“With me you’ll be alone, that’s true,” said the stranger sadly. “But you have to keep me here. You have to right ancient wrongs that you did me. I love you more than all of them do and I’ll teach you how to get along without those others, who will no longer come when you’re old.”
“I can’t,” said Dominique.
And he sensed he had just sacrificed a noble happiness at the command of an imperious and vulgar habit, that no longer had even pleasures to dispense as prizes for obedience.
“Choose quickly,” said the stranger, pleading and haughty.
Dominique went to open the door, and at the same time he asked the stranger, without daring to turn his head: “Just who are you?”
And the stranger, the stranger who was already disappearing, said: “Habit, to which you are again sacrificing me tonight, will be stronger tomorrow thanks to the blood of the wound that you’re inflicting on me in order to nourish that habit. And more imperious for being obeyed yet again, habit will turn you away from me slightly more each day and force you to increase my suffering. Soon you will have killed me. You will never see me again. Yet you’ll have owed me more than you owe the others, who will shortly abandon you. I am inside you and yet I am forever remote from you; I almost no longer exist. I am your soul, I am yourself.”
The guests had entered. The company stepped into the dining room, and Dominique wanted to describe his conversation with the visitor, who had disappeared; but given the overall boredom and the obvious strain it put on the host to remember an almost faded dream, Girolamo interrupted him—to the great satisfaction of everyone, including even Dominique—and drew the following conclusion:
“One should never be alone; solitude breeds melancholy.”
Then they resumed drinking; Dominique chatted gaily but without joy, though flattered by the dazzling company.
Dream
Your tears flowed for me, my lip drank your weeping.
—ANATOLE FRANCE
It takes no effort for me to recall what my opinion of Madame Dorothy B. was last Saturday (three days ago). As luck would have it, people talked about her that day, and I was forthright in saying that I found her to be devoid of charm and wit. I believe she is twenty-two or twenty-three. Anyway, I barely know her, and whenever I thought about her, no vivid memory ruffled my mind, so that all I had before my eyes was the letters of her name.
On Saturday I went to bed quite early. But around two A.M., the wind blasted so hard that I had to get up and close a loose shutter that had awakened me. I mused about the brief sleep I had enjoyed, and I was delighted that it had been so refreshing, with no distress, no dreams. As soon as I lay back down, I drifted off again. But after an indeterminable stretch of time, I started waking up little by little—or rather, I was roused little by little into the world of dreams, which at first was blurry, like the real world when we normally awaken, but then the world of dreams cleared up. I was in Trouville, lying on the beach, which doubled as a hammock in an unfamiliar garden, and a woman was gently studying me. It was Madame Dorothy B. I was no more surprised than I am when waking up in the morning and recognizing my bedroom. Nor was I astonished at my companion’s supernatural charm and at the ecstasy of both sensual and spiritual adoration caused by her presence. We looked at each other in a profound rapport, experiencing a great miracle of glory and happiness, a miracle of which we were fully aware, to which she was a party, and for which I was infinitely grateful to her.
But she said to me: “You’re crazy to thank me, wouldn’t you have done the same for me?”
And the feeling (it was, incidentally, a perfect certainty) that I would have done the same for her intensified my joy into delirium as the manifest symbol of the most intimate union. She signaled mysteriously with her finger and smiled. And, as if I had been both in her and in me, I knew that the signal meant: “Do all your enemies, all your adversities, all your regrets, all your weaknesses matter anymore?”
And without my uttering a word, she heard me reply that she had easily vanquished everything, destroyed everything, voluptuously cast a spell on my suffering. And she approached me, caressed my neck, and slowly turned up the ends of my moustache. Then she said to me: “Now let’s go to the others, let’s enter life.” I was filled with superhuman joy and I felt strong enough to make all this virtual happiness come true. She wanted to give me a flower and from between her breasts she drew a yellow and pale-pink rosebud and slipped it into my buttonhole. Suddenly I felt my intoxication swell with a new delight. The rose in my buttonhole had begun exhaling its scent of love, which wafted up to my nostrils.
I saw that my joy was causing Dorothy an agitation that I could not understand. Her eyes (I was certain of it because of my mysterious awareness of her specific individuality)—her eyes shivered with the faint spasm that occurs a second before the moment of weeping, and at that precise moment it was my eyes that filled with tears, her tears I might say. She drew nearer, turning her face up to my cheek, and I could contemplate the mysterious grace of her head, its captivating vivacity, and, with her tongue darting out between her fresh, smiling lips, she gathered all my tears on the edges of her eyes. Then she swallowed my tears with a light whisking of her lips, a noise that I experienced as an unknown kiss, more intimately troubling than if it had touched my lips directly.
