Do not ask me to slow down. It is impossible.
But you are already loosening your collar while I ramble on about Chantal's childhood, my love of cars, the intimacy we share, our swift progress through the fortress of space. Suddenly you and I are more different than ever, yet closer even than when we were three to a bed. But don't worry, despite all this talk of mine I am concentrating. Never for an instant do I lose sight of the road we follow through our blackest night, though I can hardly see it. Yes, my concentration is like that of a marksman, a tasteful executioner, a child crouching over a bug on a stick. And I understand your frustration, your feelings of incomprehension. It is not easy to discover that your closest friend and husband to one mistress and father of the other is driving at something greater than his customary speed, at a speed that begins to frighten you, and that this same friend is driving by plan, intentionally, and refuses to listen to what for you is reason. What can you do? How in but a few minutes can you adjust yourself successfully to what for me is second nature: a nearly phobic yearning for the truest paradox, a thirst to lie at the center of this paradigm: one moment the car in perfect condition, without so much as a scratch on its curving surface, the next moment impact, sheer impact. Total destruction. In its own way it is a form of ecstasy, this utter harmony between design and debris. But even a poet will find it difficult to share this vision on short notice.
But Chantal, perhaps you would like to remove your shoes. Perhaps you would like to imagine that you are merely one of several hundred airplane passengers preparing themselves to survive if possible a crash landing. And yet we are only three. Only three. A small but soothing number.
Of course I am not joking. How for the briefest pleasure of joking could I risk the lives of my own daughter and a poet acclaimed by the public? I am certainly not the man to take risks or live or for that matter die by chance. I am disappointed. Apparently your need to be spared-your need for relief, for de- celeration-is so great that now, after all these years, you are willing to do even the most terrible injustice to my character, merely for the sake of your urgency. You wish only to open your eyes and find us safely parked on the edge of the dark road, the interior of the automobile filled with our soft and private laughter. I understand. But I regret that it cannot be that way, cher ami.
Why not alone? Or why not the four of us? Well, these are much more serious and interesting questions. At last you perceive that I am not merely some sort of suicidal maniac, an aesthetician of death at high speed. But even to approach these subtle thoughts you must give me time, more time. And yet doesn't the fact that you've asked the first question hint at least at its answer?
Please, I beg you. Do not accuse me of being a man without feeling or a man of unnatural feeling. This moment, for instance, is not disgusting but decisive. The reason I am feeling a sensation of comfort so intense as to be almost electrical, while you on the other hand are feeling only a mixture of disbelief and misery-the reason for this disparity between us is more, much more, than a matter of temperament, though it is that too. We have agreed on the surface aspects of trauma: the difficulty of submission, the problem of surprise, a concept of existence so suddenly constricted that one feels like a goldfish crazed and yet at the same time quite paralyzed in his bowl. A mere question of adjustment. But the fact of the matter is that you do not share my interest in what I have called "design and debris." For instance, you and I are equally familiar with our white avenues, our sunlit thoroughfares, our boulevards beautifully packed with vehicles which even at a standstill are able to careen about. The bright colors, the shouts, the bestial roar of the traffic, the policemen typically wired for contradictory signals-it is a commonplace, not worth a thought. And you and I are equally familiar with those occasional large patches of sand which fill half the street, marking the site of one of our frequent and incomprehensible collisions, and around which the traffic is forced impatiently to veer-until some courageous driver falls back on good sense and lunges straight across the patch of sand, his tires scattering the sand and revealing the fresh blood beneath. Another commonplace, you say, more everyday life. The triteness of a nation incapable of understanding highway, motor vehicle, pedestrian.
But here we differ, because I have always been secretly drawn to the scene of accidents, have always paused beside those patches of sand with a certain quickening of pulse and hardening of concentration. Mere sand, mere sand flung down on a city street and already sponging up the blood beneath. But for me these small islands created out of haste, pain, death, crudeness, are thoroughly analogous to the symmetry of the two or even more machines whose crashing results in nothing more than an aftermath of blood and sand. It is like a skin, this small area of dusty butchery, that might have been peeled from the body of one of the offending cars. I think of the shot tiger and the skin in the hall of the dark chateau. But for you it is worth no more than a shrug. Your poetry lies elsewhere. Whereas I have never failed to pull over, park, alight from my automobile-despite the honking, the insults-and spend my few moments of reverential amazement whenever and wherever I have discovered one of these sacred sites. It is something like a war memorial. The greater the incongruity, the greater the truth.
But what about me, you are asking yourself, what about my life? My safety? And why am I now subjected to foolish philosophy mouthed by a man who has suddenly become an insufferable egotist and who threatens to kill me, maim me, by smashing this car into the trunk of an unmoving tree in ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty?
Now you must listen. The point is that you cannot imagine that I, the head of the household, so to speak, can behave in this fashion; you cannot believe that a life as rich as yours, as sensual as yours, as honored, can suddenly be reduced inexplicably to fear, grief, skid marks, a few shards of broken glass; you simply do not know that as a child I divided my furtive time quite equally between those periodicals depicting the most brutal and uncanny destructions of human flesh (the elbow locked inside the mouth, the head half buried inside the chest, the statuary of severed legs, dangling hands) and those other periodicals depicting the attractions of young living women partially or totally in the nude.
Spare me, you cry. Spare me. But the lack of knowledge and lack of imagination are yours, not mine. And it will not be against a tree. There you are even more grossly mistaken.
Remind me to tell you about little Pascal. He was Chantal's little brother and died around the time Hon- orine nicknamed Chantal the "porno brat." My son, my own son, who died just at the moment of acquiring character. Even now the white satin hangs in shreds from the arms of the stone cross that marks his grave.
Very well. No radio. Music, no music, it is all the same to me, though had the thought been agreeable to
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you, I suppose I might have preferred the gentlest background of some score prepared for melodrama. No doubt I am attracted to the sentimentality of flute, drum, orchestra, simply because listening to music is exactly like hurtling through the night in a warm car: the musical experience, like the automobile, guarantees timelessness, or so it appears. The song and road are endless, or so we think. And yet they are not. The beauty of motion, musical or otherwise, is precisely this: that the so-called guarantee of timelessness is in fact the living tongue in the dark mouth of cessation. And cessation is what we seek, if only because it alone is utterly unbelievable.