was fond of me was nostalgic egotism: he saw in me, in both my ambitions and limitations, the young man he had been before time and fate reduced his brilliance to mere table wit, and eroded the scope of his aspirations to the dimensions of a profitable small-town clinic.
Perhaps this is why his reaction to my attitude of moral superiority was limited to giving me only the most trivial tasks to perform. And, in fact, I was not all that distressed at being relegated to the role of an elevated pharmacist, for I had just finished years of grinding work and study that had drained mind and body and was in need of a lazy summer with time on my hands, with freedom to wander through the quaint, slightly shoddy resort village or to loaf on the banks of the sparkling Gave, overarched by ancient trees and charming stone bridges. I wanted time to rest, to dream, to write.
Ah yes, write. For at that time in my life I felt capable of everything. Having attempted nothing, I had no sense of my limitations; having dared nothing, I knew no boundaries to my courage. During the years of fatigue and dulling rote in medical school, I had daydreamed of a future confected of two careers: that of the brilliant and caring doctor and that of the inspired and inspiring poet. And why not? I was an avid and sensitive reader, and I made the common error of assuming that being a responsive reader indicated latent talent as a writer, as though being a gourmand was but a short step from being a chef. Indeed, my first interest in the pioneer work of Doctor Freud sprang, not from a concern for persons wounded in their collisions with reality, but from my personal curiosity about the nature of creativity and the springs of motivation.
So it was that, for several hours a day throughout that indolent, radiant summer, I wandered into the countryside with my notebook, or sat alone at an out-of-the-way cafй, sipping an aperitif and holding imagined conversations with important and terribly impressed lions of the literary world, or I lounged by the banks of the Gave, notebook open, sketching romantic impressions, my lofty poetic intent inevitably withering to a kind of breathless shattered prose in the process of being recorded—a dissipation that I was sure I would learn to avoid once I had mastered the “tricks” of writing.
Then, too, there was the matter of love. As the reader might suspect, the expansive young man that I was had no doubt but that he was capable of a great love… a staggering love. I was, after all, twenty-five years old, brimming with health, a devourer of novels, fertile of imagination. It is no surprise that I was ripe for romance.
Ripe for romance? Is that not only the self-conscious and sensitive young man’s way of saying he was heavy with passion? Is not, perhaps, romance only the fiction by means of which the tender-minded negotiate their lust?
No, not quite. I am painfully aware that the young man I used to be was callow, callous, self-confident, and egotistic. There is no doubt he was heavy with passion. But, to give the poor devil his due, he was also ripe for romance.
I slipped into a comfortable, rather lazy, routine of life, doing all that Doctor Gros demanded of me and nothing more. A more ambitious person—or a less blindly confident one—would have filled his time with study and self-improvement, for any dispassionate analysis of my future prospects would have revealed them to be most uncertain. I was, after all, without family and without means; I was in debt for my education; and I had no inclination to waste my talents on some impoverished rural community. Yet I was content to laze away my days, resting myself in preparation for some unknown prospect or adventure that I was sure, without the slightest evidence, lay just around the corner. As events turned out, I would have wasted any time spent in work and study; for the war came that autumn and I was called up immediately. Romantically—and quite stupidly—I joined the army as a simple soldier.
Four years of mud and trenches, stench, fear, brutalizing boredom. Twice wounded, once seriously enough to limit my physical activities for the rest of my life. Four years recorded in my memory as one endless blur of horror and disgust. Even to this day I am choked with nausea and rage when I stand among my fellow veterans in the graveyard of my village and recite the names of those “mort pour la France.”
Why did I submit myself to the butchery of the trenches when I might have served in the echelons as a medical officer? Even the most rudimentary knowledge of Doctor Freud would suggest that I was pursuing a death wish… as indeed I was. I knew this at the time, but that knowledge neither freed nor sustained me, as I had assumed self-understanding would, in my sophomoric grasp of the unconscious.
