Why was not my own voice heard, when there were outcries in my throat, tears in my flesh?
III
I am becoming horribly accustomed to going about the empty apartment alone. I find I no longer think of the scowling walls, the dumb silence, the dim windows. They wrap me in a vague acquiescence. Habit is exerting its awful power.
I seem to be gliding down a slope where there is no one at the bottom to warn me that there may be a precipice ahead or tell me whither this strange existence leads.
My days are regulated according to the rules I myself have made to apply only to myself; I go, I come, I turn the key in the lock; I loiter; then I rush at my work. Sometimes the mirror casts a sudden image which runs away busily at my approach. My shadow and the creaking under my tread are all I have for company.
Yet this is not the first time I have lived alone. There once was a room with a flowered quilt, a moth-eaten carpet and a rickety door which opened like the lid of a devil-in-the-bandbox on the mahogany wig and scarlet smile of Mme. Noël. But everything was so different! I brought nothing to that virgin space except the desire to fill it; my body knew nothing; my inner being cried out for too many things to be able to hold any of them, and had I dared, I would have stretched my arms out through the window to embrace the air of life....
My solitude now is like rotten fruit; it scorches my entrails like a fiery drink. It is a strange solitude.
Two men peopled my life and fertilized and vivified it. But wasn't that very long ago and somewhere else? Come, try to remember....
I do not know; they are neither dead nor alive. To be sure they are hungry and thirsty and get bored as living people do, but they are locked up in the earth's carcass like the real dead; and it may be that at this very moment when I am imagining them warm and active, they are already stiff and cold. To be absolutely truthful, to go down to the bottom of things, there is scarcely anything in common between the two men who went to war and me who stayed behind.
Sometimes when I am alone, I lean over, way over, to touch the very bottom of things so as to feel the pain of it.