Hans said:
“Let’s cultivate our insanities like precious flowers. Water and nurture them, as the Jews nurtured hysteria to obtain prophecies from the possessed… Do you know what I dreamed? I leaned out of a window and shouted in a voice I had never herd before: ‘Help! Help!’ The hare-lipped market woman’s voice when the vegetables are stolen, the chicken being guillotined, the dog under a taxi… to the sound of these things in my voice the people ran. They stood gasping at my door. I was trembling. I pointed to the bluish green mirror where I had seen that I was murdered. The blood was coagulating. The skin was green like that of a drowned map. There was a gash, a gash across the face. ‘Help! Help!’ Why are you so inert? I have been killed! I was asleep here on this bed which smells of bestiality. I was dreaming of Venetian alchemist bottles. I was discovering a mixture. I had succeeded in fusing the sparse elements of myself into a long-necked bottle of jade-green transparency. At last I had been able to look at myself bottled. And then I was murdered. Envy, I tell you, envy of the one who has dreams. The people stood there breathless. A woman’s toe stuck out of a hole in her bedroom slipper. When I first began to talk it seemed like a mouse that wanted to run away from the light. It was turning in upon itself. Then it ceased moving as if I had stepped on it. It lay flat. Inert. I danced furiously before them. I poked them with the coal shovel. I saw in the mirror a murdered man agonizing. A woman came forward. She opened her handbag. ‘Look,’ she said. I saw in her pocket mirror an unblemished face—my own. I was alive. Whole.”
There was tacked on Hans’ door a paper with his name and address carefully printed. I asked him:
“Are you afraid to forget your name and who you are and where you live? Have you ever feared amnesia, or wanted it? I have desired it because it is like an atrophy of the ideal self. The conscience goes to sleep, and therefore the critical self. You can then walk the streets and act as you please without qualms. It is only our name, our address and our relations which bind us, like so many memoranda, to the role which is expected of us. The important thing is not to perpetually resemble that fixed image of ourselves, but to create and believe in transformations.”
“In my case,” said Hans, “what’s difficult is to keep any image of myself clear. I have never thought about myself much. The first time I saw myself full length, as it were, was in you. I have grown used to considering your image of me as the correct one. Probably because it makes me feel good. I was like a gigantic wheel, very heavy, surcharged with ideas and plans and inventions, but without a hub.”
“And I’m the hub now, eh?” I said laughing.
“Yes, you’re the hub, and no matter how far I wander off, no matter how enormous the circles I make, you’re always at the centre.”
“No, the hub is really yourself. A knowledge of yourself which you obtained from my love. My love was the catalyzer! It reintegrated you… Unwind that last page in your machine so that I can read it. I like to read it as it comes out of the oven, so hot and fresh.”
“Your tenacity amuses me,” said Hans.
“And your letting things happen amuses me. I love your not holding on to anything. You have declined all the responsibilities of life except that of creating books. You’re one of the authentic artists. You never let anything fall into a mould. I like the way your mind spills out so recklessly, spilling confusion, chaos and wealth. How you flow, spread, expand, enlarge. While I weave, gather and remember. ”
“And laugh secretly at my pompous speeches.”
“Our styles too have married, you know. My writing is the wife of yours.”
This is my Seventh Day. After so much straining and waiting, after so many empty years, after so much isolation and so much striving, I have arrived at my Seventh Day, and I am enjoying it. I rest now, I rest from my straining for perfection. I rest in this rich ambiance created by Hans, this warm climate I have always sought. He has created a world for me. I rest in the present with an Oriental enjoyment. I rest in the perfection of the moment. I have arrived at the end of my hard work to a long lasting holiday, a holiday with Hans. I say this even to-day when it happens that I am lying in bed and that I cannot move because of the pain.
For hours I amused myself with my own thoughts and memories. I played with the hours and with scenes. I labored like a chiseller, with minute care, wondering if I had given some lasting form to the hours most precious to me. I remembered the afternoon when Hans was lying on the couch in my bedroom while I was dressing foran evening party, standing before my long mirror perfuming myself. The window was open on the garden, and he had said: “This is like a setting for Pelleas and Melisande. It is all a dream.” The perfume made a silky sound as I squirted it with the atomizer, touching my ear lobes, my breasts, my neck. “Your dress is green like a Princess’,” he had said. “I could swear it is a green I have never seen before and will never see again. I could swear the garden is made of cardboard, that the trembling of the light comes from the footlights, that the sounds are music, even that noise of wood being sawed. You are almost transparent there, like that mist of perfume you are throwing on yourself. Throw more perfume on yourself, like a ‘fixatif‘ on a water color. Let me have the atomizer. Let me put perfume all over you so that you won’t disappear and fade like a water color.”
I moved towards him and sat on the edge of the couch. “You don’t quite believe in me as a woman,” I said with an immense distress quite out of proportion to his fancy, “yet it happened that while I was perfuming myself I was thinking how I might get you a new suit. Your suit is frayed at the sleeves. The skin of your wrists is so white and fine, as if it could easily be burnt or scratched.”
“This is a setting forPelleas and Melisande, ” he said, “and I know that when you leave me for that dinner I will never see you again. Those incidents last at the most three hours, and the echoes of the music maybe a day. No more.”
It was as if he too had taken the essence of the hour like a blood-colored ink and were tattooing it on my memory. The color of the day, the color of Byzantine paintings, that gold which did not have the firm surface of lacquer, that gold made of a fine powder easily decomposed by time, a soft powdery gold which seemed on the verge of decomposing, as if each grain of dust held together only bytoms were ever ready to fall apart like a mist of perfume; that gold so thin in substance that it allowed one to divine the canvas behind it, the space in the painting, the presence of reality behind its thinness, the fibrous space lying behind the illusion, the absence of color and depth, the condition of emptiness and blackness underneath the gold powder. This gold powder which had fallen now on the garden, on each leaf of the trees, which was flowering inside the room, on my black hair, on the skin of his wrists, on the frayed suit sleeve, on the black carpet, on the green dress, on the bottle of perfume, on the sienna-colored nails, on his voice, on my anxiety—the very breath of living, the very breath he and I took in to live and breathed out to live—that very breath could blow it all down, mow it all down.
The essence, the human essence always evaporating.
The air of that day, when the wind itself had suspended its breathing, hung between window and garden; the air itself could displace a leaf, could displace a word, and a displaced leaf or word might change the whole aspect of the day.
The essence, the human essence always evaporating.