I awoke with a start, recognized my room, and, the way lightning in a nearby storm is promptly followed by thunder, a dizzying reminiscence of happiness fused with, rather than preceded, the shattering certainty that this happiness was mendacious and impossible. However, despite all my reasoning, Dorothy B. was no longer the woman she had been for me only yesterday. The slight ripple left in my memory by our casual contact was nearly effaced, as if by a powerful tide that leaves unknown vestiges behind when it ebbs. I felt an immense desire, doomed in advance, to see her again; I instinctively needed to write to her and was prudently wary of doing so. When her name was mentioned in conversation, I trembled, yet it evoked the insignificant image that would have accompanied her before that night, and while I was as indifferent to her as to any commonplace socialite, she drew me more irresistibly than the most cherished mistresses or the most intoxicating destiny. I would not have lifted a finger to see her and yet I would have given my life for the other “her.”
Each hour blurs a bit more of my memory of that dream, which is already quite distorted by this telling. I can make out less and less of my dream; it is like a book that you want to continue reading at your table when the declining day no longer provides enough light, when the night falls. In order to see it a bit clearly, I am obliged to stop thinking about it for a moment, the way you are obliged to squint in order to discern a few letters in the shadowy book. Faded as my dream may be, it still leaves me in deep agitation, the foam of its wake or the voluptuousness of its perfume. But my agitation will likewise dissipate, and I will be perfectly calm when I run into Madame B. And besides, why speak to her about things to which she is a stranger?
Alas! Love passed over me like that dream, with an equally mysterious power of transfiguration. And so, you who know the woman I love, you who were not in my dream, you cannot understand me; therefore do not try to give me advice.
Memory’s Genre Paintings
We have certain reminiscences that are like the Dutch paintings in our minds, genre pictures in which the people, often of a modest station, are caught at a very simple moment of their lives, with no special events, at times with no events whatsoever, in a framework that is anything but grand and extraordinary. The charm lies in the naturalness of the figures and the simplicity of the scene, whereby the gap between picture and spectator is suffused with a soft light that bathes the scene in beauty.
My regimental life was full of these scenes, which I lived through naturally, with no keen joy or great distress, and which I recall affectionately. I remember the rustic settings, the naïveté of some of my peasant comrades, whose bodies remained more beautiful, more agile, their minds more dow
n-to-earth, their hearts more spontaneous, their characters more natural than those of the young men with whom I associated before and after. I also remember the calmness of a life in which activity is regulated more and imagination controlled less than anywhere else, in which pleasure accompanies us all the more constantly because we never have time to flee it by dashing to find it. Today all those things unite, turning that phase of my life into a series of small paintings—interrupted, it is true, by lapses, but filled with happy truth and magic over which time has spread its sweet sadness and its poetry.
Ocean Wind in the Country
I will bring you a young poppy with purple petals.
—THEOCRITES: THE CYCLOPS
In the garden, in the grove, across the countryside, the wind devotes a wild and useless ardor to dispersing the blasts of sunshine, furiously shaking the branches in the copse, where those blasts first came crashing down, while the wind pursues them from the copse all the way to the sparkling thicket, where they are now quivering, palpitating. The trees, the drying linens, the peacock spreading its tail stand out in the transparent air as blue shadows, extraordinarily sharp, and flying with all winds, but not leaving the ground, like a poorly launched kite. Because of the jumble of wind and light, this corner of Champagne resembles a coastal landscape. When we reach the top of this path, which, burned by light and breathless with wind, rises in full sunshine toward a naked sky, will we not see the ocean, white with sun and foam? You had come as on every morning, with your hands full of flowers and with soft feathers dropped on the path in mid-flight by a ring dove, a swallow, or a jay. The feathers on my hat are trembling, the poppy in my buttonhole is losing its petals, let us hurry home.
The house groans in the wind like a ship; we hear the bellying of invisible sails, the flapping of invisible flags outside. Keep that bunch of fresh roses on your lap and let my heart weep in your clasping hands.
