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."