BOOK II

_BEING_

I

It is her eyes in particular. Ever since her eyes have made a part of my

life, I have known what nostalgia for Brittany means, and the infinite

mournfulness with which it permeates a human being.

She is like the rest of her race, short-legged, round, thick-set, and

her gestures conceal rather than reveal her hands. She talks in a

singsong and ends with a sigh. Her name is Marie, as though she were a

little nurse-maid of eighteen at thirty francs a month. Oh, it's not the

room she takes up. But for her blue-thistle gaze and the plaint of her

body, you'd scarcely know she was there.

* * * * *

Seven o'clock. I am already on the street with bent head, insensible to

the allurements of the shops, driven blindly on with cheeks inflamed by

the wind.

The great porte-cochere, the steps three at a time, two pulls at the

bell, long, breathless minutes; finally the door opens, cautiously.

Marie behind the door squeezes herself up on tiptoe against the wall to

let me pass.

It is almost a sacrilege to speak in a raised voice as I do and bring in

so much of the outside air. "Is dinner ready, Marie, is everything

ready?" Since Marie never answers, I go straight into the kitchen.

Goodness, nothing done. Well, I'll have to get at the supper myself.

There's still a good half-hour left, I believe.

As I hastily remove my wraps, I feel the dull pang that assails you at

the sight of disorder.

There, I have the water boiling now and the cooking is well under way. I

didn't know I was so quick and capable. After all, Marie's only a child.

Marie bustles about. I see her two reddish, porous, spatulate hands

pounce on things, I hear the clash of utensils. Her person becomes many

persons, she jostles me, moves hither and thither like a distracted

tortoise, bends almost double to pick up a strainer.... To be sure the

kitchen _is_ tiny.

I speak to her as one speaks to a child. "Do you understand me, Marie?

Don't be afraid, I am not unkind." The lifeless fixity of her face

suddenly comes undone, her features contract. Marie was dulled by the

monotonous gloom of an asylum in a distant quarter of the city. She

slightly raises the heavenly blue of her eyes without fastening them on

anything. I see her tenacious hatred wake up and stir. A single flash.

Then her red-rimmed eyes flutter and fall; she is in order again, in the

vague sort of order characteristic of things inaccessible and forlorn.

I realize she cannot understand me. To her I mean constraint, uprooting,

exile, that unusualness which throws simple people out of their orbits.

And though she has never been accustomed to anything else than

maltreatment, neglect, and beatings, I understand.... I try to be

gentler, to smile when I turn toward her, for in the end visible

kindness should make itself seen.... And it would be so good to reclaim

this nature, to explain everything to her, beginning at the beginning.

I recall the scene of yesterday evening. We were at table. She brought

in the smoking soup-tureen at arm's length. Her heavy tread rolled like

a cannon-ball upon our delight in being together, then she retreated to

the kitchen like a dog slinking to its kennel. A crash of china. I

jumped up.

"Something broken?"

"No, madam."

"But, Marie...."

"No, madam, no, madam...."

I was close beside her and this time looked deep into her eyes. I saw

the freckles on her white skin, and there emanated from her the amazing

innocence of an accused child. Her voice came from her palpitating

throat with a quiver in it.

"No, no, no."

Poor Marie. I felt remorseful. "I beg your pardon, Marie, we were

mistaken."

Nevertheless I didn't budge, as if I were at length going to learn why

one human being can be so terrorized by another.... She too stood

motionless. I did not notice that her attitude was rather peculiar. I

put my hand on her shoulders. "My little Marie...." At this she

staggered and trod heavily on breaking china. Her face was imploring....

Hidden under her bell-shaped Breton petticoat which touched the floor

lay my pretty gray china cup shivered to bits.

She behaved the way girls brought up by Sisters always do. She crouched

against the wall, her forehead hidden in the crook of her arm. Her bosom

as pinched as a wasp's went up and down precipitately, and the tears

began to flow.

I stopped gathering up the pieces to console her gently.

"It's not your fault, Marie ... come, don't cry, don't cry."

* * * * *

Marie close by is bending over the sink rubbing it with a brush round

and round always on the same spot. The water slaps on the tile floor and

squirts over my dress. Her movements have something eternal about them

and the appearance of never-ending complaint.

There is nothing to say. Whatever I do, she remains dumb, and the more I

try to reach her, the more she avoids me.

* * * * *

But what does Marie matter? I force myself to get back to my own

affairs. And quickly. _He_ will come in, there will be his gaiety, the

joy flashing in our voices, the day's doings to tell of, and our dear

union only a fortnight old....

Marie is there; nothing can efface her. My irritation against her boils

up, then turns against myself. It is not pity I feel but rather an

intolerable impotence. I hurl myself with all my force against the

eclipsed expression of the Breton girl, and each time it hurts.

Marie....

And I used to think that to love was to feel yourselves alone. On the

contrary, it is to feel yourself to be many.

No, no, love is not the emotion of two people. No, as soon as one feels

love one wants to love _everyone_, win over everyone, shine on everyone,

even on this ignorant head. What sin have I committed that a single

welcome should be denied me? She does not smile; that's my fault. What

is lacking in my love that I should face the vexation of a culpable

failure? My pity for Marie and my love for him are one, because I have

only one heart. And since my heart is repulsed, is it impure?

Marie has resumed her feeble, beaten-down existence. She has set aside

the brush, her blue eyes look beyond the walls, she wipes her wet hands

on her apron--her hostile hands, which are peculiarly hers.

What can one do? But there must be _something_ she believes in, there

must be something one can do to move her, there must be some word to say

to uncover the tomb of her heart.

I stopped. For a moment I left my work....

Where find the ultimate words of love, the final words--simple and

difficult--when one does not even know the word to make one poor

inferior Marie blossom out?

II

When I am old I shall warm myself at the rich shining vision of the

first days of my love. I shall hold out the dry sticks of my arms. I

shall beg for a little fire, a little sap. I shall return to the present

with feebly beating heart and faltering step.

Poor withered old woman, you do not remember; and others will bestow

upon you the charity of showing you a picture of lovers. You see us as

we, wife and husband, used to embrace, how I leapt to his side, how his

mouth clung to the fruits of my cheeks, and how we laughed a matchless

laughter. Well, that is enough for you, return to your winter, to the

virgin plain of your old age, to your years perched precipitously over

death.

Am I the first by any chance to hide the truth from you?

The truth of to-day has no brilliance or halo. My joy in being a young

bride is not at all what I used to fancy it would be.

The dominant motive of my life at present, its great preoccupation, is

by no means to invent new words of love. It is to give battle to the

existence that one buys--buys with pennies and infinite pains.

We are poor. As we each earn our own living, we have decided that I

shall manage the budget for both. It is my job to concoct the meals; and

they must be wholesome, pleasing to the eye, intelligently planned,

tasty. The house must be bright, beautiful, convenient, cozy, stamped

with an air of prosperity. Time has to be economized, a ceaseless

tyranny must be exercised over things, nothing may be neglected, order

must be adhered to slavishly, hygienic principles followed vigilantly.

And lastly, all these things, which are everything, must be accomplished

successfully, and so successfully that once caught and conquered they

will come easily.

If only I had the money with which to fare forth to battle, it might be

easy, but the sum at my disposal is about enough for a doll's budget.

You could hold it on the tip of a knife; it is inexorably minute.

Besides, girl that I am, I do not possess overly much of that courageous

ingenuity and imagination which go so far, nor of the determination

which clenches its fists and stares a sombre defiance.

Love? Why does one never foresee that there will be accounts and money

cares, so important and so tormenting, and at the very start? Why

doesn't one know that these things take precedence over love, over

everything in daily life?

You have to get up to do the marketing an hour earlier than you're used

to. You have to learn to sew because a new dress and the joy of

pleasing him are a wish of love, but also represent a sum of money.

At the time I did not know it, but it was an immense triumph that he was

comfortable and happy when he returned home. There was the delight his

surprise gave me when, with great pride, I produced some jolly-looking

fruit for dessert. And see--there was the modest glory of having been

able to buy the lovely flowers for his room with my own coppers.

As a girl I walked towards love anticipating fiery words, forceful

looks, and two solemn presences.... I used to say to myself: Love!...

And behold, by way of humble events and simple tasks I have found the

affirmation of love.

III

We were sleeping side by side, our breathing intermingled; and nothing

was sweeter than this nearness of our slumber.

He put out the lamp and stretched himself beside me, and we remained

like that, silent, drowned in sweetness and the night. It was a living

impression of repose.

Beside his close warmth a torpidity brooded, for the days were

exhausting, and while he raised himself slowly on his elbow to lull me

to sleep with his eyes, I broke away in spite of myself from the

beneficent clasp and fell asleep like a child.

