XVI
I cannot sleep.
There's no good-bye to say, it is late, everything is ready, and yet I am stifling in this empty room, which lives only through my sleeping son and me.
But he sleeps....
I hardly recognize him when he sleeps, and I have to go close to him. He fell asleep a moment ago and is lying exactly the way I placed him, with his arm outstretched. Is there anything tenderer and frailer to behold than this little rounded face with its fine veins and pearly curves? Beneath his sleep and the warmth of his cheeks, life is working, and what a hurry it is in!
I lean down closer, almost touching the fine down of gold on his forehead, his velvety warmth, his scarcely perceptible breath. As always, I feel both terrified and transported by this immense littleness, and consumed by a longing to put my lips to him.... I draw back: I must not wake him up.
I move away from the crib. The will to question the present which is passing takes a stronger hold of me this evening than usual.
No, it is not to you I turn, my child.
The best in me, the true, God, and my soul do not concern you.
Perhaps I am too hasty in saying this. Perhaps I have paid too much attention to the gulf between my generation and the old blind generation. Probably the gulf between your generation and mine is not so deep, but when I look carefully I do not find that you are the profound motive.
Nothing holds out the promise that in the future we can really give each other a single day. When I look at you, I am astonished that I gave you life—it is such a miracle to have caused a creature to live. I am at the verge of the space separating us. I do not find you there. I go my way, you go your opposite way, and though there be nothing impossible in the world, our mutual understanding is impossible. I shall never attain to your height.
You were born to contradict, since you must surpass, the palpitating question that I am, my acts, their purpose. You, whom I carried in my womb nine months, will never be anything but a stranger in my wet eyes and to the kisses of my lips, a stranger who departs with my blood in his veins.
You have come. But I did not sink into the fatal pit that engulfs mothers, the inevitable snare. It's so hard to resist the weak little thing which can't talk. How can you be expected to resist? A woman eclipses herself for the sake of the child she brings into the world, and at the first cry, the mother is in danger. It is the mother we should try to save. There's no need to be afraid that the mother-instinct will cool off. The earth will cool off sooner!
To have children. Love is born with them, but love is not enough. And to try with all your might to fulfill your own destiny. And misfortune if the children fall behind!
Sleep, my little one....
I have opened the window; the night breathes upon my face. In the wide outdoors, where the darkness is naked and the freshness is blue, the expanse opens out like a river. Below, the clustered houses—a sombre vegetation, a confused, winking mass, a starry profundity, vast and chaotic, with no boundary lines between city and sky.
My eyes look tranquilly upon the black future piled up at my feet. My eyes are no longer restless, because now I know for all time what the future holds. I know that soon I shall be tired and go to sleep, and when I wake up in the white daylight my son will put his arms round my neck so prettily. I will smile, then the time for parting will come. The hidden days contain the unknown.... But forever and ever it will be suffering.
The future is not a question you ask; it is the suffering that awaits you. Suffering is the answer to every question, and every instant claws the flesh. If you listen intently, you will hear that the echo of everything is a sob.
It is suffering. Suffering does not find a vent, it does not bleed in any cry, it clings to you, and nothing reveals it because it is omnipresent, so present and so plain that you can't look for or find it. It is not the tears choking your throat, nor the groan at night, nor the knell of a parting footstep, nor the mourning which stifles you, nor the heart in your breast, for that would be too little. When suffering begins with exuberant sunshine and mornings like a flourish of trumpets, it is even more terrible because it is further away.... Suffering is more. It is unlike anything else. It is regular, steady as the breath, amazing, tolerable, and it is not the last word you say, it is also the first word; it follows its mortal, monotonous course, and you realize it has no name: to live is to suffer.
Is it human misery? No, human suffering. Stammering nights, groping footsteps. Whither and why? No, there's no time to lose, you jump up and go, go, because you haven't suffered enough yet. Look.
When I leave to-morrow with my suffering in my breast I shall go in advance of suffering. I shall not hesitate in the doorway. Looking back into the room I shall not say what I have often said: "You are a bit of myself, good-bye. Since my eyes will no longer be here to see you, give them a picture of yourself to take along."
Suffering is self-sufficient. You don't associate things with it, I shall have my back turned, my body will be impatient to lean forward. I no longer care for memories.
Not one. Not even the memory of you, my two dead lovers. Other dead are further on, where I am going, or rather, other suffering. And your suffering is over because you are dead.
The pictures I have of you rise less and less frequently in my memory. How I cherished them at first! Some especially.... That little station-platform where we met ... the transparent morning flew ahead of your footsteps, the spring was intoxicated, I ran into your outstretched arms.... And the path where I cried, the sunset sinking away between the branches, my head grazing your shoulder like a fruit falling from the tree.... And another.... And another....
It is over. I carry you differently. Some of your ways, which I acquired, stick to me from habit. My voice often has your inflection, and when I am animated I feel I have made some of your ideas my own. If I don't remember you so clearly, it is because I live you and the legacy you left me rises and falls with my breathing.
In my fierce survival I have preserved only what is of use to me. All the rest has decomposed; it is nothing to me any more. We should break away from this burden of the dead. The dead are the living who have abandoned us, and sooner or later, whether we wish to or not, we forget them.
I loved my dead dearly, so dearly that it seemed to me my being inclined towards them the moment they appeared—so dearly that because of them, who have gone, love has remained.
Love proclaims its law. You must show your love, it cries.
