BOOK II (continued 2)

"See, maybe it is at this very moment when my voice is worn threadbare and in spite of yourself you push my head away and hold yourself up as if you were about to fall, that we draw closer together than ever before.

"You are watching the night as it comes creeping ... you see, don't you? There is no question, not for a moment, of parting, nor of my loving you less. Because our hearts are turned towards each other to-day. A miracle is taking place. It will not be undone.

"Listen to me. Listen to me as if you could understand. Let me spread at your feet the infinity I hold.... Since he came, if you only knew, I love you more. Not only do I feel your smile and your whole presence around me like a thousand arms and with even more than one heart, but I feel surer of myself, nobler, and—admit it—more beautiful.... To love you is to think perfection, nobility, light, and to stretch my hands out to them. It is nothing else.

"To go to him is to continue myself; it is not to lessen you.

"But.... Is it the dusk or the reflection of the tree? Your cheeks are ashen, your eyes are quite wet, and in spite of everything, in spite of everything I am hurting you.... At the moment that you love like a God, you suffer like a man....

"It is because our understanding is a high one that your grief is deep and my confession necessary.

"If you knew, if you knew....

"You see, I still tremble before stopping just as I hesitated before sitting down, because once my confession is made we shall both feel that it is closed forever.

"Does one ever know whether one has not omitted the essential word, the life word, the one that means everything and has not been said? I no longer know. It is as if I still had it within me....

"Let me stay where I am, near you, for a long time. You will let my head rest on your knees, the night will succeed better than I in revealing the heart unseen.

"Perhaps he has come already.... Tell me ... do you hear him?"

XXI

How happy I was!... I listened without stirring to the deep throbbing of his life. I came to know him better through the regular pulsing of his neck, the twisting of his arms and the warmth that passed between us than through our past meetings. All the warm invisible things that work in the depths of a human being, the changing fate, the mystery circulating in the blood, were talking into my ears.

Here we were alongside each other, breathing in unison—can you have enough of such happiness? I entrusted my entire being to him; it was a pure, holy fulfilment.

There's no use trying to sum matters up differently. It may be that at death you find the higher expression, the illumination so sought for, but the living have no other way of saying the truth to each other than through the flesh.

You understand, don't you, that you have to rest from living? No longer to have this gaping heart, this pitiless, relentless love, but simply to lie stretched out close against him, so that the whole universe comes rushing to you, the mystery reveals itself, and life finds consolation.... Does God ever bestow greater charity?

I have just given him my life, my body, my very depths, and he is gone to sleep.

Then, a human being never knows what another human being gives him?

Physical love joins nothing, leaves nothing. Nevertheless, it seems to bring everything, and it does bring everything at the red moment of embrace.

The joy at which I grasped has departed; my lips are dry, my arms empty.

Yet a little while ago I thought I was going to live like God. And to have had the hope of living like God for a single instant is in itself beautiful enough.

XXII

"You really want to know what I am thinking of? And why I look so obstinate with my eyebrows projecting like a black roof over my eyes?

"I was working out an idea, the sort of idea that seems silly when you try to express it, but is really quite reasonable and logical....

"Why do you insist upon my telling you? I assure you it's so simple that you, a man, won't understand.

"Well then. I was thinking of your wife.... No, don't interrupt ... the woman who shares your name, your home, your meals, the money you earn, your cares; the woman who lives beside you—here's the one wrong—in utter ignorance of your love for me.

"I was imagining—this is where the vagary commences—a meeting between the two of us, not a meeting of constrained smiles, not the confrontation of two human beings, with elements of the dramatic and the divine. Do try to follow me. Put together the details I am going to give you one by one the way they are in reality. Give the extraordinary interview the ordinary setting of humble, banal, tame everydayness. I told you it was a silly notion.

"I go to visit her. The interview takes place amid her familiar accustomed things, which assist and protect her. She sits beside the window—her little sewing-table, her work-basket, a dozen scattered articles. She sews without thinking of much, in the broad daylight so dazzlingly brilliant that you can't see the swing of the pendulum. Her head is bent, the sunlight grazes her neck. You feel her spirit is with her needle and thread, that is, crystallized in calm. Her tranquillized body submits in advance to the impending visit. She has only to lift her eyes to know the limits set to her being, the very boundary-line of everything she awaits.

"I enter. I go to her. My steps erect a hedge of sound around me. To make myself seen I raise my voice.... How make myself heard? I do not know.... Since truth is triumphant, the announcement of my presence may be triumphant also. It may write 'I love him' all over me before we shake hands or even give each other the first look.

"She knows. She knows everything. I feel bathed in a vast thankfulness. Just imagine: when people talk of you, she is the only one in the world who knows down to the very roots of her being the full content of their words. It is as if I were speaking to God.

"Well, I begin. Laughing, crying I impart what cannot be imparted. I hurry. The words flowing from my lips warm me with their generous wine, and I hear love pouring forth.

"I see myself, almost on my knees, scarcely perceiving her. Is it to her that I address myself? I speak merely in order to remove a barrier obstructing the light and to say the truth.

"In the breathless words that I pour out at her feet it is not a question perhaps of either her or myself. Why should it be? I never considered that I was doing her a wrong. If she reads my face, she will see things as they are. Have I turned anything away from her, have I diminished her portion, have I deprived her of anything? I have simply given you everything.

"Don't say she might repulse me and would be right if she did, because that, after all, would be the human way to act. Human to you means everything that deceives itself and denies the essential grace, everything that falls and dies in the mud of the road. Are you quite sure that a woman when she loves does not feel that sort of humanity die?

"You look at me dubiously. Of course you cannot know. You men tolerate an understanding between two women when it exists for the sake of cherishing the dust-covered memory of a man. A tomb reassures you. You will never allow life as a pretext. According to you we have no right to a sisterhood until it is too late.

