“Well, do you want to, André?…” you asked without moving your lips. Your smile illuminated my soul.
In my soul I have kept the music of your words, and on my brow the memory of your sweet caress.
28 May
The last three days I have reread your letters. I have kept them all, but they give a poor impression of you. If they were all I had to remember you by, I would think you waggish, rather fickle, always evasive and elusive. Your mind forces your soul to remain aloof.39
From time to time, however, it would suddenly cry out to me, and it was then so plaintive — like a prisoner.
“Do not withhold your affection, my brother,” you said. “I prefer it above all else.”
And later on, after a separation, you said: “I can not accept the idea of life without you.”
And there was still more. There were fleeting moments of tenderness, quickly squelched by the mind; then in the next letter, ironically you made fun of yourself and of me for having believed you.
The reason was that far from me, your mind was again dominating your soul.
Yes, sometimes your soul managed to break free, and when it spoke, its ardor astounded even me. At times I questioned your tenderness since you refused to acknowledge it to yourself; I thought that I loved you much more.
The last night before we were to part for a long time, I told you these things and wept — as much from emotion as from the wish to be assured by you — for I was comforted by only the most tenuous hope, and when I was uncertain your absence made me fear the worst. But you finally tired of the silence.
“Oh, André,” you exclaimed tearfully, “never will you know how much I loved you!”
Your mind is stubborn, despotic. It would have you be domineering. You again resorted to mockery. O the smirk on your lips! I had to obey immediately or you would evade me. Silence until I gave in. You knew that I would always come back to you. That was what made you strong; I was not sure of you; I gave up quickly.
Then came sweet reconciliation. We managed to be together more often, and our souls were all the more loving when we were apart because we had restrained them.
Your mind! I will find fault with it because it irritates me. It is your mind that I know best, and yet it is not similar in any respect to my own. You are afraid to admire without passing judgment. You would like to keep your reason unimpaired; whatever is immoderate terrifies you — as much as it attracts me. I resent your not having trembled in the face of Luther’s grandeur; then I sensed your femininity, and I suffered. You understand things too well and do not love them enough.
But our souls — they are so alike that they can not know each other!..40
I wrote to Pierre:
But let them believe. What right have you to deprive them of the joys of believing? What will you give them in exchange? They are absolutely right even if they are mistaken. To believe in possession is as comforting as to possess … and are not all possessions chimerical? They are duped by a mirage of eternity and uplifted by their hope. If there is nothing after life, who will return to tell them? Nor will they be aware of not existing after death; they will never know that they have not lived on eternally. But nothing must stand in the way of their belief here and now — it is the basis for their happiness.
I remember having shown her those lines.
“O André!” she exclaimed. “If things were the way you say they are, faith would be an illusion. Only truth is worthy of belief, even though it might offer no hope. I prefer to suffer through not believing than to believe in a lie.”
Ah! Rebel!
Your serene and lofty ideas are too much for me. I am tormented by the stability of your faith; I wish it had tottered. Oh, that your soul had cried out in the void! Mine would have been less forlorn with yours for its companion, for it would have known compassion. You might now be less haughty. But you did not flinch, and now you look down on me.
Then one day we were reading Spinoza — oh, how these memories tire me! — and admiring his divine plan.
“Does this not bother you, Emmanuèle — this unorthodox book?” I asked.
“Oh, all doubts are in the mind,” you said. “A book could not create them.”
Sweet little soul! Who could know it?
Our minds were intimately acquainted and no longer withheld their secrets. We knew each other’s thoughts before speaking and we knew how they would be phrased. I made a game of it. When we were talking I would anticipate the word that was to come from your lips and take it away from you before they parted. But familiarity with the mind did not extend to the soul.… One soul pursued the other but was always deluded and led astray by the succession of thoughts that flowed in parallel fashion through our minds. The soul was enchanted by an illusory similitude, one that involved not the soul but a frivolous mind.
It was like the lover in the legend of Ondine. Pursuing her one evening, he imagined that he saw her changing image in the will-o’-the-wisp hovering over a pond. Seduced by the captivating illusion, he dashed after it only to be disillusioned. He wept when the phantom disintegrated between his fingers.
(Our souls were obscured by our thoughts. When one of them darted forth, it would skid along smooth surfaces. The slope formed by our thoughts was so inviting and the succession of our thoughts so effortless that our souls were tempted to go wherever our thoughts coincided.)
We liked to lose ourselves in distant memories. By virtue of associations that transcended time and space and unsuspected relationships, one word was enough to evoke a host of dreams. The word was never bare but it had one and the same legend for both of us; it evoked from the past many emotions, many passages that we had read — both when we had said things and when we had read them. It was never the word itself but the recall of the past. That is why we derived so much pleasure from quoting poets — not because we experienced something through them but because they reminded us of so many things!
Then one word often signified a whole sentence known only to us — it was only a bare word to others. One word was the beginning of a verse or of a thought, another marked the end. For instance, when we were walking around the house one evening, I began:
Listen! my dear …
and you understood:
Listen to the night gently descending.41
Then it became a task, an obsession. We had always to watch for companion thoughts and to bring them to light even though we recognized them for what they were beforehand.… We no longer thought but watched each other think, and with the same result. But we were tormented by the need to test the similitude and would voice our thoughts even though we could have remained silent and communicated without words.
We anticipated sentences, snatching them from each other’s lips before they were uttered — and sometimes as we both waited for a thought from the other, the same thought would come to both of us.
On summer evenings it was with Chopin, Baudelaire.…
Leisurely dreams the moon tonight …
How would I love you, O night, without stars.…
But our tired lips left the verse incomplete and we let our eyes give more precise expression to our feelings of tenderness tinged with desire.
Some of those around us were upset by our close relationship, which we never tried to conceal. They tried to separate us, to erect barriers between us; but it was already too late, for we communicated by means of signs unnoticed by others. Instead, they quickened our interest in the mystery of sign languages, and we created our own solitude in their midst. By shackling them, they revealed to us our desires.