As soon as I left my father I heard music again. It was falling from the trees, pouring from throats, twinkling from the street lamps, sliding down the gutter. It was my faith in the world which danced again. It was the expectation of miracles which made every misery sound to me like part of a symphony.
Not separateness but oneness was music. Let me walk alone into the music of my faith. When I am with you the world is still and silent.
You give the command for stillness, and life stops like a clock that has fallen. You draw geometric lines around liquid forms, and that which you extract from the chaos is already crystallized.
As soon as I leave youeverything fixed falls again into waves, tides, is transformed into water and flows. I hear my heart beating again with great disorder. I hear the music of my gestures, and my feet begin to run as music runs and leaps. Music does not climb stairways. Music runs and I run with it. Faith makes music come out of the trees, out of wood, out of ivory.
I could never dance around you, my father, I could never dance around you!
You held the conductor’s stick, but no music could come from the orchestra because of your severity. As soon as you left my heart beat in great disorder. Everything melted into music, and I could dance through the streets singing, without an orchestra leader. I could dance and sing.
Walking down the Rue Saturne I heard the students of the Conservatory playing the Sonate en Re Mineur of Bach. I also heard my mother’s beautiful voice singing Schumann’s J’ai pardonne, which aroused me so deeply that it would make me sob. Did I sense the whole tragedy then? J’ai pardonne… Strange how my mother, who had never forgiven my father, could sing that song more movingly than anything else she sang.
Walking down the Rue Saturne I was singing J’ai pardonne under my breath and thinking at the same time how I hated this street because it was the one I always walked through on my way to my father’s house. So often on winter evenings I came out of his luxurious house, heated like a hot-house, where I had seen him pale and tense, at work upon some trifling matter which he took very seriously. Very neat, in his silk dressing gown, with brilliantine in his hair, polished nails, delicate beads of perspiration on his brow—from rehearsing a sonata with a violinist. Or else just coming down from his siesta.
This siesta he took with religious care, as if the preservation of his life depended on it. At bottom he felt life to be a danger, a process not of growth but of deterioration. To love too wildly, he said, to talk too much, to laugh too much, was a wasting of one’s energy. Life was an enemy to him, and every sign of its wear and tear gave him anxiety. He could not bear a crack in the ceiling, a bit of paint worn away, a stairway worn threadbare, a nail hole in the wall, a faded spot on the wall paper. Since he never lived wholly in the moment a part of him was already preparing for the morrow. To economize his strength he would bring himself to a stop—for the sake of to-morrow.
When I saw my father coming out of his room after his siesta I always had the feeling that here was a man who had preserved himself, who was making artificial efforts to delay the process of growth, fruition, decay, disintegration, which is organic and inevitable. He was delaying death by preserving himself from life; it was the fear of life and the effort made to avoid life which used his strength. Living never wore one out as much as the effort not to live. If one lived fully and freely one also could rest fully and deeply. Not trusting himself to life, not abandoning himself, he could not sink into sleep without fear of death…
I always left his house with a feeling of having come near to death, because everything there was clearly a fight against death.
I left the neatest, the most spotless street of Paris where the gardeners were occupied in clipping and trimming a few rare potted bushes in smv>
The light was very strong on the new street sign. I walked up to it. Yes, there was a sign which said: Anciennement Rue Saturne now changed to…
Now changed. Something effaced, something lost. I wished I were a street. I wished my name could be changed and that I might change with the city, that certain houses standing eternally inside of me might be finally torn down, that certain streets forever marked in me might have their names changed, that the whole city of the past might disappear, the whole topography change as after an earthquake or a war—that the map of my life be lost. To change as Paris changed. Streets could die out. New houses could be erected. But always what I had heard, seen, experienced would continue to walk with me down streets with changed names in the labyrinth of loss and change where nothing could be forgotten…
To be able to catch all that walked with me to my father’s house could be done only in one great flash, in one instant of absolute understanding. Each step along the Rue Saturne corresponded to a million steps I had taken during my life, the thousands of steps which had taken me from France to Germany, from Belgium to Spain, from Spain to America, from our apartment in New York, where my mother sang J’ai pardonne to the American school where I told the children I had been all around the world, from there to White Plains where I spent all my time going and coming from the Public Library, from all the studios of American artists, where I once posed, to the dismal shops on Sixth Avenue where I worked as a dress model, back to White Plains where I wrote my first novel. from Paris where I blossomed into womanhood to Italy, to Switzerland. A thousand steps into cafés, night clubs, movies, and above all, away from my father who lived in the same city. Away from him by living in a different quarter, by living a life so different from his that I knew I would never meet him there. I finally lost track of him, my memory of him.
In the same city in which he lived a thousand steps took me further away from him than a trip to India. No trip to Egypt, but a different milieu, different ideas, different people—the people and places he did not like, the ideas he did not like.
Walking in the rain to pass before my father’s house, looking up at the stained-glass window, thinking: I have at last eluded you. I am a woman you do not know. Where it is I take my pleasure, where it is I laugh, you don’t know. Part of my life you never entered. Parts of my life were poisoned by your presence, your will, your ideals. I who stand here am not your daughter, nor my mother’s daughter. It is the me who escaped the stigmata of parental love.
Standing there asserting the self that was not sunk in my love of him. Standing in the rain with tired eyes.
To escape him I had run away to the other end of the world. To be free of his memory I had run away to places where he never went. I had lost him, finally, by living in the opposite direction from him. I sought out the failures because he didn’t like those who stuttered, those who stumbled; I sought out the ugly because he tureight=”s face away; I sought out the weak because they irritated him. I sought out chaos because he insisted on logic. I travelled away from him to the whore Bijoux on the Rue Fontaine, an enormous coal-eyed whore with black painted eyelids and thickly powdered face, who was the quintessence of all whores. So far from my father’s marquises in porcelain to the animal glow of Bijoux’s eyes, the passivity of her body, the nerveless, passive whore flesh. Because my love of him was so great, my frustrated, defeated love, I travelled to the other end of life, to the drab, the loose, the weak, the wine-stained, wine-soggy men in whom I was sure not to find the least trace of him. No trace of him anywhere along the Boulevard de Clichy where the market people passed with their vegetable carts; no trace of him at two in the morning in the little café opposite the Trinite; no trace of him in the sordid neighborhood of the Boulevard Jean-Jaures; no trace of him in the cinema du quartier, in the bals musette, in the burlesque theatre. Never anyone who had heard of him. Never anyone who smelled like him. Never a voice like his. To lose him I almost had to lose myself. Sometimes, sitting at a stained and dirty table, I would ask myself: “Why am I here? How did I get here? How is it I am marketing in this street, next to a woman with a wart-covered face, next to a femme de menage with a stump for fingers, next to drunkards and beggars?”