It was a stranger who, unknowingly, unwittingly, had prevented me from giving up that night. As I stood at the rail he had come up behind me, I don’t know from where, and had started talking to me. He was an Englishman.
“Beautiful night,” he said, leaning against the railing on my right, nearly touching me.
“Very beautiful,” I answered coldly.
I thought: beautiful night for saying good-bye to cheaters, to the constants that become uncertainties, to ideals which imply treason, to the world where there is no longer room for what is human, to history that leads to the destruction of the soul instead of broadening its powers!
The stranger wasn’t intimidated by my ill humor. He continued. “The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.”
“That’s true,” I again answered coldly.
He stopped for a moment. I could see his profile: thin, sharp, noble.
“If the two were at war,” he went on, “I’d be on the side of the sea. The sky only inspires painters. Not musicians. While the sea…Don’t you feel that the sea comes close to man through its music?”
“Perhaps,” I answered with hostility.
Again he stopped, as if wondering whether he shouldn’t leave me alone. He decided to stay.
“Cigarette?” he asked, holding out his pack.
“No thanks. I don’t feel like smoking.”
He lit his cigarette and threw the match overboard: a shooting star swallowed up by darkness.
“They’re dancing inside,” he said. “Why don’t you join them?”
“I don’t feel like dancing.”
“You prefer to be alone with the sea, don’t you?”
His voice had suddenly changed. It had become more personal, less anonymous. I wasn’t aware that a man could change his voice, as he would change a mask.
“Yes, I prefer to remain alone with the sea,” I answered nastily, stressing the word “alone.”
He took a few puffs on his cigarette.
“The sea. What does it make you think of?”
I hesitated. The fact that he was shrouded in darkness, that I didn’t know him, that I probably wouldn’t even recognize him the next day in the dining room, worked in his favor. To talk to a stranger is like talking to stars: it doesn’t commit you.
“The sea,” I said, “makes me think of death.”
I had the impression that he smiled.
“I knew it.”
“How did you know?” I asked, disconcerted.
“The sea has a power of attraction. I am fifty and have been traveling for thirty years. I know all the seas in the world. I know. One mustn’t look at the waves for too long. Especially at night. Especially alone.”
He told me about his first trip. His wife was with him. They had just gotten married. One night he left his wife, who was sleeping, and went up on deck to get some air. There he became aware of the terrible power of the sea over those who see in it their transformed silhouette. He was happy and young; and yet he felt a nearly irresistible need to jump, to be carried away by the living waves whose roar, more than anything else, evokes eternity, peace, the infinite.
“I’m telling you,” he repeated very softly. “One mustn’t look at the sea for too long. Not alone, and not at night.”
Then I too started telling him things about myself. Knowing that he had thought about death and was attracted by its secret, I felt closer to him. I told him what I had never told anyone. My childhood, my mystic dreams, my religious passions, my memories of German concentration camps, my belief that I was now just a messenger of the dead among the living…
I talked for hours. He listened, leaning heavily on the railing, without interrupting me, without moving, without taking his eyes off a shadow that followed the ship. From time to time he would light a cigarette and, even when I stopped in the middle of a thought or a sentence, he said nothing.
Sometimes I left a sentence unfinished, jumped from one episode to another, or described a character in a word without mentioning the event with which he was connected. The stranger didn’t ask for explanations. At times I spoke very softly, so softly that it was impossible that he heard a word of what I was saying; but he remained motionless and silent. He seemed not to dare exist outside of silence.
Only toward the end of the night did he recover his speech. His voice, a streak of shade, was hoarse. The voice of a man who, alone in the night, looks at the sea, looks at his own death.
“You must know this,” he finally said. “I think I’m going to hate you.”
Emotion made me gasp. I felt like shaking his hand to thank him. Few people would have had the courage to accompany me lucidly to the end.
The stranger threw his head back as if to make sure that the sky was still there. Suddenly he started hammering the railing with his clenched fist. And in a restrained, deep voice he repeated the same words over and over, “I’m going to hate you…I’m going to hate you…”
Then he turned his back to me and walked off.
A fringe of white light was brightening the horizon. The sea was quiet, the ship was dozing. The stars had started to disappear. It was daybreak.
I stayed on deck all day. I came back to the same place the following night. The stranger never joined me again.
“I’LL TAKE A CHANCE,” Kathleen said.
I got up and took a few steps around the room to stretch my legs. I stopped at the window and looked out. The sidewalk across the street was covered with snow. A strange anguish came over me. Cold sweat covered my forehead. Once again the night would lift its burden and it would be day. I was afraid of the day. At night, I find all faces familiar, every noise sounds like something already heard. During the day, I only run into strangers.
“Do you know what Shimon Yanai told me about you?” Kathleen asked.
“I have no idea.”
