“It is simpler,” he tried to soothe me, “and infinitely more dangerous.”
“Then let it be dangerous,” I said. “What could be worse than living with someone who is not mine? … Who is harboring some memory and seeks to free himself from what he feels and remembers through me, simply because he deems the memory and feeling, that desire, to be unbefitting to him? … Didn’t you yourself tell me that? Well, let him own up to the unbefitting desire. Let him go to her and give up his rank, his dignity.”
“That’s impossible,” he said, his voice cracking from excitement. “He’ll perish in the process.”
“Either way we perish,” I calmly replied. “The child died of it. I am practically a sleepwalker now. I know I’m moving toward the edge, to the border between life and death. Please don’t meddle, please don’t raise your voice, or I will fall. Help if you can. I joined my life to his because I loved him. I thought he loved me … For five years I have lived with a man who has never given me his whole heart. I’ve done all I can to make him mine. I struggled to understand him. I consoled myself with impossible explanations. He’s a man, I said. He’s proud. He’s a man of his class, a lonely man. But this was all lies. Then I tried to bind him to me with the strongest possible human tie, the child. I failed. Why? Can you tell me why? … Is it just fate? … Or is it something else? … You’re the writer, the clever man, the accomplice, the witness to Peter’s life … why are you quiet now? Sometimes I think you had a hand in all this, in all that has happened. You have power over Peter’s soul.”
“I had once,” he said, “but I had to share it with someone else. You should be prepared to share it too. That way everyone might survive,” he said, but he was uncertain and confused.
I had never seen this apparently confident but lonely man so uncertain. The Buddhist monk was now just an ordinary man who would happily have run away rather than answer such painful, dangerous questions. But I wouldn’t let him go.
“You know better than I do that there is no sharing in love,” I said.
“That’s a cliché,” he retorted in bad temper, and lit a cigarette. “You can share anything. Especially in love.”
“What remains of my life if I share?” I asked so passionately that I frightened myself. “A house? A social position? Somebody I dine with, at whose hands I receive the occasional gift of tenderness the way you give an invalid a spoonful of medicine? … Do you suppose there is anything more humiliating, more inhumane, than sharing this kind of half-life with somebody? When I want someone, I want all of him,” I said, almost loudly.
So I went on: despairing, a little theatrical perhaps. Passion always has a touch of theatricality.
Just then someone passed through the conservatory, someone in military uniform … He stopped, startled, looked back, and hurried on, shaking his head.
I felt ashamed. In a quieter, more apologetic tone, I repeated.
“A whole person, someone not to be shared with others. Is that so impossible?”
“No,” he said, examining the potted palm with great care. “It’s simply very dangerous.”
“And our lives, our life together, is that not dangerous the way it is? … What do you think? It’s deadly dangerous,” I declared, and now, having put it like that, I went pale, because I felt it was true.
“The nature of life,” he replied, now courteous and cool, like someone back in his element, leaving the world of passion, returning to the milder climate of precise thoughts and concepts, employing the appropriate formulations. “Deadly dangerous is what life is. But people live with danger in various ways. There are those who live as though they were proceeding along an eternally level plain, walking stick in hand. And there are those who are constantly wanting to leap headfirst into the Atlantic. Dangers are for surviving,” he said very seriously. “It is the most difficult thing, sometimes the most heroic thing, anyone can do.”
There was a small fountain in the conservatory, the water warm to the hand. We listened to its living music as well as the music inside, the music of worldly fashion, a primitive belching.
“I don’t even know,” I said after a while, “who it is I am supposed to share him with. A person or a memory?”
“That’s not important,” he said, shrugging. “It’s the memory of someone rather than a living being. There’s nothing the other one wants, it’s just …”
“Just that she exists,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered.
“In that case we have to get rid of her.” I stood and started looking for my gloves.
“Of whom? The person? …” he asked and slowly unwillingly stood up.
“The person, the memory, the life,” I said. “Can you conduct me to this person?”
“I won’t,” he said. We moved toward the dancers.
“Then I’ll find her by myself,” I said. “There are a million people in this city, several million in the country. I have no evidence to go on, only the lilac ribbon. I have never seen her photograph; I don’t know her name. And yet I am as certain as a water diviner of finding water on an endless plain. Or a prospector who can feel the ore beneath his feet … I am absolutely sure I will find her, this someone, this memory or flesh-and-blood being who is an obstacle to my happiness. Do you doubt me?”
He shrugged. He looked at me carefully, with his sad, searching eyes.
“Maybe,” he said. “I generally believe in people who let their instincts have free rein. I believe in all their miracles and mischief … I believe you will find someone among all those millions, who will answer your call the way one shortwave radio station responds to another. There’s nothing mysterious in this. Powerful feelings reach out to each other … But what do you think will happen then, when you have succeeded?”
“Then?” I asked uncertainly. “Everything will be clearer then. I have to look her in the face, take stock of her … And if it is indeed she …”
“She?” he asked impatiently.
“Just she,” I retorted, just as impatient. “The other one, the enemy … If it is indeed she who prevents my husband’s happiness, if she is the reason why my husband cannot be entirely mine, because of some desire that ties him to her, some memory, some sentimental misunderstanding, whatever it is … well, then, I’ll leave them to their fates.”
“Even if it means the end of Peter? …”
“Too bad. If that’s what finishes him off, let him lump it,” I angrily replied.
We were already in the doorway of the great hall.
“He has done everything possible. You have no idea how much effort it has been for him these past years. You could move mountains with the strength he has spent in denying that memory. I think I know everything there is to know about it. I marveled at it sometimes. He tried to do the most difficult thing in the world. Do you know what he was doing? He was consciously trying to alienate himself from his feelings. It was like someone talking and reasoning with a stick of dynamite, persuading it not to go off.”
“I don’t believe you,” I answered in confusion. “That’s impossible.”
“Almost impossible,” he solemnly replied. “And yet he tried. Why? … To save his soul. To save his self-respect, without which no man can live. And he did it for you too; and when the child came along, he did it for the child, straining every nerve and sinew … Because he loves you. I hope you understand that?”
“I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t be fighting for him if he didn’t … But he doesn’t love me completely, unconditionally. There’s someone between us. Either that other person goes or I go. No doubt this person in the lilac ribbon is powerful, and terrifying? …”
“Should you find her,” he said, blinking and looking into the far distance, “you will be amazed. You will be amazed how much simpler the truth is than you imagine, how much closer to hand, more ordinary, and at the same time more grotesque and dangerous.”