He could not let me be. If I preferred Dostoievski to Anatole France he felt that his whole edifice of ideas was being attacked, endangered. We were too strong for each other.
Taking a gold-tipped cigarette from his case with infinite care he wiped away a tear and, with a great sigh, said: “It would be much better, anyway, if I died. I’m not of much use in the world.”
I remembered how in moments of discouragement I had often made similar remarks. I had the feeling, when I made such remarks, of believing implicitly that I would soon be dead. I made theith the absolute conviction of being unequal to the battle which life constantly demanded. In my father’s tragic face I saw the same drooping mouth of my weak days. Suddenly, for no reason at all, I was tempted to laugh, not at my father but at myself, because for the first time I realized that this little talk about death was employed for effect.
What a comedy, I thought to myself. Yet, realizing how serious I felt when enacting these scenes, I wondered why the similarity of our behaviour did not help us to understand each other.
Realizing fully I did not love him, I felt a strange joy, as if I were witnessing my father’s pain, as if he were standing there in the throes of his strong jealousy. And this suffering, which in reality I made no effort to inflict, which took place only in my head, gave me joy. This suffering which I had no intention of actually inflicting, which existed only in my own eyes, made me feel that I was balancing in myself all the trickeries of life, that I was restoring in my own soul a kind of symmetry to the events of life. It was the fulfilment of a spiritual symmetry. A sorrow here, a sorrow there. Abandon yesterday, abandon to-day. Betrayal to-day, betrayal to-morrow. Two equally poised columns. A deception here, a deception there, like twin columnades. A love for to-day, a love for to-morrow; a punishment to him, a punishment to the other—and one for myself… Mystical geometry. The arithmetic of the unconscious which impelled this balancing of events. The law of compensation and substitution. Betrayal against betrayal. I could visualize the morrow’s scenes—the countess so exalted and my father loving so much to be loved. Forgetting, as I bad forgotten, that it was himself she wanted; thinking only of the want, seduced by her want, as I was seduced every day by the emotions of others.
I felt like laughing whenever my father repeated that he was lucid, simple, logical… I knew that this order and precision were only apparent. His order was on the surface only. Beneath the level of his super-rational talk lay oceans of subtle, unformed, unrealized content. He had chosen to live on the surface, like a man who prefers the bus to the subway, but I who lived almost continually in a kind of bottom of the sea atmosphere. I knew that the sifting, filtering power of his language did not do away with the shadows. And I who had a peculiarly good nose for shadows, sensed immense layers of shadow which he refused to explore. My ambition was to descend deeper and deeper within him. His talk, on the other hand, rising in the air like a Parisian sparrow, seemed to say: I want to rise!
“Come to-night,” he said, “there will be many people there.”
“I am not made for the salon,” I pleaded. “I am like the guitar, for chamber music only. I give off my best music in the tete-a-tete.”
He laughed. I knew that intimacy was a rare experience for him, that he covered it always with the din of marginal talk. He dreaded facing all at once the entire panorama of his life, and his fear made him voluble.
If I made a hasty or mad remark, a little askew with emotion, he would say: “You are deraing!”
If he found me disturbed, or confused, or unfocussed, he would say: “Allons mettre les choses au point!” An ideal of symmetry, and the birds still flying in the Bois with an invisible order and discipline.
I got dizzy leaning over his silences. Not because I could not easily guess the multiple facts of his life, but because of the spaces, the vast distances, the widening and infinitely expanding regions impossible to cover, or explore. The more I looked into his clear eyes, as though eager to reveal everything, so open, so transparent, the more I realized all he had not given. And exactly the same thing had been said of me, and now I was writing a book in which I was trying to capture all of my own thoughts, but my father would continue to write music through which his thoughts could escape. As soon as the ground on which he stood was revealed my father abandoned it.
His impression of me, oddly enough, was the same: “You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known. You’re all mystery,” he would say.
I thought that in capturing our likenesses I had found the key to this mystery which was, fundamentally, a supreme desire to escape pain. Either into the planets, or into human affections, or into another love. One love as a refuge from another. The need of refuge immense in proportion to the sensitiveness.
If I hurt him he would withdraw into his shell. But how I hurt him, or when or where, I could never discover. Was it simply the pain of jealousy which he was running away from? He had been the first to feel anxiety—perhaps because I was so much younger and hence more capable of unfaithfulness. It was the question of my faithfulness which had caused him so much concern.
Instead of coming out of his shell to fight against the possible disintegration of our relationship, he pretended not to mind. Every silence, every comedy enacted was but a weak attempt to avoid pain. He had not yet discovered, as I had, that almost all suffering is imaginary, that by coming out into the world and going forward to meet pain one becomes aware of its feebleness. I had discovered that by meeting the person I feared to meet, by reading the letter I feared to receive, by giving life a chance to really strike at me, I had discovered almost every time that there was no intention of striking at me, that reality was far less terrifying, far less cruel, than my imaginings. This coming out into the open, offering my face, my body, to the shocks and blows and disillusions, was like going to war, because the actual fact of war is less terrible than the imagining of it.
To imagine, I found, was worse than to realize, because the process of imagining took place in a void, it was untestable, it was like a fume rising out of a crater and choking one, or like a snake inside the body. There were no hands with which to strike or defend oneself in that inner chamber of ghostly tortures. But in life the realization summoned energies, forces, instruments, gave us courage, arms and legs to fight with, so that war almost became a joy. To fight a real sorrow, a real loss, a real insult, a real disillusion, a real treachery was infinitely less difficult than to spend a night without sleep struggling with ghosts. The imagination is far better at inventing tortures than life because the imagination is a demon within us and it knows where to strike, where it hurts. It the vulnerable spot, and life does not, our friends and lovers do not, because seldom do they have the imagination equal to the task.
He told me that he had stayed awake all night wondering how he would bring himself to tell a singer that she had no voice at all.
“There was almost a drama here yesterday with Laura about that singer. I tried to dissuade her from falling in love with me by assuring her she was simply the victim of a mirage which surrounds every artist, that if she came close to me she would be disillusioned. So yesterday after the singing we talked for three quarters of an hour and when I told her I would not have an affair with her (at another period of my life I might have done it, for the game of it, but now I have other things to live for) she began to sob violently and all the rimmel came off. When she had used up her handkerchief I was forced to lend her mine. Then she dropped her lipstick and I picked it up and wiped it with another of my handkerchiefs. After the first fit of tears she began to do as all women do, to calmly make up again, wiping off the rouge that had been messed up by her tears. When she left I threw the handkerchiefs in with the laundry. The femme de chambre picked them up and left all the laundry just outside the door of my room while she was cleaning it. Laura passed by and immediately thought I had deceived her. I had to explain everything to her; I told her I had not talked about this woman because I did not want to seem to be boasting all the time about women pursuing me.”