Appropriate Place Read Online Free PDF Page B

really was interested and tried to console
him afterwards, in the car where they were sobering up while they waited for some
heat. He had kissed the tips of her fingers as one might do to some inconsequential
trollop. From his blank expression during the drive home, she realized that she was
just the proxy for his own love of the same boy.
    That was the only chilly episode between them. Afterwards, she let him
kiss the other man’s juices on her neck, seek in her the trace of stolen bliss and
breathe in the unhappiness of absence. The hours, at least, were filled.
    It was Damien who had signed her up for the sovereigntist party he’d
been associated with since its beginning. The adopted son of quiet bourgeois, he
was, he said, the natural son of a former Nazi who’d found refuge in Canada, who had
tracked down his son who was also the son of a whore and left him a fortune of
dubious origin, which Damien chose to spend discreetly and had put at the service of
the democrats in our liberation movement, after associating for a while with
terrorists, the first ones to have finally drawn some lessons from our history.
Those who favoured violence were all poor and neurotic, he said, and you had to be
healthy and rich to have a normal relationship with freedom. And so he’d left them,
after his sojourn for reflection at Saint-Gildas, and he had given some energy in
the form of cash to the petits bourgeois hungry for a normal state, the kind that
are respected by the newsmagazines and are the only ones that matter.
    Why had she believed that nonsense? Because he spouted it without the
usual hesitation of our local thinkers? Because he read
Der Spiegel
in the
original and summarized brilliantly all the French and American periodicals piled up
on the backseat of his comfortable Citroën? In any case, she had developed a liking
for the topicality of things. And had got it into her head that palingenesis
couldn’t come about without the commitment of people like her, who understood the
source and the term. Or so we believe at the dawn of our thirties, in a country
where bombs no longer go off and where intellectuals socially on the rise
nonetheless owe something to the neurotics who are in jail. She had acquired a
membership card, paid more than her dues, and started to attend meetings.
    Damien wanted to stay in the shadows but to make Gabrielle, who had a
way with people, into a figure. That was how he put it. While she was spending her
evenings on a detailed dissection, in the original, of Rosa Luxemburg’s relationship
with nationalism, persuading herself against all evidence that it hadn’t been a
total repudiation, Damien extricated from hundreds of newspapers and magazines signs
of a rebirth of patriotism, and it was from them that she finally drew her
arguments, around party tables where there was no time to waste on debates about the
particular circumstances of the Spartacus League in the early years of the
century.
    Little by little, Gabrielle had shed the jargon of her discipline,
preserving only her admiration for that little bit of a woman whose speeches had
galvanized men and who hadn’t feared the police. One day she would go to Berlin and
sit on the edge of the canal where murderers had thrown Rosa’s corpse.
    Gabrielle’s students now found her more fiery, they were glad to see
dispelled the dissertationlike atmosphere that she’d previously felt required to
keep up. The same was true in the party, where some were beginning to think she had
the makings of a
pasionaria
. Not the kind of which leaders are made, a
woman was out of the question, but the kind that strikes the proper vein among party
members.
    There was a small triumph one Sunday morning at a National Council
meeting, one that would bolster the development of her political career. A
confrontation with the Maoists had been brewing for weeks, there were still a few —
people of speeches and spirit who wanted to make