I had no time to tell him that I understood that they had not been made to live together, that it was not a question of faults and defects, but of alchemy, that this alchemy had created war, that there was no one to blame or to judge but their marriage. Already my father was launched on an apology of why he had stayed all winter in the south; he did not say that he had enjoyed it, but that it had been absolutely necessary to his well-being. It seemed to me as he talked that he was just as ashamed to have left us as he was of having spent the winter in the South when he should have been in Paris giving concerts.
I waited for him to lose sight of this judge standing behind me for which I was not responsible and then, plunging into the present, into our present, I said:
“It’s scandalous to have such a young father.”
“Do you know what I used to fear?” h said. “That you might come too late to see me laughing—too late for me to have the power to make you laugh. In June when I go South again you must come with me. They will take you for my mistress, that’s certain. It will be delightful.”
I was standing against the mantelpiece. He was looking at my hands, admiring them. I jerked backwards, pushing the crystal bowl against the wall. It cracked and the water gushed forth as from a fountain, splashing all over the floor. The glass ship could no longer sail away—it was lying on its side, on the rock crystal stones.
We stood looking at the broken bowl and at the water forming a pool on the floor.
“Perhaps I’ve arrived at my port at last,” I said. “Perhaps I’ve come to the end of my wanderings. I have found you.”
“We’ve both done a lot of wandering,” he said.
“I not only played the piano in every city of the world… sometimes when I look at the map, it seems to me that even the tiniest villages could be replaced by the names of women. Wouldn’t it be funny if I had a map of women, of all the women I have known before you, of all the women I have had? Fortunately I am a musician, and my women remain incognito. When I think about them it comes out as a do or a la, and who could recognize them in a sonata? What husband would come and kill me for expressing my passion for his wife in terms of a quartet?”
When he was not smiling, his face was a Greek mask, his blue eyes enigmatic, the features sharp and wilful. He appeared cold and formal. I realized it was his mask which had terrorized me as a child. The softness came only in flashes, swift as lightning, like breaks. Unexpectedly, he broke when he smiled, the hardness broke, and the softness which came was so feminine, so exposed, giving and seducing with the beauty of the teeth, exposing a dimple which he said was not a dimple at all, but a scar from the time he had slid down the bannister.
As a child I had the obscure fear that this man could never be satisfied, by life, by human beings… by the world. Nothing but perfection would do. It was this sense of his exactingness which haunted me, an obscure awareness of his expectations which excited me to the great efforts I had made. But to-day I told myself that I had strained enough, that I wanted to rest, that I had waited a long time for it. I felt I did not want to appear before him until I was complete, and could satisfy him.
I wanted to enjoy. My life had been a long strain, one long effort to surpass myself, to create, to perfect, a desperate and anxious flight upwards, always aiming higher, seeking greater difficulties, accumulating victories, loves, books, creations, always shedding yesterday’s woman to pursue a new vision.
To-day I wanted to enjoy…
We were walking into a new world together, into a new planet, a world of transparency, where all that happened to us since that day I clung to him desperately was reduced to its essence, to a skeleton, to a silhouette. His vision and his talk were abstract; his rigorous selection acted like an intense searchlight which annihilated everything around us: the color oom, the smell of tabac blond, the warmth of the log fire, the spring sunlight showing its pale face on the studio window, the flash of his gold ring flashing his coat of arms, the immaculateness of his shirt cuffs. Everything vanished around us, the walls, the rug under our feet, the chair we sat on, the velvet pillow under my elbow, the satin rays of my dress, the orange rim of my sleeve, the orange reflections of the walls, the branches swinging before the windows, the bark of the dog, the clock ticking, the books leaning against each other, the soft backs of French books yielding under the stiff-backed English books, the indoor air like human breath and the awareness of the other air outside cooler and lighter than our breath, the lightness and swiftness of his Spanish voice, his Spanish words bowing and smiling between the French… I could only see the point he watched, the intense focussing upon the meaning of our lives, the clear outline of our patterns, and his questions. What are you to-day? What do you believe? What do you think? What do you read? What do you love? What is your music, your rhythm, your language, your vocabulary? What is your climate? What hour of the day do you love best? What are your whims? Your extravagances? Your antipathies? Who are your enemies? Who is your god? Who is your demon? What haunts you? What frightens you? What gives you courage? Whom do you love? What do you remember? What image have you of me? What have you been? Are we strangers, with twenty years between us? Does your blood obey me? Have I made you? Are you my daughter? Are you my father? Have we dreamed? Are we real? Is our life real? Is anything real? Are we here? Do I understand you?
“You are my daughter. We think the same. We laugh at the same things. I was twenty-five when you came into the world. You owe me nothing, you’ve created your self alone, but I gave you the seed.”
He was walking back and forth, the whole length of the studio, asking questions, and every answer I gave was the echo in his own soul. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Echoes. Blood echoes. Yes, yes to everything. Exactly. I knew it. That is what I hoped. The same. Father and daughter. Unison. The same rhythm.
We were not talking. We were merely corroborating each other’s theories. Our phrases interlocked.
I was a woman, I had to live in a world built by the man I loved, live by his system. In the world I made alone I was lonely. I, being a woman, had to live in a man-made world, could not impose my own, but here was my father’s world, it fitted me. With him I could run through the world in seven-leagued boots. He thought and felt the same thing at the same time.
“Never knew anything but solitude,” said my father. “I never knew a woman I could take into my world.”
We did not speak of the harm we had done each other. The disease we carried in us we did not reveal. He did not know that the tragedy which had marked the first years of my life still colored it to-day. He did not know that the feeling of being abandoned was still as strong in me despite the fact that I knew it was not me who had been abandoned but my mother, that he had not really abandoned me but simply tried to save his own life. He did not know that this feeling was still so strong in me that anything which resembled abandon created a violent inner storm in me: a door closed on me too brusquely, a letter unanswered, a friend going away on a trip, the maid leaving to get married, the least mark of absent-dedness, two people talking and forgetting to include me, or some one sending greetings to some one and forgetting me.