While this exploitative individual revealed his whole face, and the other somewhat mysterious fellow only his profile, the woman who was sitting between them, and with whom the men may or may not have been traveling, for the moment lacked any face. Her head was back, but her face was covered by her straight, brown hair, deliberately thrown forward, perhaps to protect her shallow train-bound sleep from the light, perhaps, too, so as not to offer up, gratis, the image of intimacy and abandon of which she herself would be unaware, her sleeping, lifeless image. She had her legs crossed, and her low-heeled winter boots revealed the upper part of her calf, which went on to become a knee, where the slight sheen of her tights intensified, and ended at the frontiers of a black skirt apparently made of suede. Her whole figure, deprived of its face, gave an impression of perfection, fixity, completion and acceptance, as if there were no room in her for change, emendation or denial — like the days that are ended, like legends, like the liturgy of established religions, like the paintings from centuries past that no one would dare to touch. Her hands, resting in her lap, lay one on top of the other, the right hand with the palm open, the left hand — hanging down — half-closed. But the thumb of that hand — which had long, rather gnarled fingers, like those of someone tempted to bid a premature farewell to youth — made the slight, involuntary, spasmodic movements of someone who has fallen asleep despite herself. She was wearing an anachronistic pearl necklace; she was wearing a red stole around her neck; she was wearing a double silver ring on her middle finger. Her hair, arranged with a single, much-practiced toss of the head, did not even allow one to build up an image of the whole face from a single feature, falling as densely as an opaque veil. That is why I spent so much time studying her hands. Apart from the occasional movement of her thumb, there was something else that attracted my attention: not so much her nails — firm, off-white, manicured — but the surrounding skin, which looked terribly bitten or burned, so much so that the skin on her index fingers — because they were the worst affected — was virtually non-existent, indeed one might have doubted it had ever existed at all. The skin around these nails had suffered some serious eruption that had left behind an ugly red color, as if the skin were inflamed or raw. I thought that if it was the latter (I could not take a closer look), then it was the work not so much of the unseen incisors of the sleeping woman and of the child she had once been, as of time itself, for atrophy — for that was what it seemed to be — requires not only lack of use and activity, not only systematic suppression, but also that most temporal of all things and the thing that distracts all other things from their temporal nature: habit (or its ever-tardy daughter, the law, who is also the first to say that habit's time is nearly up and to announce an end to distraction). I was just beginning to get slightly carried away by these thoughts about a subject of which I understand nothing and, in fact, know nothing, when a sudden sideways jolt of the train made that glossy, straight, brown hair momentarily uncover the face it had been guarding. The face did not wake up, and only a few seconds later everything returned to its original position, but from the full, tight, tense lips, from the tight, tense eyelids with their tracery of tiny reddish veins (the eyes were closed and still unseen), I saw that the sleeping woman was, how can I put it, afflicted. Perhaps I saw that she was afflicted by a kind of melancholy dissolution.
"I DON'T WANT TO DIE LIKE A FOOL," I said to this woman shortly afterwards, in a hotel room that was dark, cramped and of a squalor I did not at the time notice, with bare walls and bedspreads that were grey or possibly just forlorn or simply forgotten in a heap on the floor, fitted with a clean but discolored carpet, and on which there was barely space enough to walk, with two half-unpacked suitcases taking up the space between bed and bathroom, so empty and so white that two toothbrushes — dark red and green — placed in one glass, whose cellophane wrapping had disappeared though we never knew precisely when or who had made it disappear, drew the gaze the way a hand is drawn to a dagger or iron to a magnet, so much so that when one of those toothbrushes was missing on the last night I was there, the ceramic surfaces and the tiles on the floor and walls were all tinged with the red of the remaining toothbrush, and that color even appropriated the black of the toilet bag which I left on the glass shelf so that her departure would be marked by some change or some sign of mourning in that bathroom, so empty and so white, which could be reached only by climbing over the half-unpacked suitcases and the forgotten bedspreads in a heap on the floor when, shortly afterwards, in a hotel bedroom, I said to that same woman: "I don't want to die like a fool, and since, one day or another, I will have no choice but to die, I want above all to take good care, while I can, of the one thing that is certain and irremediable, but I want especially to take care of the manner of my death because the manner is not quite so certain and irremediable. It is the manner of our death that we should take good care of, and in order to do so, we should take good care of our life, because it is that which, although nothing in itself once it ceases or is replaced, is the one thing which, nevertheless, will tell us if, in the end, we died a fool's death or a perfectly acceptable death. You are my life and my love and my life's knowledge, and because you are my life, I do not want to have anyone else but you by my side when I die. But I do not want you to rush to my deathbed when you learn that I am dying, nor to come to my funeral to say goodbye when I can no longer see you or smell you or kiss your face, nor even that you should agree, or want, to accompany me in my last years simply because the two of us have survived our respective and pitiful or separate lives, that isn't enough. What I want there to be at the hour of my death is the incarnation of my life — what that life has been — and in order for you to have been that too, you must have lived by my side from now until that final moment. I could not bear it if at that moment you were only a memory or a confused figure belonging to a vague and distant time which is this clear time that we are living now, because it is memory and distant time and confusion that I most detest and which I have always tried to diminish and reject and bury as soon as they began to form, as soon as each dear, noble present moment ceased to be present and became the past, and was vanquished by what I can only call its own impatient posterity, its not-nowness. That is why you must not leave now, because if you leave now, you will take from me not only my life and my love and my life's knowledge, but also the chosen manner of my death."
I can still remember perfectly how she listened to me as she lay on the bed in that hotel bedroom: she was barefoot but still dressed, leaning on her elbows and with her legs bent; her grey skirt had ridden up slightly to reveal part of her thigh; her straight, glossy brown hair was tilted away from me; and her sweet, grave, ironic gaze was so intent on my incessant lips that it made me feel as if I were only my lips, and that my lips were solely responsible for creating whatever emerged from them.
"And what if I die first?"
"Anything is possible," I replied at once. But I think I did so in order to disguise or to postpone a little (I did it to gain time) the only other normal and admissible answer that immediately followed, the one she was waiting for, as would any mortal lying as she was, at that moment, on that bed: "But your death would also be mine." "But your death would also be mine," I said to this same woman and, just as happens in opera, I repeated these same words several times in this morning's dream.