“What is it in me that makes the noise?”
“Everything. Your wishes, your heart, your dissatisfaction, your vanity, your uncertainty—”
“Vanity?” I say. “I’m not vain.”
“Of course you are—”
“Absolutely not!” I reply, knowing that what I’m saying is untrue.
Isabelle kisses me quickly. “Don’t make me tired, Rudolf! You’re always so precise with words. Besides, you’re not really named Rudolf, are you? What is your name?”
“Ludwig,” I say in surprise. It is the first time she has asked me.
“Yes, Ludwig. Aren’t you sometimes tired of your name?”
“To be sure. Of myself too.”
She nods as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Then go ahead and change it. Why not be Rudolf? Or someone else. Take a trip. Go to another country. Each name is a different country.”
“I happen to be called Ludwig. How can I change that? Everyone here knows it.”
She appears not to have heard me. “I, too, am going to go away soon,” she says. “I feel it. I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.”
I look at her and suddenly feel a quick fear. What does she mean? “Doesn’t everyone change continually?” I ask.
She looks over toward the city. “That’s not what I mean, Rudolf. I think there is another kind of change. A greater one. One that is like death. I think it is death.”
She shakes her head without looking at me. “It smells of it everywhere,” she whispers. “Even in the trees and the mist. It drips at night from Heaven. The shadows are full of it. And there is weariness in one’s joints. It has slipped in unobserved. I don’t like to walk any more, Rudolf. It was nice with you, even when you did not understand me. At least you were there. Otherwise I should have been quite alone.”
I do not know what she means. It is a strange moment. Everything is suddenly very quiet, not a leaf moves. Only Isabelle’s hand with its long fingers swings over the arm of the cane chair and the green stones of her bracelet ring softly. The setting sun gives her face a tint of such warmth that it is the very opposite of any thought of death—and yet it seems to me as though a coolness were spreading like a silent dread, as though Isabelle may no longer by there when the wind begins to blow again—but then it suddenly moves in the treetops, it rustles, the ghost is gone, and Isabelle straightens up and smiles. “There are many ways to die,” she says. “Poor Rudolf! You know only one. Happy Rudolf! Come, let’s go into the house.”
“I love you very much,” I say.
Her smile deepens. “Call it what you like. What is the wind and what is stillness? They are so different and yet both are the same thing. For a while I have ridden on the painted horses of the carrousel and I have sat in the golden gondolas that are lined with blue satin and turn round and round and move up and down at the same time. You don’t like them, do you?”
“No, I used to prefer the varnished stags and lions. But with you I would ride in the gondolas.”
She kisses me. “The music!” She says softly. “And the lights of the carrousel in the mist! What has become of our youth, Rudolf?”
“Yes, what?” I say, suddenly feeling tears in my eyes without understanding why. “Did we have one?”
“Who knows?”
Isabelle gets up. Above us there is a rustling in the leaves. In the glowing light of the late sun I see that a bird has let fall its droppings on my jacket. Just about where the heart is. Isabelle sees it too, and doubles up with laughter. I use my handkerchief to wipe away the excrement of the sarcastic chaffinch. “You are my youth,” I say. “I know that now. You are everything it ought to be. Also that one only recognizes it when it is slipping away.”
Is she slipping away from me? I think. What am I talking about? Have I, then, ever possessed her? And why should she slip away? Because she says so? Or because there is suddenly this cool, silent fear? She has said so much before and I have so often been afraid. “I love you, Isabelle,” I say. “I love you more than I ever knew. It is like a wind that rises, and you think it is only a playful breeze and suddenly your heart bows down before it like a willow tree in a storm. I love you, heart of my heart, single quietude in all this confusion. I love you, you who can hear when the flowers are thirsty and when time is weary like a hunting dog in the evening. I love you and love streams out of me as though through the just-opened gate of an unknown garden. I do not altogether understand it and I am amazed at it and am still a little ashamed of my big words, but they tumble out of me and resound and do not ask my leave; someone whom I do not know is speaking out of me, and I do not know whether it is a fourth-class melodramatist or my heart, which is no longer afraid—”
With a start Isabelle has stopped walking. We are in the same allée through which, that other time, she walked back naked in the night, but everything now is different. The allée is full of the red light of evening, full of unlived youth, of melancholy, and of a happiness that trembles between sobbing and jubilation. It is no longer an allée of trees; it is an avenue of unreal light, where trees bend toward each other like dark fans striving to contain it, a light we stand in as though we were almost weightless, soaked in it, like cakes on Sylvester’s Eve drenched in rum until they are ready to fall apart. “You do love me?” Isabelle whispers.
“I love you and I know I shall never love anyone else the way I love you because I shall never again be as I am at this moment, which is passing while I speak of it and which I cannot keep even if I were to give my life—”
She looks at me with great, shining eyes. “Now at last you know!” she whispers. “Now at last you have felt it—the nameless happiness and the sadness and the dream and the double face! It is the rainbow, Rudolf, and you can walk across it, but if you have doubts you will fall! Do you believe that at last?”
“Yes,” I murmur, knowing that I believe it and that a moment ago I believed it too, and that I already did not quite believe it. The light is still strong, but at the edges it is already gray; dark patches push slowly forward and the contagion of thought breaks out again beneath them, just covered over, but not healed. The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it to the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.
“Don’t be sad,” Isabelle says, watching me.
“I can’t walk on the rainbow, Isabelle,” I say. “But I should like to. Who can?”
She brings her face close to my ear. “No one,” she says.
“No one? Not even you?”
She shakes her head. “No one,” she repeats. “But it’s enough to have the longing.”
The light is rapidly becoming gray. Once before everything was like this, I think, but I cannot remember when. I feel Isabelle near me and suddenly I take her in my arms. We kiss as if we were desperate and accursed, like people being torn apart forever. “I have failed in everything,” I say breathlessly. “I love you, Isabelle.”
“Quiet!” she whispers. “Don’t speak!”
The pale patch at the end of the allée begins to glow. We walk toward it and stop at the park gate. The sun has disappeared and the fields are colorless; but in contrast a mighty sunset hangs over the woods and the city looks as though its streets were burning.
We stand for a time. “What arrogance,” Isabelle says suddenly, “to believe that a life has a beginning and an end!”