It was my father who thrust me out into the black, soiled corners of the world. Everything I loved I turned my back on because it was also what he loved. Luxury with its serpentines of light, its masquerade costume of gaiety, everything that shined, glittered, threw off perfume, would have reminded me of him. To efface such a love took me years of walking greasy streets, of sleeping between soiled sheets, of traversing the unknown. I was happy because I had finally succeeded in losing him.
But I almost lost myself too. In those dingy movies, amidst people who reeked of garlic and sweat, I was exiled from my own climate, my light, my temperature.
Only now have I been able to return to the house of my childhood, to warm rooms, to music, to laughter, to pleasure, to softness and beauty…
My father and I were walking through the Bois. On his lips I could still see the traces of a biting kiss. “We met at Notre-Dame,” he was saying.
“She began with the most vulgar cross-examination, reproaching me for not loving her. So I proceeded with a slow analysis of her, telling her she had fallen in love with me in the way women usually fall in love with an artist who is handsome and who plays with vehemence and elegance; telling her that it had been a literary and imaginary affair kindled by the reading of my books, that our affair had no substantial basis, what with meetings interrupted by intervals of two years. I told her that no love could survive such thin nourishment and that besides she was too pretty a woman to have remained two years without a lover, especially in view of the fact that she cordially detested her husband. She said she felt that my heart was not in it. I answered that I didn’t know whether or not my heart was in it when we had only twenty minutes together in a taxi without curtains in an over lit city.”
“Did you talk to her in that ironic tone?” I asked.
“It was even more cutting than that. I was annoyed that she had been able to give me only twenty minutes.”
(He had forgotten that he had come to tell her he did not love her. What most struck him and annoyed him was that she had only been able to escape her husband’s surveillance for twenty minutes.)
“She was so hurt,” he added, “that I didn’t even kiss her.”
As we walked along I again looked carefully at his lip. It was slightly red, with a deeper, bluish tone in one corner, where no doubt the dainty tooth of the countess had bitten most fiercely. But I did not say anything. I was wondering whether this persiflage of his was not an effort to disguise a scene which my imagination was able to reproduce with more accuracy. Perhaps the little countess had arrived at the steps of Notre-Dame, looking very earnest, very youthful, and very exalted. Perhaps my father had been touched by her demonstration of love. (I remembered the day 1 had meant to tell Pierre that I did not even want to be touched by him, and how difficult I had found it to say so, how I ended by permitting him to kiss me). I did not believe that my father had been annoyed by the countess’s jealousy or worship, but that, on the contrary, it had lulled and caressed his vanity. I believed that he was trying to conceal his pleasure at being pursued by an air of indifference, so that his listener might take him for a casual and cynical Don Juan, the despair of women. On the other hand, it might be that the countess had forgotten him altogether and had simply paid him a visit—that his fancy liked to play with the idea of being harassed by the pursuit of women.
He repeated a story which he had told me before—of how the countess had slashed her face in order to explain her tardiness to her husband. This story had always seemed highly improbable to me, because a woman in love is hardly likely to endanger her beauty. Any explanation would have been simpler than this far-fetched tale of an automobile accident.
I was powerfully tempted to say: “When the countess was angry because you did not kiss her she kissed you rather markedly.” But I did not say it.
Whatever his thoughts he refused to reveal them. Was he lying to me for the same reason I lied to him—because I had discovered his insane jealousy, and because I knew that when he was hurt he withdrew into himself? Here were my own tricks offered me, my own kind of lies. We were both so intent on creating this illusion of an exclusive, isolated twin love, so intent on picturing each other as standing alone in the world, with no ties whatsoever, that we were taken in by our own delusions.
When I arrived the next day he had not slept all night, thinking: I am going to lose you. And if I lose you I cannot live any more. You are everything to me. You are my only real love. My life was empty before you came. My life is a failure and a tragedy anyway.
He looked deeply sad. His fingers were wandering over the keys, hesitantly. His eyes looked as if he had been walking through a desert.
“You make me realize,” he said, “how empty my activity is, that in not being able to make you happy I miss the most vital reason for living. And here I am putting down notes on paper, playing the piano—it all seems futile to me if I am to lose you because of it.”
I told him that I was thinking of exactly the same thing, that as I was coming along I had been thinking that what made me unhappy was that he had no need of me. “There is no place for me in your life,” I said.
“You are everything to me,” he said, “you are everything I have. If you see me joyous and active it is because of you. If I did not have you I would go under. I am active only because I have you.”
I was amazed to see him weep, to see the mask completely effaced.
“Do you know,” he said, “I can’t play the comedy of love any more. I can’t say anything I don’t mean. You don’t know how you have altered my conception of love.”
He was again the man I had known in the south. His tone rang true.
I wanted to beg him to abandon the comedy of good manners. The elusive gaiety and mockery he presented to the world, his costumes, seemed to me more dangerous than my pretenses. The social masquerade was more harmful than the roles I played for the sake of adventure, or illusion. To lie for illusion, to lie to create a pleasure, did not taint the soul; but to lie to satisfy the vanity of a duchess, or to refuse the dinner of a marquis, to lie with flowers and visiting cards, to lie with the engraved writing-paper, with the complicity of butlers, interviewers, secretaries, this sort of lying was harmful.
I asked myself why it was I wanted to change him, why was it I did not love him as he was. What was it that I thought I could save him from?
Why could we not make room for each other? Every gesture I made annihilated one of his. Beneath our worship of each other we were waging an obscure war. He took it as an offense if I did not smoke his cigarettes, if I did not go to all his concerts, if I did not admire all his friends, if I did not read all the books he loved. He wanted the woman to be absorbed by him, to become selfless. But at the same time, the truly selfless woman he did not like. He demanded a match, duels, resistance.