risked damnation in order to feel that she was mine — if a nineteen-year-old could be damned for the sin of dreaming of a girl and wanting her with a child’s desperation.

How long and sad the mornings seemed to me, filled with the bitter taste of restless nights, exhausted from desire! To avoid missing a single gesture or any expression on her face, I decided to close the blinds partially and watch through the cracks. I would look for the slightest contraction of a muscle, trying to make her seem more and more mine.

I was enthralled. One afternoon he unbuttoned her blouse. I left my room and ran furiously down the stairs. I breathed in the air like men coming out of a mine after an accident. The streets led me nowhere. The people were like larvae, vegetating in my world for the sole purpose of spoiling it. None of them knew why they were born or why they would have to die. They strolled about, indifferent, neither discontented nor happy, greeting each other if they were acquainted. I was alone, the only one alive in a desert. I struggled not to turn back, but to continue amongst people and houses and brightness. When I tired, I sat down in a park. The sun fell at an angle, scorching the earth, making the limp flowers thirsty, creating intense, fleeting reflections on the lake where a boat was sailing. I left, irritated by the sense of perfect happiness coming from the trees, the children’s screams, the limpid sky, the air filled with life. I walked for hours and ended up, distressed, at a cinema that was showing only current events. I bought a book that I never read and left my dinner untouched at a restaurant.

That night I thought: Tomorrow I will open the window, stand on the desk, and sing, shaking my arms about, so they will exclaim: “He’s gone mad!” I’ll address them. The mere thought of it gave me pleasure: I would unsettle them with my feigned (feigned?) madness.

The next day I was calmer. I raised the blinds all the way and sat down, placing a cushion on the chair to make myself more visible. “Maybe that will restrain them,” I thought with loathing.

The girl seemed surprised when she saw me. The fact that the blinds had been shut for several days must have made them think I was away on holiday. She was wearing the red blouse that made her look so beautiful. I was filled with a profound sadness, more intense than ever, for her and for me. It was an uncontrollable, noxious pity.

But it didn’t last long. Soon the man appeared. He didn’t see me. They began to quarrel violently, as if they were taking up an argument that had started long ago. They disappeared from sight, but I could still hear the bitter tone of their voices, though I couldn’t make out any of the words. An hour or so passed. The girl returned to the window; soon he joined her and seemed affable. They were leaning on the window ledge; when I looked again they were kissing. It was a hazy afternoon, with a storm threatening. The air was still. I pretended to read. From time to time I glanced at the couple kissing, making an effort not to raise my head too high. Suddenly, my eyes met the girl’s. Her gaze was fascinating, impossible to ignore. We looked fixedly at each other. Her eyes seemed to be smiling at me in a complicated way, full of refusal and promise. As if her kisses were for me. The girl seemed to be offering herself diabolically to me. Had it not been for the distance, I could have taken her by the arm and she would have followed me. The torture continued for a moment. I was ablaze, as if enveloped by flames. I felt grotesque, sitting high on the cushion, paralyzed before the creature that absorbed me. She was all kisses, but it was easy to forgive her. The air was unbreathable. The girl kept looking at me as, almost literally, I died.

My father fell gravely ill that summer. In September I was scheduled to retake the exams I had failed, but he died before then. It was a sad summer. I loved my father, and his sudden death made me grow up, grow old. I was overcome by a deep melancholy that the years have not been able to expel. That summer marked a turning point in my life. It altered me forever. I returned to my room, to my desk by the window, to the landscape of my student years where I was now a stranger after an absence of only a few months. The weather was gentle, the afternoons pleasant, less blue, the green of the trees more nuanced. All of it gave the impression of becoming more beautiful so that I might sleep better.

