The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre Page B

day she thought of them without much pleasure. There was a fixed horror in the air about her, a midday horror. The room was filled with stale heat which had spent its force outside, and left its radiance in the folds of the curtain, and was stagnating there, inert and ominous like a human destiny. ‘If he knew, he is so austere that he would hate me.’ She had sat down on the edge of the bed, just like yesterday, when Mathieu was sitting naked at her side; she eyed her toes with distaste, and the previous evening lingered, impalpable, with its dead pink light, like the faded fragrance of a scent. ‘I couldn’t — I just couldn’t tell him.’ He would have said: ‘Right: very well, we’ll fix it’ — with a brisk and cheerful air, as though in the act of swallowing a dose of medicine. She knew that she could not have endured that face: it had stuck in her throat. She thought: ‘Midday!’ The ceiling was grey like the sky at dawn, but the heat was of midday. Marcelle went to bed late and was no longer acquainted with the morning hours; she sometimes had the feeling that her life had come to a stop one day at noon, and she herself was an embodied, eternal noontide brooding upon her little world, a dank and rainy world, without hope or purpose. Outside — broad daylight, and bright-coloured frocks. Mathieu was on the move outside in the gay and dusty whirl of a day which had begun without her, and already had a past. ‘He’s thinking about me, he’s doing all he can,’ she thought without affection. She was annoyed because she could imagine that robust, sunlit pity, the bustling, clumsy pity of a healthy man. She felt languid and clammy, still quite dishevelled from sleep: the familiar steel helmet gripped her head, there was a taste of blotting-paper in her mouth, a lukewarm feeling down her sides, and, beneath her arms, tipping the black hairs, beads of sweat. She felt sick, but restrained herself: her day had not yet begun, it was there, propped precariously against Marcelle, the least movement would bring it crashing down like an avalanche. She laughed sardonically and muttered: ‘Freedom!’
    A human being who wakened in the morning with a queasy stomach, with fifteen hours to kill before next bed-time, had not much use for freedom. Freedom didn’t help a person to live. Delicate little feathers dipped in aloes tickled the back of her throat, and then a sense of uttermost disgust gathered upon her tongue and drew her lips back. ‘I’m lucky, apparently some women are sick all day. At the second month: I bring up a little in the morning, and feel rather tired in the afternoon, but I keep going. Mother knew women who couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco, and that would be the last straw.’ She got up abruptly and ran to the basin: she vomited a foamy, turbid liquid, which looked rather like the slightly beaten white of an egg. Marcelle clutched the porcelain rim, and gazed at the frothing water. She smiled wryly, and murmured: ‘A memento of love.’ Then a vast metallic silence took possession of her head, and her day began. She was no longer thinking of anything. She ran her hand through her hair and waited: ‘I’m always sick twice in the morning.’ And then, quite suddenly, she had a vision of Mathieu’s face, his frank, determined look, when he had said: ‘Well, I suppose one gets rid of it, eh?’ and a flash of hate shot through her.
    It came. She first thought of butter, and was revolted; she seemed to be chewing a bit of yellow, rancid butter, then she felt something like an insistent laugh at the back of her throat, and leaned over the basin. A long filament hung from her lips, she had to cough it away. It did not disgust her, though she had been very ready to be disgusted with herself: last winter, when she was suffering from diarrhoea, she would not let Mathieu touch her, she was sure she smelt unpleasantly. She watched the dabs of mucus sliding slowly towards the drain-hole, leaving