What could he have told her? What does he know about me? Nothing. He doesn’t know that when I get carried away by a sunset, my heart fills with such nostalgia for Sighet, the little town of my childhood, it begins to pound so hard, so fast, that a week later I still haven’t caught my breath; he doesn’t know that I’m more moved by a Hasidic melody, which brings men back to his origins, than by Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart together; he couldn’t know that when I look at a woman, it is always the image of my grandmother that I see.
“Shimon Yanai thinks you’re a saint,” Kathleen said.
My answer was a loud, unrestrained laugh.
“Shimon Yanai says that you suffered a lot. Only saints suffer a lot.”
I couldn’t stop laughing. I turned toward Kathleen, toward her eyes, not made for seeing, nor for crying, but for speaking and perhaps for making people laugh. She was hiding her chin in the neck of her sweater, concealing her lips, which were trembling.
“Me, a saint? What a joke…”
“Why are you laughing?”
“I’m laughing,” I answered, still shaking, “I’m laughing because I’m not a saint. Saints don’t laugh. Saints are dead. My grandmother was a saint: she’s dead. My teacher was a saint: he’s dead. But me, look at me, I’m alive. And I’m laughing. I’m alive and I’m laughing because I’m not a saint…”
At first I had had a hard time getting used to the idea that I was alive. I thought of myself as dead. I couldn’t eat, read, cry: I saw myself dead. I thought I was dead and that in a dream I imagined myself alive. I knew I no longer existed, that my real self had stayed there, that my present self had nothing in common with the other, the real one. I was like the skin shed by a snake.
Then one day, in the street, an old woman asked me to come up to her room. She was so old, so dried out, that I couldn’t hold back my laughter. The old woman grew pale and I thought she was going to collapse at my feet.
“Haven’t you any pity?” she said in a choked voice.
Then, all of a sudden, reality struck me: I wa
s alive, laughing, making fun of unhappy old women, I was able to humiliate and hurt old women who, like saints, spit on their own bodies.
“Where does suffering lead to?” Kathleen asked tensely. “Not to saintliness?”
“No!” I shouted.
That stopped my laughter. I was getting angry. I walked away from the window and stood in front of her; she was sitting on the floor now, her arms around her knees and her head resting on her arms.
“Those who say that are false prophets,” I said.
I had to make an effort not to scream, not to wake up the whole house, and the dead who were waiting outside in the wind and the snow flurries. I went on:
“Suffering brings out the lowest, the most cowardly in man. There is a phase of suffering you reach beyond which you become a brute: beyond it you sell your soul—and worse, the souls of your friends—for a piece of bread, for some warmth, for a moment of oblivion, of sleep. Saints are those who die before the end of the story. The others, those who live out their destiny, no longer dare look at themselves in the mirror, afraid they may see their inner image: a monster laughing at unhappy women and at saints who are dead…”
Kathleen listened, in a daze, her eyes wide open. As I spoke, her back bent over even more. Her pale lips whispered the same sentence tirelessly: “Go on! I want to know more. Go on!”
Then I fell on my knees, took her head in my hands, and, looking straight into her eyes, I told her the story of my grandmother, then the story of my little sister, and of my father, and of my mother; in very simple words, I described to her how man can become a grave for the unburied dead.
I kept talking. In every detail, I described the screams and the nightmares that haunt me at night. And Kathleen, very pale, her eyes red, continued to beg:
“More! Go on! More!”
She was saying “more” in the eager voice of a woman who wants her pleasure to last, who asks the man she loves not to stop, not to leave her, not to disappoint her, not to abandon her halfway between ecstasy and nothing. “More…More…”
I kept looking at her and holding her. I wanted to get rid of all the filth that was in me and graft it onto her pupils and her lips, which were so pure, so innocent, so beautiful.
I bared my soul. My most contemptible thoughts and desires, my most painful betrayals, my vaguest lies, I tore them from inside me and placed them in front of her, like an impure offering, so she could see them and smell their stench.
But Kathleen was drinking in every one of my words as if she wanted to punish herself for not having suffered before. From time to time she insisted in the same eager voice that sounded so much like the old prostitute’s, “More…More…”
Finally I stopped, exhausted. I stretched out on the carpet and closed my eyes.
We didn’t talk for a long time: an hour, perhaps two. I was out of breath. I was wet with perspiration, my shirt stuck to my body. Kathleen didn’t stir. Outside, the night softly moved on.
Suddenly we heard the noise of the milkman’s truck, coming from the street. The truck stopped near the door.
Kathleen took a deep breath and said, “I feel like going down and kissing the milkman.”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t have the strength.
“I would like to kiss him,” Kathleen said, “just to thank him. To thank him for being alive.”
I was silent.
“You’re not saying anything.” She sounded surprised. “You’re not laughing?”
And as I still didn’t say anything, she began to stroke my hair, then her fingers explored the outlines of my face. I liked the way she caressed me.
“I like you to touch me,” I told her, my eyes still closed. After hesitating, I added, “You see, it’s the best proof that I’m not a saint. Saints in that respect are like the dead: they don’t know desire.”
