But there, the dashboard settings are now subtly different. You cannot be as aware of them as I am, yet for me the mere climbing or falling of needles, the sometimes monstrous metamorphosis of tiny, precise numbers behind faintly illuminated glass, a droplet traveling too quickly or too slowly through its fragile tube-these for me are the essential signs, the true language, always precious and treacherous at the same time. And now the settings are different. There are the mildest indications that we are beginning to deplete the resources of this superb machine, though in our present context those resources are of course inexhaustible and in fact will probably account for the grandeur of the sound that will wake our poor curate. Nonetheless the life of the car is running out, the end of our journey tonight is not as distant as one might think. Naturally there are steep grades, sudden turns, even abrasive changes in the road's surface, and still time enough to tax us, preoccupy us, demand the utmost from our living selves. And of course you may argue that our experience so far has been constant, virginal, that we have heard no variations in the music that reaches us from beneath the car; that Chantal has not discovered some poor wounded bird imponderably present and expiring on the seat beside her. Yes, things are the same, I am not even beginning to feel the strain of driving at this high speed.
But then our situation is not so very different from my war, as I call it, with Honorine's old-fashioned clock. It is a crude affair that hangs on her wall. Nothing but a few pieces of dark wood, a long cord with iron weights at either end, a circular ratchet, a horizontal pendulum fixed with wooden cubes like a tiny barbell. It is only the bare minimum of a clock, suggesting both the work of a child and the skill of some parsimonious medieval craftsman. Small, simple, dark, naked. And yet this contraption makes the loudest ticking I have ever heard. And slowly, it ticks more slowly, more firmly than any time device created by any of the old, bearded lovers of death in the high mountains. Well, I cannot stand that ticking. It is unbearable. So at every opportunity I stop the clock. But somehow it always starts up again and beats out its relentless unmusical strokes until once again I find it so insufferable that I jam its works.
You know the clock, you say? And you have never bothered to listen to the noise it makes? But of course you are familiar with Honorine's old clock. Of course you are. What a silly oversight. We are not strangers. Far from it. And how like you to be so unconcerned with something that gives me the utmost aural pain. But what I mean to say is this: that I hear that ticking loudest when the clock is stopped. Exactly. Exactly. It is the war I cannot win. But it is a lovely riddle.
The point is this: that our present situation is like my wife's old clock. The greater the silence, the louder the tick. For us the moment remains the same while the hour changes. And isn't it curious that I really know very little about automobiles? I merely drive them well.
Yes, it was a rabbit. You see it is true, as everyone says, that at high speeds you can feel absolutely nothing of the rabbit's death. But next it will rain, I suppose, as if an invisible camera were recording our desperate expressions through the wet glass. Perhaps you should have agreed to the radio after all.
Confession? Confession? But do you really believe that the three of us are sitting here in what I may call our exquisite tension (despite all my own pleasure in this event, I am not insensitive to the fact that we are in a way frozen together inside this warm automobile) merely so that I may indulge in guilty revelations
and extract from you a few similar low-voiced scraps of broken narrative? No, cher ami, for the term "confession" let us substitute such a term as, say, "animated revery." Or even this phrase: "emotional expression stiffened with the bones of thought."
I do not believe in secrets-withheld or shared. Nor do I believe in guilt. At least let us agree that secrets and so-called guilty deeds are fictions created to enhance the sense of privacy, to feed enjoyment into our isolation, to enlarge the rhythm of what most people need, which is a belief in life. But surely "belief in life" is not for you, not for a poet. Even I have discovered the factitious quality of that idea.
No man is guilty of anything, whatever he does. There you have it. Secrets are for children and egotists and sensualists. Guilt is merely a pain that disappears as soon as we recognize the worst in us all. Absolution is an unnecessary and, further, incomprehensible concept. I am not attempting to justify myself or punish you. You are not guilty. Never for a moment did I think you were. As for me, my "worst" would not fill a crooked spoon.
And yet there are those of us, and I am doing my best to include you among our select few, for whom the most ordinary kind of daily existence partakes of the contradictory sensation we know as shame. For such people everything, everything, is eroticized. Such a man walks through the stalls of a butcher in a kind of inner heat, which accounts for his smile. But if we allow shame to the sensualist and deny guilt to the institutions, it is simply that such words and states serve poetic but not moral functions. In the hands of the true poet they are butterflies congregating high in the heavens, but in the hands of the moralists or the metaphysicians they are gunpowder.
But you are becoming angry, cher ami. Be patient.
Another cigarette. I approve. Though you must know that every minute you are growing more and more like my good but crippled doctor, despite the fact that you are in full possession of your four limbs. But it occurs to me that had I not given them up on the very day you entered our household, I would now ask you to reach slowly across the space between us and position your freshly lighted cigarette between my own dry lips. And you would do that for me. I know you would. And your shaking hand would hover there an instant just below my line of vision, sparing my own two hands for their necessary grip on the wheel, until I fished for the end of the cigarette with my parted lips and then found it, held it, inhaled. One of your cold fingers might even have brushed the tip of my nose as I waited and then exhaled, blowing one lungful of smoke against the inner side of the windshield like a silent wave curling along a glassy shore.
Cigarettes always make me think of bars. They remind me of the war, of talkers around a dark table, of wine, of a woman's hand in my lap.
But no, not even that single puff. Not even now. It cannot be. And yet while you are drenched in the aroma of your cigarette, and while Chantal may be acquiring some slight awareness of the relative newness of this automobile which she cannot help but smell, I myself am breathing in fresh air, dead leaves, ripe grapes. And the windows are closed. Quite closed.
Chantal? Do you hear Papa's voice as through the ether? Whatever you are thinking, ma cherie, whatever monsters you may be struggling with, you must believe me that your presence here is not gratuitous. That would be the true humiliation, Chantaclass="underline" to be as small as you are, to be as young as you are, to be seated behind Henri and me and hence quite alone in the car with no one to comfort you by touch or wordless embrace (precisely as I comforted you at the death of Honorine's Mama, that splended woman), and then to be conscious of yourself not only as so very different from the two men talking together in the front of this darkened and terribly fast sport touring car, but also to know yourself to be forgotten, only accidentally present, unwanted perhaps. What could be worse? Especially since you are in fact no child, and have spent almost the total store of your youthful sexuality on your own small portion of Henri's poetic vision, and since you have always harbored a special regard for your Papa's love.
But it is not so, Chantal. You are no mere forgotten audience to the final ardent exchange between the two men in your mother's life, men whose faces you cannot even see. Not at all, Chantal. No, I have thought of you with utter faithfulness from the beginning. In my mind there were always three of us, Chantal, never two, and in all the accruing of the elements of this now inevitable event (the month, the day, the night, the route), there you were in the very center of my concern. And during these last hours it has been the same: when I thought of you and Henri finishing your dinner in the restaurant, when I waited for the attendant to go through the motions of pumping the last tankful of gasoline into this silent car, when I noticed on my wristwatch that the time of our rendezvous was approaching, even when I so unexpectedly depressed the accelerator and violently increased our speed and hence interrupted our lively conversation and signaled the true state of things: in all this you were the necessary third person whose importance was quite equal to Henri's and mine.