But last night, although nearly midnight, sleep was slow in coming. He

kissed my lips. Suddenly a strange will broke in me.... What instinct

was I obeying?... Then a violent repulsion. I knitted my brows. Ah, I

detested him....

* * * * *

That night it was I who wide-eyed and curious watched him fall asleep.

IV

There was one second above all....

If I had had the time to think, I should have thought that this second

was worth the whole of life, the whole of death, and even more than

life.

V

The nights are links in a chain. Previously life consisted of day and

night; white, black; black, white. Since then life goes on unbrokenly.

VI

This morning when I caught a reflection of myself in the shop windows, I

noticed I had a strange air of authority, a self-assurance quite new and

indefinable, a manner crisper, more clear-cut. When I purchased my

provisions I had the courage to haggle, and the market-women treated me

as an equal.

My firmness and decisiveness have made Marie reveal the pale ocean of

her eyes. A distance seems to have been set between us.

VII

They point to us, just stopping short of using their index fingers, as

an example of a happy couple. They speak enviously of our great good

fortune as if we were bound on an adventurous voyage on which you embark

only once in your life.

What do their "young couple," their "happy pair" mean? Do people really

imagine that you arrive at happiness so quickly and easily, and that to

be sent off _together_ into the steep mountain country, life is in

itself enough to make you find the fulness of life?

Happy!... When everything tends to estrange you, the opposite natures of

man and woman, their conflicting interests, their very physical

attraction for each other. Happy! When you realize that two beings,

however close they may be, are forever divided. When, no matter how free

you are, marriage forces you to restrain and prostrate yourself. When,

apart from your joint life, you have your own career to pursue. And

when, after the day's work is accomplished, come the night's kisses as

if to undo the good of the day's work--behold the body, the blood, the

lips of love--and you change from friends into lovers again.

To be sure, there are occasionally moments of blinding delight, and it

is sweet to lean on a shoulder and have a second in the duel of life and

be with a man who smiles and takes you in his arms.

But to be happy! To feel that your measure is filled, that you are

yourself and him.... Man and woman are above all enemies; you feel it at

every turn. And yet you tell yourself that at the heart of some

inaccessible firmament there does exist a sublime harmony and it _must_

be attained, even if the road to it is superhuman and your strength

fails. And this harmony and this road must be taken afresh every day, if

ever one approaches them, for a human being changes from day to day.

I am already somewhat stronger and simpler, and somewhat appeased, but

still we are not "happy" as yet.

VIII

It is true; she was sincere....

While talking she cast off her enormous furs and fiddled with her rings

in the unconscious wish to remove them. Her restless head was set high

on a neck encircled by pearls. Minus the litter of ornaments she would

have tempted you to hold your hand out to her.

The landscape, swallowed up in long gulps by the window of the

railway-coach, had a sombre fascination for her, because it was moving

almost as fast as her pain. You saw her shoulders gradually shrink

together and slowly draw down the beautiful column of flesh supporting

her head. Then you saw them raised helplessly to ask the eternal

question, "What shall I do?" And then you saw them in the characteristic

gesture of all sufferers--thrown back as if to toss off the pack of

unhappiness loaded on her back.

Her story burst and rose in precipitate bubbles. Her voice, at moments,

broke. The woman at her side remained perfectly calm, walled up in the

dull indifference accompanying the forties. At the jolting of the train

she merely shook her head--was she listening?--and turned toward the

flying window where her own story was passing.

Darkness would soon be falling. So I had an excuse for going to sleep,

and as soon as I shut my eyes the young woman took up her tale of woe

anew, twice, three times, ten times. The whole of her misery escaped

from under a mask of restraint.

"And listen, the other day...."

Did I need to hear what she was going to say?

At the end of one sentence I caught "my little girls." I could see her

little daughters--exactly alike, well-behaved, in airy frocks, two heads

with long, elastic curls, a twin step in walking--the sort of children

who are their parents all over again and invariably provoke the

question, "Whom does she look like--her father or her mother?" as if

you have to search into a child's origin.

I could see her husband too. Haven't all these women the same way of

saying "my husband"? I could see him short, bustling, jovial--really not

a bad sort--and with a chubby face, the only kind I could possibly match

up with the young woman's insipid face. Though she said nothing of a

garden, I imagined a very strait-laced one with rectilinear,

timidly-flowering walks, the sort of garden that is not cherished with

love. And I also saw the family in their home, a substantial white-stone

ornate building. I raised my eyes furtively. I must have got a poor view

of her when she came in an hour ago. Now she looked pretty. Her features

were regular, her color had heightened, her quivering mouth showed her

lips to the fullest, and her distressed hand, pushing back her hair,

disclosed a brow eloquent, smooth and flawless as ivory. Certain women

derive their entire beauty from the pathetic. She was one of them.

Her eyes turned from the scenery; I lowered my lids.

"He doesn't understand me any more ... it's all over ... I am nothing to

him ... still ... a love match...."

The scraps of her plaint were borne off by the wind, the engine snorted

more vigorously, and the last remnants went down with me in the roar of

a far-off, formidable lullaby.

I soon awoke. Still bemoaning her lot, with the same phrase, it seemed

to me, always at the same point. She went on with such bitter

persistence that in the end you couldn't help learning her story by

heart. I did at any rate. The two women kept looking at each

other--shadowy vis-a-vis--the younger one far from the other, far from

us, far from everything, rooted in her life, in her square garden, in

her thirty years. It was as if she were talking aloud for the first

time.

I listened. Each detail revealed a year, a corner of the house, an

important event. I felt a dull rage fermenting in me instead of the

timidity and compunction one usually experiences in trespassing upon

another's inmost recesses.

Why? Perhaps because I, a stranger, had not the power to interpose and

hold the secret of this trouble so as to remedy it.

Ah, I no longer need to listen nor need to know the man in order to feel

that he is right to lose himself in his business and be merely a good

father who sees in his wife nothing but the mother of his children and

shrugs his shoulders when she heaves with sighs.

The evening air was blowing in cooler through the upper half of the

window. We were entering a plain where the green of the meadows was

deepening into mauve. Two rows of trees, which had been a profile

against the sky when seen from afar, turned into a black curtain

suddenly drawn. Here and there houses stood out as though groping in the

dark--faces blotted out as soon as arisen--one field swallowed up the

next; the ragged line of a hedge came and went; an embankment followed,

its slope daubed with brown, unwholesome stains, its top dressed with

tufted grass and straggling bushes, which moved their arms like signals.

The young woman's brows were drawn. She was questioning the obscure

flickering stretch of space. I read the questions in her face: Why does

he merely graze her forehead when he comes back in the evening? Why does

he keep her out of everything? Why does he never feast on her presence

or heed her advice? How did he love her? She had been right a short

while before when she had said bitterly: "A little less than a

prostitute, a little more than a servant."

The woman was certainly suffering and calling upon a God who could not

answer. At night when the close jealous house is asleep, she undoubtedly

falls to her knees in secret and wrings her barren hands and invokes

misery, love, grief, as if the sacred words were for the whole world.

Thou, God whom she implores, Thou knowest well the reason of her

trouble, a simple reason, brutal, elementary. Why dost Thou let her hunt

for others?

I threw myself back because I both wanted and feared that my face might

betray me.

The Midi was beginning, the first olive trees were rounding off the

landscape, the night sky was already smiling in the rosy light of dawn.

* * * * *

In our times no woman has the right to live under the shelter of a

man's labor. The woman who dares to accept such shelter should abdicate

and commit her dignity to the hands that are productive. She should

consent to her dethronement and take the condescending love that is fed

to the weaker without complaining.

Men begin--the women know it well--by adoring this weakness. "My wife,"

that piece of fragility, those useless days, those little arms which

don't know how to do anything, the jewels he brings home, the great

astonished eyes, the mincing steps, everything that is touching and

contrasts with the struggle of his existence. Then he comes to extract

pride from this relation. "It is I who protect, sustain, feed her. It is

I...." He mounts a few steps higher and sees her a little lower,

incapable, infantile, unequal to battle, unequal to his power. Each day

inevitably finds them a little farther apart, and she in approaching him

is bound to raise her eyes while he condescends. If his love lasts it

takes the very form of contempt, though neither is conscious of it.

Which is just and proper.

A woman supported by her husband has no right to protest. If she is not

_earning_ her living, she should have some work to do, should use her

arms, her idle strength, her health. Merely bringing children into the

world is not enough.

The fat lady starts up from her entrenchment of cushions. "We are almost

there. We must get ready."

Bags pulled open emit the animal odor of leather and give out nickel

glints as they are snapped shut again. Then the fire of the rings

disappears under the gloves. "We are there!" They are now quite free to

stare at me.

What a metamorphosis. She has resumed her former appearance of a lady.

She is scarcely pretty. In the glimmer of the night-lamp she seems

sharp-featured and masked by a ghastly pallor, as if the generous sun

had abjured her forever.

