Yes, it seems to me that one of the strongest gratifications of night driving is precisely that you can see so little, and yet at the same time see so very much. The child awakes in us once again when we drive at night, and then all those earliest sensations of fear and security begin shimmering, tingling once again inside ourselves. The car is dark, we hear lost voices, the dials glow, and simultaneously we are moving and not moving, held deep in the comfort of the cushions as once we were on just such a night as this one, yet feeling even in the softness of the beige upholstery all the sickening texture of our actual travel. As children we had absolute confidence in the driver, although there was always the delicious possibility of a wrong turn, some mechanical failure, all the distant unknowns of the night itself. And then there was sight, whatever we could see to the sides of the car or on the road ahead, and it was all so utterly dependent on the headlights, and sight so uncontrollably reduced was of course all the more magnified and pleasing.
It is no different now. Even setting aside our projected destination, which to me is the final blinding piece in a familiar puzzle, the fourth and solid wall in a room of glass, the clear burst of desire that is never entirely out of my mind, while for you it is quite the opposite, since what you know about our particular journey blunts you to the pleasures of this road, this night, this conversation, so that you and I are like two dancers at arm's length, regurgitation locked together with ingestion in a formal, musical embrace. . But setting all this aside, as I say, there is still the undeniable world of our night driving, and it is alluring, prohibitive, personal, a mystery that is in fact quite specific, since it is common to child, to lovers, to the lone man driving from one dark town to the next.
Yes, raise your eyes. Look through the clear glass of the windshield while it is still intact. There, do you see how the outer edges of the cone of light shudder against the flanks of darkness? And look at the actual length of our yellow beams, the reach of our headlights. We can see remarkably far ahead, and to the sides as well. Note that clump of wild onions out there in the dark, and that blasted tree, and that jagged boulder stuffed into that trough of moss. And there, that little road marker no larger than a child's stone in a cemetery and which you refused to read.
But I will tell you something. The hour is precisely eighteen minutes past one a.m., and in mere moments, as soon as we are drawn into the gentleness of the long curve that lies just ahead-but of course it is still invisible-there will be on our right a rather small grove of olive trees, a stone hut, a silent but watchful dog. And if you look when I tell you to look, you will see that among the olive trees someone has made a small pile of human possessions: a white wooden chair, a broken trunk, a crude rake for the garden, a heap of clothing that might have been stripped from dead bodies. It is difficult to understand that the life of the stone hut has been emptied into the darkness, and that the olive tree is beautiful only because it is so deformed. Yet these things are true.
It is amusing to think that tonight our speeding car shall frighten the abandoned dog.
But do you know that once Chantal and Honorine together urged me into the arms of a woman of luxury? It is true. Absolutely true. And I complied.
Chantal was only a girl at the time, and we were traveling, the three of us, in a car very like the one we are presently enjoying. We had dined well, after a day of gray clouds, flat road, high speed, and having left behind us connecting rooms with high ceilings, marble fireplaces, wallpaper the elegant color of dry bone, had walked into a moonlit street filled suddenly with the warmth of summer and the smell of flowers. A moving shadow, an open window, a few notes of music, and then we understood that we had stumbled into the very center of the honeyed hive of a city already acclaimed for its women. Down the narrow street we went arm in arm, laughing, Chantal and Honorine both claiming to be well-known residents of that gentle quarter. And I was in the middle, walking between Chantal and Honorine, and somewhere a caged bird was singing and even out there in the street I could smell fat bolsters, feather beds, nude flesh.
It was a night of wine. And the woman, when we found her, was much older than Honorine and might have come fresh from some turn-of-the-century stage
where whiteness of skin and heaviness of flesh and limb were especially admired. Chantal and Honorine exclaimed their enchantment; I hesitated; the woman raised her chin and smiled. And do you know that Honorine proposed with so much good spirit that I enjoy this woman that I became aroused and agreed to leave Chantal and Honorine eating chocolates in a little empty parlor while, several ornate rooms away, I contributed three quarters of an hour of sexual authenticity to their delightful game? In taking that tall and heavy woman, who filled her maturity with the exact same elegance with which she lived in her skin, it was as if I had only found my way again to Chantal and Hon- orine, and as if I had accepted from mother and daughter the same unimaginable gift. So I prepared the way for you. Don't you agree? And with my two women, who are yours as well, have I not created a family small in size but rich in sentiment?
The next day we were a close and smiling triad as we continued driving through the sterile marshlands and past the great brown windmills with their sad faces and broken arms.
But I must tell you that this little romantic story about the complicity between my wife, my daughter, and the older woman of luxury reminds me more strongly than ever of a curious emotional reaction of mine-a reaction I rarely recall and never felt except upon one of those innumerable occasions of Chantal's childhood happiness. That is, Chantal had only to reveal the slightest sign of personal enjoyment, had only to pick some leaf or kiss Honorine or show me with evident pleasure some faintly colored illustration in one of her books, to send me sliding off into the oddest kind of depression. I was a perfect companion to her gloom, her anger, her hours of fear, her childhood pantomimes of adult frustration, her little floods of helplessness in the face of some easy problem. But let Chan- tal throw her arms around my neck or grow warm of cheek or simply give me a clue that she was momentarily alive in one of those private moments of beatitude all children experience and I was hopelessly alien from her and depressed, inexplicably downcast. Throughout all of Chantal's childhood I was sorry for her whenever I should have been glad. Yes, I was actually sorry for my own child, but sorry only when she was in one of her states of well-being. And when she was herself unhappy, why then I was busily content.
I hear your impatience. And in the circumstances my perhaps sentimental recollections must touch you with profound irritation, especially since you have imagined so much more life than I myself have lived. And perhaps you have already analyzed my darker, nearly forgotten parental emotions as fear of mortality, and have thus dismissed them. But I must ask you again to indulge my nostalgia, if only because its source is gone, quite gone, and I am now capable of loving Chantal without putting myself perversely at the center of our relationship, like the fat raisin that becomes the eye and heart of the cookie. No, for years I have been what the rest of the world would call a normal father, feeling only joy for Chantal's joy and pain for her pain. My "perversion" has long since been cauterized. I no longer reverse and then exaggerate what Chantal feels. I still enjoy licking smeared chocolate from my daughter's fingers, and do so with perfect impunity. But I am in no way responsible for maintaining Chantal's life, and long ago gave up anticipating grief for its loss.
Do you know that now I am not even tempted to look into the rear-view mirror?