In fact there were many indications which might well in those days have been described as ‘forward’, which gave me some right to assume that the tenderness with which she looked at me, the apparently indiscreet and purely accidental touching of the back of my hand or my shoulder, constituted binding promises, promises of greater and more exquisite attentions which, if I were only to ask, would await me, preludes to celebrations as unalterably decreed as the calendar. She had a deep, soft voice (I cannot abide light, high-pitched women’s voices).When she spoke she put me in mind of the smooth, pure, subdued yet sultry murmur of a dove; of the voices of subterranean springs; of the faint rumble of distant trains heard on sleepless nights. Because of the deep voice in which it was uttered, her every word, even the most banal, took on for me the profoundly satisfying power, charged with meaning without being exactly comprehensible, of some lost primeval language, clearly sensed, perhaps dimly grasped in dreams.

When I was not in her company and returned to the society of my friends I was tempted to tell them about Elizabeth, even to sing her praises. But at the sight of their world-weary, indolent and derisive faces, their visibly inquisitive search for outlets on which to vent their sarcasm, I was not only afraid of becoming their victim but also wished to be thought of as, in general, sharing their attitude. I would therefore relapse into a stupid, speechless embarrassment, which in turn would give way a minute or two later to that arrogant decadence whose doomed but proud sons we all were.

Finding myself in this stupidly ambiguous position, I did not know to whom to turn. I thought from time to time about making a confidante of my mother, but as I was still so young I thought that she would be incapable of understanding my troubles. My relationship with my mother was neither true nor spontaneous, but a feeble attempt to ape the attitude of other young men to their own mothers. In their eyes, indeed, there was no such thing as a real mother, only a kind of brood-animal to which they owed their upbringing and their life, or, at best, something like the landscape of home into which one has by chance been born and to which one devotes no more than a sentimental thought. All my life, however, I had felt an almost religious dread of my mother; I simply suppressed this feeling. At noon I lunched at home. We would sit quietly opposite each other at the big table in the dining-room. At the head of the table my late father’s chair stood empty, and every day, in accordance with my mother’s instructions, a place was set for the eternal absentee. My mother used to sit to the right of the departed, I to his left. She would drink a golden muscat wine, I would drink half a bottle of Vöslauer. I was not fond of it and would have preferred burgundy, but my mother had so ordained. Our aged steward, Jacques, served us, his old hands trembling in snow-white gloves. His thick head of hair was almost as white. My mother ate little, rapidly and with dignity. Whenever I raised my eyes to her she looked down at her plate yet, only a moment before, I had felt her watching me. Ah, I knew well enough at the time that she had many questions to ask me, and that she only suppressed them to spare herself the shame of being lied to by her only child. She carefully folded her napkin. Those were the only moments when I could really study her broad, rather puffy face, with its slack pendulous cheeks and wrinkled, heavy eyelids. I looked at her bosom as she folded her napkin together and I thought, meditatively and at the same time reproachfully, that the origin of my life had lain there, in that warm body, that essence of her motherhood, and I wondered at myself for sitting opposite her, so silent, stubborn and hard-bitten. I wondered, too, that my own mother had nothing to say to me and that she was obviously as much at a loss with her grown-up, prematurely grown-up, son as I was with her, my old, prematurely old mother, giver of my life. How gladly I would have spoken to her about my inner conflict, my double life, and about Elizabeth and my friends! But she plainly had no desire to hear about all the things she sensed, to be forced to condemn out loud what she deplored in her secret heart. Perhaps, very probably, she had come to terms with that eternal and gruesome law of nature which compels sons to put their origins out of mind, to regard their mothers as elderly ladies, unmindful of the breasts from which they drew their first sustenance; that unchanging law which also forces mothers to watch the fruit of their bodies growing bigger and bigger, more and more alien; first in sorrow, then in bitterness and, at the last, in resignation. I felt that my mother talked to me so little because she wanted to prevent me from saying things which she would have to hold against me. If I had had the freedom to speak to her about Elizabeth and about my love for the girl I would probably, in a sense, have dishonoured both my mother and myself. In the event I often wished to speak of my love. But I thought of my friends.