Even his coat could seem to be stirring with his easy flowing life, even to his clothes he gave the imprint of liveliness. Even his coat could stiralive the love in me which wanted only to be liberated from intensity… To enjoy… I wanted to enjoy… to enjoy…
I parted not from the past, but from past pain, retaining only the humor of the sketches on the wall, and the deep flowing grooves of a mellow undemanding love.
During a sleepless night I thought: Hans, my love, I can love you better now that you cannot hurt me. I can love you more gayly and more easily and loosely. I can endure space and distance and betrayals. Only the best and the strongest for you, Hans, my love, the eternal wanderer, the artist, the faithless one… Nothing is changed except that to-day my courage was born. Lie here, breathing into my hair, over my neck. No hurt will come from me. No judgment. No woman ever judged the life stirring within her womb. To torment you is impossible to me. It is like allying myself with the world against my own flesh and blood. I cannot be against you because I am too close to you. I was harder to-day than I have ever been, for the game of it, but I got no joy. I will always stand by you, with you, against the world. I will laugh with you even if it is against me.
He sat on the edge of my bed, and I watched the transformations in him. I watched the moist, half-open mouth close musingly, the scattered talk crystallizing. The man so easily swayed, caught, moved, now collecting his strength again. At that moment I saw the big man in him, the man who appeared to take his work like a drug, who appeared to be merely enjoying recklessly, idling, roaming, but deep down set upon a terribly earnest goal. Intent on handing back to life all the wealth of material he had collected, intent on restituting to the world what he had taken from the world with his enormous creator’s appetite.
A moment before, flushed by drink, he had been scattering his riches, ideas, imaginings, fantasies, emotions, all diffuse, fragmented. The moment when he crystallized and set himself to work was beautiful to watch. He was not altogether serious yet, was still laughing while he caressed me.
“What magnetic force have you there? It’s like electricity,” he said, “What have you there inside you that I can’t tear myself away from?”
“At this moment, with your hair uncombed and some of my rouge on your mouth, you look absolutely illiterate!”
“Woman, woman, she’s always holding man back from his high purpose.”
I lay on the bed still sunk in my joy, but watching him with secret pride.
“I’m going to write about the death of the soul,” he said.
“And what of the Lemurian man?” I laughed, jumping up. “And what of the surrender to the biologic?”
“You’re always too quick,” he said, “always too impatient. I’m still in the womb.”
“Listen, Hans, I feel your book swelling up inside me like my very own child. Better than my very own, because your book inside me is like a fecundation, while writing my own books is like Narcissism. I love to be fecundated. I’m a female, I’m absolutely female, and I glory in it.”
I stood in the middle of the room laughing and combing my hair.
“I glory in it. I say, let a woman write books, but let her above everything else remain fecundable by other books—especially if they are good. It’s the woman who writes books in solitude who dies. You paint the gigantic fresco, the cosmic fresco; I bring crumbs like an indefatigable ant.”
“And you laugh secretly at my important speeches… You’re no ant.”
“I’m the night then. The all-mother with enormous protective wings covering the world, blanketing it, lulling it. You sleep on the security I give you, on the warmth. I am the night who watches over you through curtained windows with very wide open eyes.”
“You will put me to sleep.”
“In the morning I awake singing because I know you have slept profoundly, lulled by the beautiful lies I tell you, beautiful lies like fairy tales.”
“You lie awake thinking up new lies every day.”
“I lie awake because you snore. You’re so happy you snore. I love to hear you snore, Hans. I love you because you’re natural. I love you because you forget to have your hair cut, and because you scrub yourself spic and span like a Dutchwoman scrubs the cobblestones in the street. I love you because you live in streets where people wear bedroom slippers and don’t comb their hair. I get rested from my burning fever for perfection.”
“Don’t talk any more about rest,” said Hans. “I haven’t written a line to-day.”
“That’s all right, we’re writing chapters all the time, you and I. We write when we sit in a café doing nothing. We’re writing when we dream at night, we’re writing while we eat and even while we fuck. We’re the most industrious couple alive. I wish we could be lazy, layoff. Our profession is in our blood. We can never walk out on it.”
“I’m going to sit down and add to my Self-Portrait. I want to write about the time when I was fifteen years old and expounding Nietzscheu salready had a dose of clap.”
When I heard the typewriter’s dry crackling, I was happy.
I felt myself softly closing the door upon the world. I drew in long mystical bolts. I pulled in rustless shutters. Silence. I imprisoned within myself that mood and texture of Hans’ being which would never go into his book, that which only a woman could see and know.
Johanna arrived last night. Johanna arrived last night.
I repeated this to myself as if I could not understand it. Only the night before I had been with Hans, and now Johanna was here.
Day of hallucination. I imagined Johanna in Hans’ room, preparing to possess his life again. I choked over my food. I tried to work, and I choked over my work. Johanna in Billancourt. I remembered Hans’ pleading words: to wait.
When I slept the pain suffocated me. I had to get up and walk about. When I awoke in the morning the pain lay on the back of my head like a stone. What would become of Hans now, of his life, his work, his joys? What would Johanna do to him?
The most terrible pain of all is the pain which does not explode, which makes no sound, which beats against nothing, which refuses to be exhausted by cry or gesture. The most prolonged and intricate of tortures. There is no air, no rain, no thunder, no lighting, no darkness, no fire. There is nothing to fight. The pain is in the tissues, in the cells, in the silence, in the breathing, invisible and soundless. To shift, to move away, to elude the torture was impossible, since there was no separation between me and the pain. No space, no distance, no voice, no face that one could strike.
I took a long walk alone. The “vigne vierge” was blood red on the walls and fences. I walked against the wind, weeping for Hans, for the lover I could never forget, soft, tender, dangerous, defenceless in women’s hands. My love, Hans, whom I had filled with strength and self-knowledge. I would always be there for him, always his. The day Johanna hurt him I would be there to love him again into wholeness. No one knew the softness in me for Hans, the softness, the forgivingness, the patience, the knowledge I had of his weakness, the love of his weakness…