Claude soon noticed that Ursula was no longer in love with her. She was
delighted. An adventure with a woman was amusing to her so long as it
wasn’t serious, so long as it was only a game, considered as an unusual
excitement by both partners; but the mute and passionate love of this
child who was too young, too pure, and too sincere had embarrassed and
irritated Claude. This love affair had confronted her with utterly
unwanted problems, needlessly complicating her existence. There were
indeed moments when Ursula’s clear little face, so filled with love and
admiration for her, flattered Claude and even touched her. There had
indeed been days when Ursula had reawakened in her that desperate
tenderness which needed to be directed toward children, and as she had
caressed the girl’s glistening hair, her own heart had been filled with
hunger and regret. But most of the time Claude had felt only one desire,
and that was to discharge all of her irritation upon the nearest victim,
and the victim had nearly always been Ursula.
And so the change that had taken place delighted her. At last she found
a good little comrade in Ursula. Claude liked to watch the girl’s
serious face. And she found again the silent little girl to whom she had
been attracted that first day, but now purged of all sexual desire. That
side was quite finished for Claude too. After all, the pleasure of
watching the child’s first reactions to love, and the enjoyment she had
experienced in educating the girl in this direction, had passed. She was
not a man; she couldn’t marry Ursula. She was not Petit; the idea would
never have occurred to Claude to live in union with a woman. Therefore,
she told me in one of her surprisingly candid moments, everything had
“fortunately gone back the way it should be.”
But I sensed that in the depths of her being, Claude retained a vague
remorse over having initiated Ursula to a vice for which there was no
true natural leaning in the girl. And I wondered what it was that Claude
sought so devouringly in one girl after another, since it was clear that
she did not seek to develop a Lesbian liaison. First she had seduced
Ursula, then Mickey, and recently there had been a fresh young recruit,
Renée. What was this unappeasable hunger for the young, the innocent?
And then I remembered a story Claude had confided to Ursula, in their
most intimate days. They had been talking inconsequentially about things
that made one feel guilty, and Claude had told, first, of a cat she had
once picked up on the street and brought home, a skinny half-grown cat
with no charm whatever. Her lover of the moment had leaped with disgust
at the sight of the animal, and had advised Claude to throw it out the
window. Finally she had put it out in the street. Her guilt over
abandoning that cat had haunted her for years, Claude told Ursula, just
like her guilt over an abortion.
And then, in the tumbling way in which Claude had of linking the most
trivial and the most consequential of events, as though they were of
equal importance, Claude had related how she had once found herself
pregnant, and had suppressed the birth of the child. She had been living
with the same lover who had objected to the cat—a dissipated journalist
whom she had met shortly before her divorce from her first husband. When
she found herself pregnant she vacillated for two months, unsure in her
own mind about having the child. Not that she had any fear of scandal.
But the inconvenience.... Still, she had been tempted, feeling something
marvelously warm growing within her. Day by day she had studied her
breasts, which seemed to grow fuller and harder, and her belly, which
was soon to fill itself with child. She had almost decided to have the
baby; and then suddenly, after the incident with the cat, she had sought
out a doctor and had an abortion. She had done that like almost
everything she did, on impulse, without reflection. When she found
herself stretched on the operating table, with two nurses strapping down
her legs and the doctor bending over her with the chloroform, she had
realized that she was about to kill her child, and it was too late.
Remorse had entered her with the odor of the chloroform, and she
awakened, empty and alone, with this remorse within her. Since then,
Claude had tried to have another child—she had tried with lovers, with
her second husband—but she had never again conceived.
As I recalled this story, it seemed to me that Claude’s first instincts
toward Ursula, and probably to all of her girls, had been nothing but
maternal. And while with girls like Mickey the adventure quickly turned
to erotic sport, there had been in Ursula a truly childlike response,
and this had touched Claude more than she knew. It seemed to me that she
felt guilty toward Ursula and at the same time resented the girl for
having let her have her way, for having allowed herself to be drawn into
the game. It was almost a motherly resentment over the bad behavior of
her child. Claude would have loved to find an Ursula who was faithful to
her childhood, and who would remain only a child for her—her little
girl.
All these unhappy feelings in Claude were augmented by her boredom in
the little switchboard room where she had spent the last two years.
