The Garden Square Page 3

  “You said to the good?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, I sometimes think if only we had known… My mother simply came up to me and said, ‘Come along now, it’s over, come, it’s over.’ And I just let myself be led away like an animal to the slaughterhouse. Ah! If only I had known then, I promise you I would have fought. I would have saved myself. I would have begged my mother to let me stay. I would have persuaded her, oh how I would have!”

  “But we didn’t know.”

  “The cherry season went on that year like all the others. People would pass under my window singing, and I would be there behind the curtains watching them, and I got scolded for it.”

  “I was left free to pick cherries for a long time.”

  “There was I behind the window like a criminal, and yet my only crime was to be sixteen. But you? You said you went on picking them for a long time?”

  “Longer than most people. And yet you see…”

  “Tell me more about your cafés full of people and music.”

  “I don’t really think I could go on living without them. I like them very much.”

  “I think I would like them too. I can see myself at the bar with my husband, listening to the wireless. People would talk to us and we would make conversation. We would be with each other and with the others. Sometimes I feel how nice it would be to go and sit in a café, but if you are a single young woman you can hardly afford to do so.”

  “I forgot to add that sometimes someone looks at you.”

  “I see, and comes over?”

  “Yes, they come over.”

  “For no reason?”

  “For no particular reason, but then the conversation somehow becomes less general.”

  “And then?”

  “I never stay longer than two days in any town. Three at the most. The things I sell are not so essential.”

  “Alas.”

  The wind, which had died down, rose again, scattering the clouds, and once more the sudden warmth in the air brought thoughts of approaching summer.

  “But the weather is really wonderful today,” the man said again.

  “It is nearly summer.”

  “Perhaps the truth is that one never really starts anything: perhaps things are always in the future?”

  “If you can say that, it is because each day is full enough to prevent you thinking of the next. But for me the present is empty, a desert.”

  “But don’t you ever do anything of which you could say later you had at least achieved something?”

  “No, nothing. I work all day, but I never do anything of which I could say what you have just said. I cannot even think in those terms.”

  “Again, please don’t think I want to contradict you, but you must see that whatever you do, this time you are living now will count for you one day. You will look back on this desert as you describe it and discover, with startling precision, that it was not empty at all, but full of people. You won’t be able to escape it. We think nothing has started and yet it has. We think we are doing nothing, but all the time we are doing something. We think we are going towards some solution, and then we pause and turn around, and there the solution is, behind us. It was like that with that city: at the time I did not appreciate it for what it was. The hotel was indifferent, they had let the room I had reserved, it was late and I was hungry. Nothing was waiting for me in that city except the city itself, vast – and try and imagine what a vast city, utterly absorbed in its own occupations, can be like for a tired traveller seeing it for the first time.”

  “I cannot imagine it.”

  “Nothing is waiting for you except a nasty room giving onto a noisy, dirty courtyard. And yet, looking back on it, I know that that voyage changed me, that much of what I had seen and done before led up to it and so became clear and understandable. It is only afterwards that we know whether we have been in such or such a city; you should be aware of that.”

  “If you mean things in that sense, perhaps you are right. Perhaps things have begun for me, and that they began on that particular day when I wanted them to.”

  “Yes, you see we think nothing happens, and yet, in your case, it seems to me that perhaps the most important thing that will have happened in your life is just this decision you have made not to begin living yet.”

  “I understand you, I really do, but you must also try and understand me. Even if that moment is past, I can’t know it as yet, and I haven’t the time to understand it. I hope one day I will know, as you did with your journey, and that when I look back everything behind me will be clear and fall into place. But now, at this moment, I am too involved to be able even to guess at what I might feel one day.”

  “Yes. And I know that probably it is impossible to make you understand things you have not yet felt, but all the same it is hard for me not to try and explain them to you.”

  “You are very kind, but I am afraid that I am not very good yet at understanding the things I am told.”

  “Believe me that I do understand all you have said, but even so, is it absolutely necessary to do all that work? Of course I am not trying to give you any advice, but don’t you think that someone else would make a little effort and still manage, without quite so much work, to have as much hope for the future as before? Don’t you think that another person would manage that?”

  “Are you frightened that one day, if I have to wait too long and go on working a little more each day without complaining, I might suddenly lose patience altogether?”

  “I admit that the kind of willpower you possess is a little frightening, but that’s not why I made my suggestion. It was just because it is difficult to accept that someone of your age should live as you do.”

  “But I have no alternative. I have thought about it a great deal, I assure you.”

  “May I ask you how many people you work for?”

  “Seven.”

  “And how many storeys?”

  “Six.”

