So it would go, if you were in the right. But you are not. If I could discover that my clarity is a sham and that I am afraid of death and have devised the entirety of our glassy web because of that same fear of death, I would give myself happily to sobbing over the wheel and spend the rest of my days (after undertaking the cure) in trying to make restitution to you and Chantal. But I can make no such discovery, because there is no such discovery for me to make. Of course I have my qualms. Who would not? But as for this maniacal dread of death that would explain my planning, my determination, my mounting exhilaration as well as my need for a couple of companions, witnesses, supporters to accompany me in the final flash of panic-well, it is unknown to me, your maniacal dread.
But let me be honest. Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of committing a final and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early manhood, and that drew me with so much conviction and compassion to those grainy, tabloidal, photographic renderings of bodies uniquely fixed, but nonetheless fixed, in their own deaths. And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with the cut string I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued by what I defined as the fear of no response. It is true. I have nothing to hide. In those days (needless to say I was then no sensualist) I required recognition from girls behind counters, heroes in stone, stray dogs. Let a policeman dip his stick in the wrong direction and I suffered chills in the spine. The frown was my bete noire. If the world did not respond to me totally, immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then I did not exist-or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved, loved, which is what I most demanded. But no more. The heat of those feelings is quite gone. I have long since known what it is to be loved. Now, tonight, I want not relief but purity.
But of course I have just now asked you for "one moment of genuine response." So you see how close you have come to the mark.
I do not know why that figure of speech (the kneeling marksman, the drawn bow, the golden arrow) reminds me so insistently of little Pascal. But so it docs, the great naked hunter calling forth the little child like a voice from the shadows. Perhaps little Pascal was destined to become a larger-than-lifesize hunter, naked (except for the silver bow, the golden arrow) and stalking his invisible victim among the white boulders beneath a vast sky of unchanging blue. At least I always saw the grown man in little Pascal. By the time he died, when he was not yet three years of age, he had already become a child god, an infant Caesar. Yes, he had already attained his true character by the time he died.
It is a pity that you had no children. So much intimacy with Chantal surely precludes your thinking of her as your own child. But perhaps it is time for you and me to share Pascal-since anything is possible, and since nothing matters, and since he only exists among the white boulders. But it is true: Pascal has been dead for so many years that he might as well be your son as well as mine. What's that? You long ago decided against fathering children? But everything considered, how right you were. Now that you mention it, the thought of a child surviving you is out of the question. But of course little Pascal survives nothing at all.
And yet who can fail to eulogize our infant Caesar?
He was a fat and contrary tyrant, cher ami, and in his third year he began each of our days by subjugating Honorine and me, and even Chantal, to the essential paradox of his fatness, his pink skin, the crown of authority with which he masked his sweet nature. Admittedly, Honorine is not small. But neither is she large in her bones, in her flesh. How then did she mother a child so beautiful in his naked weight, so fatly and gently erotic for all his recalcitrance and pretended ferocity? We shall never know. He was his own source, I often thought, and he is gone. But I saw his little fat body on the spit as often as I saw it crowned; in the chubbiness and gleam of his totally sweet and spoiled nature he was that desirable, that strong.
Yes, he came to Honorine and me with every sunrise, bold and bare, having stripped off his white nightshirt and wearing only his buttery skin and disapproving frown and air of infant determination. With every sunrise he pulled away the bedclothes not from me but from Honorine, who was always his happy match for nudity. Perhaps you are not able to visualize those mornings. But I see them stilclass="underline" dawn at the window, sunlight falling across our bed from that window and from the rose and plum-colored tapestry on our bedroom wall, the sound of distant bells, the scent of coffee, and the birds in the air and already the small automobiles congregating somewhere on the cobblestones. And then the entrance of Pascal, the open door, the light winking from the long glass handle, and our little naked son approaching us with his pink cheeks and pouting underlip and little penis which Honorine always used to touch with the tip of her finger, as if that tiny sexual organ belonged not to Pascal but to the winged infant cast in bronze. You must see such a morning as clearly as I do, cher ami, if only to know that in fact I am not a person who despises life. Quite the contrary.
But in he would come, pouting, wordless, making his little belly fatter than ever (as might some exotic fish with air) and in my own arousal from sleep I would see his bare plumpness and the light in his fine-spun golden hair. And the lip, the beautiful underlip thrust out and moist in his unmistakable message: that he was the joy of all who saw him, but in return there was nothing in all the world to give him joy. Too ripe, too beautiful, too lordly, pleasing but never pleased- such was the fate and character he had created for himself at that early age. But there he would be, the brown eyes filled with accusation, the sunlight flooding the spot where he stood, the tiny spigot crooked and gleaming in the base of the belly. In that moment the faun in the tapestry would quiver at the sight of him and the silver dove on Honorine's commode would fly.
Well, it was always the same. He would wait until I had had my awesome look at him and until Honorine had begun to smile in her feigned sleep and to make her soft welcoming sound, and then cloaked in all his slow assurance he would march across the carpet and reach out one chubby hand and pull the bedclothes from his mother's nude, youthful body. For a moment the two of us, Pascal and I, would gaze on Honorine, who would continue to conceal her wakefulness and, for our sakes, would incline her cheek toward the pillow and arch her back and stretch out an arm and luxuriate in the aroma of her night's perfume.
Do you see her? Do you see Pascal and me? Are you listening?
Well, after that moment, and as if he had received an invisible and all-important sign of acquiescence from Honorine, little Pascal would begin to climb. Yes, with great deliberation he would climb onto our bed (the very same antiquity in which at present Honorine lies sleeping) and then climb onto his mother's warm and well-shaped body. Yes, with frowning difficulty he would mount that body, straddle the hips, seat himself, position himself, until his rosy and sturdy little buttocks were firmly, squarely in place atop Honorine's cluster of purple grapes. There he would sit. Enthroned. And he was quite aware of how he was sitting and how thoroughly his own baby flesh covered and cushioned the flesh of his mother's grapes. I knew what he knew because there was no mistaking the way he would glance in my direction, settle his weight, and then raise his chin in a perfect gesture of self-satisfied defiance.