Well, you have my sympathies. The onset of this condition of yours, with its promise of facial discoloration and even loss of consciousness so evident in every rattling breath you take, must certainly come as the final outrage, like eczema on top of leprosy. And unless I am mistaken, by now you are quite wet with perspiration. I suppose the body expresses what the mind refuses to tolerate, which probably says something about my own single lung and satisfactory respiratory system. But I would give you relief if it were in my power. Fields of oxygen, the smell of a blue sky. … I wish I could give them to you, cher ami. As it is, I am certainly going to find it harder to hear your voice, while for you it will be much more difficult to concentrate on anything but these increasing indications of expiring breath. But perhaps you should remember that it is only the rarest person who is not in one sense or another gasping for air.
Our villages carved out of old bone, our forests shimmering with leaves the color of dried tobacco, our village walls over which the dead vines are draped like fishing nets, the weight of the stones that occupy the slopes of our barren hills like sculpted sheep, the smell of wood smoke, the ruby color of wine held to the natural light, the white pigeon drawn to the spit even as he becomes aroused on the rim of the fountain-surely there is no eroticism to match the landscape of spent passion. There is nothing like an empty grave to betray the presence of a dead king in all his lechery. The blasted tree contains its heart of amber, you can smell the wild roses in the sterile crevices of ancient cliffs, suddenly you find the whitened limb of a tree sleeved in green. Yes, ours is a landscape of indifferent hunters and vanished lovers, cher ami, so that but to exist on such a terrain, aware of blood and manure, of the little paper sacks of poison placed side by side with bowls of flowers on the window ledges of each village street, or aware of the unshaven faces of our local pharmacists or of the untended pubescence of the girls who work in our markets and confess their fantasies in our darkened churches-yes, simply to exist in such a world is to be filled with a pessimism indistinguishable from the most obvious state of sexual excitation. I am a city person and not without my own form of pragmatism. And yet whenever I have seen from the window of this very car a glimpse of a distant woodland, I have thought of the royal hunting party mounted and in pursuit of a fevered stag, and thought of the sound of the horns, the lovers in that boisterous army, pretty and plumed, flushed and separated on their tossing horses but riding only in wait for the day of the chase to give way to the night of the tryst, when the mouth that took the brazen hunting horn by day will take the elegant and ready flesh by night. Yes, we who are the gourmets and amateur excavators of our cultural heritage know in our cars, our railway trains, our pretentious establishments of business, that we have only to pause an instant in order to unearth the plump bird seasoning on the end of its slender cord tied to a rafter, or a fat white regal chamber pot glazed with the pastel images of decorous lovers, or a cracked and dusty leather boot into which some young lewd and brawny peasant once vomited.
Yes, dead passion is the most satisfying, cher ami. You have hinted as much in your verses. But no wonder I have always thought of Honorine as mistress of a small chateau and nude beneath a severe black hunting costume for riding sidesaddle, though she has never been on a horse in her life. And you can imagine my pleasure when Honorine did in fact inherit from her mother, that noble woman, the small chateau which I myself named Tara and which you and I have filled with the deadest of all possible passion. You don't agree? You disclaim anything but vitality and tenderness in your relations with Chantal and Honorine? Then perhaps it is only my own passion that is so very dead, cher ami.
But the owl is watching us. And look there. Rain. Just as I expected. Soon the invisible camera will be trained on us through the wet and distorting lens of our windshield.
But I too once had a mistress. You did not know? Well, I hope that despite all you have been told about the power of your sullen allure you do not consider yourself the only person to have received the gift of love as seen through the prism, as I may call it, of another woman, though it is true that my own experience was confined to a single mistress and not to a pair. Never in my lifetime would I have contemplated a pair of mistresses. I am one of those lesser and hence more limited men, as you well know.
But little Monique was quite enough for me at the time. At the beginning of our friendship she was only a few weeks into her twentieth year, which, come to
think of it, was exactly Chantal's age when you, in all your mysterious naturalness and unconcern, determined to extend to her the love of the poet, if you will indulge the expression. Then too, Monique was a shade smaller even than Chantal, a fact I take to mean not that I was trying to duplicate my daughter in my mistress but simply that I was lucky enough to win Monique with a single glance and that she was the smallest person with whom I ever shared what she used to call the dialogue of the skin. Her size was important to me not because it mimed specifically the small size of Chantal and Chantal's lovely grandmother, but only because it bore out so perfectly an idea that has obsessed me since earliest manhood: that the smaller the woman one regards the greater one's amazement at the vastness, fierceness, of the human will.
So Monique was remarkable, then, for her startling size, the utter harmony of her physical proportions, the immensity and even dangerous quality of her will. Her self-assertiveness was staggering. Of course she never failed to obey me, and yet even when she conformed to my simplest suggestion (about what to eat, what not to eat, some article of clothing, and so forth) she did so with beautiful vehemence, as if she were acting on her own prideful volition instead of mine. But never fear, she gave as good as she received.
If I loved Monique for her size, I loved her equally for the nature of her skin and its complexion. Tight, painfully and wonderfully tight over the entirety of her little face and limbs and torso, so thin and tight that actually I used to fear the consequences of a slip of the threaded needle. And of course her skin was white, almost glazed, in fact, and whiter even than Hon- orine's fair skin. And you know that my predilection for whiteness is just as intense as my appreciation of the Mediterranean hues.
Short skirts, short hair, bright blue lacquered shoes, occasionally a blouse tastefully crocheted, and the inevitable silk stockings as if always to confirm her threatened womanhood-I can still see her, one of the most inventive girls and strongest human beings I have ever known. I used to meet her twice a month on a schedule so strict that it did not vary more than several minutes from one occasion to the next. We were equally intolerant of lateness, though the flowers I carried and the luxury of the car I drove always gave me the advantage in these matters of time and demonstrations of anger. But we enjoyed each other's anger, and vied with each other in the creation of embarrassing public displays of bad temper. It was as if we shared between us an unspoken agreement to parody the lovers' quarrel, the domestic disagreement, whenever possible. Yes, even now it gives me oddly pleasurable satisfaction to recall how often I submitted to the insults she shouted at me on the most crowded of street corners (in the sun, in the rain, in the darkness after a splendid meal), and how she in her turn bore with quivering fury the disciplinary blows I so often inflicted with the edge of my heavy fork on her fragile wrist, usually under the eager eyes of an old waiter in the most elegant of restaurants. But as I say, it is a familiar and convenient pattern, this happy ritual of disruption and reconciliation. We relied on it totally, Monique and I.