Ephemeral, this body was undeniably ephemeral. I was overwhelmed by despair, vague and distant; I barely discerned the cause, buried as it must have been in ancient memory, abruptly rekindled and fighting to return, to take hold and actualize itself in a vision. Ephemeral — a word that I heard pronounced as a murder, as an image before my eyes, floating, tearing the veil; a living and funereal abrasion coming to break on the surface of anamnesis.
I had hoped that at least this hour of tragedy would provide me with a confidant, some faithful shadow attached to all that I was not able to bring into the light. What I had wanted to bury came back to me; there is no way to assassinate the cadaver I have been carrying in me for eternity, no way to dull the acidic decomposition that gnaws at me, torturing my flesh every time I find myself falling in love. I constructed each love too much in my own image. Did I want to collide against the jagged edges of suffering, to touch the infinitely collapsible floor of hell? And wasn’t hell itself merely a pretext, in its essence ultimately denied?
“All the torments of romantic passion,” I would say to myself sometimes, ironically. It was the repetition of the same torments that astonished me in particular. Seasons blended together: summer, autumn, winter, I never had any notion of time. My passion always seemed to be solitary or, rather, disconnected, unintelligible to myself or to others. Even Christ had not been alone; at least he had suffered in company, alongside two thieves. It was not that I had chosen solitude. In fact I suffered from it, but even the idea of passion seemed ridiculous and outdated, like something profoundly external, coming from an outside that was inaccessible to me, out of my reach.
Always failing, impaling myself on this fulcrum between speaking and keeping quiet, a knot was forming that I couldn’t undo, little by little strangling my voice, cutting it off in a silence haunted by powerlessness. Rereading Stendhal and Flaubert at the time, their words, coursing through me, opened up a chasm in which my devastating powerlessness devoured me even more violently. Trying to forget through reading, I ended up forgetting everything, even reaching a state of self-oblivion, which alone is able to appease suffering: a blackout in the broken dream of this narrative. The only thing that managed to subsist in my eyes — lost and blind to everything else — was a dispossession that seized, embraced, and then released, without any more substance or intelligibility than that. It was an impossible task to set the boundaries of what I was, up to the edge where I blurred into the other — the indescribable other — so much did the meanings escape me, the words that others before me had uttered deep within an analogous attrition. I longed to reduce the impossible to the inessential, but I no longer had recourse to this principle of logic, which had suddenly become inadequate.
Inadequate, I would repeat the word to myself, my jaws clamping down on my breath, trying to choke it, to nip in the bud the inarticulate expressions that were surging and gnawing. Why give voice to the unarticulated? Because the inexpressible doesn’t articulate itself in the least; it shatters into pieces before even taking form. I felt distinctly that something was breaking under a kind of assault; an obscure combat was taking place, syncopating my breath with its blows. At the impact of that secret confrontation, shuddering with a sadness only noticeable to myself, I pretended to be imperturbable.
Thus, forever oscillating between forced tranquility and irrepressible anguish, I was disconcerting those around me. And indeed, how was I to explain this apparent absurdity: that it is possible to have feelings, to suffer for them, and at the same time to be unable to cut oneself off from them or to have any contempt for them. These sentiments alone have wrested me from the inane inhumanity of my reclusive life spent between God, whom I wanted not to know, and an ennui that I could no longer break or abandon, as I had done too often by absorbing myself in unspeakable frivolities. These sentiments alone have been able to keep me from shamelessly abandoning myself to a life composed entirely of an empty and false legion of distractions.
What was I, truly? A drag queen of intellection, a gigolo of enamoration. A vile series of obscene appearances that had besieged my being without allowing it to escape the gradual stripping bare of its miserable suffering, despair obscurely making its way through my lonely soul. I was finally shedding my mask, my pride, through a fall and a superb defeat, a reduction to my most pure nothingness; such was my annihilation in those beloved arms.
I was swallowed up in the contemplation of this being, asleep, so close, seated and head drooping. I was looking at the bent neck, slender and dipped in shadow beneath a mass of hair. The slow rise and sure fall of breathing, the sudden jerks of consciousness that brusquely raise the oscillating head, which inevitably falls again, as if detached from the body.
I was struggling to discern in the shadows a bitter or desperate crease of the mouth. Arms crossed, folded in sleep over a resting heart, calm in its prison of ribs. That morning at the Apocryphe, while A*** was waiting for me to be able to leave the club, I was wondering what all the surroundings that besiege the sleeping senses — music, lights, voices — were becoming in A***’s dreams. What rhythmic effect was insinuating itself into A***’s sleep? I observed the circular and twitchy movement of the head, corrected in an effort of forced rigidity, straightened and then languid, surrendering to its own weight, straining the neck to the point of making me, watching, uneasy.
What did I get out of watching A*** sleep? I toyed with the desire to interrupt the fall of this head that, in an impulse of sudden tenderness, I could have encircled in my arms and pressed against my shoulder; I wanted to hold, to caress this face that a stray beam of light was illuminating miraculously, unveiling its bottom half as if it were detached, displayed separately from the rest of the body. A***’s legs were stretched over my knees. I didn’t dare move, restraining the impulse of my muscles, normally so restless, I realized then. I was nothing but pure heat, pure momentary contact, a living support frozen in the observation of the other’s shudders, those waves that move through the abandon of sleep. A***’s head was resting on its side so that the plane of the cheekbone was visible, skull slowly slipping against the mirror upon which it was leaning. Never before had this beloved body been so perfectly abandoned to my contemplation.
It felt as if I had never been permitted such transparency with anyone — anyone but A***. Had I confided more in A*** than in anybody else? What had I revealed? Had I unmasked myself, or at least what I thought I knew of myself? No, more likely I had exposed my own collapse, the ruin of the edifice I had so painfully constructed out of rhetoric and made to stand in for an identity. I was forcing myself to forget this nudity. My soul was not retreating behind a multitude of appearances that it could have incarnated endlessly, but rather, hollowed from the inside, was being instilled with doubt over this cavity that it hadn’t filled with anything. I was then forced to recognize what I had always secretly wanted others to discover: “I” is nothing. It was a painful triumph when, faced with this beloved being, I finally achieved what I had always been aiming toward: the ability to confess my own weakness, my nothingness. But the weight of this nothingness was revealed only to me; it remained unintelligible to A***, and I remained in the barrenness, the ruin, at last revealed as if by accident, following this confrontation with my own nudity and death. “What am I,” I was asking myself, “other than what you do not know how to say about me?”