  “And rooms?”

  “Eight.”

  “It’s too much.”

  “But no. That’s not the way to think. I must have explained myself very badly, because you haven’t understood.”

  “I think that work can always be measured, and that, no matter what the circumstances, work is always work.”

  “Not my kind. One could say of that kind of work that it is better to do too much than too little. If there was time over to think or start enjoying oneself then one would really be lost.”

  “And you’re only twenty.”

  “Yes, and, as they say, I’ve not yet had time to do any wrong. But that seems beside the point to me.”

  “On the contrary, I have a feeling that it is not, and that the people you work for should remember it.”

  “After all, it’s hardly their fault if I agree to do all the work they give me. I would do the same in their place.”

  “I should like to tell you how I went into that town, after leaving my suitcase at the hotel.”

  “Yes I should like to hear that. But you mustn’t worry on my account: I would be most surprised if I let myself become impatient. I think all the time of the risk I would run if that should happen, and so, you see, I don’t think it will.”

  “It was only in the evening, after leaving my suitcase…”

  “You see people like me do think too. There is nothing else for us to do, buried in our work. We think a great deal, but not like you. We have dark thoughts, and all the time.”

  “It was evening, just before dinner, after work.”

  “People like me think of the same things, of the same people, and our thoughts are always bad. That’s why we are so careful and why it’s not worth bothering about us. You were talking of jobs, and I wonder if something could be called a job which makes you spend your whole day thinking ill of people? B
ut you were saying it was evening, and you had left your suitcase?”

  “Yes. It was only towards the evening, after I had left my suitcase at the hotel, just before dinner, that I started walking through that town. I was looking for a restaurant, and of course it’s not always easy to find exactly what one wants when price is a consideration. And while I was looking, I strayed away from the centre and came by accident to the zoo. A wind had risen. People had forgotten the day’s work and were strolling through the gardens, which, as I’ve told you, were up on a hill overlooking the town.”

  “But I know that life is good. Otherwise, why on earth should I take so much trouble?”

  “I don’t really know what happened. The moment I entered those gardens I became a man utterly fulfilled by life.”

  “How could a garden, just seeing a garden, make a man happy?”

  “And yet what I am telling you is quite an ordinary experience, and other people will often tell you similar things in the course of your life. I am a person for whom talking, for example, is a blessing, and suddenly in these gardens I was so completely at home, so much at my ease, that it might have been made especially for me as much as for the others. I don’t know how to put it any better, except perhaps to say that it was as if I had achieved something and become, for the first time, equal to my life. I could not bear to leave the gardens. The wind had risen, the light was honey-coloured and even the lions whose manes glowed in the setting sun were yawning with the pure pleasure of being there. The air smelt of lions and of fire, and I breathed it as if it were the essence of friendliness which had, at last, included me. All the passers-by were preoccupied with each other, basking in the evening light. I remember thinking they were like the lions. And suddenly I was happy.”

  “But in what way were you happy? Like someone resting? Like someone who is cool again after having been very hot? Or happy as other people are happy every day?”

  “More than that I think. Probably because I was unused to happiness. A great surge of feeling overwhelmed me, and I did not know what to do with it.”

  “A feeling which hurt?”

  “Perhaps, yes. It hurt because there seemed to be nothing which could ever appease it.”

  “But that, I think, is hope.”

  “Yes that is hope, I know that really is hope. And of what? Of nothing. Just the hope of hope.”

  “You know, if there were only people like you in the world, no one would get anywhere.”

  “But listen. You could see the sea from the bottom of each avenue in that garden, every single one led to the sea. Actually the sea usually plays very little part in my life, but in those gardens they were all looking at the sea, even the people who were born there – even, it seemed to me, the lions themselves. How can you avoid looking at what other people are looking at, even if normally it doesn’t mean much to you?”

  “The sea couldn’t have been as blue as all that, since you said the sun was setting?”

  “When I left my hotel it was blue, but after I had been in those gardens a little while it became darker and calmer.”

  “But you said a wind had come up: it couldn’t have been as calm as all that?”

  “But it was such a gentle wind, if you only knew, and it was probably only blowing on the heights: on the town and not on the plain. I don’t remember exactly from which direction it came, but surely not from the open sea.”

  “And then again, the setting sun couldn’t have illuminated all the lions. Not unless all the cages faced the same way on the same side of the gardens looking towards the setting sun?”

  “And yet I promise you it was like that. They were all in the same place and the setting sun lit up each lion without exception.”

  “And so the sun did set first over the sea?”

  “Yes, you’re quite right. The city and the garden were still in sunshine, while the sea was already in shade. That was three years ago. That’s why I remember it all so well and like talking about it.”

