After the big renunciation
I was thinking (no idea why, go figure) last night about how very annoying the end of Casablanca is, and All About Rick, and then this came to me.
This is spoiler for end of Casablanca should there be anyone out there who doesn't know it
***
Once the immediate sense of stunned shock has worn off, as she sits next to Victor in the cramped plane seats Ilsa finds herself - curiously relieved.
Because in the long term, it would have been a disaster. Not for the reasons Rick had advanced. She could not have told Rick the real state of affairs - Victor was her beloved husband and her dear comrade in the struggle, but it had been many years since they renounced bourgeois possessiveness. Infatuated as she has been, she had still found tiresome Rick's assumption that it was an either/or choice.
Such an American thing.
How could she have told him that Victor knew? That they had agreed on the original plan, since they could see certain potential advantages to that course of action?
There had been something about the atmosphere of Casablanca, above and beyond the genuine fears of their situation, something that turned everything into a hallucinatory fever-dream. So that she had found herself being drawn into Rick's sentimental, Hollywood-movie, vision of their situation. Behaving unlike herself.
Oh, she loved him - he was a darling in that tough-guy-manner-concealing-soft-centre American fashion (he'd have called Sidney Carton a sap, but had behaved the same, if with a different idiom, himself), and a remarkably good lover, but there was that -
That taking decision out of her hands.
Also, she thought, if he has decided to return to the struggle, he is the kind of man who thinks of women as distractions, not comrades.
She gave a little sigh and rested her head on Victor's shoulder.
Putting his arm around her, he said 'I think Huck Finn is going to light out for the territory, don't you?'.
This was so apt, so almost telepathic of her own thoughts, that Ilsa gave a little snort of amusement and curled closer in to his side.
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