The Pearls
I came home in the morning and I went to bed, freezing and also trembling with an icy and melancholy delirium. A while ago, in your room, your friends of yesterday, your plans for tomorrow (just so many enemies, so many plots hatched against me), your thoughts at that time (so many vague and impassable distances), they all separated me from you. Now that I am far away from you, this imperfect presence, the fleeting mask of eternal absence—a mask quickly removed by kisses—would apparently suffice to show me your true face and satisfy the strivings of my love. I had to leave; I had to remain far away from you, sad and icy! But what sudden magic is causing the familiar dreams of my happiness to start rising again (a thick smoke over a bright and burning flame), rising joyously and continuously in my mind? In my hand, warmed under the bed covers, the fragrance of the rose-scented cigarettes that you got me to smoke has reawakened. With my lips pressed against my hand, I keep inhaling their perfume, which, in the warmth of memory, exhales dense billows of tenderness, happiness, and “you.” Ah, my darling beloved! The instant that I can get along without you, that I swim, joyful, in my memory of you (which now fills the room), without struggling against your insurmountable body, I tell you absurdly, I tell you irresistibly: I cannot live without you. It is your presence that gives my life that fine, warm, melancholy hue, like the pearls that spend the night on your body. Like them, I live from and sadly draw my tinges from your warmth, and, like them, if you did not keep me close to you, I would die.
The Shores of Oblivion
“They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in general it is actually life that wronged them. Death, that pious and irreproachable witness, teaches us, in both truth and charity, that in each man there is usually more good than evil.”
What Michelet says here about death may be even more applicable to the death that follows a great and unhappy love. If, after making us suffer so deeply, a person now means nothing to us, does it suffice to say that, according to the popular expression, he is “dead for us”? We weep for the dead, we still love them, we submit at length to the irresistible appeal of the magic that survives them and that so frequently draws us back to their graves. But the person who, on the contrary, made us experience everything, and with whose essence we were saturated, can no longer cause us even a hint of pain or joy. He is more than dead for us. After regarding him as the only precious thing in this world, after cursing him, after scorning him, we cannot possibly judge him, for his features barely take shape before our memory’s eyes, which are exhausted from focusing far too long on his face. However, this judgment on the beloved person—a judgment that has varied so greatly, sometimes torturing our blind hearts with its acumen, sometimes also blinding itself so as to end this cruel discord—this judgment has to carry out a final variation.
Like those landscapes that we discover only from peaks, it is solely from the heights of forgiveness that she appears before you in her true worth—the woman who was more than dead to you after being your very life. All we knew was that she did not requite our love, but now we understand that she felt genuine friendship for us. It is not memory that embellishes her; it is love that wronged her. For the man who wants everything, and for whom everything, if he obtained it, would never suffice, receiving a little merely seems like an absurd cruelty. Now we understand that it was a generous gift from the woman, who was not discouraged by our despair, our irony, our perpetual tyranny. She was always kind. Several remarks of hers, quoted for us today, sound indulgently precise and enchanting, several remarks made by the woman whom we thought incapable of understanding us because she did not love us. We, on the contrary, spoke about her with so much unjust egotism, so much severity. Do we not, incidentally, owe her a great deal?
If that great tide of love has ebbed forever, we nevertheless can, when strolling inside ourselves, gather strange and beguiling shells, and, when holding them to one ear, we can, with a mournful pleasure and without suffering, hear the immense roaring of the past. Then, deeply moved, we think about the woman, who, to our misfortune, was loved more than she loved. No longer is she “more than dead” for us. She is a dead person whom we remember affectionately. Justice would have us revise our opinion of her. And by the all-powerful virtue of justice, she can be mentally resurrected in our hearts so as to appear for that last judgment that we render far away from her, render calmly and tearfully.
Physical Presence
We loved each other in the Engadine, in some remote village with a doubly sweet name: the reverie of German sonorities languished in the voluptuousness of Italian syllables. All around, three unbelievably verdant lakes reflected the fir forests. Peaks and glaciers closed off the horizon. In the evening the delicacy of the light was intensified by the variety of those perspectives. Will we ever forget the lakeside strolls in Sils-Maria, at six o’clock in the fading afternoon? The larches, so darkly serene when bordering on the dazzling snow, stretched their branches, of a sleek and radiant green, into the pale-blue, nearly mauve water.