  “I understand. One thinks one can get by without talking, but it’s not possible. From time to time I find myself talking to strangers too, in this very garden square, just as we are talking now.”

  “When people need to talk it can be felt very strongly, and strangely enough people in general seem to resent it. It is only in squares that it seems quite natural. Tell me again, you said there were eight rooms where you worked? Big rooms?”

  “I couldn’t really say, since I don’t suppose anyone else would see them in quite the same way as I do. Most of the time they seem big, but perhaps they’re not as big as all that. It really depends on the day. On some days they seem endless and on others they seem so tiny that I think I could suffocate. But why did you ask?”

  “It was only out of curiosity. For no other reason.”

  “I know that I must seem stupid to you, but I can’t help it.”

  “I would say you are a very ambitious person, if I have really understood you, someone who wants everything that everyone else has, but wants it so much that one could almost be lead to thinking… one could almost find this desire… heroic.”

  “That word doesn’t frighten me, although I had not thought of it in that way. You could almost say I have so little that I could have anything. After all, I could want to die with the same violence as I want to live. And is there anything, any one little thing in my life to which I could sacrifice my courage? And who or what could weaken it? Anyone would do the same as I do: anyone, I mean, who wanted what I want as much as I do.”

  “I expect so. Since everyone does what he thinks he has to do. Yes, I expect there are cases where it is impossible to be anything else but heroic.”

  “You see, if just once I refused the work they give me, no matter what it was, it would mean that I had begun to manage things, to defend myself, to take an interest in what I was doing. It would start with one thing, go on to another and could end anywhere. I would begin to defend my rights so well that I would take them seriously and end by thinking they existed. They would matter to me. I wouldn’t be bored any more, and so I would be lost.”

  There was a silence between them. The sun, which had been hidden by the clouds, came out again. Then the girl started talking once more.

  “Did you stay on in that town after being so happy in those gardens?”

  “I stayed for several days. This can happen.”

  “Tell me, do you think that this can happen to everyone?”

  “There must be some people to whom it has never happened. It’s an almost unbearable idea, but I suppose there are such people.”

  “You don’t know for certain do you?”

  “No. I can easily be mistaken. The fact is I really don’t know.”

  “And yet you seem to know about these things.”

  “No more than anyone else.”

  “There’s something else I want to ask you: as the sun sets very quickly in those countries, surely, even if it set first on the sea, the shade must have reached the town soon afterwards, right? The sunset must have been over very soon, perhaps ten minutes after it had begun.”

  “You are quite right, and yet I assure you it was just at that moment that I arrived: just at the moment when everything is alight.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  “It doesn’t sound as though you do.”

  “But I do, completely. And, anyway, you could have arrived at any other moment, without changing all that followed, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes, but I did arrive then, even if that moment only lasts for a few minutes a day.”

  “But that isn’t really the point, is it?”

  “No, that isn’t really the point.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “Afterwards the gardens were the same, except that it became night. A coolness came up from the sea and people were happy, for the day had been hot.”


  “But even so, eventually you had to eat?”

  “Suddenly I was no longer very hungry. I was thirsty. I didn’t have dinner that evening. Perhaps I just forgot about it.”

  “But that’s why you had left your hotel – to eat, I mean?”

  “Yes, but then I forgot about it.”

  “For me, you see, the days are like the night.”

  “But that is because you want them to be like that, isn’t it? You would like to emerge from your present situation just as you were when you entered it, as one wakes up from a long sleep. I know, of course, what it is to want to create night all around one, but, you see, it seems to me that however hard one tries the dangers of the day break through.”

  “Only my night is not as dark as all that, and I doubt if the day is really a threat to it. I’m twenty. Nothing has happened to me yet. I sleep well. But one day I must wake up once and for all. It must happen.”

  “And so each day passes by in the same way for you, even though they may be different?”

  “Tonight, like every Thursday night, there will be people for dinner. I will eat lamb all alone in the kitchen at the end of the corridor.”

  “And the murmur of their conversation will reach you the same way, so very much the same that you could imagine that each Thursday they said exactly the same things?”

  “Yes, and as usual I won’t understand anything they talk about.”

  “And you will be all alone, there in the kitchen, surrounded by the remnants of the leg of lamb in a sort of drowsy lull. And then you will be called to take away the meat plates and serve the next course.”

  “They will ring for me, but they won’t waken me. I serve at table half-asleep.”

  “Just as they are waited on, in absolute ignorance of what you might be like. And so in a way you are quits: they can neither make you happy nor sad, and so you sleep.”