They stood before the window in the fierce, cold light. The man had his back to the window and was watching the girl’s powerfully lit face: he watched the woman in his arms as he moved in a peculiarly encouraging and threatening manner that suggested both rescue and assault, the movements precise and appropriate to the moment. He too found the situation reassuringly familiar. He was no longer afraid that lonely, empty months of damp and solitude had led him to lose his voice. He was aware that every word, every movement of his, found favor with the audience. He looked at the girl contentedly, being in no hurry, having plenty of time to spare. The face, that heart-shaped face, whose every feature, every subtle shade of color, was amplified by the strong light, was simply the face of a woman, that was all — which did not mean that he was lying when he said he would recognize it among a thousand women’s faces, even under a mask. One woman’s face was as a hundred women’s faces, faces he had bent over in similar situations with just such tender and solemn solicitude, as if each were a puzzle he had to solve, an arcane script, a word written in signs taken from the cabala or some other realm of magic, each a word that added some meaning to life. He watched the face patiently, solemnly. Because these signs on a woman’s face, the slightly upturned, delicately freckled nose, the mouth which was raw like the cut flesh of a plump fruit, the golden down above the upper lip, and the chin, that childish little chin set among curves, the brilliant fine-drawn line of the closed eyes, the ample blonde swell of the eyelashes, and, next to the nose and the mouth, the two harsh lines that life had left as its legacy of fear and suspicion and which now, touched by light and by a strange pair of arms, seemed to soften and melt; all this was the rune, the secret script whose meaning he had to decipher. The two faces — the serious male face, gazing, and the girl’s face with its closed eyes, its relaxation, its faint smile, and air of expectation — swam next to each other like two planets tied together by an unbreakable law of attraction.
“Why hurry?” thought the man. And so did she.
What was this? Was it love?… He was pretty sure that it was not. But now that he leaned over the girl’s face and felt the warm breath of her young mouth on his skin, now that the attraction, which was gradual and irresistible, forced him to move closer to her lips, advancing very slowly, with an almost religious reverence, his whole body bending, like a fugitive dying of thirst and worshipping at the fount of water he leans over, he did consider the question. “Could this be the One?…” But he already knew that she wasn’t, or, more precisely, that she was only one among many others who were also not the One, or, even more precisely, that she, too, was the One. He would have recognized the girl among a thousand other female faces — his powers of recollection worked with a remarkable, almost supernatural power when it came to remembering women’s faces, employing precisely the same instincts as a beast of prey does when he picks up traces and scents in the jungle — but he also knew that this relationship would be as inconclusive as the rest, for no relationship was ever conclusive: whatever the power of the mysterious, dumb, yet harshly insistent voice emanating from certain women, the signal never said anything more than, “Here I am: we have something in common that we could explore, you and I.” There was never any other signal but this. He always heard the voice and heeded the call, like an animal in the jungle. His ears would prick up, his eyes begin to shine and he would straighten his back. And so he would set off in the direction of the sound, following the scent, sniffing, listening, constantly on the alert, his instincts always reliable. This was the way they called to him, the young, the beautiful, the ragged, the mature, and the aging, serving maids and princesses, nuns and traveling actresses, seamstresses and serving girls, women who could be paid in gold and more discriminating women who lived in palazzos (who also, eventually, had to be paid, and more plentifully, in gold). So it had been with the baker’s widow, with the canny daughter of the Jewish horse trader, with M.M. the French ambassador’s favorite, with C.C. the ruined child bride in the convent, and with the dirty, lecherous creature who only recently had been swept away to be deposited in his harem at Versailles by His Most Christian Highness Louis of the Bourbons. So it had also been with the young wife of the French captain, with the lady mayoress of Cologne, and with the princess d’Urfé who was as old as the hills and so skinny that a man was likely to prick his finger on one of her bones when embracing her…. Each time he heard the voice and at every call he set out, never once lacking the feral excitement of sniffing the air or failing to experience the erotic trembling and the thrill of concentration when the mysterious question once again presented itself. “Could this be the One?…” But no sooner did he face the question than he knew that it wasn’t, that not one of them was. And so he moved on.
And everywhere there were inns, and theaters with nightly performances, and every day miraculously produced someone, something, provided one wasn’t afraid. No, I have never been afraid, he reflected with satisfaction, and drew the girl’s unresisting body still closer to him. “But it would be good if this were finally she, the One I have been looking for,” he thought. “It would be good to rest. It would be good to know that there was no more need for quick thinking and elaborate strategies, that someday the plot might be reduced to something perfectly simple, that one might live one’s life with a woman who loved one back, and so desire nothing more. It would be very good,” he ruefully thought. But it was as if the plot had become fatally confused at some point and had now to be straightened out, as if somewhere, at some time in the past, the fragile image of truth that he was seeking had been shattered and was lying in pieces at his feet. And now he had to bend down and recover each and every fragment of it. This girl, for example, had lovely ears, pink and childlike, a fine pair of ears with a most delicate shell-like curve, a lovely interplay between bone, cartilage, and the lobe’s faintly comical, simple fleshiness: yes, her ears were a practically edible delight. What should he whisper into such ears? Should he say, “You are wonderful, unique….”? He had said it so often before. But it was as if he were afraid of losing his touch, and so, more for the sake of practice, for memory’s sake, he leaned toward the girl’s ear and with his hot breath whispered into it: “You are wonderful, unique.”
Fine and delightful as the ear was, it blushed to hear the words. Indeed, the girl blushed along her whole face. For the first time she felt embarrassed. There was something impudent, aggressive, almost improper in the words, as there is in every lie told at important moments. But there was something familiar and encouraging in them too, something reminiscent of certain patriotic songs, the kind of songs that people had been singing for centuries, in the shadow of public monuments and other sacred places. “Unique,” he had said, and the girl blushed as if she had heard something deliciously risqué. She blushed because she sensed the lie, and then the man fell silent again, flushed by success and a little amazed at the inevitability of it all, knowing it could not be otherwise, that there was no greater lie to be told. And both of them felt that this lie was in some way a secret truth. So they kept silent, the pair of them, somewhat disoriented. They sensed that, in its own mysterious way, “unique” was, like all eternal verities, a truth, that is to say as much a truth as when someone pronounces the words “Motherland!” or “So it must be!” and begins dutifully to weep. And however vulgar and shameless the sentiment may be, such a person feels that the grand mendacious cliché is, in some deep way, as true as his patriotism or sense of destiny, or indeed the words “You are wonderful, unique.” And so, because they could not think of anything else to say to each other, they set to kissing.