Each turn of the wheels brings us closer to the town. The young woman

drawing herself up reassumes her manner of a somebody. She is back in

her setting, already less unhappy because she is nearer her unhappiness.

She pulls out her watch. Five minutes still. Time enough to lean on

one's elbow and think sad thoughts pro tem, which come running like a

docile flock.

I put my hand up to my forehead to prevent her searching my eyes for the

fountain of compassion denied her. There is no compassion for her in me,

neither is there in the opal-tinted meadows, nor under the sapphire of

the sky. To find compassion she would have to reconstruct her life from

top to bottom. A fate such as hers lies outside the fate of humanity;

suffering such as hers is beside and apart from the suffering of

humanity. I say her fate has not made her suffer enough yet and the

woman does not deserve to live.

A woman who does nothing is fallen in the sight of love.

He and I are going to the country on our holiday. I have been thirsty

for its freshness....

The carriage is empty now. You feel the double pulse of the train as it

rolls between two slopes spitting out rings of smoke, pursued, you'd

think, by its own speed, travelling on, on, on....

IX

We've been here a week.

Strange days, without axis or prop or stay, passed as if outside of

something, as if you had been asked to step up to a door but not invited

inside. Nature is not easy to reach and penetrate.

We had longed to live in this spot conceiving it beforehand as an oasis

set in dew. And here it is under our feet with its earth which smells

good and its breezes which tinge our cheeks. For all our ardor and

assiduity nature preserves her mystery; she is an unresponsive mother

insensible to the clamor of her children. When we draw near, she stops

talking and either drops a veil or retires completely into seclusion.

"You would like to assay my movements, cull the delicate scent of the

grass blade by blade, meditate like this tree, follow the steps of the

peasants who are my only kith and kin, be a wave in space, unravel the

relations of things, and delude yourselves with my warmth. That is what

everybody wants. May your wish recoil on you. Do not try to reach me.

Do not turn your heads in my direction. Let the thrills and tremors of

your feelings pass between yourselves. I know you not."

In order to arrive at a mutual understanding with nature, one

undoubtedly must have more of the heart of a recluse, a body more

inclined earthward, a face of greater taciturnity. We are intruders.

It is only in the evening that you blend and fall into harmony with

everything. Night awaits you--you see--below the horizon, and we set out

to meet it.

We take each other's arms, I feel my joy preparing; he smiles at the

care I take to prevent his catching cold, and off we go, arm in arm,

tramping to the tune of a sounding tread like two comrades who once were

schoolmates.

The little nestling village lies far behind; at a gulp the turn in the

road swallows up the last hut. The landscape ahead is still variegated,

but as it draws gently nearer the colors wane, the ground flattens, the

features relax as in a face after a smile.

Silence.... Twilight within us is falling also. To admit it we watch the

surrounding dusk with swelling chests and quivering nostrils.

On the rising ground opposite a yellow point is kindled, another and

another, performing an unconscious duty--to usher in the night. And

night is now here. Close by, in the fields, she has already drowned the

olive-trees, which have no compact mass to offer in resistance, scarcely

even any outlines, defenseless, except for their hundred-year-old

trunks. Their life is a thing of quivering, silvery breezes, and when

the darkness comes slinking and whispering, a breath will lull their

gray-lined brows to sleep.

Along the embankment on either side of the road, trees--you can't tell

what sort of trees any more--make great human gestures, as if to give

warning of a drama about to begin. Instinctively we quicken our pace and

draw closer together. The rich blood runs lively in our veins. We share

a fleeting warmth.

And now noises spring up, noises that belong to night alone and are a

part of its peacefulness; mournful bayings, which echo throws back

faithfully from yon slope; the croaking of the frogs, which blight the

heart of the atmosphere; a human call now and then, direct and piercing,

and from the ground the metallic chirping of the crickets.

How at ease you feel, full of loving-kindness, and how sincere you are.

You have sins lurking in your flesh, crimes piled up in your brain, a

sombre mood inhabiting your heart. Everything can be confessed and laid

bare. The night is all-comprehending. Night-time is different from the

stiffly starched daytime with its color and form to distract man from

his intimate verity. You can venture upon the wildest thoughts, expand

to your uttermost limits, forget your own existence, and discard all

past gestures. They were all inadequate. You don't want to retain any of

them except the gesture you would make here--spread your arms while

walking and hold your hands open like two pure, empty chalices.

Complete blackness now. You can no longer distinguish between silence

and space, fear and the rustling; all things are merged in each other,

trees with trees, their masses with the slope, and the slope, deprived

of its contours, with the sky, which has come down to join the earth.

Everything is blended, obliterated. The very cypresses, during the

daytime a spear thrust at the azure, are also added to the darkness.

Beneath our eyes, tired from not seeing anything, the road kindly

extends its vaporous pallor. Except for the road no line to arrest the

impulse within, no perspective. The only clear things, our own figures.

We have never before entered such solitude together, nor ever before

been laid so bare to each other. It makes us walk slowly and solemnly,

as if we were passing beneath the eye of God.

* * * * *

The idea of us as a couple. We. We two.

Must an idea, then, remain implanted in the hearts of human beings in

order to keep them upright? If I did not feel the pulsing of my love

constraining me to live, the night, with no reason to respect my spirit,

would stretch me out, I fancy, on any chance slope beneath the large

serenity.

But I am upheld. Every intake of fresh air gives a new thrill and a

youthful vigor to the idea in my heart, and I feel it mounting so

swiftly that I must run to keep up with it. So as to hold it fast for

my protection I rake together my loveliest recollections. Are my

loveliest recollections those of our nights in each other's arms, our

kisses, the storm that beat against our bodies?... No, they are not. As

I raise my eyes to where the firmament should be--if it still exists--I

find the blessed peacefulness which comes from his presence. The

sentiment that grips my heart when I feel myself taking part in his life

is lofty. It has something in it of respect, and trust, and pity; it is

hard to say just what. It spurs me to action, even to boldness, and it

raises around me a strong wall in which I am secure.

This is not a recollection; it is a bit of the future, and the future

alone is what you discover as you go forward into the infinite. At one

bound you mount to the summits of love. Love is the future magnetized by

the heart.

* * * * *

He is there. His profile is massive in outline. He towers over the

sunken country, the clods crunch beneath his feet. I walk close beside

him. I ask for nothing. Maybe my only wish is that my footsteps should

make less noise and my shoulders take up less room.

But I have another wish. I know what it is. Although I love him with my

whole heart, I want to love him more. One does not attain to love once

for all; the heart can never be filled to the full. How far shall we go?

I can go on and on without stopping and outdistance the sources of the

night; my youth is inexhaustible, my feet will never weary. I want to

love him _more_.

Space heaves a deeper breath. She is traversed by currents, scoops of

darkness, aromatic whiffs. The perfume sweetens the lips; flowers must

be dotting this hedge. And suddenly space goes mad. A black wind swirls

down from the tree-tops and fills the nocturnal expanse with the

creaking of branches.

* * * * *

Must we stop at the greatest moment, at the point where the road looks

supernatural, as though it possessed a density of its own and were

suspended in space?... I should have liked to walk further; one never

goes far enough. Must we really return to the stolid lamp and babbling

kisses?

* * * * *

Not immediately. Let us prolong this great sombre moment. Let us stay

here where even time might come to a standstill. The trees droop lower

here, and in these tranquil meadows the spirit may play hide-and-seek.

* * * * *

It is really unhappiness that makes you stop. I return from the night;

all I bring back is this strangled throat, a body like a tortoise-shell

covering a silent heart and blinded eyes.

If I emerge from myself, disconsolateness everywhere, spread all over

the world. The sleeping desert....

He is close beside me, but since he lives, he can do nothing for me. I

can do nothing for him. I used to think that in loving him I crowned

him. Love is not enough. This evening I saw his life rise from the

ground, distinct from love, _outside_ of mine; I saw his life, bared to

all the winds, isolated from everything, raise and satisfy itself. I see

that this is right.

His life is complete in itself, unique and important; his life is not

merely the image that inspires me, the voice that I evoke, the face I

love dearly. His life is an insuperable force, vivid, inviolable and

free, which my heart out of sheer love of him failed to recognize. I was

right a few minutes ago to want to blot myself out, because I ought not

to count. Beyond my limited, restricted presence, he has the whole of

infinity to breathe in.

Then where are the nights which are to enlighten me? Of him I know

nothing but my love, nothing except that by his very existence he

contradicts what I know of him. Who will tell me how far I must go and

to what I must attain? I have slept in his arms, I have lived side by

side with all his cares, and I have given myself up to him with a joy

like unto which there is nothing. All I have given is myself. And yet

more is necessary.

* * * * *

And a great conviction rises up straight and strong and shines as if a

light had sprung from the midst of the meadows.

