I was no longer free. My freedom would have humiliated Kathleen, who had been without freedom for so long. I had invented an attitude toward her which I could no longer get rid of.
If only this had done some good! If only it had helped Kathleen! But she was still unhappy and her laugh was still without sincerity.
Kathleen was getting worse and worse. She began to drink. She was letting herself go.
I discussed this with her. “You have no right to act this way.”
“Why not?” she would say, her eyes wide open with an expression of false innocence.
“Because I love you. Your life matters to me, Kathleen.”
“Come on! You don’t love me. You just say so. If it were true you wouldn’t say it.”
“I’m saying it because it is true.”
“You’re saying it out of pity. You don’t need me. I don’t make you feel good or happy.”
These arguments had none of the results I hoped for. On the contrary, after each one, Kathleen let herself go still further.
Then one evening—the day before the accident—she explained to me at last why she couldn’t believe in the integrity of my love.
“You claim you love me but you keep suffering. You say you love me in the present but you’re still living in the past. You tell me you love me but you refuse to forget. At night you have bad dreams. Sometimes you moan in your sleep. The truth is that I am nothing to you. I don’t count. What counts is the past. Not ours: yours. I try to make you happy: an image strikes your memory and it is all over. You are no longer there. The image is stronger than I. You think I don’t know? You think your silence is capable of hiding the hell you carry within you? Maybe you also think that it is easy to live beside someone who suffers and who won’t accept any help?”
She wasn’t crying. That night she hadn’t been drinking. We were in bed. Her head was resting on my outstretched arm. A warm wind was blowing through the open windows. We had just gone to bed. This was one of our rituals: never to make love right away; to talk first.
I could feel how heavy my heart had become, as if it were unable to contain itself. She had guessed correctly. You cannot hide suffering and remorse for long. They come out. It was true: I was living in the past. Grandmother, with her black shawl on her head, wasn’t giving me up.
“It isn’t my fault,” I answered.
I explained to her: a man who tells a woman he thinks he loves, “I love you and shall love you forever; may I die if I stop loving you,” believes it. And yet one day he sounds his heart and finds it empty. And he stays alive. With us—those who have known the time of death—it’s different. There, we said we would never forget. It still holds true. We cannot forget. The images are there in front of our eyes. Even if our eyes were no longer there, the images would remain. I think if I were able to forget I would hate myself. Our stay there planted time bombs within us. From time to time one of them explodes. And then we are nothing but suffering, shame, and guilt. We feel ashamed and guilty to be alive, to eat as much bread as we want, to wear good, warm socks in the winter. One of these bombs, Kathleen, will undoubtedly bring about madness. It’s inevitable. Anyone who has been there has brought back some of humanity’s madness. One day or another, it will come to the surface.
Kathleen was sober and lucid that evening. I had the impression her old self had come to visit her. But I knew that it would leave again. That the visit would be short and that only the self that was trying to imitate it would remain. And someday even that one would stop searching. Then the divorce would be final.
That night I understood that sooner or later I would have to leave Kathleen. To stay with her had become meaningless.
I told myself: suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us. Men cast aside the one who has known pure suffering, if they cannot make a god out of him; the one who tells them: I suffered not because I was God, nor because I was a saint trying to imitate Him, but only because I am a man, a man like you, with your weaknesses, your cowardice, your sins, your rebellions, and your ridiculous ambitions; such a man frightens men, because he makes them feel ashamed. They pull away from him as if he were guilty. As if he were usurping God’s place to illuminate the great vacuum that we find at the end of all adventures.
Actually it is good that this should be so. A man who has suffered more than others, and differently, should live apart. Alone. Outside of any organized existence. He poisons the air. He makes it unfit for breathing. He takes away from joy its spontaneity and its justification. He kills hope and the will to live. He is the incarnation of time that negates present and future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory. He suffers and his contagious suffering calls forth echoes around him.
One day or another I shall have to leave Kathleen, I decided. It will be better for her. If I could forget, I would stay. I cannot. There are times when man has no right to suffer.
“I suggest an agreement,” Kathleen said. “I’ll let you help me, provided you let me help you. All right?”
