“The violinist is in love with me, but I am not in love with her.”
“Oh God!” I shouted, “don’t get lost in the details. You’re always going off into details.”
“Now say I am superficial.”
“At this moment you are. I wanted you to face me full face. I wanted to make you come to life, by pain, if necessary. But you’re only suffering because your vanity has been wounded.”
“I am working myself to the bone for Laura’s sake.”
“That isn’t altogether true either. Laura doesn’t want you to work. Your work is an opiate. Why can’t you say anything real? I have a good ear for false tones.”
“Then go and have your ears cleaned!”
He was furious. He paced up and down in long strides, pale, his lips blue with anger.
“You only love in me,” I said, “what resembles you. What is different in me you don’t understand.”
“You’re the most complex woman I’ve ever known.”
“You never try to know women—that’s why you never give them more than a night.”
It seemed to me that my father was not quarrelling with me but with his own past, that what was coming to light now was his constant feeling of guilt towards my mother. If he saw in me now a sort of avenger it was only because of his fear that I might say to him what my mother used to say. Against her words he had erected a huge defense: the approbation of the rest of the world.
But in himself he had never quite resolved the right and the wrong. He too was driven now by a compulsion to say things he never intended to say, to make me the symbol of the one who had come to punish. I had come to expose his life of lies and deceptions. Perhaps to prove to him his worthlessness.
And yet this was not the nature of my struggle with him at all. I could have stood in front of him and been silent—still he would have interpreted my words as a reproach. He was so far from accepting my real words. It was as if he feared that whoever came near to him had come to punish him, to expose him.
He was not yet convinced that he had acted rightly. He feared so much that I had come to say: “The four people you abandoned in order to live your own life, in order to save yourself, are here again. They have not died. They are not crippled. It is only faith in love they have lost. You lost it, too, when your betrothed betrayed you. We all lose it at some time or other. Your running away was not a crime. Why are you ashamed?”
Because I had come to ask him for the truth he thought I had come to accuse him, or to condemn. I could not make this clear. I was not aware of it at the moment. The scene between us was taking place between two ghosts, talking at each other, saying things that we could not make clear, because we were both choked by our own anger, blinded by our own emotion.
My father’s ghost was saying: “I cannot bear the slightest doubt, the slightest criticism. Immediately I feel judged, condemned.”
My own ghost was saying: “I cannot bear lies and deceptions. It makes the ground shift under my feet. I need truth and solidity.”
They could not understand each other. They were gesticulating in space. Gestures of anger, of despair. My father pacing up and down, angry because of my doubts of him, forgetting that these doubts were well founded, forgetting to ask himself whether I was right or not. And I hysterical with despair because my father would not understand, because the fragile, little Japanese bridge between the two portions of his soul would not even hold me for a moment, me walking with such light feet, trying to bring messages from one side to the other, trying to make connections between the real and the unreal…
I could not see my father clearly any more. I could see only the hard profile cutting the air like a st stone ship, a stone ship moving in a sea unknown to human beings, into regions made of rock, of granite, of mineral. No more water, or warmth, or flow between us. All communication paralyzed by falsity. Lost in the fog. Lost in a cold, white fog of falsity. Images distorted as if we were looking through a glass bowl. His mouth long and mocking, his eyes enormous but empty in their transparency. Enormous and bulbous, like the eyes of a fish. Not human. The human contours all lost. No longer the voice of a human being saying simple things, like—”I am hungry, I am sleepy, I am tired.” (I could not remember his ever saying these things.) But like voices saying: “You doubt me. You think I have no talent.” And an interruption. The wind blowing. The wind, or a river boat’s siren, or a storm. Then the voice again: “You think I am bad. I am working so hard. The women I have known I never cared to know. I never did them any harm (but I did not say you did). I sent them red roses when everything was finished. I never saw them cry. When they got sick I didn’t like it. I don’t like sickness. It isn’t aesthetic. You haven’t enough scientific spirit. Life is like a marvellous machine. You must run it with exactitude. As you run the body. When I stop making love my machine gets out of order. I get yellow and I don’t feel well. Be rational, my daughter.”
And I thinking while the radio of his quick, smooth speaking continued: “I stopped loving my father a long time ago.” What remained was the slavery to the pain, the habit of thinking that I loved him, the slavery to a pattern. When I saw him I thought I would be happy and exalted. I pretended. I worked myself up into ecstasies. When one is pretending the entire body revolts. There come great eruptions and revolts, great, dark ravages, and above all, a joylessness. A great, bleak joylessness. Everything that is natural and real brings joy. He was pretending too—he had to win me as a trophy, as a victory. He had to win me away from my mother, had to win my approbation. Had to win me because he feared me. He feared the judgment of his children. And when he could not win me he suffered in his vanity. He fought in me his own faults, just as I hated in him my own faults.
Certain gestures made in childhood seem to have eternal repercussions. Such was the gesture I had made to keep my father from leaving, grasping his coat and holding on to it so fiercely that I had to be torn away. This gesture of despair seemed to prolong itself throughout my life. I grew to love everything that fled, everything that vanished before me, and to believe that everything I loved would always be lost. I repeated this gesture blindly, hundreds and hundreds of times. It was so hard for me to believe that this father I was still trying to hold on to was no longer real or important, that the coat I was touching was not warm, that the body of him was not human, that my breathless, tragic desire had come to an end, that the man I was holding to-day was not the man I needed, and that my love had died.
Great forces had impelled me towards symmetry and balance, had impelled me to abandon my father in order to close the fatal circle of abandon. I had forced the hour glass of pain to turn. We had run after each other. We had tried to possess each other. We had been slaves of a pattern, and not of love.
Our love had long ago been replaced by the other loves which gave us life. All those portions of the self which had been tied up in the tangle of misery and frustration had been loosened imperceptibly by life, by creation. But the feelings we had begun with, twenty years back, he of guilt and I of love, had been like railrot>To-day I held the coat of a dead love—and it was hard to believe in the death of it.
This had been the nightmare—to pursue this search and poison all joys with the necessity of its fulfilment. To discover that such fulfilment was not necessary to life, but only to the mind. We were writing myths with our life blood, books in which destiny forbade us to forget our ideal loves, our promises to ourselves. What we call our destiny—the railroad tracks of our obsessions.