I am only a woman, I can think only spasmodically. I love as one weeps,

but there comes a day of which this is the night, on which your forehead

touches the profound truth. You feel the loving-kindness of your heart

aroused, and you oddly understand that the perfect union of man and

woman has never been part of the natural scheme of things, and in order

to be happy together it is not enough to love one another.

* * * * *

Come. We may return. Press me close to you, if you will, closer still.

Don't let us talk.

I know why I am content: your arms, my all-powerful life, our firm

footsteps. I do not know why the slight shadow seems to have vanished:

to live, go forward, pierce the narrow track of the road with your clear

eyes for stars, follow a night one does not see....

And then, O God, in braving the heavens, to understand with love that

which transcends love.

X

I hesitate to go out on the street. I feel that people's eyes are drawn

to my figure. There's no use fooling myself. The little girls actually

point to me with furtive, vinegary glances, for they are more

ingenuously hypocritical than women. Their insistent gaze embarrasses

me.

Two long months to wait before the first cry of my child! If only I

carried nothing beside my child. I feel also an imprisoned love

developing which beats at the bars of its cage and chafes so that I

don't know how to distract it.

The layette is quite ready; swaddling-bands warm to the touch, chemises

like a doll's, caps which will never be of use; the equipment of a

marionette; linen as soft as lint, bibs round and puffy as cockades. I

have spread everything out in front of me, and each article as it passes

through my hands assumes a shadowy lifelikeness.

Two months before I shall really know whether I am to be like other

mothers, a brooding hen, with folded wings and in-turned heart,

passionate for my own children, cattish and carping in my attitude

toward other children. Two months before I shall know the secret force

of that wild love which, they say, springs up all at once.

I am being initiated however. The other women give me a hearty welcome;

they make the impression of crowding together to make room for me. A

real sisterhood? Or the imperceptible joy of seeing a rival temporarily

diminished? Under their escort I enter into the forbidden arcana. "What

do you feel? _I_----" They make me a target for their reminiscences.

Each shamelessly outdoes the other. From the quantity and finished

preciseness of the details narrated I infer that the story has been oft

told. The least loquacious are the mothers who "have had a lot of them."

These have nothing left but a vast, frequently refreshed memory in which

their life merges in a blur with the life they have so many times

carried beneath their hearts.

Which of them am I to believe? Many have broached the subject to me,

many have discussed it, none has told me the secret of being a mother,

the word that would reveal, the sign, flashing and disappearing, by

which the treasure awaiting me would shine from afar, which would _make

me understand_. I have heard them bemoan the misery of the months before

childbirth and the sufferings of childbirth itself. I have heard them

boast, with the reverence of fetich-worship, of the care they gave their

little ones. But here their maternity stops. I still do not know. I have

two months to wait.

I plunge my fingers into the milky mass of the little garments. "Do

you," I say to my husband, "see the head of your child underneath this

hood? Let us try to imagine...."

He smiles without answering, shaken in his flesh, so lucid and so well

prepared for his approaching fatherhood that I feel myself a hundred

leagues behind. He, at least, knows why he will love his child, why he

already loves it.

As for me, my vision is obscured by the disconcerting pictures drawn by

the other women. Perhaps also I am under the ancestral pressure exerted

by the long line of my foremothers. Why should I be different? What

quality would make me better?

The animal heaviness reasserts its rights. My body is an unwieldy sheath

overspread with sleepiness, ramified by thick blood, its cells given

over to contented, torpid well-being. My very heart is struck with

stupor.

To lie at full length, on my bed beneath the weight of my breasts of

rock, no longer to move or think, only to feel at momentary intervals a

light stirring, a caress, which gently turns on its self and folds its

wings.

XI

I scarcely dare to get up. She knew me in my slenderness of the previous

summer, when I took the torrid paths like a goat leaping dangerous

mountain tracks. It was from my brisk manner of ready, go! she told me,

that she could tell how warm our love was.

We were living in the same inn. The very first day I was struck by the

blooming youthfulness of this woman who so skilfully escaped the burden

of the forties and constantly trailed a lover, a lover with a vindictive

eye and bullish neck and forehead. Perhaps on close inspection you might

suspect the fine tracery of wrinkles on her transparent skin.

Nevertheless she shone resplendent as we younger women don't know how to

shine.

Black on white, a head surcharged with mystery and night, two jewels,

no, two green pools, a mouth that revealed the shape of a kiss better

than other mouths, a figure not very tall but with a race and suppleness

which lent dignity. Clothes planned to reveal the curves of her body.

Movements kindling I know not what lights. Woman, in short, with all a

woman has in her of the venomous and the childlike.

We sat directly opposite each other at table. The charm of her vivid

smile, glowing face, and darting movements turned the frugal meal for me

into a riotous feast.

One morning as I was starting out on a walk by myself for nowhere in

particular she came up to me in an easy spontaneous way, as if there

really did exist a sisterhood among women. Part of her loveliness was a

deep, maternal voice; in crystal tones she plunged into a surprising

eulogy of the relationship between my husband and me. She had noticed

us. How perfectly united we must be! "Married? Absurd!" She pouted. But

we had such a way of locking arms, and looking and waiting for each

other, also such a....

She went on talking and talking. I was rather bewildered.... Was it

really _us_ she was describing--sombre with passion, eagerly relishing a

concord that was pregnant with storms which might break suddenly from a

clear sky? Wasn't it more like her own love? I was at a loss how to

answer. Still I could not recognize ourselves. She clutched me and

laughingly declared I was a little savage, and my being a little savage

pleased her.

We came to where the country takes a sudden dip, so that to be visible

to the heavens it has to cling to the bronzed trunks of the

half-stripped cork-trees. We went on breasting the wind. I knitted my

brows. Everything she said breathed, at least to me, another age or

another sphere; it all hinged on love, was dedicated to love, and by

that very fact created a distance between us. I saw her cramped and

confined by the very thing that gave her so much vitality; I saw it was

her crucifixion. She was nothing but the instinct for love restricted to

the need of man. Nevertheless she attracted me.

We got to know each other better. She astonished me more and more.

Whether she and her lover carried on a squally conversation on the bench

in the hall or whether she wandered along the narrow, brambly paths in a

sort of ferocious abandon, or whether she came to me and threw her

thorny crown at my feet with a radiant gesture, she was Woman as men

have described her, as they have wanted her. She was the ancient bearer

of a fatal property, the creature who either subdues her opponent or is

subdued by him, and knows nothing else; the sorry creature of tears and

fascinations....

She never spoke of her life or of herself. We were two women, our lot

therefore was the same, she was in love, I was in love. What else need

one want?

"Good-bye for the present," she cried as the cart set off down the road

at a snail's pace. She stood with her head inclined tenderly sidewise

and her floating veil prolonging the farewell.... There was a bend in

the road. I thought that was to be my last view of her.

But a little while ago as I was going to lie down, an imperious ring

tore the silence. Actually she, her smile, her veil, her dress a tangle

of silver.

"What a pretty little nest! How comfortable you must be! Well, well.

Still happy?"

And then--there!--her laugh with a little savagery in it. She notices

that I am expecting a baby. "Well, of all things!" She throws her gloves

into the air, seats herself, gets up again, and from her hectic

restlessness I infer that she feels defrauded. My home is too cozy and

my manner too tranquil. Not, of course, that she wants to find me in

misfortune, but it's as though I have passed over into an enemy's camp.

She has come because she is in trouble. I do my best. I hold her hands

in mine and try to trace the ravages of grief on her faun face because

she keeps saying: "I'm so miserable." She must be suffering. But I

cannot get myself to be moved.

This is her story. Her lover has betrayed her, she is sure of it. In

tidying his drawers she found letters from a woman referring to a recent

rendezvous. She thought she'd die when she read them.... Still I am

unmoved. She warms up to her theme. At breakfast, then and there, a

terrible scene; they fly at each other.... Disgust seizes me.... To show

my interest and stimulate my pity, I ask some questions. "So you had an

explanation and could come to an understanding?" She snatches her hands

away and draws back. "Aren't you listening?"

To come to an understanding! That would be too easy. They rushed at each

other at the first pretext, each resorting to shifts and dodges and

keeping silent as to the real issue, though recognizing the other's

grievance. "He beat me."

She closes her beautiful victimized eyes. She has displayed the seven

wounds of her heart; and the least she expects is the shelter of my

breast and the succor of my arms....

"But it would be so simple to tell each other the truth and try to

understand each other...."

She keeps her flexible panther-like body from bounding up. "The truth!

what truth? Do you think love is so simple? He has deceived me. That's

the only truth I need to know." She gives herself up to tears, and her

clear eyes turn into two bloodshot orbs.