"In my unfailing and fatal sincerity I say your wife might understand. Truth striking the ear is bound to impress. And that I should be alive as I am alive at this moment, with the eloquence and magic that spring from real presences, is also bound to impress. Look at me. Need I say a single word? Isn't a great love with eyes uplifted convincing?

"When you tell me sometimes that I am beautiful, it is like a gift. She would see me bearing this gift, and if she perceived her forty years moaning and fading at my approach, she would understand that age in a woman is an offense love cannot forgive.

"Your eyes are searching space. You are wondering where such a conversation would lead her and me. Don't bother. It would merely lead me to the side of truth and her to its summit. I imagined that was enough and one could stop there.

"I imagined that after I had spoken, she would rise and stand without taking a single step, upright and solemn, her work at her feet, she would feel the morals of the world collapse, its false hells, its hardness and harshness, its monstrous delusions, everything that sheathed her in a coat of mail and incited her to self-defense.... Feeling her heart set at liberty, she would think of you, but of you with your body sloughed; of your real self hidden where neither she nor I can penetrate.

"Then she would draw nearer—would she know to what? It is a deep-seated law in us to try desperately to approach something. She would rediscover the dazzling moments when her twenty years of age gave her the power to bid the submissive universe do everything for your good. It would be a similar instant that I would place like a sheaf of wheat in her open arms. Don't you see?

"The room sparkles in all its sunlight; every surface sends forth gleams; the day calls to the day and floats before her. Are we rivals? We are simply sisters in the same love. I want to take her hands because I remember that once you chose her....

"Well....

"But my notion is squelched. I couldn't help it. Your astonished expression squelched it. Before I spoke, when the idea was still imprisoned behind the wall of my forehead, it gave me a light like a torch, I assure you. You questioned me, and now it's a mocking will-o'-the-wisp, teasing me from a distance and vanishing as I advance. Didn't I tell you it was an idea not to be handled?

"I have fallen short of caressing a bit of truth between my clasped hands. It escaped me.... And you smile consoled."

XXIII

Twice we said we would part at the turn of the road, at that tree, exactly at that tree, and twice we passed by laughing at our weakness. We still could not believe in the separation at hand.

But the moment was upon us.

There, at the house hidden behind the trees and bushes, you will go on, and I will stand still.

He pressed my hand with increasing tenderness. My laugh taunted us with so much assurance that I tried to believe in it. To fill up the gaps, we blustered and said the needless inconsequent things people always say when they face a long separation.

It was a little before noon. The sheeted shadows cast by the sunlight burned and smoked in bluish waves. Between the trees of the woods stretching beside the sea liquid flakes blinded your eyes. You'd see annoying red spots long after you'd turned your eyes away.

I said to myself: "Only a few steps more and it will be over. One step less and another minute will be plucked from our parting." To keep down my emotion I hurriedly spoke of something else.

It must have rained in the morning. When we brushed against the branches, the silence was broken at our feet by the limpid sound of falling drops, the leaves wore a new skin, and the atmosphere, impregnated with freshness, smiled the smile of nature when she wants to dry her tears. The depths of the woods were enveloped in a blue down; a troop of squat little fir-trees, their skirts on a level with the ground, rang a crisp chime.

We hurried, so at one in our approaching distress that we went too fast. The house behind the trees and bushes came into more prominent view—shutters like eyes pitilessly closed, pointed teeth of a gray-painted fence, threatening minutiae of a garden descending a bushy battered skull of a slope. But after all, there can be no such thing as separation between us two.... And for a moment, to prove the strength of love, yes, for a moment, I was ready to run.

Here we are at the house. Seen at close range with its covering of red tiles and rugged face and front fanned by two dwarf firs, the little house in the way of our free career does not seem very imposing.

It must be. What's the use of delaying any more? Is it saddening to part when each carries away the other? For I carry away your voice, and the sadness of your eyes, and this kiss I give you.... I do not leave you; I am not even distressed. Look, I am leaving you.

I took a few steps away. They rang under my eyes. I picked up every detail of our parting and held it pressed against my heart, each grain of red earth, each flash of mica in the road. It was not so difficult....

Behind me I heard him walking away with a tread heavier than mine, which seemed to set stones tumbling down a mountainside.... Two months.... What is an absence of two months? I decided not to turn around.

The road narrowed and became a serpent of clay, then a creamy winding. I tried so hard to think of nothing that I noticed a great many surprising things we had not observed before. That tree with a heavy black ball at the end of its longest branch which the birds of heaven had stuffed with earth and was now grass-grown; the slope with a red covering of rich plants made, you'd think, of fingers dipped in blood....

It was in spite of myself that I faced about. A dark figure just this side of the last bend in the road.

Ah, he turns round; he heard me. Could we remain apart? I stretch my arms out to him, I begin to run. Why did we talk of other things a few minutes ago? Were we insane?...

I have already passed the dead aloe, I am near the house with its two firs. My abrupt race swells my decision not to leave him. I lift my eyes. He didn't see me.

His form is no more than a black point, a blind insect nibbling at the road and entering the earth's lair.... One last step. It is over, it is over.

My arms fall, I turn back stumbling, dizzy. How can you tell what sort of a road it is when the sun is the color of mourning and the summer has the taste of tears?... Doesn't he know?

Noon. The Angelus tosses its twelve bronze strokes at the sun and they slowly dissolve. But I am insensible to everything. Everything. The host of trees, the flashing breastplate of the sea turn around an empty space.

Why this sky stretching out after the branches, why this sparkling happiness, why this sleepiness of the earth when I am racked and branded with a red-hot iron by what I failed to say while there was still time?