I wonder about the people around.
In what sense?
Well, the waiters, didn’t they come and wake you?
It was a somewhat rundown Café, with very old waiters. At that age you understand many things.
They let you sleep.
Yes.
What time was it?
I don’t know, afternoon.
How did you end up in that Café?
I told you it’s a long story, I don’t know if I want to tell it, and besides you’re swaying against me and I don’t know why.
To keep you from going back to your world.
Ah.
The story.
If I tell you will you sit on the floor again?
I wouldn’t think of it, I like it. You don’t like it?
I beg your pardon?
I asked if you like it.
What?
This, my legs spread, my sex rubbing against yours?
He closed his eyes, his head slid back a little, I tightened my fingers on his shoulders, he opened his eyes again, he looked at me.
There was a woman I loved very much, he said.
There was a woman I loved very much. She had a beautiful way of doing everything. There is no one in the world like her.
One day she arrived with a small book, used, the cover was a very elegant blue. The great thing was that she had crossed the city to bring it to me, she had seen it in an old bookstore, and had dropped everything to bring it to me immediately, she found it so irresistible, and precious. The book had a magnificent title: How to Abandon Ship. It was a handbook. The letters on the cover were clear, perfect. The illustrations inside laid out with infinite care. Can you understand that a book like that is worth more than a lot of literature?
Maybe.
You don’t find at least the title irresistible?
Maybe.
It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she arrived with that book. For a long time I carried it with me, I loved it so much. It was small, it fit in my pocket. I went to teach, I put it on the desk, then I put it back in my pocket. I must have read maybe a couple of pages, it was fairly boring, but that wasn’t the point. It was good to hold it in your hand, leaf through it. It was good to think that however disgusting life might be, I had that book in my pocket and next to me a woman who had given it to me. Can you understand that?
Of course, I’m not an idiot.
Ah, I forgot the best part. On the first page, which was blank, there was a rather poignant dedication. It was a used book, as I said, and on the first page there was this dedication: To Terry after the first month of his stay in St. Thomas’s Hospital. Papa and Mamma. Your imagination can wander for days on a dedication like that. It was that type of beauty that I found heartrending. And that the woman I loved so much could understand. Why am I telling you all this? Ah, yes, the Café. Are you sure you want to go on?
Of course.
Time passed, and in that time I lost the woman I loved so much, for reasons that here don’t interest us. Moreover, I’m not sure I understood them. Anyway, I continued to carry with me…
Wait a minute. Who said it doesn’t interest us?
Me.
Speak for yourself.
No, I’m speaking for both of us, if you don’t like it get down from there and have the Son tell you the story, when he arrives.
All right, all right, there’s no need to…
So it was a strange time, for me, it seemed a little like being a widower, I walked the way widowers do, you know, a little stunned, with eyes like a bird that doesn’t get it. You know what I mean?
Yes, I think so.
But always with my little book in my pocket. It was idiotic, I should have thrown away everything that the woman I loved so much had left behind, but how do you do it, it’s like a shipwreck, a lot of things, of all kinds, remain floating on the surface, in these cases. You can’t, really, clean up. And you have to hold on to something, when you can’t swim anymore. So I had that book in my pocket, that day, at the Café, and, look, by now months had passed, since it had ended. But I had the book in my pocket. I had a date with a woman, nothing very important, she wasn’t a special woman, I scarcely knew her. I liked how she dressed. She had a lovely laugh, that’s it. She didn’t talk much, and, there in the Café that day, she spoke so little that it all seemed to me tremendously depressing. So I pulled out that book and began to talk to her about it, telling her that I had just bought it. She found the story strange, but in some way curious, she relaxed a little, she began to ask me about myself, we started to talk, I said something that made her laugh. It was all simple, even pleasant. She seemed to me more beautiful, every so often we leaned toward each other, we forgot the people at the other tables, it was just the two of us, delightful. Then she had to go, and it seemed natural to kiss. I saw her disappear around a corner, with a very attractive walk. Then I lowered my gaze. On the table were our two glasses of pastis, half full, and the blue book. I placed a hand on the book and I was struck by its infinite neutrality. So much love and time and devotion had been deposited in it, from Terry’s time to mine, and so much life, and of the best kind: and yet it was nothing, it hadn’t put up the least resistance to my little infamy, hadn’t rebelled, had merely sat there, available to any other adventure, utterly without a permanent meaning, light and empty as an object that had been born right then, rather than one that had grown up in the heart of so many lives. So I came to understand our defeat, in all its tragic import, and I felt vanquished by an unspeakable and final weariness. Maybe I realized that something had broken, forever, inside me. I felt that I was slipping some distance away from things, and that I would never be able to retrace that path. I let myself go. It was splendid. I felt any anguish dissolve, and disappear. I found myself in a luminous serenity, lightly veined with sadness, and I recognized the land that I had always sought. The people around saw that I was sleeping. That’s the whole story.
You can’t think I’ll believe that you’ve been sleeping for years because of a silly thing like that…
It was only the last in an impressive series of silly things like that.
Like?
The treachery of things. You know what I’m talking about?
No.
It’s very instructive: to see how objects contain nothing of the meaning we give them. All it takes is an oblique circumstance, a tiny adjustment to the trajectory, and in an instant they are part of a completely different story. Do you think that this chair will be different for having listened to my words or having held your body and mine? Maybe, months from now, someone will die in this chair, and, no matter what we do tonight that is unforgettable, it will accommodate that death and that’s it. It will do it as well as possible, and as if it had been constructed for that purpose. Nor will it react when, maybe just an hour later, someone will drop into it, and laugh at a vulgar joke, or tell a story in which the dead man plays the role of the perfect idiot. You see it, the infinite neutrality?
Is it so important?
Of course. In the behavior of objects one learns a phenomenon that is to some extent true for everything. Believe me, it’s the same for places, people, even feelings, ideas, too.
What is it?
We have an incredible force with which we give meaning to things, to places, to everything: and yet we can’t secure anything, it all goes back to neutral right away — borrowed objects, fleeting ideas, feelings as fragile as crystal. Even bodies, the desire of bodies: unpredictable. We can bombard any piece of the world with all the intensity we’re capable of and, an hour later, it’s newly reborn. You can understand something, know it thoroughly, and it has already shifted, it knows nothing of you, it has its own mysterious life, which takes no account of what you’ve made of it. Those who love us betray us, and we betray those we love. We can’t secure anything, believe me. When I was young, trying to explain to myself the mute sorrow that clung to me, I was convinced that the problem lay in my incapacity to find my path: but you see, in reality we walk a lot, with courage, intuition, passion, each of us on our own just path, without errors. But we leave no traces. I don’t know why. Our footsteps leave no imprint. Maybe we are astute, swift, mean animals, but incapable of marking the earth. I don’t know. But, believe me, we don’t leave traces even in ourselves. Thus there is nothing that survives our intention, and what we construct is never built.