I have given notice. I am going away to-morrow evening, I with my
tremendous memory. Whatever may happen, whatever tragedies may be
reserved for me in the future, my thought will not be graver or more
important when I shall have lived my life with all its weight.
But my whole body is one pain. I cannot stand on my legs any more. I
stagger. I fall back on my bed. My eyes close and fill with smarting
tears. I want to be crucified on the wall, but I cannot. My body
becomes heavier and heavier and filled with sharper pain. My flesh is
enraged against me.
I hear voices through the wall. The next room vibrates with a distant
sound, a mist of sound which scarcely comes through the wall.
I shall not be able to listen any more, or look into the room, or hear
anything distinctly. And I, who have not cried since my childhood, I
cry now like a child because of all that I shall never have. I cry
over lost beauty and grandeur. I love everything that I should have
embraced.
Here they will pass again, day after day, year after year, all the
prisoners of rooms will pass with their kind of eternity. In the
twilight when everything fades, they will sit down near the light, in
the room full of haloes. They will drag themselves to the window's
void. Their mouths will join and they will grow tender. They will
exchange a first or a last useless glance. They will open their arms,
they will caress each other. They will love life and be afraid to
disappear. Here below they will seek a perfect union of hearts. Up
above they will seek everlastingness among the shades and a God in the
clouds.
. . . . .
The monotonous murmur of voices comes through the wall steadily, but I
do not catch what is being said. I am like anybody else in a room.
I am lost, just as I was the evening I came here when I took possession
of this room used by people who had disappeared and died--before this
great change of light took place in my destiny.
Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I
imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one
is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his
entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh,
gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it
would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus
because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of
the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of
living.
There is no mysterious fire. I have stolen the truth. I have stolen
the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure
things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right.
And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving
respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that
deceit and religious blasphemy employ.
. . . . .
Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple
Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our
doings, our goings, our original fall? Who will dare to tell
everything, who will have the genius to see everything?
I believe in a lofty form of poetry, in the work in which beauty will
be mingled with beliefs. The more incapable of it I feel myself, the
more I believe it to be possible. The sad splendour with which certain
memories of mine overwhelm me, shows me that it is possible. Sometimes
I myself have been sublime, I myself have been a masterpiece.
Sometimes my visions have been mingled with a thrill of evidence so
strong and so creative that the whole room has quivered with it like a
forest, and there have been moments, in truth, when the silence cried
out.
But I have stolen all this, and I have profited by it, thanks to the
shamelessness of the truth revealed. At the point in space in which,
by accident, I found myself, I had only to open my eyes and to stretch
out my mendicant hands to accomplish more than a dream, to accomplish
almost a work.
What I have seen is going to disappear, since I shall do nothing with
it. I am like a mother the fruit of whose womb will perish after it
has been born.
What matter? I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things
are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course,
the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again, will satisfy.
. . . . .
But I have finished. I am lying stretched out, and now that I have
ceased to see, my poor eyes close like a healing wound and a scar forms
over them.
And I seek assuagement for myself. I! The last cry, as it was the
first.
As for me, I have only one recourse, to remember and to believe. To
hold on with all my strength to the memory of the tragedy of the Room.
I believe that the only thing which confronts the heart and the reason
is the shadow of that which the heart and the reason cry for. I
believe that around us there is only one word, the immense word which
takes us out of our solitude, NOTHING. I believe that this does not
signify our nothingness or our misfortune, but, on the contrary, our
realisation and our deification, since everything is within us.
THE END