I am rushing ahead of my tale—beyond it, really. But then, life is neither linear nor tidy. Too, there is a direct link between my being heavy with passion that long delicious summer and my being possessed of a death wish that autumn. The link is Katya.
Katya…
Three days ago I returned to Salies for the first time in twenty-four years, the first time since I left the army and came back to assume the shabby practice of the aging doctor of my native village. Four years in the trenches had pulverized my fine aspirations; I no longer yearned for fame or dreamed of excitement; I clung thankfully to the peace and inner silence I found in the featureless rounds of a country practice. The years passed unnoticed and unremembered, and one autumn morning I found myself suddenly forty-five years old. It was a time for weighing youthful hopes against mature accomplishment, for it was quite certain that I had by then done all I was ever going to do. Sitting alone at my desk that evening of my forty-fifth birthday I asked that least original of introspective questions: Where had it all gone? And the somewhat less banal question: What, after all, had it been?
My heart swollen with nostalgia, with a pain akin to remorse, I decided to return to Salies and look for the threads of my life there, where the fabric had been torn apart. I had an impulse to drop everything and rush off that evening, but there is a heavy irony in the way prosaic life refuses to accommodate the theatrical rhythms of fiction, and it was another three years before I was able to arrange a vacation and come for a fortnight to Salies.
I have been here for three days now; wandering, walking alone. I even purchased a child’s notebook for the purpose of recording memories of that summer. At this moment I am writing in that notebook as I sit beside the flowing Gave beneath an ancient overhanging tree that I remember from my first summer here. Externally, Salies has changed very little during the intervening quarter century; the same Second Empire fancywork on the faзades of the casino and the public baths, the same self-conscious quaintness in the decor of the restaurants. But a certain diminished melancholy can be felt in long overdue repainting and in postponed repairs; for Salies fell out of fashion when it became no longer acceptable for a woman to enjoy a comfortable middle age, cushioned by rounds of social trivia and routines of self-cosseting. Nowadays such women are driven by both self-image and externally imposed ideals to play forever at the burlesque of youth, plying their cosmetics with trowels, and panting feverishly after the phantoms of fun, purpose, and fulfillment.
Still the hydropathic branch of French medicine is nothing if not responsive to the vagaries of economics and fashion, and it was not long after women of a certain age stopped coming to Salies that its water was discovered to contain just that combination of temperature, salts, and trace minerals that made it sovereign for the treatment of severely retarded children. The casino and the charming little hotels have become establishments for the year-round care of such unfortunates as are kept, for their own good, well away from the quotidian lives of their discomfited parents. And today, down streets where once pairs of modish ladies paraded their gowns of mauve or ashes-of-rose, queues of gawking bland-faced children slap and stumble along under the control of large, disinterested matrons who bring them daily to the baths. There they plash about in the tepid waters or gag and grimace as they swallow their daily dosage.
But it is not this change of tone and clientele that makes it difficult for me to record my impressions and memories of that summer before the war. Indeed, Salies has been spared the architectural blemishes of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties that have scarred most resort villages, protected by its fall from fashion and subsequent lack of growth and modernization, and the unchanged physical surroundings tempt and prompt my recall, each remembered event dislodging in turn another incident, another sound, another image from the deep lagan of my memory. And there is another, rather frightening, bridge between this time and that summer nearly quarter of a century past. Now as then, there are whispers and rumors of impending war. There is a kind of melancholy excitement in the air, a timid hysteria, a low-grade fever of patriotism. Plans and projects are suspended; and there is an ambience of hopelessness in the brave talk and awkward swagger of the young men who are half expecting to be mobilized, despite everyone’s confidence in General Maginot’s impregnable line.
But despite the physical and emotional parallels between today and that distant summer, I find it difficult to express my memories lucidly. The problem is not in the remembering; it is in the recording; for while I recall each note clearly, they play a false melody when I string them together. And it is not only the intervening years that distort the sounds and images; it is the fact that the events occurred on the other side of the Great War, beyond