Should I tell her that I am insensible to such despair, and her love is

merely a mistake proceeding from books, it really isn't love? Should I

tell her that love is logical and simple at bottom, and is less in its

transports than in the gentleness it conveys? Should I tell her that men

like change more than women and for a man to snatch at a passing

temptation does not mean that he is trying to reach the love he prefers?

Should I?

She anticipates me. "I understand, I understand, you are not in love.

Poor little thing, you'll see when you love!" She sends her prophetic

look around the orderly room and the, to her, inconceivable quiet. What

polite excuse can she find for getting away quickly? She came a long way

to meet a real sister in love. We ought to have groaned together over

the common enemy who is also the common God; then she would have

departed in her honorable failure aided and reinforced for the eternal

contest.

Shall I let her leave like this? I have been able to secure a serenity

which she does not surmise; it would be a charity to beg her to try to

secure the same serenity. This woman ... I shall say to her: "A beloved

is neither a God nor an enemy, he is a friend you must discover in spite

of passion. I know it's hard and needs an iron will and devotion, but I

swear one succeeds...."

* * * * *

She raises the window-shade. Her face stands out--is it the

same?--marred by the light.

The borders of her green eyes show the streaky after-effects of tears,

her cheeks are lined, her lips have lost their blood and youthful red,

the two tendons of her lovely marble neck twitch, and the cherished body

in its holiday attire collapses like a broken toy.

I approach her, holding out in my comradely arms the new spirit that

will blossom on the new earth. I am not the only one; other young women

would speak as I do. The love by which we live is not like the love the

others die of.

* * * * *

But when I come close to her she steps into the full light ... I give up

the idea of explaining myself. There is nothing to say. She is twenty

years older than we are.

XII

I have the feeling that I am not prepared; it is a sort of

embarrassment, an obscure terror, and when I get myself to say so to the

other women, they laugh and hush me up. "Don't worry. The knowledge

comes of itself. Just being a mother teaches you how to raise a child."

It was by chance that I came to this street. I was walking along. The

hospital. A dull flat smell surrounded the sordid building with a

leprous haze. The doorway was swallowing up a long line of women from

off the gray canyon of the street. I do not know what struck me--I

retraced my steps and followed the women in.

We were made to wait in a room heavy with a brew of musty drug smells.

Someone shut the door, and immediately there broke out a fearful hubbub,

a concert of human meowings, bawls, pipings. A panic nearly seized me.

With the dull patience of animals penned in together the women formed

into groups and filled out blank forms, rocking and bobbing the light

fragile bundles they each carried in their arms.

I went up to one of them, leaned over and looked upon the crumpled patch

of a little old red face. Then I realized I had come there to occupy

myself in my period of expectancy and catch a glimpse of my child in

advance.

The woman's face was bloodless, like the face of a drowned corpse, and

fanned by long colorless locks limp as seaweed. Seeing the supplication

in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a

benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is

its age.

The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin

and stretched itself, opened two rather glassy eyes encircled by mauve,

and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered

with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier

out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy

gurgle. "Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she

declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No

use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good

out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine

words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"

"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a

triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in

button-hole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us.

What do you say to that, eh?"

A group gathered. "What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature

with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine

veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh

covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath. "Oh, only this."

The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her

darling on her knees. "My daughter's," she explained to the circle

around her. "Her third. Maybe you think she hasn't got something to

worry about--three babies and working in a factory. Babies--I know a

thing or two about babies. I've had eleven." There was a general stir of

compassion followed by protests. "I have two left." She danced the mite

on her knee. Her tower of a body swayed back and forth, through her

half-open jacket you could divine her dead breasts. There was something

weird and horrible in the dismal accustomedness of her knees.

"The doctors make you fuss such a lot. You give the babies too much, and

you don't give 'em enough, and you don't bathe 'em, and you don't weigh

'em. There wasn't such a lot of talk in my time, but they grew up all

the same. I said to my daughter, 'Look here, you let me alone, either I

know what to do or I don't know what to do.' I used to give mine

toast-water, that was all." She tucked up the lank pads of hair clinging

to either side of her face. "You boil two or three crusts of bread...."

"Oh, I know," interrupted the woman with the drowned-corpse face.

"Mine has bronchitis," went on the ogress. "I wonder where he caught it.

He never goes out and he sleeps close to the stove. I am going to try

and see if I can't get a bottle of syrup...."

The folding-doors opened, a white-clad nurse made a sign, and all rose,

each with the same enamored hugging-to-her of her wailing burden.

The crowd poured into an immense, well-heated room paved with white

flag-stones and painted white. The light beat down hard through a row of

bay-windows. At the far end presided a handsome old man in a white

smock, an immaculate nurse at his side. "The doctor!" whispered the

women in a tone of awed hostility. The man did indeed seem indifferent

and just as God should be.

Spread out symmetrically on the bare table in front of him among other

instruments was a complete apparatus of justice, bright and

glittering--a set of scales with a basket and a row of copper weights

drawing clamorous notes from the straggling music of the sunshine.

With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes,

turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she

stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A

suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh

arose amid the cries.

The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their

children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous,

skulking faith of believers approaching God.

From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I

might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish

crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like

a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ...

a baby with a back all covered with boils....

"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm."

"He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I

don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know."

The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him,

handled the little body, remained impassive while pronouncing his rapid

decision, and took up the next case.

Among the lethargic flock who went away with bowed heads, some, to rally

their spirits, mumbled the flesh of their babies with fierce kisses as

if to take revenge and show that this man after all had done them

harm....

* * * * *

I got up, dragging my double weight.

So this is the maternal infatuation which is so sanctified and revered.

"I don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know." And I presumptuously was

going to commit the same folly, I, who knew no better than they, who had

not learned the unknown love awaiting me....

Why doesn't that man, the doctor, who _knows_, arise and snatch away

these lives contaminated by the fond ignorance of the mothers, and

proclaim that the instinct is fallible, fatal, even criminal?

* * * * *

Most of the women met me again under the porte-cochere, because I walked

with difficulty. The one with the drowned-corpse face gave me a friendly

little nod.

"You will see," her nod said, "it will soon be your turn...."

Yes, I know.... To be a mother.... In return for the gift of life, to

have the right of death over one's child. And to use that right.

XIII

A rending, moments repeated incessantly, torture indescribable, pain

embedded in the body, battle, cruel cries....

I remember everything and every second. I remember the seconds when I

gnawed at my bedclothes, when I howled like a wild beast. I remember all

of them and others. I remember that none of them was ever the last, how

the hours added themselves to the seconds in an excruciating, inhuman

succession of throes in which my whole being set furiously upon itself,

how I no longer had the strength to suffer.

I twisted my head from side to side like a dying animal in entreaty; I

stifled it in the pillows; it was wet with perspiration; I felt a new

convulsion begin and break like a wave. And when an infernal force tore

me with a pang greater than all the others, I heard vaguely a cry that

was no longer mine, a film passed over my pupils, I sank into an abyss

sunlit and sultry. It was over ... it was over ... I fell asleep.

* * * * *

Did I remain in that state of lethargy and inertia for long? When I

opened my eyes the whiteness and blankness of the walls of my room

seemed to be released by a spring. About me was a startling silence

peopled with sibilant whispers. I saw women stooping, then disappearing

with their arms full of linen.

* * * * *

My baby! My baby!

His father, exultant, held him out to me. I became fully conscious. But

goodness, how ugly he was! The shrivelled face of an old woman, the

profile of a vulture, a forehead covered with plushy mucosities, cheeks

smeared as with the yolk of an egg, hands on the outside exactly like a

bird's and on the inside creased and red. And real nails!

At the fontanelle the pulse beneath the skin throbbed terrifyingly, and

the fuzz on his skull was skimpier than pin-feathers on a fledgling.

I took him in my arms, stiff and long in his swaddling-clothes. His eyes

opened half way and showed a glassy violet with milky gleams.

Our child? We both in turn dropped timid solemn kisses on his downy

cheeks made of a sweet smell, and I dared not say anything.

* * * * *

Well?... The call of the blood, the rejoicing of the flesh, the issue of

love, the instinct, the lurid mother-instinct at last?

No!

XIV

I should like to hold these things fast, for always.

I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present

form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully

preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of

the heart he gave me.

This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self

for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to

understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a

mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free

from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.

My little boy is near me, awkwardly assaying his first steps in the

garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank

him.

It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart:

the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible

arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the

petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of

mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which

is unique only to me.

I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay

hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my

organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a

joy or a pain. I no longer remember this.

I am in a hurry for him to grow up and be able to listen; I should like

to talk to him. I have found words for the others, though they awoke in

me only an uncertain love and set my heart in chaos. He has given me an

intelligible emotion, and to him I have said nothing.

