Later I translated the exact words of the song and watched as their meaning, which I had imperfectly intuited that night, unfolded. I transcribe the essential lines here:
I can’t stand the pain
and I keep looking for all the faces I had
before the world began.
I’ve only known desire and my poor soul will burn
into eternal fire.
And I can’t even cry,
a sphinx can never cry.
I wish that I could be
a silent sphinx eternally.
I don’t want any past
only want things which cannot last.
Phony words of love
or painful truth, I’ve heard it all before.
A conversation piece,
a woman or a priest, it’s all a point of view.
The vision comes back to me instantly: A*** crossing the stage in the feline roving of the choreography, embodying an enigmatic, silent figure twisting to the extreme limit of dislocation in miraculous movements that were syncopated but not staccato. Even as this body fades away, a spectral figure remains, immobile; the stage is populated with incarnations, sudden gestures, hieratic poses set in a relentless progression. There was something cat-like or divine in this body that, moved by some sly, sensual pleasure, was embodying in nonchalant strides a languid damnation, an immemorial fatality made into movement.
When I entered the dressing room, I found A*** immobile as if in prayer or confession, legs bent, forearms fixed on a high barstool supporting A***’s entire body weight. Hands dangling, wrists slack, gaze abandoned and lost in the emptiness, then focusing on me as I entered and following me to where I sat down opposite. It was like the disdainful pose of the sphinx (or the image I had of it then), the same sharp aesthetic. I thought this to myself and, laughing, affectionately let slip, “my sphinx”—as if I had said “my love.” We remained face-to-face, our bodies as if petrified. A terror silted up in my throat; the desire I had felt welling up in me at the sight of those distant movements on the stage had been suspended. I could do nothing but adore. Those eyes, so black, fixed on me, subjected me to an unbearable torture.
The following winter we planned a trip to New York to visit A***’s family, including A***’s mother, uncles, aunts, and cousins. We thought of it as a break, an interpolated parenthesis in the delirious lifestyle caused by our jobs. We wanted a rest from the excitement — and the resulting comedown — of our nights of partying, to flee the invasive rumble of the social scene. We also wanted to repair the damage done by A***’s inability to remain faithful to me, by those passing flings that always led to remorse and then a sudden resurgence of desire and a whirlwind week of all kinds of debaucheries. We were hoping that through a month of intimacy, of living free from constraint, we could erase the hurts that a year of voracious and nocturnal passion had inflicted on us.
We left right at the beginning of January, not long after the New Year. The day we arrived we visited A***’s mother, whom I was meeting for the first time. She was living alone in a studio, on the twelfth floor of a building on Second Avenue. Behind her apparent reserve upon their reunion, which contrasted starkly with the effusive demonstration of affection deployed by A***, I perceived the joy, or rather the painful relief, brought on by this homecoming. The insidious pain inflicted on her by A***’s long absence seeped through her happiness. I sensed the misery, the despair caused by the distance from the sole person she loved. She wouldn’t even allow herself to show this sadness, so deep was the wound. She considered me attentively without asking any questions and, it seemed, accepted me without need for discussion. I was there with A***, who seemed to be attached to me and to whom I seemed to be attached. What did she suspect our relationship to be? What did she think of it? I never knew. All I learned, which I heard through A***, was that she appreciated my attentiveness and my lack of histrionics. Of all the people she had had the occasion to see in A***’s company, it was for me, apparently, that she had the most esteem. She was astonished by how young I was (ten years younger than A***). She thought it was a good omen that I wasn’t particularly extroverted. I think she feared for A***, not knowing anything about her child’s life, and what she imagined or heard of it did not reassure her in the least. And, though she never regarded A*** with disapproval, she did not manage to conceal her anxiety. She was as apprehensive of meeting me as she was excited: she was no doubt dreading that she would not care for me as much as A*** was counting on it.
We stayed in a hotel for three nights, waiting for one of my former fellow university students to hand over his apartment in the city, which we would stay in during his upcoming absence. Our room, on the 25th floor of a modern building, opened onto East 42nd Street. We had agreed to spend our first nights in luxury: the room was big, the bathroom adorned with marble, and the bed immense. Despite the long trip and despite being awake for more than 24 hours, we weren’t tired at all, nor did we want to sleep. Through the taxi window, I had avidly observed all that passed before my eyes: the graffiti on the palisades and walls; the waves of oversized cars; the baroque decay of certain neighborhoods; the diversity of the people walking on the sidewalks. I felt intoxicated; the dreams I had suppressed in my state of prolonged wakefulness were turning everything I saw into visions: eyes open, I was dreaming this newly discovered city. The almost electric atmosphere of this place, completely new to me, was as exciting for me as it was for A***, whose childhood and adolescence had been lived out in this familiar setting. For the first time, we could feel like a couple; in this restless, teeming city we were experiencing an ineffable, exalting feeling of intimacy and togetherness. The city before our eyes and under our feet united us through its simple strangeness or familiarity. I was trying to decipher the traces of A***’s past life, and for A*** this trip served as a type of secret confession.
Turning away from the window where I had been contemplating the night sky and the horizon of lights, I did a little dance toward the bed. A*** came out of the shower, wearing only a towel. I coaxed A*** onto the bed, and then held my new prisoner captive between my arms and legs. As we rolled around, a juvenile excitement seized me, the desire to play, to roughhouse, to run out of breath doing something frivolous. I couldn’t remember having had such a desire for a long time; I had forgotten that state of mind, lost since childhood, and it returned to me suddenly in a hotel room smack in the middle of New York. I whispered inconsequential words in A***’s ear, who could do nothing but laugh. My body was immense; it could have embraced all of America. The blood in my arteries, the air in my lungs, the ideas in my head all shared the same lightness. I horsed around with A*** like I had never dared to do before, allowing myself the liberties and improprieties that formerly I had thought of as obscene, but which now seemed innocently naïve. When asked what I was doing, I replied that I had finished my homework and certainly had the right to play with my toys before my afternoon snack.