That the protective parent turns out to be the opposite, that familiar accord turns out to be the basket containing the hidden asp, that it is impossible to weigh the magnitude of what your father is doing as opposed to that of what will soon be happening-this is a disillusionment I cannot discuss for now. But let me at least reassure you in this other matter: you are here, now, with Henri and me, only because of the strength of my devotion, my poor Chantal. No one can rob you now of your Papa's love.
We are like the crow and the canary, cher ami. We are that different. And yet we are both Leos. It is almost enough to engage my interest in astrology. Or at least it is a fact that should help me to suppress more effectively my amusement at the new astrological age of the young. Of course this amusement of mine is more sympathetic than scornfuclass="underline" one cannot merely scoff at the signs of the zodiac sewn to the buttocks of the tight faded pants of our young men and women these days. How like them to believe in the old wizardry and yet sport these portentive signs so innocently, naively, on the seats of their pants.
But you and I are Leos. One more unbreakable thread in the web. What does it mean? Is it the crudest irony of all, or does it somehow light the way to our reconciliation? Is it a mockery of our differences or a hint as to the nature of that odd affinity for each other that we appear to share? Perhaps your future biographer will find in this astrological coincidence of ours the essential clue to what will always be known as your "untimely death." Who is to say?
I seem to remember an old adage that the true poet has the face of a criminal. And you have this
face. You and I know only too well that you are publicly recognized by your short haircut, the whiteness of your skin, the roughened texture of this white skin, the eyes that are hard and yet at the same time wet and always untrustworthy, as if they have been drained of blueness in a black-and-white photograph. Are you beginning to see yourself, cher ami? Yours is the face of the criminal, the lover from the lower classes, the face of someone who has just died on a lumpy sofa in an unfamiliar apartment and who lies there as if alive but already cooling, with one hand touching the bare floor and the grainy head supported in the grip of two cheap sofa cushions. And no matter how you dress, whether conventionally in your dark modest three-piece suit as of this moment, attired in exactly that same absence of flamboyance as myself, as if we had come from separate business offices only to meet on the same outmoded train, or whether you are casually dressed in a somewhat rumpled mauve shirt and loosened tie, as I have often seen you, still for me you are only dressed in one way: in black pants and in a white shirt that is open at the collar, and tieless, and a little soiled. It is the garb of the man about to be executed, the garb of the unsmiling poet whose photograph is so often taken among those festive crowds at the bull ring.
And let us not forget your days as a mental patient. We are all familiar with those red-letter days of yours, cher ami.
Yes, I know you well. Only a Leo could cultivate so successfully this persona of the man who has emerged alive from the end of the tunnel or who has managed to cross the impossible width of the arena. It is always the same: you are like a man who spends his life in intense sunlight becoming all the while not pinker, darker, but only whiter, as if your existence is a matter of calculated survival, which accounts for your curious corpselike expression, which in turn is so appealing to women. You are plain, you smoke cigarettes, you appear to be the friend of at least half of all those professional toreros now working with the majestic bulls, as some people think of them.
And you have spent your days, months, in confinement. We have only to see your name, or better still to see your photograph or even catch a glimpse of you in person, to find ourselves confronting the bright sun, endless vistas of hot, parched sand, the spectacle of a man who always conveys the impression of having been dead and then joylessly resurrected-but resurrected nonetheless. Of course your suffering is your masculinity, or rather it is that illusion of understanding earned through boundless suffering that obtrudes itself in every instance of your being and that inspires such fear of you and admiration. Another way of putting it, is to say that you have done very well with hairy arms and a bad mood. But I am not trying to rouse you with insults. At any rate you will not deny that in yourself you have achieved that brilliant anomaly: the poet as eroticist and pragmatist combined. Though you merely write poems, people admire you for your desperate courage. You are known for having discovered some kind of mythos of cruel detachment, which is another way of expressing the lion's courage. And I too am one of your admirers. Just think of it.
Your modesty? Honesty? Humility? Anxiety? I am aware of them all. In you these qualities are made of the same solid silver as that courage of yours. Yes, you are the kind of man who should always be accompanied by a woman who is the wife of a man as privileged as me. Only some such woman could qualify as your Muse and attest to your courage.
Well, I prefer the coward.
Is it possible then that I too am a Leo? I for whom the bull is interesting, if at all, not for his horns but for the disproportion between his large flabby hump and little hooves? I who possess none of those externals of personality which adorn you, cher ami, like banderillas stuck and swaying in the bull's hump? I who despise the pomp and frivolity of organized expiation? I for whom the window washer on a tall building is more worthy of attention than your torero in the moment of his gravest danger? I who must get along without a Muse and for whom poetry is still no match for journalistic exhibitionism? (The poetry of present company excluded, cher ami.)
Well, perhaps I am merely the product of an astrological error or, more likely, of some clerical slip in the mayor's office. Perhaps I am only a counterfeit Leo,
a person who has lived his life under the wrong sign of the zodiac-the coward to your own man of courage. But then how ironic it is that behind the wheel tonight we find not the poet but only the man who disciplines the child, carves the roast. Perhaps the crow is not so inferior after all to his friend the canary.
It is quite true that I am unable to bear the cold. In all her good humor, Honorine still considers it my severest failing, this inevitable capitulation of mine to the power of the falling thermometer. The shocking whiteness of our bed linen, the touch of approaching winter on the back of my neck, the painful sensation of coldness spreading like water on tiles across the undersides of my thighs, the chill my hand is forever detecting on the surface of my rather bony chest (despite flannel shirt, woolen pullover, tweed jacket), a sudden unpleasant deadening in the end of my nose-here is a sensitivity which even I myself deplore. What could be more cowardly than fear of the cold?