The window of my anguish stood before me with the blinds down. The girl with the red blouse seemed to belong to a remote past. All of it was a dream dispelled by the light, disrobing everything that had been made mysterious by the night. How absurd my anxious ravings now seemed to me. I needed to apply myself to my studies. Why all those fine intentions, if the future seemed inaccessible, life difficult, everything useless? But I had to work hard, make my way, beat a path if necessary, do as others did, offer my mother support (my sister too, until she married), and start a family. Then later I would live in my children, die like my father — quickly, one radiant summer — and be mourned by my family.

Despite all my reasoning, despite the mental discipline I attempted to impose, I have to confess that when the accustomed hour approached, I was again obsessed by the window opposite me. The greater the effort to remain indifferent, the more anxious I grew. Everything that had seemed to vanish the night before my arrival returned in all its intensity. But no one opened the window. Nor the following day. Nor any other day. I felt liberated. I would sit at my desk, calmly, without thinking of anything, my spirit at rest. I remembered what I studied and was slowly but surely making progress, following a straight path. I felt solid and began to feel sure of myself. The sense of inferiority at having failed my June exams began to fade. I was exultant.

When the memory had almost vanished, and I no longer looked up from my desk — as if the window opposite now belonged to another world — I realized one day that the blinds were up. I could see into the room that for so long had been like an extension of mine. But the girl wasn’t there. Another girl had appeared, with the same young man, but she didn’t awake in me any sense of curiosity. Whether they raised or lowered the blinds, kissed in front of me or not, didn’t matter.

One day, toward evening, I heard someone climbing the stairs. I could recognize the footsteps of everyone who came to visit me; I needed to hear them only once to know who was coming to see me. But I had never heard that kind of step. “Somebody must have the wrong address,” I thought, since I lived on the top floor. But then I immediately told myself: “No, they’re coming here, the steps of someone who has never been here before.”

They stopped on the landing outside my door. A few seconds passed. The person was hesitating before knocking. Then I heard him going down. I was intrigued. The steps stopped for a long time on the floor beneath mine. Then they started up again, giving the impression of being tired. The strange visitor had decided to come up again. There was a soft knock on the door, as if they didn’t wish to be heard. If it hadn’t been for the steps, I might not have even realized someone was knocking.

I opened the door. It was the girl with the red blouse. She was paler, almost ashen. She had lost a lot of weight. Without a word she strode across the room directly to the window, as if we had known each other for years, as if I knew that she would come. And why. From my desk she gazed at the window opposite. She stood there with a sad, eager look. Speechless, motionless. She remained for an instant, as if alone in the world. I felt I should do something, move her away from the window, not let her look. I could feel she was suffering, but I was paralyzed, out of respect, and because I sensed the situation was unreal. What stood before her must have represented a happiness she would never find again.

It was almost dark. I went toward her. I have never again felt such tenderness as on that evening beside the sad girl who did not know to what degree she had taken possession of my heart. Why I decided to approach her, what words I uttered: these things have been erased from my memory. I recall, with terrible precision, only her heartrending sobs. She burst into tears in my arms, which must have seemed impersonal to her, as if she were crying against a wall. She cried with greater pain than I did when my father died. Never again have I heard a person weep like that. I felt I needed to protect her, as if destiny had brought her to me, as if in some way her future belonged to me, and mysteriously she had become my responsibility. Everything I had learned from literature (which at that time was considerable) was evoked. I carried her in my arms, like a child, shaking as she wept uncontrollably, and laid her on the bed, as if she were something that belonged to me, something not seized, but offered, found. I knelt on the floor with my face by hers, her tears dampening my cheek.

Hours and hours passed. She never said a word. The fits of sobbing became less frequent, and she fell asleep, like a flame that slowly fades. I watched over her. It was a chaste night, but I still recall her soft hair, the salty taste of her tears. How can one let the hand of a sleeping body drop! How lips parch when the heart suffers. I felt as if I held a dead bird in my hand. I must have fallen asleep in the early morning. When I awoke it was day, the room full of sun. I never saw her again. Never again have I lived hours of such passion, a night of love so pure.