I love him as I love no one, because he is the sole human being for whom

I am _responsible_. My love is responsibility first and foremost. If he

bends over, I suppress a cry; if the sun shines too strong on him, I

shield him with my body; if he makes a new gesture, a slight disquiet

flits through me. In whatever concerns him danger seems to lurk. He is a

lively, approachable child, people like him, and when they come up and

speak to him, I smile a pleasant, natural smile, though his life and his

death keep up an incessant sport within me and incessantly it devolves

upon me to secure his life. It is a tragic stake, a terribly cruel

problem; it is the entire basis of mother-love.

* * * * *

He has run as far as the ivy thicket, thirty yards from my chair. I

tremble so that I have to get up and leave my work. Every now and then

he comes tottering to present me with a shaving of wood fished up from

the sand he plays in, a big earth-coated pebble, treasure-troves of all

sorts. "Look, mother." His attention flatters me.

If I were to disappear without leaving anything?... Without leaving a

will? Or suppose that from beyond the tomb I were to say: "Before you

took your first steps your life was all arranged. In order that you

should be happy I kept you from having dignity or a sense of justice. No

need for you to undergo the bitter struggle that presses upon a man, the

primordial cares of existence, honesty--honor, in short. Are you not my

child? If I have taken trouble and pains it was to deprive human beings

all for your sake. You will be exempted from earning your bread and

pursuing an occupation. You will depend upon the labor of others, you

will be under the delusion that you are distinguished from those upon

whom you depend. That is the end to which my efforts will have served."

But this is wrong, unwholesome, dishonorable.

* * * * *

When he is grown up into a tall young man whom people take notice of,

shall I have the courage to look him in the face and say:

"You are not everything to me: you never have been my whole passion. I

have cherished you on my knees, I have served you, I have idolized you.

I have never deceived myself. I knew perfectly that in loving a child

one gives without ever receiving. I have reserved the highest place for

others. It is not to you that I have dedicated the essential thing in my

life, its supreme reason, if a supreme reason can be found.

"Therefore you have the right to leave me. You must be finer, you must

repudiate me. I bow before what you are. I free you from the duty in

which children are cooped up, and I assume the duty myself. Whatever I

may have done, never let my course of life be an example to you; there

is no example; you, nothing but you, is what will count.

"You will have so much to do, everything I have failed to do. Go, keep

your face set forward, never turn back. What were you born for if not to

depart from me? To be sure, you are flesh of my flesh, but a part of my

flesh that is unlike me, a contrary current that has emanated from

me.... You say no to everything I am.

"Does it hurt me to see you disappear? Am I alarmed? Do I suffer? That

does not concern you. _I was forewarned_. On the day you were born I was

told that the tearing-away process would last as long as I last. We

leave each other each minute. Your head mounts upward towards the

heavens, mine draws closer to the earth.

"It is right and proper that this should be so. Without you, you know,

my existence would be justified. It was not merely to bring you into the

world that I was born. The thing is that your existence should be

justified.... No, do not delay. Life is nothing but a departure and

every time one halts one commits treason.

"I shall have to come to understand many things, thanks to you. I have

always tried to be clear and know myself, but when I went to the bottom

of things, I mean to the bottom of myself, there always remained

_another_ soul, a rebellious soul which refused to reveal its mystery,

and I have doubted whether it is humanly possible to learn the truth of

it.

"I was not mistaken. The real, unknown part of myself, my unreachable

soul, is in your eyes. You will see through what I have got no knowledge

of. If you beheld how I look at you! You are like the travellers who

come from afar, from the lands of fable concealed under lovely names of

gold. You resemble those travellers. Your eyes will see beyond the

horizon in which I go astray. I tell you that of the two of us the one

who ought to kneel, listen, and learn is not you.

"My little baby, I shall owe to you the sole love that is sorrowful and

perfect, the love that neither barters nor expects reward. Since I have

given everything, you will owe me nothing."

* * * * *

Shall I have the courage to say this to him? It will be hard perhaps,

but already I find that it is a veritable grace from heaven to have

twenty years in which to attain to such courage.

* * * * *

Here he is coming back, running this time and brandishing in his plump

hand a twig he has broken off all by himself. He drops plump on his

knees as on two round balls, all hampered in his clumsy race to me. His

chubby cheeks are stained with crimson. He throws himself on me.

"Mother," he lisps, the little flatterer....

The mournful moment of a kiss, the exasperating moment of an abortive

embrace, the fleeting moment of contact--he is gone.

XV

The test has been made.

We have lived side by side in the heart of the country, we have done the

humble things of daily life together, have shared its immediate

exigencies, have enjoyed the wild spirit of long walks together, the

redolent silence of the little wood, all the freedom written on the face

of the earth and carried by the waters. After this we shall feel that

the looks we exchange are sisterly, and I have the improbable hope of

some day being able to say: "I have found a woman friend."

Her very name seems wonderful. Eva....

I met her in the office where I work. What a lovely vision the first

day! You so rarely find strength blended with sweetness in a woman that

her bearing seemed a little supernatural. It was merely self-assurance,

however, and the majesty of perfect health that gave her her superb

manner of treading the waves. You noticed her tallness and fearless

vitality, and did not try to question her eyes for the secret being in

her. This was fully expressed by her quick gestures, the smile of her

frank lips, the fearless carriage of her head, the straightforward look

of her beautiful brown eyes.

A sort of reserve established a connection between us at first.

I noticed her diligence, her desire to do well, and a something like

heroism, which made her rush into the forefront of life and carry away a

little more than her share of the burden.

Our silent understanding lasted for some time. Perhaps without our

knowledge the intuition brooding in women brought us closer than words

could have done. One evening in speaking of her home and saying how

happily she looked forward to meeting her husband, she used a phrase so

tender, warm and chaste that I caught a glimpse of the woman in her. Her

face, always behind a mask of energy, turned gentle and serious as if

veiled by serenity. I imagined a couple in her image, for it is the

woman who makes or unmakes the couple. She must have achieved a deep

marriage.... The weather was fine and bright, and we left for home

together.

I think I shall always remember her pure voice, which revealed the

restlessness of living like a burning bush hidden behind strength and

youth.... I kept wishing we'd never reach the corner where we had to

separate.

But there it was already. The red of the sky threw its glow on her face

and spread an impalpable halo of dusty rays behind her. "Till

to-morrow," she said. I almost ran off, my heart swelling with

gratitude. I remember my eyes smarted.

That was several months ago. When we decided to spend our vacation

together, I felt beforehand that we were going to be friends.

We made the rash experiment of bringing two couples, two poor couples,

under the same poor roof. We did it and we were gay and happy in the

doing. It makes you believe in miracles.

I do believe in miracles. It is not a miracle that this beautiful woman

with the tanned cheeks walking beside me is the strongest attraction in

the landscape because of the tall stem of her body, the dancing refrain

of her steps, and the brilliance of her complexion. Other women have

passed over the ageless earth who were as alive, as charming, as

stirring. The miracle is that her brow is clear, her manner clean-cut,

her gaze straight and sure and keen with intelligence; that she goes

lovingly toward a love which she has built with her own hands; that she

is free and strives to be sincere in her freedom. Our mothers knew not.

The woman in us owes them nothing but our faults.

If you look at this woman carrying her will on her shoulders, leading

her will on towards the realization of her inner idea, towards the

simple desire to be brave, to love, to be truthful; if you see her

passing in nature, if you see how she moves, how she takes into her

being the keen sea-air and how aware she is of everything, the great

eucalyptus, its gray-green leaves tossing in the wind, the ochre-colored

slope checkered with vines, the sleepy languor of the lovely coast-line

robed in blue, you can tell at a glance that our humanity is strangely

new.

When she returns to her and her husband's orderly, flower-decked room,

what a life she will stir up; what creative power, what inspiration,

what harmony she will contribute to their relation.

* * * * *

Will she and I succeed in producing that supreme masterpiece known as

friendship? Friendship between two women used to seem almost impossible

to me. I have always seen women leagued against man. They meet only to

connive, and when they meet, humanity divides into two camps with the

woman's camp almost wholly devoted to the concoction of plots and lies.

Two women together? Two enemies confronting each other. If they cease

from their rivalry, it is in order to set traps for male weakness.

* * * * *

She turns round. "Quick, we ought to be back already." Her smile is so

confiding and my heart so happy, she is so radiant, so wholesome and her

presence is so forceful that some day, I say to myself, the name of

friendship will have to be the same as of love.

XVI

An arbor at the water's edge. Cool green leaves. Flowers. Boughs striped

with sunshine. Close by, the peacefulness of a sleepy stream.

We had decided to celebrate our second wedding anniversary here. We rose

early in the morning, set out arm in arm, keeping step, and came to

this springtime nook as if to a rendezvous arranged by spring itself.

The setting for our lunch was all it should be--the midday sun blazing

down upon the surrounding country, the table garlanded with flowers, the

scenery framed in the arch of the arbor.

Two years....

