… Perhaps then, when I first met Ligeia, the tenderness that Isabel thinks is enough for her and enough for a lover would have been enough for me too. But she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t realize that a writer’s entire life is like some absorbing novel read in the small hours of the morning during adolescence, read just as dawn breaks, a novel with the title Lost Illusions. It is a bitter and sad paradox that in attempting to say everything, to give everything its meaning, one ends by emptying all life of what meaning it has naturally and by coming to see that after all nothing can be said through the cold and artificial forms of literature. When did I discover this? Was it the very vulgarity of a vender of figs, skinny and penniless, who was forced off a beach by the owners of a restaurant? Was it my refusal to see her searching helpless eyes, to allow her and her problems to break the delicate balance between imagination and act that I had come to the islands to find? Was it losing Ligeia’s collection of little pebbles? Why did I let all that distract me from my central passion, my poem, from the concentration of my purpose? What did my poem have to do with an old woman who sold figs, or with colored pebbles, or even with Ligeia? My unity was overcome by divisiveness: words could not conquer the fragmentation of reality, a fragmentation that was there already, before I tried to write it. Then once again only the determination to make everything fixed, and again the failure to fix the past, to devour the present, to accept all of the future’s premonitions. Moi, j’aurais porté toute une société dans ma tête? Ah, ha, ha …
“God, what a difference!”
“You found it so different? It really surprised you? Yet it didn’t last long. How long does it take for an effrontery imposed upon the body to wear off? By contrast with what I have wanted to share with you, and you have never understood, what does this matter?”
… To struggle with a fleshless enemy. Never to know whether abstention rather than the work in progress is the sure way. I must think this through. How do you live suspended in air, uncertain of the real value of what you do and what you cease to do? If to act is to fail, and to abstain is to succeed because abstention leaves at least a mark of protest, then how can one describe an epoch that ought to be left undescribed? For this monstrosity of an era should not be allowed to leave any of its demented words for the ear of posterity …
“Would you laugh at me, Ligeia? Yes, you would. You can’t understand.”
… From our first years together I always understood that the meaning of our age is to be found in taking all meaning away from it. The absurd. That is to be Byron today … and every effort to answer that deafness with a creative effort, a book or a painting or a score, is to cooperate with an era that deserves only its silence. The artist’s work must remain within him and never be given light. To hand it over to those who do not deserve it is obvious weakness. So long as we do not share our work, our work can have value, that is the precondition for value today. Within me, within me: the whole struggle. The meeting between what I feel intuitively and what I understand. The bridge of my spirit, to be crossed only by my spirit. Within me the debate between the tradition’s conventions, the strength of one century become the limitations and debilities of the next. Within me the search for the absolute, the failure of incompleteness, the creation of that incompleteness which, simply because it is all that can be attained, is converted into my tiny absolute. Within me the giants disguised as windmills: no one will ever believe that they are giants, that the insane has become the rational because it alone sees what reasonable fools cannot see. To hold faith: not to express anything, not to reveal anything. Not to expose ourselves, neither to attrition before dogma nor to the diminution of mere indifference: why should what we have be taken from us to be destroyed and prostituted? Better silence. Always silence, if we prefer not to accept the corruption of those who insist we be what we are not, and of those others who isolate us and gnaw upon us and render us harmless. I don’t know. I don’t want to look behind me. I don’t live in some other century but in this one, a time that assassinates with prison or with success, that destroys with the gallows or with applause, that, whether it accepts or refuses what we write, nevertheless always attacks and annihilates us. There is no way out. So long as our age of ironic barbarism endures, we must hold fast and sing the panegyric of a society that insists upon being called holy, or hold fast and serve the grindstone wheels of that other society which already feels itself to be holy because it distributes refrigerators liberally. There’s no solution. No one wants our work. Everyone demands us to be high priests, acolytes of the great cults. Who will save himself? He who must sing the glories of labor or he who must sing the glories of the products of labor? There is no way out. Better to keep silent.
“That is the heroism that you never recognize in me, Ligeia. Ah. It would be more heroic then to write, write, write, but never to publish, to hold back waiting for a better era. I don’t know. Ask me some day and see if then I answer you. For now I don’t know. Honestly, I do not know. Believe me.”
“Javier,” you whispered in his ear, Pussycat, as the car moved across the ford.
“What?”
“This scene with the bulls,” you smiled. “Why don’t you write it?”
* * *
Δ “Javier? Are you here? Put on the light, I can’t see the bed. That goddamn mania you have for always drawing the curtains. Or is it night already? Javier, are you here? Did you take your blessed Nembutal? Okay, okay, if you don’t want to answer, I don’t really care.” For whether or not he was there, sleeping or paying you no attention, it was all the same. It made no difference at all.
You know, Dragoness, some actions lead to a magnificent absence of conclusions: nothingness is the real value of certain moments in life. And you say to Javier, who perhaps is not even in the room, that following the incident of your opening his letter, for many months you and he lived a suspended kind of life that consisted indeed of desiring and awaiting, but each alone and separately. You would like to recall it clearly, for it was the bridge across time that led you — little by little, of course, with all the fine gradations, the dead moments and the stretched ones, that one could ask for — to what you live and are today. Says who, eh? Greece, your return, the first months in Mexico City, when the war began, those days remained behind you, pushed back by a desire you both shared but neither mentioned aloud: to attain some new discovery that would not suppress but sharpen your passion. As you put it, Ship ahoy, to graduate and join the Navy. If the road toward that waiting and unknown truth was a time of imperceptible change, slow, marked by an absence of visible events, yet you walked it together. You can confess that when the change came, you were both hoping that it would be an explosion that would blow your lives up and split them apart.
“No, it wasn’t like that. It was never like that. What can I know about him? I speak for myself alone.”