It was exactly what he held against Hostia: she'd died without his permission. While alive, Hostia had seemed less a woman of flesh and blood than a memory incarnate. A body like a path you'd once taken. A face you now saw only in dreams. A friend-just a friend. At first, news of her disappearance caused Dorsay only middling sorrow. Not grief, even, but annoyance. "Hostia's dead, dammit! Just my luck!" At first it had seemed a minor loss. They hadn't been lovers for a long time. Her kisses, her embraces: he wasn't going to miss them. They saw each other rarely, and never alone. Two or three times a year, Hostia would show up at one of his parties, one of those weekends that seemed fortuitously to happen when he was around, but which he'd actually planned under the table. With each new publication, one of the two hundred and eighty copies on regular paper (a handsome ragstock nonetheless) was set aside for her. She'd write him to discuss it after reading it. Had those letters perhaps kept up, in a way, their former amorous commerce? At any rate, he would no longer get letters signed Hostia. He'd understood as much before the publication of the next collection. Of the two hundred and eighty ragstock copies, one would have no owner; the fireworks would be short an echo and a gleam. The unavoidable fact made its way into him. Hostia was, if not the first, one of the first to fall; with time, others would follow, and the poet's cohort would go on thinning out. It was something successful writers never considered. They advanced at the head of an army of a hundred or three hundred thousand comrades. How could they tell, when they turned to take in this enthusiastic crowd with a glance, if it was smaller than before? Dorsay knew each one of his "happy few" by name. Hostia's death had been a sign: they were getting older, just like him. He saw himself, in twenty years, staggering through a Sahara of Letters between his last ailing readers. He imagined himself abandoned to the implacable sun of posterity, which withered his works. The winds of History would scatter the words he had so lovingly chosen. Taken individually, they weren't heavy enough to withstand such torture. He'd made a fatal mistake in not stringing them together one to the next. Now there was the secret to lasting works: the mesh, the network, the weave… Without them, words were wisps of straw. And as expected, the prettiest were the most deceiving. "0 poet! Trust not in words," he moaned. "If you don't bend them to your will, they'll impose their own…" Shortly after Hostia's funeral, he dove back into reading his own poems. He reemerged defeated. The words he'd thought to tame had toyed with him. He'd sorted them like stamps in an album, or plants in a herbarium. And what comfort would they have brought to Hostia, in her new abode, if by some miracle she could hear them? Poetry addressed itself not to the living, but the dead; it was something like their mail. Overwhelmed by this sudden intuition, he junked the precious volumes whose creation and publication had given his life meaning until now. When the garbagemen pulled up the next day at dawn, he almost went down to snatch his papers back. He was stopped only by the thought of his readers' stupefaction when they learned he hadn't bothered to keep even a single copy of each of his books. He recalled Bert Jansch, the guitarist who hadn't owned a single instrument during the most productive period of his career. In the studio as in concert, he used whatever was lent him. No doubt they took care only to give him the best… Still, the image of an offhanded Orpheus had amazed Dorsay. And what amazed him even more was that he too had dared free himself of his reverence for the sacred object. He listened to the rumble of the garbage truck grow faint down the cold, dark streets, taking away the fruit of twenty years of labor and rumination. Dirtied, dog-eared, soon to be crushed, his books jostled among potato peelings and sticky yogurt cups toward the ruin of a public dump. And he couldn't care less. Incredulous at first, then with a kind of arrogant elation, he saw that he really didn't give a damn. He was free.
He had to put this freedom to the test right away. He pulled a jacket on. He needed a hat-but no, it was raining; he wanted the rain, the cold, black rain, to bathe his forehead. He hadn't let himself get soaked for… twenty, maybe thirty years, even! The life he led was too comfy, too neat. How could he bear witness to the strangeness of being in the world-a heart alarmed under the stars-if he no longer felt anything? The world burned and froze, bit and scratched; it was haunted by women with mad or famished gazes, roaming up and down the streets in search of someone. Wasn't that how he'd come upon Hostia, long ago? One night, in the street. It was raining, he remembered. A cold, black rain. He slammed his door shut and ran down the stairs four at a time. Somewhere, a woman with a famished look in her eye was looking for him: Hostia's replacement, her relief, sent by fate.
He walked for a long time. He hadn't buttoned his raincoat. The rain wasn't that cold. Or that black. Actually, it fell black on the empty streets and red, green, blue, and yellow on the busy boulevards. Dorsay walked unhurriedly, searching for a face. How to know? How to tell some instinctive complicity tied you to a stranger? You'd feel it, right? Was it really something you could feel? He made an effort to remember the first moments of his meeting with Hostia. But he had to admit that if she hadn't agreed to follow him, he probably wouldn't have any memory of the encounter. Even so, he could recall little of what had preceded their embrace… and precious little of the embrace itself! It was like a story someone had told, leaving out all the details. They'd touched-there was that-and then they'd coupled: nothing unforgettable, nothing everlasting about it. But then how was it that Hostia belonged to his life forevermore, like a cast member in a show with but a single performance?
That night, at any rate, he met no one. Many people crossed his path. They had no faces. He probably didn't have one to them, either. Around midnight, he came to a halt in a deserted square. Before an imposing edifice stood what seemed to be the bronze statue of a child. Not an idealized child-an allegory of childhood-but, he thought to make out in the dark, a simple schoolboy in a cap and duffle coat, satchel in hand. He was idly surprised. You rarely saw statues of children, except perhaps on graves. He looked around in vain for a plaque with some information about the unusual sculpture. He vowed to find someone who'd shed some light on it… when it was light out, perhaps. He felt weary, with no idea of where he was, nor how far from home. What with his great idea of going out without a hat, his hair drooped in dripping strands down his forehead. He'd walked right through puddles, his leather shoes waterlogged; he was cold, tired, willing to bet he'd pay for his childish behavior with a raging cold. He looked around for a taxi. No taxis. The sign for a hotel drew his eye.
The Museum Hotel was on the other side of the street, across from the statue. Its name stood out in bluish neon letters over a glass door, through which could be glimpsed the usual faux marble lobby decked with potted plants, and one of those sofas too soft and squashy to be comfortable. The iron plaque set beside the door boasted three stars. Dorsav thought that if he could take a hot bath in the next five minutes, he had a chance of avoiding a cold. Then, for the same price, he'd stay the night. Of course he clung, like anyone else, to his little habits. He wouldn't have his mouthwash at hand, or his bedtime reading (Milosz one night, and the next Baudelaire). But hadn't he just tossed his entire body of work overboard? Surely it wasn't to batten himself down in routine again so soon! After all, perhaps life began anew with every step only for those with the courage to strike out from marked trails. If he went home tonight, either by cab or by walking an hour in the rain, he could be sure of one thing: nothing would happen. But if he pushed open this glass door and slept at the Museum Hotel like a traveler without any bags, maybe… Maybe he didn't know what, but that was exactly what he wanted: knowing nothing in advance. The principle of uncertainty that seemed to have steered his youth hadn't been working for a long time. Likely it alone had brought him discoveries, lovers, friends, everything that had really counted. Dorsav wanted it back in his life, to enrich it once more.