Before arriving at Portoferraio, Marie had turned onto a small winding road that led to the cemetery where her father was buried. Once there, standing motionless, she bowed her head in silence a moment in front of his grave. She placed the bouquet of wild flowers on his grave and left without looking back, she returned to the car and took off without delay toward Portoferraio. She’d driven into the city proper and continued all the way to the port, blankly staring out the smudged windshield, its surface covered in a thick layer of dirt and resin from the pine tree under which the old truck had spent the winter. Marie drove along the quays slowly and parked the car by the harbormaster’s office. She got out and left the port on foot to go have an espresso at the counter of one of the many cafés on the esplanade by the docks. She sipped her espresso calmly, it was almost noon, she was in her full splendor, wearing white pants and a slightly faded parma pink shirt, and she watched the ships drift in and out of the port. After about twenty minutes, a boat coming from Piombino came into the port, and I was there, on the deck of the boat.
It was my first time in Elba since the previous summer, almost a year to the day since Marie’s father’s death. I took the same Toremar boat I’d taken the previous year, when I’d come back from China to attend her father’s funeral. As soon as the boat set sail, I took refuge in one of the cabins on the lower deck, and I sat lost in thought in the hot, dark shade of a stiff seat with metal armrests. I ended up falling asleep, dozing in the half-light, soothed by the hum of the motor, details from the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death filling my mind, without my trying consciously to put them together into any particular order. No, I settled only on snatches of that night in my half-sleep, making some vague conjectures — hypotheses and projected images — calling on different areas of my brain, having recourse to reason when developing hypotheses or evoking corresponding images from dreams. To a few confirmed and proven facts from that night, I added my own fantasies, mixing them together liberally in my mind, linking imaginary acts to real places in my half-sleep, mentally walking around the apartment on rue de la Vrillière, where I’d spent more than five years with Marie, moving in and out of rooms, opening the window and finding the gate around the Banque de France, Parisian streetlamps infusing the whole scene with a yellow light, while at the present moment I was sitting snugly on a boat silently crossing calm seas between the coast of Italy and the shores of Elba.
I knew that night contained its own objective reality — what had really taken place in the apartment on rue de la Vrillière — but that reality would always be out of my grasp, I could only circle it, approach it from different angles, go around it and attack it from the side, but I’d always come up short, as though what had actually happened that night was fundamentally unattainable to me, out of my imagination’s reach and irreducible to language. I could reconstruct that night in mental images with the precision of dreams, I could cover it in words with a formidable power of evocation, all in vain, I knew I’d never reach what had been the fleeting life of the night itself, but it seemed to me that I could perhaps reach a new truth, one that would take its inspiration from life and then transcend it, without concern for verisimilitude or veracity, its only aim the quintessence of the real, its tender core, pulsing and vibrant, a truth close to invention, the twin of fabrication, the ideal truth.
Toward the end of the trip, while the boat approached the shores of Elba, my thoughts began to drift toward another night Marie had talked about, the night of her return from Japan. I hadn’t been with her that night, but I saw in a similar way the events unfold behind my closed eyes, with the main characters materializing and taking shape in my mind, faceless and nameless, and yet they were not inventions or chimeras but real people whose lives must have corresponded to what I saw in my mind. Lulled by the hypnotic hum of the boat’s engines, I watched these characters move silently in my mind, and, even if I was absent from the scenes unfolding behind my closed eyes, even if I wasn’t actively involved, even if I failed to appear physically among the other figures, I knew I was intimately present, not only as the sole source of each evocation, but at the heart of each and every character, to whom I was bound in ways unknown, with hidden and secret ties linking us together — for I was as much myself as each one of them.
My imperfect knowledge of what happened the night of Jean-Christophe de G.’s death, the many murky areas surrounding the events of that evening, were hardly a handicap for me. On the contrary, this forced me to employ my imagination to a much greater degree, pressed me to provide all the details in my mind, whereas had I really been there I’d simply have remembered everything. No, I wasn’t there that night, but I’d followed Marie in thought with the same emotional intensity as if I had been, as in a performance executed without me, not from which I am absent, but in which only my senses participate, as in dreams, where each figure is no more than an expression of one’s self, recreated through the prism of our own subjectivity, sprung from our own sensibility, our intelligence and fantasies. Even if I wasn’t fully asleep, my mind was seized by the irreducible mystery of dreams, that force which allows you to create extraordinarily elaborate images and which then arranges them in a series with no apparent order, with vertiginous gaps, areas that vanish into thin air and characters drawn from our own lives who merge seamlessly, fuse, transform into new beings, and, despite this radical incoherence, these images awake in us, with a blistering intensity, memories, desires, and fears, all of which, as happens rarely in life itself, give rise to true terror and love. For there is no third person in dreams, never, it is always a matter of one’s own self, as in “The Island of Anamorphosis,” an apocryphal story by Borges in which the writer who first invents the third person in literature ends up, after a long process of solipsistic decline, depressed and conquered, renouncing his invention to switch back to the first.
I was among the first to disembark when we arrived at Elba. Marie was waiting for me at the quay, she watched me come down the gangplank, her gaze attentive, veiled, beautiful. There was love the moment we saw each other again, from the first look, even if my arms, my hands, drawn toward her uncontrollably, didn’t act on the impulse my eyes betrayed. Reaching the quay, I simply put my hand on her shoulder, silently, not knowing what to say, letting my hand slide down her bare arm, our first physical contact in two months. It was Marie who’d invited me to join her in Elba, but clearly that didn’t imply any change in our relationship — we were still separated, even if, by sheer circumstance, our relationship had become new, ambiguous, unexpected.
As strange as it may sound, I made Marie happy, I’d always made her happy. Besides, I’d noticed that I made women happy, not all women in general, but each one in particular, each believing herself the only one, by her singular perspicacity, her penetrating gaze, and her feminine intuition, to detect in me hidden qualities no other woman could identify. Each of them was in fact convinced that these invisible qualities, which they’d detected in me, passed unnoticed to everyone except herself, whereas in reality many a woman was the only one to appreciate my secret qualities and to fall under my spell. It’s true, however, that these qualities were far from apparent, and, if too nuanced or subtle, my charm could be mistaken for dullness and my sense of humor as lacking, as only a thin line separates finesse from drabness.