The afternoon passed tranquilly.

He was seated close beside me. I saw his profile against the bank and

the misty line where the horizon was falling asleep. His wandering gaze

was caught by everything and rested on nothing. He seemed to be summing

up each breath of nature, each line, each feature, and he had eyes

only--this being a day apart from other days--for the broad effects of

the great stretch of landscape.

A halt. We count on our fingers, we hold a mental roll-call before

turning back.... Presently, when we start on our homeward walk, the

great amphitheatre of vapors, the slope fringed with trees, the belt of

mist will each one by one be making their quivering signs.

* * * * *

Two years. What has my love become, my hope, the spirit without end

which dwelt within me?... We are two, that is all.

The same current of the spirit--if not the same spirit--drives its waves

through us. The same flame--if not the same heart--mounts within us. The

same love of truth--if not the same truth--throws the light of day

between us. And nothing but silence is needed for us to be close and

united.

We love each other better than ever; we no longer talk to each other.

Had anyone said to me the first day of our marriage: "You will want to

explain everything to him, what you are, what you see, what you wish;

you will want to find out from him what he is, what he sees, what he

wishes; you will also want to find out what in both of you is

reconcilable and perhaps, above all, what is irreconcilable: this is his

concern or interest, this is your concern or interest," I should have

nodded my head. "Yes, exactly."

But if I had also been told: "A day will come when you will have nothing

more to learn of each other, nothing more to tell each other; without

mutual explanations you will understand everything," I should have

denied the possibility. I should have cried out that a whole century

wouldn't be enough to bring two human beings into harmony, because human

beings change from second to second. I should have said it was

blasphemy.

But the day did come.

There is a region of soft azure outlines where words have been

extinguished. _He_ exists and I exist.

It is a little green arbor where nothing, in short, binds us together,

neither the flaming leafage, nor the smell of invisible murmuring water,

nor the languishing hour; neither the nights past and gone, nor the days

to come, nor the little child asleep at home in his cradle. If anything

binds us together, it is the freedom that each of us has found, nothing

else.

* * * * *

One must never say "This is love," for love is the heaven that the heart

has in prospect, and the whole of space is yet to be traversed.... It is

an immense feeling which speaks and impels you and is made up of

certainty and clearness.

I am sure of him.

He might see a weapon of crime in my hands--or at least some symbolic

weapon, something he holds a crime--without a shrug of his shoulders.

Remembering that my tenderness is unfailing, he would say to me "all

right," then he would come to me to find out why what I was doing was

right.

And he is sure of me. He could leave us, his hearth, his love, his

child, without so much as a glance back. I should merely say: "He had to

go, he must submit to our love, and go his own way. That is how we love

each other."

A moment at the foot of a hill, a great moment, so welcoming, so stable,

and so peaceful that it is like an open doorway before which you must

commune with yourself before entering. Two years gone by. Before me the

rest of my life.

* * * * *

I have also had my doubts and fears. In the beginning I said to myself:

"Will life allow such a love? What will become of this ardor and

determination? And he, will he allow me to love him as my heart

dictates?"

We have gone through daily cares together, poverty, weariness, all the

formidable common things. We got many laughs and more strength out of

them. In the evening his step would sound on the dark landing; I would

run to the door to meet his smile; he would kiss me; the hours would

fly.... That is the way two years unrolled their seasons and brought

forth their fruits, and we became strict with each other because

perfection revealed her face to us from afar.

So, without a word said, by minutes added to minutes, by the divine

simplicity to which one approaches, you reach the promised land and the

very heart of love.

I say what I see. Life does allow all the ardor, all the sublimity of

two human beings to flourish; and in their relation to each other she

grants even the impossible. I say what he and I are.

* * * * *

With one accord we rise, we know it is time. Our child is waiting for

us, our house, our to-morrows, a thousand impatient desires, and all the

things you don't think of in advance.

We follow the line of the bank. Where to? I do not know, but I know it

is sweet, very sweet, and his arm is linked in mine.

Ahead of us are two banks set with houses and edged with reeds

sharp-edged and long as swords.

It gives you a sort of dizziness to follow the banks straight ahead

without removing your eyes. These two lines, separated forever and

mingled forever by the current, are fascinating.

A marvel. Is it not a marvel? An arch. Rising from the ground on either

side, its loving, solid curve clasps both banks and brings them together

in an embrace. Nevertheless they are like two convicts. Yet at one point

they become a single bank; they touch, they merge. Then they go on,

their bed widening out. In spite of appearances they are still closely

united in order to sustain the deepening river which will place its

mouth on the mouth of the ocean.

* * * * *

Yes ... one more look....

Above the slope leaning down to lull itself in bliss, the sky has just

enshrined a light cloud the color of periwinkles, and the arch resounds

like an Hallelujah in stone.

Come.

XVII

He entered.

I cannot say how I reacted to the first steps he took into my life. I

have only a confused impression left. The man who entered was not one to

whom I could be indifferent. He was an aspect of my own being which was

taking form and moving outside myself without recognizing me.

He approached shyly enough. My heart rose ... he approached ... I felt

vaguely that a large event involving me was taking place in far-off

regions, and the shadow of his body spread an immense new something

before my eyes.

I thought him very gentle. I noticed the metallic clearness of his

restless gaze, and that his figure suggested a great tree which

dominates the other trees and lowers its branches so as not to be alone.

What was he going to do among these people, what attitude would he, the

single sane person in the entire gathering, assume? How was he going to

behave in this brilliant drawing-room filled with twittering women,

dazzling lights, bare shoulders, ripples of laughter, and heavy

perfumes?

I had tried hard to cut a figure but soon had to confess myself beaten.

The women spoke a language not like the rest of the world's. Their

vocabulary was limited to "masterpiece," "infamous," "divine,"

"diabolical," "delicious," "intriguing." In their presence an average,

disgracefully normal, tame creature like myself without vices or

virtues, had to keep mum.

The old gentleman advancing screened my escape from the group in which I

had been trapped, and I managed to retreat to a safe corner, from which

I saw the women fasten on him with a buzz of talk, a whole gamut of rosy

bosoms and a great display of fireworks.... Further off the hostess was

keeping a watchful eye to see that no one of the women distinguished

herself too much. The elderly laughing gentleman must have been some one

of importance....

The tobacco-laden air was gradually getting to be unbreathable. The

noise pounded incessantly. I sat riveted to my chair without daring to

move, as though a nightmare were upon me, the sort in which a terrible

load oppresses your chest, though you remain conscious. "I am dying, I

am dying." The load weighs more heavily. "No, I am dreaming, I am going

to wake myself up." But you are impotent; you can't shake the load off

and you can't come out of the nightmare.

* * * * *

It was just as I was exerting every muscle and scrap of courage to

escape from the oppressive spectacle--I had devised a polite

pretext--when he entered.

The hostess went to meet him with her wide smile, her hand uplifted, and

the phrase of greeting she had repeated at least twenty times since I

had been in the room.

She steered him my way, threw out a rising syllable, a descending

syllable, like two balls between our two faces, and then propelled him

over to the group while I listened to the muffled echo of his name bury

itself in my heart.

I forgot the smoke, the noise, my eagerness to leave. Even the weight

lifted from my chest in the very way a nightmare suddenly takes wing and

yields to a dream of clear, bright meanderings.

They did not pay much attention to him. The loud dame who presided over

the group captured all eyes. She was plump and short; as she talked she

flapped her arms like fins, and every now and then let out from her

chest as from a great case a vibrant laugh, which sent undulations over

her salmon-colored bosom. When she herself had done laughing, she would

cast her eyes about in quest of approval as though levying tribute from

the faces. But when she encountered the newcomer, she had to stop

because his frank gaze pronounced disapproval and denial.

How I wanted to thank him!

The company had been too much for me; it became too much for him. Soon I

saw him cast about for a retreat.... For a second his eyes glided over

me, I alarmed him as he had alarmed me. Then he slunk away, with the

same crushed, crestfallen manner that I must have had.

He walked off ... the curtain of palms ... he disappeared.

By fits and starts the nightmare returned, clutching me with clammy

tentacles. The noise fell in slabs, the weight on my chest suffocated

me. Through a mist phantoms glided by, exchanging absurd bows,

disjointed gestures, and disconnected remarks. A woman in a spangled

gown with hair like flaxen wood-shavings turned and showed a chalky

face. Others followed her, branded with painted red smiles. They were

all hurrying. Refreshments were being served under the rotunda. The

subdued clash of silver against glass sounded along with the clatter of

china, little exclamations, and the shuffling of feet.

I am dreaming. Impossible that a gathering of human beings should be

such an outrage on life, such a parody of it. When living persons come

together and have attired themselves beautifully, it is for the

interchange of what is best in them, not for the spilling of gall and

the raising of a hubbub. I must be dreaming.

