There is a passage in this early diary wherein I say that I would like to relive my life in Spain. It amazes me now when I reread it. Already, at that early age, I was bemoaning the irreversibility of life. Already I was aware of how the past dies. I reexamine what I had written about New York for my father because I feel that I have not done justice to it. I watch each minute of the day as I live so that nothing will be lost. I regret the minutes passing. I weep without knowing why, since I am young and have not yet known any real suffering. But, without being fully aware of it, I had already experienced my greatest sorrow, the irreparable loss of my father. I did not know it then, as indeed most of us never know when it is that we experience the full measure of joy, or of sorrow. But our feelings penetrate us like a poison of undetectable nature. We have sorrows of which we do not know the origin or name.
I had never openly expressed my love to my father. He thought me proud and isolate, and strange and wayward. My mother regarded me as an actress. Neither of them believed in me, neither of them took me into their confidence. And it was so terribly necessary that I have some one to confide in, some one who would listen and silently assent, or silently pass judgment on my doings. But there was no one.
I remember a night before Christmas when, in utter desperation, I began to believe that my father was coming, that he would arrive Christmas Day. Even though it was that very day I had received a postcard from him, even though I was obliged to admit to myself that Arcachon was indeed too far away for my hopes to be realized, still a sense of the miraculous impelled me to expect what was humanly impossible. I got down on my knees and I prayed to God to perform a miracle. I looked for my father all Christmas Day, and again on my birthday, a month or so later. To-day he will come. Or to-morrow. Or the next day. Each disappointment was baffling and terrifying to me.
To-day he is coming. I am sure of it. But how can I be sure? I am standing on the edge of a crater.
My true God was my father. At communion it was my father I received, and not God. I closed my eyes and swallowed the white bread with blissful tremors. I embraced my father in holy communion. My exaltation fused into a semblance of holiness. I aspired to saintliness in order to conceal the secret love which I guarded so jealously in my diary. The voluptuous tears at night when I prayed to God, the joy without name when I stood in his presence, the inexplicable bliss at communion, because then I talked with my father and I kissed him.
I worshipped him so passionately that I grew old and the form of his image grew blurred. But I had not lost him. His image was buried deep in the most mysterious regions of my being. On the surface there remained the image created by my mother—his egoism, his neglectfulness, his irresponsibility, his love of luxury. When for a time my immense yearning seemed to have exhausted itself, when it appeared that I had almost forgotten this man whom my mother described so bitterly, it was only the announcement of the fact that his image had become fluid; it ran in subterranean channels, through my blood. Consciously I was no longer aware of him; but in another way his existence was even stronger than before. Submerged, yet magically ineffaceable, he floated in my blood.
At thirteen I record in my diary that I want to marry a man who looks like the Count of Monte Cristo. Apart from the mention of black eyes it is my father’s portrait which I give: “A man so strong… with very white teeth, with a pale and mysterious face… a grave walk, a distant smile… I would like him to tell me all about his life, a very sad life, full of harrowing adventures… I would like him to be proud and haughty… to play some instrument…”
The image created by my mother, added to the blurred memories of a child, do not compose a being; yet in my haunting quest I fashioned an imagined individual whose fragments I pursued relentlessly. The blue eyes of a boy in school, the talent of a young violinist, a pale face seen in the street—these fleeting aspects of the image that was buried deep in my blood moved me to tears. To listen to music was unbearable. When my mother sang I exhausted myself in sobs.
In this record which I have faithfully kept for twenty years I speak of my diary as of my shadow, my double; I say I will only marry my double. As far as I knew this double was the diary which was full of reflections, like a mirror, which could change shape and color and serve all kinds of imaginative substitutions. This diary which I had intended to send to my father, which was to be a revelation of my love for him, became by an accident of fate a secretive thing, another wall between myself and that world which it seemed forbidden me ever to enter.
I would have liked great love and affection, confidence, openness. My father, I felt certain, would have rejected me—his standards were too severe. I wrote him once that I thought he had abandoned me because I was not an intelligent nor pretty enough daughter. I was a perpetually offended being who fancied that she was not wanted. This fear of not being wanted weighed down on me like a perpetual icy condemnation.
To-day, when he arrives, will I be able to lift my head? Will I be able to keep my head lifted, will I be able to stand the cold look in his eyes when I raise my eyes to his? Will my body not tremble with fear when I hear his voice? After twenty years I am still obsessed by the fear of him. But now I feel that it is in his power to absolve me of all fear. Perhaps it is he who will fear me. Perhaps he is coming to receive the judgment which I alone can mete out to him. To-day the circle of empty waiting will be broken. I am waiting for him to embrace me, to say with his own lips that he loves me. I have made a God of him and I have been punished. Now when he comes I want to make him a man again, to make him a human father. I do not want to fear him any longer. I do not want to write another line in my diary. I want him to smash this monument which I have erected to him and accept me in my own right. To-day when he comes I want to tear out this secret which I have kept inside me so long. It is strangling me. I want him to come and deliver me.
He is coming now. I hear his steps.
I expected the man of the photographs, the young man of the photographs. I had not tried to imagine what twenty years had done to his face.
It was not any older, there were no wrinkles in it, but there was a mask over it. His face was a mask. The skin did not match the sensitive skin of his wrists. It seemed made of earth and papier mache. It was not pure skin. There must have been a little space between it and the real face, a little partition through which the breeze could sing, and behind this mask another smile, another face, and skin like that of his wrists, white and vulnerable.
At the sight of me waiting on the doorstep he smiled, a feminine smile, and moved towards me with a neat compact grace, ease, youthfulness.
I felt unsettled. This man coming towards me did not seem at all like a father. It seemed to me that his first words were words of apology. After he had taken off his gloves, and verified by his watch that he was on time—it was very important to him to be on time—after he had kissed me and told me that I had become very beautiful, almost immediately it seemed to me that I was listening to an apology, an explanation of why he had left us. It was as if behind me there stood a judge, a tall judge whom I could not see, and to this judge my father addressed a beautifully polished speech, a marvellous speech to which I listened with admiration, for the logic was so beautiful, the smooth chain of phrases, the long and flawless story of my mother’s imperfections, of all that he had suffered, the manner in which all the facts of their life were presented, all made a perfect and eloquent pleading, addressed to a judge I could not see and with whom I had nothing to do. He had not come out free of his past. Taking out a gold-tipped cigarette and with infinite care placing it in a holder which contained a filter for the nicotine, he related the story I had heard from my mother, all with an accent of apology and defense.