Almost daily she was becoming more irritable. Her rages were proverbial
in Down Street. One encountered less of the charming, smiling, and
beautiful Claude, as her place was taken by a nervous, aging woman,
always quarreling with someone or other. All the discontented souls of
the barracks came to her switchboard room to complain and conspire.
Claude was continually discovering new enemies.
At the same time, her liaison with the colonel continued. She went out
often with him, and drank a good deal. Several times she had been
brought back to Down Street dead drunk. Officers in foreign uniforms
would be seen taking her out of a taxi in their arms. She would be put
to bed and would immediately fall asleep, to wake up in the morning in
bad humor, because she was ashamed of herself. Her name was often seen
on the punishment list for having returned to the barracks drunk. Claude
pretended to consider this amusing, especially since the noncommissioned
officers were rather in awe of her, and rarely carried out the sentences
they gave her. Corporal Pruneface didn’t dare send her to the kitchen,
and Machou wouldn’t ask for her. They all knew that Claude was Colonel
Max’s mistress, and they preferred to be in her good graces. Aside from
Max, Claude went to bed occasionally with one woman or another, at Down
Street and elsewhere.
The most extraordinary thing in all this was that Claude was essentially
a good woman, with an astonishing childlike purity. She could take
drugs, get drunk, go to bed with the first man who came along, but she
never uttered a cynical word, and she was never blasé. A bouquet of
flowers gave her more pleasure than the most luxurious of gifts. One
might tell her the most naïve and innocent tales, and her face would
immediately light up. If someone were to say, “The Holy Virgin came down
onto the altar in the barracks chapel and told Mickey to put on a blue
dress,” Claude would certainly have been the only woman in Down Street
to believe in the miraculous tale.
If any of the girls needed money, she could always ask Claude for it.
Claude would give away her last sou, just as readily to a new recruit
who had arrived at the barracks only the night before as to her best
friend.
And there was another side to Claude. She had gathered among her friends
in Down Street an altogether weird collection of women, as different as
possible from herself. These friendships were utterly platonic, and
these women possessed qualities that Claude alone could see. For
instance, there was Paula, the only recruit totally unaffected by the
vogue of sex at Down Street. She was the typical old maid of all the
ages, the same anywhere in the world. Even in uniform she succeeded in
dressing like the “woman in the green hat.” Her khaki skirt dragged
nearly to her heels. Her cap fell over her nose. A grayish bun bounced
against her neck. She was ageless and colorless and even her voice had
no recognizable character.
Claude declared that Paula was an exceptional patriot. The Captain was
highly embarrassed when she tried to find an occupation for this
patriot, for besides all her other shortcomings, she had no training or
aptitude for office work, and she was in ill health and couldn’t work in
the kitchen or in the household. Finally they made a sacristan of Paula.
She appeared only at the hours of religious observances, and no one knew
what she did in between times. Besides, no one was concerned. Claude was
the only person to take the slightest interest in Paula. She even
attempted to persuade us that Paula was attractive, and she was
continually finding new ways for Paula to arrange her hair, which Paula
obstinately rejected.
There was another old maid—an Alsatian, dry, dark, and always in bad
humor. Claude pretended that she was good nature itself, and dragged
this woman from bar to bar to distract her. The Alsatian opened her soul
to no one but Claude. She worshiped her, mending her stockings, making
her bed, polishing her buttons. With everyone else she was acid-tempered
and always dissatisfied. But with Claude she was completely transformed.
The celebrated charm had worked on her too.
There was a little blonde Provençale whom Claude had baptized “Baby” and
who was the most stupid, most vain, and most good-natured little thing
to be found anywhere. She had rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and a perfect
pretty-doll face, and she dyed her long eyelashes pale blue. Baby was
interested only in boy friends, whom she recruited with great
perseverance from the navy. Claude lent her own civilian clothes to Baby
whenever she went on leave, gave her money, and bought her the little
cakes of which she was especially fond. And with Baby, as with Paula and
the Alsatian, Claude’s relationship was never anything but completely
normal.
Now Ursula took her place among these neutral and restful friendships.
She saw Claude as she was, a disoriented woman filled with rare
qualities, and with common faults; a woman who would be old soon enough,
but who preserved astonishing areas of youthfulness in her heart. Ursula
defended Claude to me. At bottom, Ursula felt, Claude had done her no
harm; she had never harmed anyone, for there was nothing destructive in
her.