Slowly and imperceptibly, however, the clown’s performance began to wind down; first the cymbals failed to come together, then they halted in mid-air. I was horrified to realize that the clown’s game was over; I was dumbfounded, painfully so. A beautiful and joyful moment had frozen in mid-air. I moved quickly away from the window in the direction of a small park in the center of town.
The chestnut trees had shed their yellow leaves. The old wooden restaurant was closed, and a number of broken benches were strewn in front of it. I dropped into one of them. It was in such bad repair that I nearly landed on my back looking up at the sky. The sun was sending a gleam of tiny crystals through the branches.
For a while I stayed as I was, my eyes lost in the heights, and weak, indescribably weak. Then up came a strapping lad and sat down beside me. A pair of large dirty hands came out of rolled-up sleeves, a powerful red neck out of an open collar. After giving his head a good scratch with all ten fingers, he took a book out of his pocket and began to read. He held the pages close together to keep the wind from turning them and muttered loudly as he read. From time to time he ran his hand through his hair to aid his understanding of the text.
I gave a meaningful cough, then — my back still diagonal, my eyes still on the branches — asked, “What are you reading?”
The lad thrust the book into my hands as if I were blind. It was a long tale in verse about highwaymen. The book was filthy, covered with grease spots and dirt; it had clearly gone through many hands. While I was perusing it, he got up and stood there towering over me, sure of himself with his rolled-up sleeves and bare neck. Yet I found it as pleasant and calming as the cymbal playing in the shop window.
“And. . Well, doesn’t reading give you a headache?” I asked, returning the book to him.
He seemed not to understand.
“Why should it?” he asked. “Not in the least.”
He sat down again and went back to his reading.
So there was a category of things in the world I was destined never to be part of: carefree mechanical clowns, strapping lads undisturbed by headaches. A broad and vigorous river, full of life and purity, was flowing past me — in the trees, in the sunlight — and I, all darkness and frailty, was fated to remain on its banks.
I stretched out my legs on the bench and, propping my back against a tree, made myself comfortable. What prevented me from being strong and detached, I wondered, from feeling the fresh, vibrant sap circulating in all these branches and leaves, and circulating in me, from standing straight, tall, and unencumbered by thought in the light of the sun, sober, my life clearly laid out in front of me, self-enclosed, as in a trap?
The first step in that direction might be to breathe more slowly and more deeply. I was not good at breathing: my chest was either too full or too empty. I began inhaling with confidence. Within a few minutes I felt better. A fluid of perfection, weak at first but gaining in intensity moment by moment, had begun to flow through my veins. The noise of the street recalled the presence of the city, which was now revolving around me slowly like a gramophone record. I had become in a way the center and axis of the world. The most important thing was not to lose my equilibrium.
One morning I happened to be at a circus when the performers were rehearsing, and I witnessed a scene that came back to me now. A fan, a regular member of the audience with no circus training whatsoever, had, without blinking an eye, scrambled to the peak of the table-and-chair pyramid that an acrobat had just descended. Like all those present I admired the precision with which he scaled the rickety construction. The exaltation that came of surmounting the first obstacles imbued the amateur with what one might call a science of equilibrium, which pointed his hands to the exact place they needed to be and enabled his feet to gauge the minimal weight required to hoist himself onto the next step. Encouraged, exhilarated by the sureness of his progress, he reached the top in a matter of seconds. But there something very strange occurred: he suddenly became aware of the fragility of his position and the audacity of his undertaking. His teeth chattering, he begged the acrobats for a ladder and pleaded with them over and over to hold it steady. The once bold amateur came down step by step with great caution, covered with sweat from head to toe, amazed and upset at having had the idea to make the climb.
My position in the park at that time was like the peak of that flimsy pyramid: I felt a fresh and powerful sap circulating through me but had to make an enormous effort to keep from falling from the heights of my certitude. It occurred to me that this was how I should be when I saw Edda: calm, sure of myself, full of light. It was a long time since I had been to their place. For once in my life I wanted to put on a firm, unbending front.
Placid and magnificent as a tree. Just so — a tree. I filled my lungs with air and addressed a warm, comradely salute to the branches above my head. There was something rough and simple in a tree, something that went perfectly with my new strength. I stroked the trunk as if patting a friend on the back. “My friend the tree!” The more closely I observed the branches in its crown reaching out to infinity, the more I felt my flesh divide and let the fresh air from outside circulate through the spaces. And my blood, majestic and mixed with sap, rose in my veins, foaming from the percolation of the simple life.
I stood up. My knees buckled at first, unsure of themselves, as if wishing to compare my strengths and weaknesses in a moment of hesitation. Then I strode off to see Edda.
The heavy wooden door leading to the terrace was closed. Its immobility disturbed me. All my ideas vanished into thin air. I leaned on the handle. “Chin up!” I said to myself but immediately took it back: only the timid need to keep their chins up to do something; the strong — normal people — know neither courage nor cowardice. They simply open doors.
The cool darkness of the first room enveloped me in its calm and cheerful mood. It seemed to have been waiting for me. This time the bead portière coming together after I had passed through it made a strange click that gave me the impression I was alone in an empty house at the edge of the world. Was that the sense of extreme equilibrium the man felt at the peak of the chair pyramid?
I knocked loudly on Edda’s door. Frightened, she told me to come in.
Why did I go in so slowly? Did I go in slowly? I thought that the presence of a person such as myself or, rather, of a tree should be perceptible from far off, yet I could tell that it caused neither surprise nor excitement nor any emotion whatever.
For several seconds my thoughts ran ahead of me, depicting a perfect, dignified entrance: I saw myself advancing with self-confidence, aloof, and taking a seat at the foot of the bed in which Edda was lying. My actual person was as incapable of realizing these beautiful projects as a broken down old trailer: when Edda asked me to sit, I went to a chair on the other side of the room.
The grandfather clock between us made an annoyingly loud ticktock, and strange to say, it would crescendo and diminuendo with the ebb and flow of the tides, rolling away in a wave in Edda’s direction until I could scarcely hear it and returning as a breaker so violent that I thought my eardrums would burst.
“Edda,” I began, interrupting her silence, “I have something very simple to tell you.”
Edda made no response.
“Do you know what I am, Edda?”
“No, what are you?”
“I’m a tree, Edda, a tree. .”
Of course this brief conversation took place entirely in my imagination; not a word of it was actually uttered.
Edda pulled her dressing gown over her legs and nestled further into the bed. Then she put her hands under her head and looked at me attentively. I would gladly have parted with anything I owned to turn her gaze anywhere else in the room. Suddenly I saw the large bouquet of flowers in a vase on a shelf. That saved me.