Poor Kathleen! I thought. It’s too late. To change, we would have to change the past. But the past is beyond our power. Its structure is solid, immutable. The past is Grandmother’s shawl, as black as the cloud above the cemetery. Forget the cloud? The black cloud which is Grandmother, her son, my mother. What a stupid time we live in! Everything is upside down. The cemeteries are up above, hanging from the sky, instead of being dug in the moist earth. We are lying in bed, my naked body against your naked body, and we are thinking about black clouds, about floating cemeteries, about the snickering of death and fate which are one and the same. You speak of happiness, Kathleen, as if happiness were possible. It isn’t even a dream. It too is dead. It too is up above. Everything has taken refuge above. And what emptiness here below! Real life is there. Here, we have nothing. Nothing, Kathleen. Here, we have an arid desert. A desert without even a mirage. It’s a station where the child left on the platform sees his parents carried off by the train. And there is only black smoke where they stood. They are the smoke. Happiness? Happiness for the child would be for the train to move backward. But you know how trains are, they always go forward. Only the smoke moves backward. Yes, ours is a horrible station! Men like me who are in it should stay there alone, Kathleen. Not let the suffering in us come in contact with other men. We must not give them the sour taste, the smoke-cloud taste, that we have in our mouth. We must not, Kathleen. You say “love.” And you don’t know that love too has taken the train which went straight to heaven. Now everything has been transferred there. Love, happiness, truth, purity, children with happy smiles, women with mysterious eyes, old people who walk slowly, and little orphans whose prayers are filled with anguish. That’s the true exodus. The exodus from one world to the other. Ancient peoples had a limited imagination. Our dead take with them to the hereafter not only clothes and food, but also the future of their descendants. Nothing remains below. And you speak of love, Kathleen? And you speak of happiness? Others speak of justice, universal or not, of freedom, of brotherhood, of progress. They don’t know that the planet is drained and that an enormous train has carried everything off to heaven.
“So, you accept?” Kathleen asked.
“I accept what?” I wondered.
“The agreement I suggested.”
“Of course,” I answered absentmindedly. “I accept.”
“And you’ll let me make you happy?”
“I’ll let you make me happy.”
“And you promise to forget the past?”
“I promise to forget the past.”
“And you’ll think only about our love?”
“Yes.”
She had gone through her questionnaire. She stopped to catch her breath and asked in a different tone of voice, “Where were you before?”
“At the station,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“At the station,” I said. “I was at the statio
n. It was very small. The station of a small provincial town. The train had just left. I was left alone on the platform. My parents were in the train. They had forgotten me.”
Kathleen didn’t say anything.
“At first I was resentful. They shouldn’t have left me behind, alone on the platform. But a little later, I suddenly saw a strange thing: the train was leaving the tracks and climbing toward the smoke-gray sky. Stunned, I couldn’t even shout out to my parents: What are you doing? Come back! Perhaps if I had shouted, they would have come back.”
I was beginning to feel tired. I was perspiring. It was warm in the bed. A car had just screeched to a stop under the window.
“You promised not to think about it anymore,” Kathleen said in despair.
“Forgive me. I won’t think about it anymore. In any case, these days trains are an outmoded way to travel. The world has progressed.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
She pressed her body against mine.
“Every time your thoughts take you to the little station, tell me. We’ll fight it together?”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
The accident occurred the next day.
THE TEN WEEKS I spent in a world of plaster had made me richer.
I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position. The shadows on the walls, on the faces, are not the same.
Three people came to see me every day. Paul Russel came in the morning; Kathleen in the evening; Gyula in the afternoon. He alone had guessed. Gyula was my friend.
A painter, of Hungarian origin, Gyula was a living rock. A giant in every sense of the word. Tall, robust, gray and rebellious hair, mocking and burning eyes; he pushed aside everything around him: altars, ideas, mountains. Everything trembled, vibrated, at his touch, at the sight of him.
In spite of our difference in age, we had a lot in common. Every week we would meet for lunch in a Hungarian restaurant on the East Side. We encouraged each other to stick it out, not to make compromises, not to come to terms with life, not to accept easy victories. Our conversation always sounded like banter. We detested sentimentality. We avoided people who took themselves seriously and particularly those who asked others to do so. We didn’t spare each other. Thus our friendship was healthy, simple, and mature.
I was still half dead when he burst into my room, pushed the nurse aside with his shoulder (she was getting ready to give me an injection), and, without asking me anything, announced in a firm and decided voice that he was going to do my portrait.
The nurse, needle in hand, stared at him aghast.
“What are you doing here? Who let you in? Get out immediately!”
Gyula looked at her with compassion, as if her mind were not all there.
“You’re beautiful,” he told her. “But mad!”
He studied her with interest.
“Beautiful women nowadays aren’t mad enough,” he went on nostalgically. “But you are. I like you.”
The poor nurse—a young student—was on the verge of tears. She was stuttering.
“The injection—Get out—I have to—”
“Later!” Gyula ordered.
And taking her by the arm, he pushed her toward the door. There, she whispered something in his ear.
“Hey! You!” Gyula said after closing the door. “She says you are seriously ill. That you’re dying! Aren’t you ashamed to be dying?”
“Yes,” I answered weakly. “I’m ashamed.”
Gyula walked about to familiarize himself with the view, the walls, the smell of the room. Then he stopped near the bed and challenged me.
“Don’t die before I’ve finished your portrait, do you hear? Afterward, I don’t give a darn! But not before! Understood?”
“You’re a monster, Gyula,” I told him, moved.
“You didn’t know?” he wondered. “Artists are the worst monsters: they live on the lives and deaths of others.”