Kathleen’s voice became lighter and sounded more provocative. “And you desire me?”
“Yes.”
I again felt like laughing: a saint, me? What a wonderful joke! Me, a saint! Does a saint feel this desire for a woman’s body? Does he feel this need to take her into his arms, cover her with kisses, to bite her flesh, to possess her breath, her life, her breasts? No, a saint would not be willing to make love to a woman, with his dead grandmother watching, wearing her black shawl that seems to hold the nights and days of the universe.
I sat down. And I said angrily, “I’m not a saint!”
“No?” Kathleen asked without being able to smile.
“No,” I repeated.
I opened my eyes and noticed that she was really suffering. She was biting her lips; there was despair in her face.
“I’ll prove to you that I’m not a saint,” I muttered angrily.
Without a word I started to undress her. She didn’t resist. When she was naked, she sat down again as before. Her head resting on her knees, she looked at me in anguish as I too undressed. Now there were two lines around her mouth. I could see fear in her eyes. I was pleased; she was afraid of me, and that was good. Those who, like me, have left their souls in hell, are here only to frighten others by being their mirrors.
“I am going to take you,” I told her in a harsh, almost hostile voice. “But I don’t love you.”
I thought: she must know. I’m not a saint at all. I’ll make love without any commitments. A saint commits his whole being with every act.
She undid her hair, which fell to her shoulders. Her breast rose and fell irregularly.
“What if I fall in love with you?” she asked with studied naïveté.
“Small chance! You’ll hate me rather.”
Her face became a little sadder, a little more distressed. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
Somewhere, above the city, there was a hint of dawn in the foggy world.
“Look at me,” I said.
“I’m looking at you.”
“What do you see?”
“A saint,” she answered.
I laughed again. There we were, both naked, and one of us was a saint? It was grotesque! I took her brutally, trying to hurt her. She bit her lips and didn’t cry out. We stayed together until late that afternoon.
Without saying another word.
Without exchanging a kiss.
SUDDENLY, the fever vanished. My name was taken off the critical list. I still had pain, but my life was no longer in danger. I was still given antibiotics, but less frequently. Four shots a day. Then three, then two. Then none.
When I was allowed visitors, I had been in the hospital for nearly a week and in a cast for three days.
“Your friends may come to see you today,” the nurse said as she washed me.
“Fine,” I said.
“That’s your only reaction? Aren’t you pleased to be able to see your friends?”
“I am. Very pleased.”
“You’ve come a long way,” she said.
“A very long way.”
“You’re not talkative.”
“No.”
I had discovered one advantage in being ill: you can remain silent without having to apologize.
“After breakfast, I’ll come and shave you,” the nurse said.
“It won’t be necessary,” I answered.
“Not necessary?”
She seemed not to believe me: nothing that’s done in a hospital is unnecessary!
“That’s right. Unnecessary. I want to grow a beard.”
She stared at me a moment, then gave her verdict.
“No. You need a shave. You look too ill this way.”
“But I am ill.”
“You are. But if I shave you you’ll feel better.”
And without giving me time to answer, she continued, “You’ll feel like new.”
She was young, dark, obstinate. Tall, buttoned up in her white uniform, she towered over me and not merely because she was standing up.
“All right,” I said, to put an end to the discussion. “In that case, fine.”
“Good! T
hat’s the boy!”
She was happy with her victory, her mouth wide open showing her white teeth. Laughingly, she began to tell me all kinds of stories which seemed to have the following moral: death is afraid to attack those who make themselves look nice in the morning. The secret of immortality may well be to find the right shaving cream.
After helping me wash, she brought my breakfast.
“I’ll feed you as if you were a baby. Aren’t you ashamed to be a baby? At your age?”
She left and immediately returned with an electric razor.
“We want you to look nice. I want my baby to be nice!”
The razor made a tremendous noise. The nurse went on chattering. I wasn’t listening to her. I was thinking about the night of the accident. The cab was speeding. I had no idea it would send me to the hospital.
“There you are,” the nurse said beaming. “Now you’re nice.”
“I know,” I said. “Now I’m like a newborn baby!”
“Wait and I’ll bring you a mirror!”
She had very large eyes, with black pupils, and the white around them was very white.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“I’ll bring it, you’ll see.”
“Listen,” I said threateningly, “if you hand me a mirror I’ll break it. A broken mirror brings seven years of unhappiness! Is that what you want? Seven years of unhappiness?”
For a second her eyes were still, wondering if I wasn’t joking.
“It’s true. Anybody will tell you: one should never break a mirror.”
She was still laughing, but now her voice sounded more worried than before. She was wiping her hands on her white uniform.
“You’re a bad boy,” she said. “I don’t like you.”
“Too bad!” I answered. “I adore you!”
She muttered something to herself and left the room.
I was facing the window and could see the East River from my bed. A small boat was going by: a grayish spot on a blue background. A mirage.
Someone knocked at the door.