The key sitting ironically, half a question mark, like our knowledge of destiny. But I sat on five lines, cursing the world for the shocks, loving the world because it has jaws, weeping at the absolute unreachable, the fifth line and the fifth voice saying always: have faith, even curses make music. Five lines running together with simultaneous song.
The poverty, the broken hairbrush, the Alice blue gown, twilight of sensations, musique ancienne, objects floating. One line saying all the time I believe in god, in a god, in a father who will lean over and understand all things; I need absolution, I believe in others’ purity and I find myself never pure enough; I need absolution. Another line on which I was making colored dresses, colorful houses, and dancing. On the top line I danced with a feather on my hat. Underneath ran the line of disease, doubt, life a danger, life with sharp edges, life singing mockery with an evil mouth, or life slobbering, or mouths spitting insults. Everything lived out simultaneously, the love, the impulse, the doubt of the love, the knowledge of the love’s death, the love of life, the doubt, the ecstasy, the knowledge and awareness of its death germ, everything like an orchestra. Can we live in rhythm, my father? Can we feel in rhythm, my father? Can we think in rhythm, my father? Rhythm—Rhythm—Rhythm.
At midnight I walked away from his room, down the very long corridor, under the arches, with the lamps watching, throwing my shadow on the carpets, passing mute doors in the empty hotel, the train of my silk dress caressing the floor, the mistral hooting.
As I opened the door of my room the window closed violently—there was the sound of broken glass. Doors, silent closed doors of empty rooms, arches like those of a convent, like opera settings, and the mistral blowing…
The white mosquito netting over my bed hung like an ancient bridal canopy…
The mystical bride of my father…
It was I who told the first lie, with deep sadness, because I did not have the courage to say to my father: “Our love should be great enough to be above jealousy. Spare me those lies which we tell the weaker ones.”
Something in his eyes, a quicker beat of the eyelid, a wavering of the blue surface, the small quiver by which I had learned to detect jealousy in a face, prevented me from saying this. Truth was impossible.
At the same time there were moments when I experienced dark and strange pleasures at the thought of deceiving him. I knew how deceptive he was. I felt deep down that he was incapable of truth, that sooner or later he would lie to me, fail me. And I wanted to deceive him first, in a deeper way. It gave me joy to be so far ahead of my father who was almost a professional deceiver.
When I saw my father vanishing at the station a great misery and coldness overcame me. I sat inert, remembering each word he had said, each sensation.
It seemed to me that I had not loved him enough, that he had come upon me like a great mystery, that again there was a confusion in me between god and father. His severity, his luminousness, his music, seemed again to me not human elements. I had pretended to love him humanly.
Sitting in the train, shaken by the motion, the feeling of the ever-growing distance between us, suffocating with a cold mood, I recognized the signs of an inhuman love. By certain signs I recognized all my pretences. Every time I had pretended to feel more than I felt I experienced this sickness of heart, this cramp and tenseness of my body. By this sign I recognized my insincerities. At the core nothing ever was false. My feelings never deceived me. It was only my imagination which deceived me. My imagination could give a color, a smell, a beauty to things, even a warmth which my body knew very well to be unreal. I could pursue the wanderings of my mind and my imagination but I could never deceive my mouth, my skin, my body, my desire. These could never act. In my head there could be a great deal of acting and many strange things could happen in there, but my mouth, my skin, my desire were sincere and they revolted, they prevented me from getting lost down the deep corridors of my inventions. Through them I knew. They were my eyes, my ears, they were my truth. Through them I recognized love.
To-day I recognized an inhuman love. I knew I was leaving cliffs, abysses, precipices, clouds, twilights, all the regions to which my love of my father would take me, away from earth and away from my own body…
Lying back on the chaise longue with cotton over my eyes, wrapped in coral blankets, my feet on a pillow. Lying back with a sweet feeling like that of convalescence, lying in a room in darkness but knowing one is no longer ill.
All weight and anguish lifted from the body and life like cotton over the eyelids.
In this state of somnolescence I recognized a mood in which I lived often, perhaps almost continually, in spite of light and sound, in spite of the streets I walked, the things I did. A mood between sleep and dream, where I caught the corner of two streets—the street of dreams and the street of living—in the palm of my hand and looked at them simultaneously, as one looks at the lines of one’s destiny.
There would come cotton over my eyes and long unbroken reveries, sharp, intense and continuous, like those I experienced coming out of the ether when I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel, when I began to hear voices. I began to see very clearly that what destroyed me in this silent drama with my father was that I was always trying to tell something that never happened, or rather that everything that happened, the many incidents, the love of twenty years, the trip down south, all this produced a state like slumber and ether out of which I could only awake with great difficulty. It was a struggle with shadows, a story of not meeting the loved one but loving one’s self in the other, of never seeing the loved one but of seeing reflections of his presence everywhere, in everyone; of never addressing the loved one except through a diary or a book written about him, because in reality there was no connection between us, there was no human being to connect with. No one had ever merged into my father, yet we had thought a fusion could be realized through the likeness between us: but the likeness itself seemed to create greater separations and confusions. There was a likeness and no understanding, likeness and no nearness.
Now that the world was standing on its head and the figure of my father had become immense, like the figure of a myth, now that from thinking too much about him I had lost the sound of his voice, I wanted to open my eyes again and make sure that all this had not killed the light, the steadiness of the earth, the bloom of the flowers, and the warmth of all loves but my love for him. So I opened my eyes and the curtain wavered before me.