The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre Page B

happen to me.’
    ‘I know,’ said Mathieu; ‘your line of life is broken. But you told me you didn’t really believe in that sort of thing.’
    ‘No, I don’t really... But it is a fact that I just can’t picture my future. It’s a blank.’
    She said no more, and Mathieu eyed her in silence. Without a future... suddenly he was conscious of a bad taste in his mouth, and he realized how deep was his attachment to Ivich. It was true that she had no future: Ivich at thirty, Ivich at forty, didn’t make any sense. There was nothing ahead of her. When Mathieu was alone or when he was talking to Daniel or Marcelle, his life stretched out before him, plain and monotonous: a few women, a few holidays, a few books. A long and gentle slope, Mathieu was moving slowly — slowly down it, indeed he often found himself wishing that the process could be speeded up. And suddenly, when he saw Ivich, he felt as though he were experiencing a catastrophe. Ivich was a voluptuous and tragic little embodiment of pain, which had no morrow: she would depart, go mad, die of a heart attack, or her parents would keep her close at Laon. But Mathieu could not endure to live without her. He made a timid movement with his hand: he longed to grasp Ivich’s arm above the elbow and squeeze it. ‘I loathe being touched.’ Mathieu’s hand fell back: and he said quickly: ‘That’s a very nice blouse you’re wearing, Ivich.’
    It was a tactless remark: Ivich bent her head stiffly, and tapped her blouse with an air of constraint. She regarded compliments with disgust, they made her feel as though a rather blatantly alluring image of herself were being hacked out with a hatchet, and she was afraid of being deluded by it. She alone could think with due propriety about her own appearance. And she did so without the use of words, with a sort of affectionate certitude, a caress. Mathieu looked diffidently at Ivich’s slender shoulders, the straight, round neck. She often said: ‘I have a horror of people who are not conscious of their bodies.’ Mathieu was conscious of his body, but rather as though it were a large and embarrassing parcel.
    ‘Do you still want to go and see the Gauguins?’
    ‘What Gauguins? Oh yes, the exhibition you were talking about. Well, we might go.’
    ‘You don’t look as if you wanted to.’
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    ‘But if you don’t want to, Ivich, you must say so.’
    ‘But you want to go.’
    ‘I’ve been already, as you know. I would like to show it to you, if it would amuse you, but if you don’t care about it, I’m no longer interested.’
    ‘Very well then, I would sooner go another day.’
    ‘But the exhibition closes tomorrow,’ said Mathieu in a disappointed tone.
    ‘I’m sorry for that,’ said Ivich indifferently: ‘but it will come back.’ And she added briskly: ‘Things like that always come back, don’t they?’
    ‘Ivich,’ said Mathieu, kindly but with some irritation, ‘that’s just like you. You had better say you no longer want to go, you know quite well that it won’t come back for a long tune.’
    ‘Oh well,’ she said amiably: ‘I don’t want to go because I’m upset about this examination. It’s hell to make us wait so long for the results.’
    ‘Aren’t they to come out tomorrow?’
    ‘That’s just it.’ And she added, touching Mathieu’s sleeve with the tips of her fingers: ‘You mustn’t mind me today, I’m not myself, I’m dependent on other people, which is so degrading; I keep on seeing a vision of a little white paper stuck to a grey wall. I just can’t help it. When I got up this morning, I felt as if it was tomorrow already: today isn’t a day at all, it’s a day cancelled. They’ve robbed me of it, and I haven’t so many left.’ And she added in a low, rapid voice: ‘I made a mess of my Botany Prelim.’
    ‘I can well understand that,’ said Mathieu.
    He wished he could discover in his own recollections a time of trouble that would enable him to