Johanna was making a supreme effort to reassert herself, to dominate and possess him again. But why does she want to possess him again only to leave him again dispossessed and reduced?
It was this implacable destruction, this necessity forone to triumph over the other, which incensed me. Why couldn’t Johanna be great without killing Hans? Why couldn’t Hans be great without first killing Johanna? Why must either of them be enriched and saved only by means of the other’s death?
Destruction the sole measure of strength - that was an attitude I found impossible to share. Strength is evinced through creation, I thought. I would not feel greater by triumphing over Hans. I could only feel great if Hans were made greater through me.
War! The necessity of war!
Johanna and I in a taxi, holding each other closely. Johanna saying: “You are giving me life, you are giving me what Hans has taken away from me.” And I heard myself answering with fevered words of passion. Our knees locked, our hands locked, kissing in full awareness of our rivalry. Our enmity rumbling low, deep, watchful.
It was like madness forme to be carrying this diamond lodged in the middle of my forehead, the hard light of my lucidity, of my vision, thinking of means to save Hans while exchanging warm kisses with Johanna. Who is the innocent one?The onewho loves. I feel that Johanna does not love Hans. Who is the human being? The onewho really suffers from the loss of his love. I feel that Johanna would never suffer as I would. She would suffer only in her pride. Who is the cleverest? Who the strongest? The one who loves the least, the one who fights for the triumph of his own ego.
Johanna said: “I am afraid of your eyes,” and she made herself small in my arms. “Your eyes pierce every veil.”
And as Johanna whispered in my ear I recollected the closing words of Hans’ letter: “Thanks to you I am not being crushed this time. Don’t lose faith in me, I beg you.”
Hans came to see me. He tried to kiss me and I would not let him. No, I could not bear that. No, he should not touch me—that would hurt me. He was baffled.
“I want you more than ever,” he said. “Johanna has become a stranger to me. The first two nights with her I could not feel any passion. I love you, and with you alone I feel the connection between the image I carry in me and my desire. There’s no such thing as loving two women. You have displaced Johanna.”
Before he had finished I had surrendered. The closeness seemed profoundly natural. There was nothing changed.
After a while he said:
“Doesn’t Johanna bore you? I find that she talks too much.”
“We have so much to say to each other.”
“Nobody can say to Johanna: ‘Listen, listen deeply.’ I can only make her listen by violence. What do you do that she listens to you?”
“I just look at her.”
“But what do you have to say to each other?”
“If I gave you my own idea and my own image of Johanna, Hans, you would love her. There’s a great deal of mystery in our world, a great deal that will never be clear to you. You think I must know more, because I am a writer, that it must all be clear to me. But all I can say is that there is a world which is closed to you. Johanna has slipped between your fingers. I won’t tear her to pieces as you have done.”
I touched Johanna’s bracelet without looking at it, like a talisman.
“I sit down and try to tell you, to tell you what I’d much rather go on living ecstatically, unbeknown to you—to all. You beat your head against the walls of our world, yes, and because I am an artist you think I will give away the mystery. I will say what Johanna is. I will tear the veil. But to-day I hate my work, Hans. I don’t want to formulate, to force out the delicate, the vague, the voluptuous into the daylight of words. I renounce my mind and my work. I would much rather just live.”
We were lying on the couch, under the window of colored stones. Many, many afternoons we had lain on this couch, looking up at the light coming through the colored stones.
It was not the window which gave on the garden, on its old ivy like the long arms of a furry-haired monkey twisted around the walls. It was not either the window which opened on the sky, showing the bare skeleton of trees in winter. It was for us a window opening on a world we had made together according to our own vision. The Orient-blue stones, the turquoise, the geranium red, the midnight blue, the Veronese green, the chrome yellow, the carmine, those were like the colors of our own moods which gave to sky, sun and moonlight and daylight their own individual hues, which deformed the shape of trees into unknown trees, an unknown world. This other world we entered as soon as we were alone, with a language of our own. This world, slowly, given them, created out of a particular manner of looking at things, at people at events, at new books, pivoted on the axis of a twin vision and purpose, on my faith in his purpose and his vision, my devotion to his purpose… this widely expanded world, made out of vast ideas, out of caresses, out of faith, out of fears and courage… it was this world we saw lying on the couch after the blood fusions, after the intermingling of breath and blood through the colored window with its constellations of hues like the hues of our moods and our particular vision. At first indistinct, and then so immense and potent and indestructible, because everything always flowered between us. This window opened on our multi-formed and multi-colored universe, with its big rhythms and sweeps and profound intensity.
Everything else was an excursion.
“What did you and Johanna talk about?”
I told him everything that these two days with Johanna contained. I exposed all my feelings to him, all my fevers, all my turmoil. I let him read into me nakedly. All former surrenders to him seemed but half a gift, compared with this exposure of myself, this breaking up of myself, this absolute dissolution of myself into him.
I gave myself to him by truth. Nothing else was of importance but our world, the integrity of our world. It was not important that I should have found another who was part of myself, a fragment of myself. It was not important that I should have found Johanna who completed me, because I as an artist had lived marginally, whereas Johanna had given all her life to sensations and gestures. It was not important that I should have found the face I wanted to see in the mirror, that other side of myself, daring, fiery, manifesting itself in acts. My free self! The incarnation of my imaginations, of my inventions. That was not important—that was the pursuit and the love of the self. To love Johanna was merely to love myself, the desired, unrealized, unformulated half of my self.
What I loved to-day, far, far above this self, was Hans. Hans, the other.
To-day I had been treacherous to woman and to myself and to the shadows of myself. I had yielded up the proud and isolated self and all self-seeking.
And he—he lay there quietly, almost broken by a gentle, tolerant wistfulness.
“You and Johanna have something to give to each other. The love you describe is wonderful. I certainly can’t hate or despise that. I see what you give each other. I’ve just realized that what I give is something coarse plain, compared to that.”
I stopped him.