The smallest incident could arouse an anguish as great as that caused by death, and could reawaken the pain of separation as keenly as I had experienced it the day my father had gone away.
In an effort to combat this anguish I had crowded my world richly with friends, loves and creations.
But beyond the moment of conquest there was again a desert. The joys given to me by friend, lover, or book just written, were endangered by the fear of loss. Just as some people are perpetually aware of death, I was perpetually aware of the pain of separation and the inevitability of it.
And beyond this, I also treated the world as if it were an ailing, abandoned child. I never put an end to a friendship of my own accord, I never abandoned anyone; I spent my life healing others of this fear wherever I saw it shadowed, pitying the whole world and giving it the illusion of faithfulness, durability, solidity. I was incapable of scolding, of pushing away, of cutting ties, of breaking relationships, of interrupting a correspondence, of throwing out a servant.
My father was telling me the story of the homely little governess he had made love to because otherwise she would never know what love was. He took her out in his beautiful car and made her lie on the heather just as the sun was going down so he would not have to see too much of her face. He enjoyed her happiness at having an adventure, the only one she would ever have. When she came to his room in the hotel he covered the lamp with a handkerchief, and again he enjoyed her happiness, and taught her how to do her hair, how to rouge her lips and powder her face. The adventure made her almost beautiful.
We were talking about our escapades. Skirting the periphery of our lives, maintaining ourselves there because we knew that by dwelling on our adventures, on the gestures we made without love, we saved ourselves from talking about love. We wanted to give each other the illusion of having been faithful to each other always, and of being free to devote our whole life to each other.
My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!” I was telling him about the books I read, the explorations, the voyages, the discoveries.
My father said: “Take your elbows off the table!”
I was explaining to my father that I had been exposing myself to every danger with joy, that I love risk, I love danger. It was very comical of him to frown and to ask me to take my elbows off the table as if I were a child, because I was so much older than he was; all I was telling him was so much older than his stories of perfumed countesses waiting for him in the reception room after the concerts in Poland, Germany, Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Hungary. All these perfumed women with wrinkless dresses giving him silver cigarette cases. Always the same. Bathed, perfumed, manicured women. Notes. Rendez-vous. The same words exchangeNone of them leaving a memory. He couldn’t even remember their names. So I take my elbows off the table, my father, but I am so much older than you in daring…
Suddenly I stopped and asked him laughingly: “Did you ever take them to the same room, each new woman to the same room, as if you wanted each new adventure to efface the other? Or perhaps only to compare, or to desecrate?”
“I did! I did!” He said this in a tone of exultancy, as if he had discovered the most important point of resemblance between us. This little detail seemed to him to indicate a profound sameness of feeling.
“I wonder why…?”
He did not know, but the very memory of it gave him a colorful pleasure. His face colored with pleasure and laughter.
“I also liked giving the handkerchief given to me by one lover to another, lending the book belonging to one to another; I liked nothing more than to find them together in the same room, to feel the full flavor of my secrets and my treacheries.”
He forgot all about the elbows.
Love had not been mentioned yet. Yet it was love alone which obsessed us. Not music, not writing, not painting, not decorating, not costuming, but love, the orchestration of love, its metamorphosis. I was living in a furnace of love, a blaze all around. Obsessional loves, passionate loves, sensual loves, love in mystery, in darkness, in resistance, in contrast, love in fraternity, gratitude, imagination. Loving maternally, loving as the artist can love with all my senses. A passion for man, for woman, for change… Changing every day from woman to mother, lulling in my arms at night the men whom I fought and tantalized during the day.
“I do think,” he said, “that we should give up all this for the sake of each other. These women mean nothing to me. But the idea of devoting my whole life to you, of sacrificing adventure to something far more marvellous and deep, appeals so much to me…”
“But I have not been living out adventure only…”
He stopped me and said:
“You should give him up. That isn’t love at all. You know I’ve been your only great love…”
I did not want to say: “not my only great love,” but he seemed to have guessed my thought because he turned his eyes completely away from me and added: “Remember, I am an old man, I haven’t so many years left to enjoy you…”
With this phrase, which was actually untrue because he was only fifty-five years old and younger than most men of his age, he seemed to be asking me for my life, almost to be reaching out to take full possession of my life, just as he had taken my soul away with him when I was a child. It seemed to me that he wanted to take it away now again, when I was a full-blown woman. It seemed natural to him that I should have mourned his loss throughout my childhood. It was true that he was on the oad to death, drawing nearer and nearer to it; it was also true that I had loved him so much that perhaps a part of me might follow him and perish with him, just as the child of nine had followed him and perished with him. Would I die again with him? Would I follow him from year to year—his withering, his vanishing? Was my love a separate thing, or a part of his life? Would I leave the earth with him to-day? He was asking me to leave the earth to-day—and this time I could not. This time I felt that he did not have the power to take my life again in his hands. This time I felt that I would fight against locking myself in with him, giving myself up wholly. I would not die a second time.
Having been so faithful to his image as I bad been, having loved his image in other men, having pursued the men who played piano, the men who talked brilliantly, intellectuals, teachers, philosophers, doctors, every man with blue eyes, every man with an adventurous life, every Don Juan—was it not to give him my absolute love at the end? Why did I draw away, draw away and at the same moment decide to give him the illusion he wanted—but not the abdication, not the absolute.
Six silver grey valises, the scent of tabac blond, the gleam of polished nails, the wave of immaculate hands. My father leaped down from the train and already he was beginning a story. “There was a woman on the train. She sent me a message. Would I have dinner with her? Knew all about me… had sung my songs in Norway. I was too tired, with this damnable lumbago coming on, and besides, I can’t put my mind on women any longer. I can only think of my betrothed.”
In the elevator he over-tipped the boy, he asked for news of the negro’s wife who had been sick, he advised a medicine, he ordered an appointment with the hairdresser for the next day, he took stock of the weather predictions, he ordered special biscuits and a strict vegetarian diet. The fruit had to be washed with sterilized water. And was the flautist still in the neighborhood, the one who used to keep him awake?