One evening, the hour was especially favorable to us: within moments the setting sun brought out all possible nuances in the water and brought our souls all possible delights. Suddenly we gave a start: we had just seen a small, rosy butterfly, then two, then five, leaving the flowers on our shore and fluttering over the lake. Soon they looked like an impalpable rosy dust sweeping along the surface; then they reached the flowers on the opposite shore, fluttered back, and gently resumed their adventurous passage, stopping at times, as if yielding to temptation upon this preciously tinged water like a huge, fading blossom. This was too much, and our eyes filled with tears. In fluttering over the lake, these small butterflies flickered to and fro across our souls (our souls, which were tense with agitation at the sight of so many beauties and about to vibrate) and passed again and again like the voluptuous bow of a violin. Their slight flittering did not graze the water, but it did caress our eyes, our hearts, and we nearly fainted with each quiver of the tiny, rosy wings. When we spotted them returning from the opposite shore, thereby revealing that they wer
e playing and freely strolling on the surface, a delightful harmony resounded for us; they, however, returned slowly by way of a thousand whimsical detours, which varied the original harmony as a bewitching and fanciful melody. Our souls, now sonorous, listening to the silent flight, heard a music of enchantment and freedom and all the sweet and intense harmonies of the lake, the woods, the sky, and our own lives accompanied it with a magical delicacy that made us burst into tears.
I had never spoken to you, and I had even lost sight of you that year. But how deeply we loved each other in the Engadine! I never had enough of you; I never left you at home. You came along on my strolls, ate at my table, slept in my bed, dreamed in my soul. One day (could not a sure instinct, as a mysterious messenger, have notified you about that childishness in which you were so intricately involved, which you, too, experienced, yes, truly experienced, so profound was your “physical presence” in me?), one day (neither of us had ever before seen Italy), we were amazed at what we were told about Alp Grün: “From there you can see all the way to Italy.” We left for Alp Grün, imagining that in the spectacle stretching out beyond the peak, there where Italy began, the hard, physical scenery would halt brusquely, and an utterly blue valley would open up in the depths of a dream. En route it struck us that a border does not alter the soil and that even if it did, the change would be too subtle for us to perceive it all at once. Though a bit disappointed, we laughed at ourselves for being so childish.
However, upon reaching the summit, we were dazzled. Our juvenile imaginings had come true before our very eyes. At our side, glaciers sparkled. At our feet, torrents cut through a savage, dark-green Engadine landscape. Then a slightly mysterious hill; and beyond it, mauve slopes kept half-revealing and concealing in turns a truly blue region, a radiant avenue to Italy. The names were no longer the same; they instantly harmonized with this new softness. We were shown the Lago di Poschiavo, the Pizzo di Verona, the Val Viola. Next we went to an extraordinarily savage and solitary place, where the desolation of nature and the certainty that we were utterly inaccessible, as well as invisible and invincible, would have increased the voluptuousness of our loving each other there, intensified it into a delirium. I now truly and deeply felt my sadness at not having you with me in your material form, not merely in the apparel of my regret, but in the reality of my desire. I then descended a bit lower to the still towering spot where tourists came for the view. An isolated inn has an album in which they sign their names. I wrote mine and, next to it, a combination of letters alluding to your name, because it was impossible for me not to supply material proof of the reality of your spiritual presence. By putting a trace of you in that album I felt relieved of the compulsive weight with which you were suffocating my soul. And besides, I nurtured the immense hope of someday bringing you here to read that line; then you would climb even higher with me to compensate me for all that sadness. Without my saying a word, you would grasp everything or, rather, recall everything; and, while climbing, you would depend fully on me, lean heavily against me to make me feel all the more concretely that this time you were truly here; and I, between your lips, which keep a faint scent of your Oriental cigarettes, I would find perfect oblivion. We would very loudly holler the wildest things just to glory in the pleasure of yelling without being heard far and wide; only the short grass would quiver in the light breeze of the peaks. The ascent would then cause you to slow down, puff a bit, and I would lean toward you to hear your puffing: we would be insane. We would also venture to where a white lake lies next to a black lake, as gently as a white pearl next to a black pearl. How we would have loved each other in some remote village in the Engadine! We would have allowed only mountain guides to come close, those very tall men, whose eyes reflect different things than the eyes of other men and who are virtually of a different “water.” But I am no longer concerned with you. Satiety occurred before possession. Even platonic love has its saturation point. I would no longer care to bring you to this countryside, which, though not grasping it, much less knowing it, you conjured up with such touching precision. The sight of you retains only one charm for me: the magic of suddenly remembering those sweetly exotic German and Italian names: Sils-Maria, Silva Plana, Crestalta, Samaden, Celerina, Juliers, Val Viola.