I thought he would ask how the accident had happened. He didn’t. And yet, I wanted him to know.
“Do you want me to tell you about it?” I asked him.
“You don’t have to,” he answered disdainfully. “I don’t need your explanations.”
There was a circle of fondness around his eyes.
“I want you to know,” I said.
“I’ll know.”
“It’s a secret,” I said. “No one knows it. I’d like to tell you.”
“You don’t have to,” he answered contemptuously. “I like to discover everything for myself.”
I tried to laugh. “I might die before you have a chance.”
He was flaming with threatening anger. “Not before I’m through with your portrait, I told you. Afterward you can die whenever and as often as you like!”
I was proud. Proud of him, of myself, of our friendship. Of the tough laws we had made for it. They protected us against the successes and the certainties of the weak. True exchanges take place where simple words are called for, where we set out to state the problem of the immortality of the soul in shockingly banal sentences.
Gyula turned up every afternoon. The nurses knew they weren’t to disturb us when he was there. For them he was an animal whose insults, in Hungarian, would have reddened even the cheeks of a black girl.
While he was sketching, Gyula told me stories. He was an excellent storyteller. His life was filled with innumerable adventures and hallucinatory experiences. He had died of hunger in Paris, handed out fortunes in Hollywood, taught magic and alchemy nearly everywhere. He had known all the great men of contemporary literature and the arts; he liked their weaknesses and forgave them their successes. Gyula too had an obsession: to pit himself against fate, to force it to give human meaning to its cruelty. But of course he only spoke of that mockingly.
One day he came as usual toward the beginning of the afternoon, and, framed by the window, began to work. He was silent. He hadn’t even said hello when he came in. He seemed preoccupied. Half an hour, an hour. He suddenly stopped moving, remained motionless, and looked me straight in the eyes, as if he had just torn asunder an invisible veil that covered them. For a few seconds we stared at each other. His thick eyebrows arched as he frowned: he was beginning to understand.
“Do you want me to tell you?” I was upset.
“No,” he answered coldly. “I have no use for your stories!”
And again he was absorbed by his work, in which he found answers to all questions and questions for all answers.
A week later he told me something that didn’t seem to have any relation to the subject we were then discussing. We were speaking of the international situation, the danger of a third world war, the important part that China would soon be playing. Suddenly Gyula changed the subject.
“Incidentally,” he said, “have I told you the story of my unsuccessful drowning?”
“No,” I answered mockingly. “Where did it happen: in China?”
“Spare me your comments,” he said. “You’d do better to listen.”
Good old Gyula! I thought. How do you tell a woman that you love her? You probably insult her, and if she doesn’t understand that kind of love-talk, you simply stop loving her. Good old Gyula!
One summer he had gone to the French Riviera for his vacation, to get away from the heat. He often went to the seashore. That morning he swam out too far. Suddenly a sharp cramp paralyzed his body. Unable to use either his arms or his legs, he let himself sink.
“I began to drink the salt water of the sea,” he said. “There was no fear in me. I knew that I was dying, but I remained calm. A strangely sweet serenity came over me. I thought: at last I’ll know what a drowning man thinks about. That was my last thought. I lost consciousness.”
He was saved. Someone had seen him sink and rescued him.
While watching the lines his brush drew on the canvas, Gyula went on, smiling imperceptibly.
“When I came to, I looke
d all around me. I was lying on the sand, in the midst of a group of curious people. A bald old man, a doctor, was leaning over me and taking my pulse. In the first row, a terrified young woman was looking at me. She put on a vague smile for me, but the expression of terror remained. How distressing: a horrified woman who smiles. I thought: I’m alive. I have outwitted death. One more time death didn’t get me. Here is the proof: I’m looking at a woman who is looking at me and smiling. The horror on her face is there for death, which must still be very near, right behind me. The smile is for me, for me alone. I told myself: I could have been here, in the same spot, and not have seen this woman, who, right now, is more graceful and beautiful than any other. I could have been looked at by a woman who didn’t smile. I must consider myself happy, I told myself. I’m alive. Victory over death should give birth to happiness. Happiness to be free. Free to provoke death again. Free to accept freedom or to reject it. This reprieve should give me a feeling of well-being. And yet, I didn’t have it. I was searching conscientiously within myself: not a trace of joy to be found. The doctor was examining me, the people gave me mute expressions of sympathy like alms, and the young woman’s smile was becoming more open—that’s how one smiles at life. In spite of that, I wasn’t happy. On the contrary, I was terribly sad and disappointed. Later, this unsuccessful drowning made me sing and dance. But there, on the sand, under the burning, purple sun, under the eyes of this unknown woman, I felt disappointed, disappointed at having come back.”
Gyula worked silently for a long time. I think he was painting with his eyes closed. I was wondering if he was still disappointed. And if later on he had seen the young woman again. But I said nothing. Paul Russel came back to my mind. He is wrong, I thought. Life doesn’t necessarily want to live. Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.