The picture of my father’s foot. One day down south, while we were driving, we stopped by the road and he took off his shoe which was causing him pain. As he pulled off his sock I saw the foot of a woman. It was delicate and perfectly made, sensitive and small. I felt as if he had stolen it from me: it was my foot he was looking at, my foot he was holding in his hand. I had the feeling that I knew this foot completely. It was my foot—the very same size and the very same color, the same blue veins showing and the same air of never having walked at all.
To this foot I could have said: “I know you.” I recognized the weight of it, its speed, its lightness. “I know you, but if you are my foot I do not love you. I do not love my own foot.”
A confusion of feet. I am not alone in the world. I have a double. He sits on the running board of the car and when he sits there I do not know where I am. I am standing there pitying his foot, and hating it, too, because of the confusion. If it were some one else’s foot my love could flow out freely, all around, but here my love stands still inside of me, still with a kifright.
There is no distance for my love to traverse; it chokes inside of me, like the coils of self-love, and I cannot say I love you, or feel any love for this sore foot because that love leaps back into me like a perpetually coiled snake, and I am trying to leap out. I want to leap out freely, from the window of my own body, into love. I want to flow out, and here my love lies coiled inside and choking me, because the other, my father, is my double, my shadow, and I don’t know which one is real. One of us must really die so that the other may find the boundaries of himself. To leap out freely and safely beyond the self love must flow out and beyond the wall of confused identities. Now I am all confused in my boundaries. I don’t know where my father begins, where I begin, where it is he ends, what I, the difference between us…
The difference is this, I begin to see, that he wears gloves for gardening and so do I, but he is afraid of poverty and I am not. Can I prove that? Must I prove that? Why? I hate drabness, but I have no fear of poverty. I have loved only poor men. I want to prove this. To whom? Why? For myself. I must know wherein I am not like him. I must disentangle our two selves.
I walked out into the sun. The sun slipped between my legs. I sat at a café. A man sent me a note by the garcon. I refused to read it. I would liked to have seen the man. Perhaps I would have liked him. It is possible some day I might like a very ordinary man, sitting at a café. It hasn’t happened yet. Everything must be immense and deep and extremely complicated. I like complicated games and complicated loves. I play at them seriously. The humor in them is at first invisible, because pity forbids irony. I can only laugh years later, when there is no one around who can be hurt by my laughter.
Walking into the heart of a summer day, as into a ripe fruit. Looking down at my lacquered toe nails, at the white dust on my sandals. Smelling the odor ofbread in the bakery where I stopped for a chocolate-filled roll. The femme demenage passes very close to me. Her face is burned, scarred, the color of iron. The traces of her features are lost, as on a leprous face. The whites of her eyes bloodshot, her pupils dilated and misty. In her flesh I saw the meat of an animal, the fat, the sinews, the blackening blood, the meat we are when fire eats into us. So easily burned and scarred. So easily turned into cinders.
My father had said once that I was ugly. He said it because I was born full of bloom, dimpled, roseate, overflowing with health and joy. But at the age of two I had almost died of fever. I lost the bloom, the curls, the glow, all at once. I reappeared before him very pale and thin, and the aesthete in him said coolly: “How ugly you are.” This phrase I have never been able to forget. It has taken me a life time to disprove it to myself. A life time to efface it. It took the love of others, the worship ofpainters to save me from its effect. In one instant my faith in myself was killed. From that moment on, no matter what the mirror revealed, I remained unconvinced. All I could see was this phrase of my father’s, the dissatisfied look in his blue eyes. Never could I detect in him the slightest expression of love. His paternal role was summed up in the one word: criticism. Never a word of faith, of encouragement, of enthusiasm. Never an elan of joy, of content, of approval. Always the sad, exacting blue eyes dissatisfied and condemnatory.
From that moment on it was not the mirror which served me but others. It was the reflection of myself in desirous eyes which I relied on. What I saw in the mirror until the age of sixteen was not myself but my father’s phrase. Even to-day I do not look into the mirror… I look into men’s eyes, into the mirror of men’s eyes…
Out of this came my love of ugliness, my effort to see beyond ugliness, always treating the flesh as a mask, as something which never possessed the same shape, color and features as thought. Out of this came my love of men’s creations. All that a man said or thought was the face, the body; all that a man invented was his walk, his flavor, his coloring; all that a man wrote, painted, sang was his skin, his hair, his eyes. People were made of crystal for me. I could see right through their flesh, through and beyond the structure of their bones. My eyes stripped them of their defects, their awkwardness, their stuttering. I overlooked the big ears, the frame too small, the hunched back, the wet hands, the webbed-foot walk… I forgave… I became clairvoyant. I saw the aura of persons, the light they threw off. A new sense which had awakened in me uncovered the smell of their soul, the shadow cast by their sorrows, the glow of their desires. Beyond the words and the appearances I caught all that was left unsaid—the electric sparks of their courage, the expanse of their reveries, the lunar aspects of their moods, the animal breath of their yearning. I never saw the fragmented individual, never saw the grotesque quality or aspect, but always the complete self, the mask and the reality, the fulfilment and the intention, the core and the future. I saw always the actual and the potential man, the seed, the reverie, the intention as one…
I loved beyond flesh… because flesh was so often a caricature, a disguise, a mockery. No man’s thoughts could ever be so ugly as the charred face of the femme de menage. It was as if I saw the original innocence. Everywhere I saw innocence. Everywhere I saw a beauty no aesthete ever captured. It was only the body which decomposed, deteriorated, betrayed. Only the body ever emitted a bad smell…
Now with my love of my father this concern with the truth lying beneath the mask, the depths lying beneath the surface and the appearance, became a obsession and a disease because in him the mask was more complete than in anyone I knew; the chasm between his appearance, his words, his gestures, and his true self was deeper.
Through this mask of coldness which had terrified my childhood I was better able, as a woman, to detect the malady of his soul. I remembered a meeting at the reception room of the Salle Pleyel during the years I had not wanted to see him. It was after a symphonic concert; I had come into the reception room to see the orchestra leader who was stifling under the pressure of visitors. As I was drawing away from the crowd I caught sight of my father standing apart. I saw his waxen face and I knew that he was ill. His soul was sick. He was very sick deep down. His skin was that of a man who was dying inside; his eyes could no longer see the warm, the real, the near. He seemed to have come from very far only to be leaving again immediately.