Little groups were coming back; women's laughter cut the curdled air

like sharp lashes.

* * * * *

Again I made a painful effort and rose. With the looks of the women

riddling me and paralyzed by the men's attention, I crossed the room

driven by a force that operated for me. I found myself beside him.

* * * * *

He raised his eyes slowly. Did he smile? I no longer know. But he

looked--as I must have looked--as though he were gazing into light.

XVIII

I have a new friend.

A friend.... When I see him, it is like a revision of all I am, a kind

of unusual sincerity that urges me on, amplifies me, and carries me

toward him.

When he is away, I have the impression of having discovered a treasure

within myself from which I draw in deep draughts....

And also of hymns striking up beneath my tread.

XIX

"Why? Yes, tell me why you squeezed my hand so hard?"

I lean towards him, my head touches his chest. He is enraptured,

overwhelmed, and as smiling as the night when it is about to pass.

He did not answer.

A silky wind blows down from a sheltering eminence and carves his face

and makes me cling to him. Are we on the borders of the true silence,

the ultimate silence in which human beings find themselves face to face?

"You! You!"

A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering

in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise,

cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles shine like glowworms.

Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a

profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which

at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us

in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling

apparition of a group of houses lighting up.

The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow--almost hurts

me--because I feel _he_ is looking at me.... He says: "Your shining

curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes."

Mentioned in his quivering passionate voice my hair, my forehead, my

mouth, my eyes are so new that I close my eyes so as to see them ...

And I did not know....

The garden has changed. Pale ochre reflections. Little shivers damp and

creeping. Heavy black pockets on the parasol tops of the trees. The

mournful andante of a swaying cypress. As though it were the first time,

my beloved, that we were alone and had only found each other this

evening under the narrow sky.

The shadows spread haphazard piling up in ridges, drawing after them dim

white trails. Unknown thoughts escape from everywhere. They are too

swift for me. The breeze carries them away. His face at my right,

blurred except for the prominent features, is silvered over and turned

into a medallion....

Am I quite sure that he is still close to me? I tighten my hand in his.

The true, regular pulse at his wrist assures me all is well and down

here everything is fair and _true_. The garden and the leaves, the

multiplying lights of the town, the gloaming are all real.

The air is stirring and freshening up. Let us walk. Straight ahead of us

as far as the last terrace with its ornamental balustrade; then we will

follow the Broad Walk at the entrance of the garden.

He takes my arm gently. I do not dare to lean on it, though the weight

of his presence bears me to the ground. I feel I am alone in upholding

his life. Who will tell him, who will ever tell him the whole drama that

this means? Will he ever know how I see him, how he lives for me? Other

people and he himself see his huge figure, always a little bowed as if

he never dared to be altogether tall, the steel of his eyes, and the

slope of his forehead, which every shadow exaggerates, and his gaze

bemired in clouds. They may see his simplicity and transparent

kindliness; but at this they stop.

I am caught in what is inexpressible in him. I assume all the questions

a man may put to himself without being able to solve them, all the vague

poignant evils. And when he appears, I feel that a word has been

fashioned to express everything, but not a single word to express his

face. It is too outside of everything, too mysterious, perhaps too like

my own.

We are at the Broad Walk, a solemn pile in which the trees go two by

two, close together, erect--a cathedral. A chilly silence lays a sheet

on your shoulders, the nave boldly thrusts its black pillars upwards,

and the branches topping the vault wed in the sky.

In spite of yourself you say something in a very low voice. "Up there,

that red glow as through a stained-glass window."

"Tell me you love me ... tell me ... tell me you love me...."

He has said _me_, he has said _you_, as if it were possible to stand

this shock on your breast without turning pale. He sees I am sinking and

passes his irresistible arm about my body. The future tears itself to

pieces at the bottom of my life. At the end of the Broad Walk the last

golden ray goes down in a black mass. I do not know how to say these

things, but I raise my head like a slow remonstrance and I hold my gaze

up to him. Have I said everything?

Let us return. I can go no further. He takes my hand and presses it with

the warm strength of his fingers. It is limp and inert, the palm

lifeless and cold.

What have I done to deserve this diaphanous gloaming, this prolonged

rhapsody rising about us? I have loved once already, and that counts I

know. But if I had not had this great passion to love another man, if I

did not still have it, would my heart be so clairvoyant? Would the new

evening be as mild as it is? But if in spite of my deepened heart, I am

not yet all-embracing and big enough?

We have gone the full length of the Broad Walk and back. Have we really

gone so far? Behind us the view retreats into the opaque distance, and

the whole pile, as mournful as a church abandoned by God, fades away

slowly beneath a pall of silence. Our walk is almost at an end. We still

have to cross a deserted spot, where thin bushes hold up their charred

arms to support the slanting line of the gold and black rays.

* * * * *

Does he see this high dizzy instant passing close within our reach? I

might snatch it perhaps but for these mad throbbings, this veil over my

eyes, the dryness of my lips. Only the fragments of the instant reach

me, but even they are beautiful enough to dazzle me.

He stops and faces me and his gaze fixes on my throat. Doubtless he too

is catching the fragments....

What are you to do when you are a mere humble human being and have no

power to retain the superhuman moments?

May my longing for truth at least flame out. My love of truth is my

finest quality, my one merit. May it shake me as the wind shakes a tree,

and may my hands, if they dare, rend these garments which hide me from

his eye. Garments are a lie, and the moment is naked....

He has understood. He trembles so visibly that I feel my breasts quiver

like twin flowers and my whole being stir. He draws me to him and holds

without daring to embrace me, small, panting, fainting away....

* * * * *

The pile has been swallowed up, the Broad Walk has turned black, the

beautiful moment has fled through my fault; we have only a few steps

farther to go. If I have nothing to give him, may he at least share with

me the one idea I still retain.

This idea is the strange knowledge I have of my body, but of a body no

longer mine, so lucid has it become, full of resonances, coursing blood,

warmth and appeal ... a body of mysterious flesh and tense limbs, as

bright as a torch, as sensitive as a soul ... a body I want to give

him--my body and my arms.

XX

"No, don't get up, stay where you are; it is I.

"You told me you were not going to work this evening, so I came. I want

to talk to you.

"I am going to sit beside you, if you don't mind, on the cushion on the

floor under the window, where I like to sit when it is as light as it is

now.

"I hesitate, not because it's hard to say. On the contrary, it's too

simple, and things too simple are beyond words to express.

"I really have nothing to tell you. You understood. You know. But it is

right for me to come and right that the confession I want to make should

revert to our love, for it has to do with our love.

"How you look at me.... Your eyes probe to the depths.... Yes. That is

it.... You do see, don't you? I love him.

"Perhaps the confession, which is so long, so long in beginning and has

weighed so heavily, is already finished?... No. Since my eyes are

overflowing, I have not yet made it. Well, listen, I have no idea any

more of what I am going to tell you, but don't interrupt, let me say

everything....

"Oh, I wanted to speak in orderly sequence, and I promised myself I

should not be moved but would talk to you quite simply. When I came in,

I felt I was growing and rising. I heard my own words stirring like live

things.... But they are trivial; they hurt me so I wish I could find

others.

"To think that here at this window we have so often talked of love, not

of our love, but of all love. You remember? You used to say--I think it

was you: 'What is beautiful is not the face you love so dearly, it is

the need to love it dearly. What matters is not the delirium in which

two people lose themselves, but the truth they discover.' And when you

and I evoked those two rays of light which are one, love and truth, our

words were so vast that we had to stop talking.

"This evening--do you know why?--instead of telling their splendid

secret my words are mere splinters ripping my throat.... Yet when we

used to talk here, I did not know love was so beautiful; we did not say

it was.

"You certainly saw the change in me, and you guessed. The morning when

you stopped in front of me and restrained the exclamation in your

breast, I was sure you knew. Perhaps it was very apparent. I came and

went in a radiance; the house grew chilly, everything in the house was

conscious of it and unnatural. Evenings I worked later and later, as if

I were afraid of falling asleep, and when we discussed things, it was I

who explained, I who knew. You must have seen, too, how often I buried

myself in silence, content in it sometimes, then tortured.

"You observed me. There was no reason for speaking one day rather than

another?

"A reason has arisen.

"It was yesterday evening. Walking beside him I suddenly realized that

in him, in us, in me, there was a sort of attraction; I responded to

it--with all the strong, fine need of truth you gave me. It is this need

of truth which brings me to you this evening.

"Take it, take it before giving it back to me. Don't let us ask whether

it is more painful for you who receive it than for me who bestow it. Let

us forget that man retains the proud authority of the male in his flesh

and says "possess" as of a thing. Don't let us ask whether the union

between man and woman is sublime to this degree. Let ours take that

stand. One always has the time to suffer in, but there is only one time

in which to love in truth.

"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?