There is nothing to be done about the sound. But you may well wish to close your eyes, or simply lean forward and bury your face in your hands. The entire deafening passage will last an eternity but also no time at all. Why see it? Why not leave the seeing as well as the driving to me? And you might amuse yourself by considering what the peasants will think when we shake their street and start them shuddering in their poor beds: that we are only an immoral man and his laughing mistress roaring through the rainy night on some devilish and frivolous escapade. Or consider what we shall leave in our wake: only an ominous trembling and a half dozen falling tiles.
But do you see it?. . Just there?. . That huddled darkness of habitation?. . The stones in the rain?. . Here it is…. Hold on
Come, come, cher ami. It is behind us. But now you know how trustworthy I really am.
Do you realize that among all the admiring readers of your slender and now somewhat rare volumes there are those who, if given even the briefest glimpse into your life and mine, would consider me a silly coward and you a worthless soul? If the invisible camera existed, and if it recorded this adventure of ours from beginning to end, and if the reel of film were salvaged and then late one night its images projected onto a tattered white screen in some movie house smelling of disinfectant and damp clothing and containing almost no audience at all, it is then that your malignant admirers would stand in those cold aisles and dismiss me as a silly coward and condemn you as a worthless soul. As if any coward could be silly, or any soul worthless. But then it is what you at least deserve, since you have spent your life sitting among small audiences in your black trousers and open white shirt and with your cigarette in your mouth and your elbows on your knees and your hands clasped-like a man on a toilet-telling those eager or hostile women that the poet is always a betrayer, a murderer, and that the writing of poetry is like a descent into death. But that was talk, mere talk. Now, if given the chance, you would speak from experience.
As for me, I have said it already and will not hesitate to say it again: I am an avowed coward. I am partial to cowards. If I am unable to detect in a stranger some hint of his weakness, some faint gesture of recognition passed back and forth between us furtively and beneath the table, or at least the briefest glimpse of his particular white flag raised in the empty field that is himself, then I am filled with hopelessness, with a sadness as close to despair as rain to hail. But who is not?
Who in the very depths of the dry well of his "worthless" soul does not loathe the stage setting that holds him prisoner? Who does not fear the inexplicable fact of his existence? Who does not dread the unimaginable condition of not existing? It is easy enough to say that tomorrow you are going to turn into a rose or a flower. But this optimism of the believer in the natural world is the cruelest ruse of all, a sentimentality worthy of children. Of course I am overstating the situation grossly. But if you cannot find the rift in your selfconfidence or admit to the pale, white roots of your cowardice where it thrives in your own dry well, then you will never ride the dolphin or behave with the tenderness of the true sensualist.
Only a bumpkin would call your cowardly bad- dreamer "silly."
What, cher ami, still arguing? Still unable to put aside self-preservation, the survival instinct, the low- level agitation of the practical mind, the whole pack of useless trumps of the ego? (In the deck that represents the ego all the cards are the same and each one of them is a trump. But these are the liars, the worthless trumps.) But why continue wasting your time and mine by inventing false arguments which I will only refute? Your arguments are hardly gifts to the mind. You are not interested in what they mean. It pains me to see you pulling them out of your sleeve-another argument, another trump-and in each one to hear you shout what you have been shouting the whole night: stop talking, stop the car, set me free. That has been your only refrain, through all I have said. But why can't you listen? Tonight of all nights why can't you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else.
Let me repeat: you do not want me to take you seriously but only to heed your shouts in the dark, which is why for the first time in your life you are not only wheezing but wheezing on the very brink of savagery. You are strangling in the ill-concealed savagery of your resistance. But you know my position. It will not change. Surely I must be able to strike that one slight blow that will cause all your oppressive defenses to fall, to disappear, leaving you free indeed to share equally in the responsibility I have assumed, short-lived or not.
As it so happens, this particular argument of yours is just as obvious but perhaps a little more interesting than the rest, and I have long ago faced it studiously. Some men, or so goes this line of reasoning, search with uncanny directness for what they most fear to find. We rush off to die precisely because death's terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides relief. We are so consumed by what we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it. "Now" becomes better than "later." We run to the ax instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged. And so forth. And as one of the few interesting efforts to make sense of suicide (except for the clinical, to which I do not subscribe) this particular argument of yours has its appeal. We have heard it before, we have listened, it has a good ring. We can imagine the shoe fitting. It is possible, it is exactly the kind of paradoxical behavior that engages all but the bumpkins. And who knows? Perhaps it has cut short the lives of a few bumpkins as well.
But this one is not the lever to pry me from my purpose. My clarity is genuine, not false, while my dread, as you in your pathetic hope imagine it, does not exist. What more can I say? I respect your theory; I respect the fear from which you yourself are suffering (though it oppresses me horribly, horribly); perhaps it would be better for all concerned if. just this once I could find you in the right and could hear the shell cracking, so to speak, and all at once find myself overcome with fear and so pull to the side of the road, thus ending our journey, and in rain and darkness sit sobbing over the wheel. Then I could take Chantal's place back there on the floor and slowly, slowly, you could drive the three of us to Tara. In that case you would take to your bed for two days, Chantal would return to her riding lessons, I would follow your lead to the asylum that effected your famous cure.