Somewhere in the world to-night there are faces lying dormant for me, persons to whom I have things to say. I am waiting for them, I stretch my arms out to them, I know they will come because of my need for embraces, a desire for caresses, so strong to-night that I jump up with a start. It is as if half of my body were missing. I see myself deserted and frightfully widowed, and my mouth quivers with hunger and thirst for another mouth.
I know a man is on the way. I shall recognize him. I shall have the somewhat bitter audacity you must have in order to confess yourself the immense thing you are. I shall stir him, I shall do everything; you can go the full lengths of the sublime that dwells within you.
As soon as he will rise above the horizon he will realize from my mere expression that I have long lost the trick of lying.
And when I read the first glance he gives me, when desire bewilders him a little and forces him back within himself, I shall be happy to be beautiful. Beneath his eyes my sound healthy self will brace up again, my inexhaustible twenty-seven years, my rounded limbs, everything which goes slightly to pieces when love is absent. Here is the offering, blond, slim, laughing, which I already present to you.... He will perceive uncomprehendingly that if I am a little more beautiful than myself, it is because by virtue of loving one comes to resemble the love one feels.
When he will have looked at me long, I will explain what each of my features means; I will speak. Because silence is beautiful after the last words, and it is the woman who has the most to say.
I may have a stronger expression than other women, perhaps a slightly more taciturn expression, too. My solitude would account for this. Women are not sufficiently alive to the fact that one should live alone, depart alone, and return alone, and that there is no one outside one's self. No one. In going to meet love again, I who have been twice widowed and have my child to make me feel more isolated, shall find nothing but another solitude. To be sure, there will be kisses, meetings, a symphony of voices. Yet in spite of everything to know you're alone, all the time....
All the time....
If I had reached this secure kingdom through my own power I should be very proud. But I don't deserve the credit. My dead lovers gave me this awful superhuman gift. For there comes a moment when you have taken from some one else everything there was to be taken. Without his noticing he becomes useless, he must disappear. Who resigns himself to this?
My lovers bestowed upon me the love I was capable of, attentive and complete, they bestowed upon me the intelligence of my blood, my tears and my words.... And then they gave me up. They performed this supreme deed.
And now when enlarged by love I desire love again, I give it its place. Love is not the essential thing. I have often said: "Life, my life." The phrase has assumed the shape of my lips because it says the essential thing. Love, after all is nothing but the most beautiful moment.
I summon all the moments of my life. Even the least thrilling cling just as deeply by roots of flesh.
Life wishes to become what it never has been: It is ready, it is empty.... Until to-night human words filled it saying:
"Nothing changes here below; nothing can possibly change: love goes on from age to age, death was and will be, life is forever the same, and man is always man." To express this the word "eternal" has been invented.
I do not know. I came, I, a woman, and like every other creature, I too began by loving. Life was not the same, I swear it was not the same. Life had a different taste, I shouldered it differently, and my death, while resembling other deaths, does not exist by the same idea.
I am; everything is changed.
And even if I had never lived, other women are ready to change the earth. You can't tell yet what the women of my generation are capable of. They themselves don't know altogether.
The memory of what they have always been told weighs upon them. Man is a fierce, greedy lover. With bloodshot eyes like a blind man, he has fallen upon the feverish couch where lies the vanquished enemy. He has brought his boiling sap, and between his clasped arms a great tenderness. When he has risen from the couch, he has been sad, his eyes have been wasted, his tenderness worn out. And he has said: "This is woman."
This has lasted long. I do not know if there hasn't been some reason for it. I simply say I live. I am honest, exact, I have muscles of steel, I like people to say what is, I am loyal, willing, I earn my living, and I am inured to suffering. What truth does one fail to recognize when it shows its face?
I think. I want. I know.
It has taken me a long time to take in the humble things I now know. I commenced with very little; my youth passed in chaos, I had to suffer very much. So it is not chance, random truths that I follow. I do not set limits to them. Even my death will not disprove them. Thus, a few scattered fragments hover. I snatched and caught them in moments of alert intelligence, I held them fast with my willing heart, I gripped them between clenched teeth to keep from losing them.
The wind rises on the right. Is it not the wind that has extinguished those dots of gold, the houses, without deepening the dark of the town?
I see the wind, it is blowing near. And here, immobile, upright in my heavy rectitude, I share with the wind the moments which are driving it on. One by one. I fly with them, one by one.
I go where they are going, even elsewhere, and my death perhaps is far from reaching its limits. It has been on the way a long time, it will stop when I am completely tired out, when there will be nothing more for me to do, when my breath will not be an indispensable breath. Then that will be all. They say it is hard to die. Does that mean that the world holds something more tragic than life?
The wind has swollen the whole sky. The sky is ready to drop down from on high—ah, let the sky fall! The wind pins itself to my face. It has become so violent that I cross my arms on my breast to brave it. The infinite future, as though it too were swollen, approaches the houses.
How can I tell what the future holds? No use searching the violet depths of the horizon or breathing in the whole of the sky. The times to come are beyond my reach. They give no sign.
There, below, all I see is my own existence. But how I see it! Flashing, assiduous, full of free spaces, brooding, crimson in my veins, paling slightly at the horizon, departing in the starless wind, and returning in haste to my limbs.
The woof of the night has changed color again.
Can it be that what I am is a promise of something that should be?
The wind blows stronger.
No, it is not for nothing that to-night I am drawing a deeper breath than on all other nights, a breath stronger than my strength, rising up over my life.
Night passes, as pure as a summoning voice.
Then it must be, Lord, that soon, perhaps at dawn, you must go further than your journey and, in flashes of your being, reach heights higher than everything you have said, live to the last drop of your blood, live more than life?
Here I am.