Book: The age of maturity. Page 2

“Pictures do not capture,” he thought irritably, “they offer themselves, and whether they exist or not depends only on me, I am free in front of them.” Too free: this created additional responsibility in him, and he felt guilty.

He could imagine what Ivish felt, but he himself never felt anything: for her, things were living accomplices, their constant emanations penetrated her to the very core, while Mathieu always saw objects only from afar.

“Youth is amusing,” thought Mathieu, “it shines from the outside, but inside you don’t feel anything.” Ivish felt her youth. Boris too, but they are exceptions. Martyrs of youth. “We all just didn’t know that we were young, not me, not Brunet, not Daniel. We realized it only later.”

He waited through a thousand small, everyday worries; of course, he hit on women along the way, traveled, and finally earned a living. But in the meantime, his only concern was to stay ready. Get ready to act. A free and deliberate act that will determine his future life and become its beginning. He could never give himself completely to love, to pleasure, he was never really unhappy, it always seemed to him that he was somewhere else, that he had not yet been fully born. He waited. And during this time, quietly, stealthily crept up the years and grabbed him by the collar. Now he is thirty-four. “We should have started at twenty-five. Like Bruno. Yes, but then you start with an incomplete understanding of the essence. And as a result, you are fooled ... And I did not want to be fooled. He dreamed of going to Russia, dropping out of school, learning some craft. But each time, half a step before sharp turns, he was held back by a lack of sufficient reason. And without them, everything collapsed. And he kept waiting...

He was definitely out of tune with himself: he was soured in this viscous heat and felt a long-standing monotonous feeling of everyday life - in vain he repeated the phrases that once inspired him: “To be free. To be self-sufficient, to be able to say to myself: I exist because I want to, to be my own source. Empty, high-flown words, the tiresome chatter of an intellectual.

he suddenly returned to the table, picked up the vase, which turned out to be very heavy, and threw it on the parquet: it suddenly occurred to him, and immediately after that he felt as light as a cobweb. He gazed admiringly at the shards of porcelain: something had just happened to this three-thousand-year-old vase among fifty-year-old walls, under the eternal light of summer, something very bold, like dawn. He thought, "I did it!" - and felt himself proud, free from the world, without attachments, without a family, without roots, a tiny, stubborn sprout that pierced the earth's firmament.

That's how they see me. Daniel, Marcel, Brunet, Jacques: a man who wants to be free. He eats and drinks like everyone else, he is a civil servant, he is not involved in politics, he reads Evre and Populaire, which support the Popular Front, he has difficulties with money. But he wants to be free, the way philatelists want to buy a stamp collection. Freedom is a secret garden. His little collusion with himself. A person is lazy and cold, a little chimerical, but fundamentally very prudent, a person who secretly made for himself a banal but lasting happiness and occasionally justifies himself with lofty considerations. Am I not like that?

To exist is to drink oneself without being thirsty.

She raised her sweet, ugly face to him. There was a touching and almost sensuous submissiveness in him that spurred an underlying desire to hurt her, to make her feel ashamed. “When I see her,” said Daniel, “I understand sadists.”

After all, there is a difference whether people take drugs out of desperation in order to destroy themselves, or in order to assert their freedom - then this deserves only praise.

“Delarue has passions,” said Boris, continuing his thought aloud, “but he is still not attached to anything. He's free.

“She is wonderful,” thought Boris, “she is ashamed to love me, because she is older. But in my opinion, this is natural, all the same, it is necessary for one to be older than the other. In addition, it is more moral: Boris could not love a peer. If both are young, they don't know how to behave and act frantically, it seems that they are playing children's dinner. It's different with older people. They are solid, they control a partner, and their love is weighty. The connection with Lola seemed to Boris natural and justified.

- You are here, you are affectionate, - said Lola, - it seems that you feel good with me, and then suddenly - no one, and I don’t understand: where did you go?

- Yes. To be free. Absolutely free. Here it is, your vice.