Just think of it: you sit beside her on the cream- colored leather divan; you remove the owlish eyeglasses and notice that the eyes are flecked in the comers with anxiety; the great hall is silent, waxen, filled with the residual afterglow of the late sun; you notice that the face turned in your direction is strong but that the smile could be interpreted as timid; your hand grazes the chaste white linen of the blouse which, her eyes still on yours, her body apparently relaxed, she herself begins to unbutton, as if without thinking; with relief you notice an endearing tobacco stain on several of the otherwise conventionally white teeth; and then like a figure from our wealth of erotic literature, you find yourself kneeling on that polished stone floor and holding a firm ankle in one hand and in the other the heel of a shoe that appears to have been molded from dark chocolate. And then she leans forward, leans on your shoulder, frees herself of the shoes you could not remove, and then stands up and, for a moment, experiences girlish difficulty with the zipper of the plum-colored velvet pants. Well, the vision is yours as well as mine: the disappearance of the velvet trousers, the strength and shapeliness of the hands that pull down the underpants, the clear uncertain tone of the voice in which she remarks (quite wrongly, as all of my photographs attest) that she has never been very good at stripping. And there at eye level, for you are still kneeling, there at eye level we find the slight protrusion of the hip bone, the modest appearance of the secret hair which might have been shaven but was not, the smallest off-center appearance of the navel born of the merest touch of a hot iron against that soft and ordinary flesh. But more, much more, as only you and I could know. Because just there, adorning that small area between navel and pubic hair, there you see once again the cluster of pale purple grapes on yellow stems-yellow stems! — that coils down from the navel of our Honorine or, to put it another way, that crowns the erogenous contours of our Honorine as it did even when she was only an unexpectedly eccentric girl. Grapes, cher ami, a tattoo of smoky grapes that move when she breathes or whenever there is the slightest spasm or undulation in her abdomen. After seeing them, who would risk any constricting definition of our Honorine?
But you and I have been the foxes to those ripe grapes, have we not? And to think that it is she, this sleeping Honorine, who awaits our passing.
Well, now you can breathe again, as can I. That's a dangerous turn, you saw how much trouble it gave me, for all my knowledge of our route and no matter the perfect timing-or perhaps nearly perfect timing, I should say-with which I prepared once more to meet its treachery. Yes, an extremely difficult turn, a threatening moment indeed, as you could tell by the song of our tires and my silence and the sternness with which I held the wheel. Of course you too felt that sudden inundation of centrifugal force, the nausea that told us that we might in fact be leaving the road. But it's all right, the uncertainty is past, we have emerged from the turn, again we are safely adhering to the earthly path of our trajectory-which on a white road map looks exactly like the head of a dragon outlined by the point of a pen brutally sharpened and dipped in blood. But it is precisely by such small incidents as this one, when all at once the irrationality of the night intrudes upon us, that we inside the car are given to see ourselves as through the eyes of some old sleepless goatherd on a distant hilclass="underline" to him, we are only the brief inaccessible stab of light that announces impersonally — quite impersonally-the vicious passing of an invisible and even inconsequential automobile through the damp and chilly medium of the black night. Then we are gone.
And so we are. So we are.
Chantal? Can it be? Have you forgotten the injunction of your Papa? Have you, like a poor childish sleepwalker, slipped free of your belt and worked your way down, down to the narrow but thickly carpeted area between the rear seat and two front seats? You, Chantal, burrowing down back there like some little frightened animal or tearful child? But it is a grievous tabloidal gesture. It could hardly be more hurtful to your Papa, who despairs to imagine you now conscious of nothing whatsoever except the burden of your own pure and quite meaningless revulsion. It is not how I thought you would behave, Chantal. Surely you cannot hope to save yourself by lying flat or in the fetal position and bracing yourself with knees and shoulders and covering your distracted face with your beautiful, small hands? Alas, the effort is futile, as you must know. But perhaps you are simply trying to escape your Papa's voice. Could it be that? You prefer the fine soft music of our transmission to the truth of what your Papa is saying? But there is time yet to recover yourself and regain your seat and participate in the assessment, analysis, of our discussion.
After all, you are nearly twenty-five years old. And I confess I found your sobbing more tolerable than this sudden convulsive state of withdrawal. But can't you see that this collapse of yours is, at the very least, an extreme distraction? Think of it, Chantal, we may not be so fortunate on the next turn.
But here it is, cher ami: my own dear Chantal lying face down behind us. How much worse it is for my poor child than I imagined. And only a few days ago I watched from our bedroom window as below in the otherwise empty courtyard Chantal, fresh from her riding lesson and dressed in her whipcord britches and black boots, emerged from this very automobile, alone except for her mother's Afghan which she was holding on a leather leash. The cobblestones like loaves of moldy bread, the long beige-colored car, the dog with his silken brown and white coat ruffling in the afternoon's cool breeze, the small and quick-moving woman with her dark hair, olive complexion, black riding boots, and dwarfed by the dog-it was a sight I could not help but admire, safe as I was from the long waves of regret which that same scene would have inspired in me in years past. I was still aware that Chantal's energetic presence below in the courtyard only heightened all the more the abandoned quality I especially appreciate in my wife's chateau, as if one could catch a glimpse of a large modern car left standing empty inside the iron gates of the very castle where the sleeping princess lies in all her pallor. I thought of it from my place at the window. But what most held my attention was the sheer vigor of the young woman below with the dog. How tight she was in her small body, I thought, and in her dark complexion how very different she was from our own fair and slowly sauntering Honorine. Yes, Chantal takes her small size and rose-and-olive beauty from her grandmother, that woman of diminutive regal shape and Roman coloring. How odd that not a trace of the old woman's alluring decadence is to be found in the features of our Honorine.
But now she has collapsed, the "porno brat" who became my child of the Renaissance. A few days ago I watched her crossing the courtyard quickly, happily, somewhat disheveled from her ride. The tall thin dog drifted from view to the clicking of my daughter's boot heels. She abandoned the car, this car, with the door on the driver's side wide open. I smiled. Now Chantal lies behind us, her body crumpled on the floor of the car like the corpse of an abducted socialite. She is a cameo nearly destroyed. And yet need I say that regret is not at all the same as grief?
I have two significant regrets. Only two. The first is that the crash soon to be reported as having occurred near the little village of La Roche must result inevitably in fire; the second is that the remains of the crash must inevitably disappear.
No doubt such considerations are not important. Even now I can hear your argument that these refinements of mine are for you nothing more than trivia elevated to the condition of impossible torment, or that at a time like this my extensive articulation of violent, unseemly details is nothing more than a kind of unfair tugging on the fishhooks already embedded beneath your skin. But of course I would by no means accept the notion of "trivia"; the nature and extent of physical damage can never be trivial, even when measured against the irreplaceable loss of three lives. And surely I need not remind you that I am serious and hence not at all interested in the infliction of minor psychological injury. On the other hand, if you were in fact thinking, if you were but a little more engaged in our discussion, then you might well retort that for a man who has pre-empted absolute or, we might say, whiplash control over this much immediate last-minute life, all speculative fantasy becomes a mere glut of self-indulgence. What, you ask, is he not satisfied with things as they are, with all the tangible evidence of the terrible blow he is dealing his daughter, his closest friend, himself, but what he must inflate himself still further and so must invent in his own eyes, arrange within his own head, even that context of circumstances in which the three of us will no longer exist? But he goes too far, you say, too far. Well, it would be a pretty speech if you could make it. But even if you did reply to me with some such dubious form of logic, my own reply, prompt and good-natured as it would clearly be, would convince even you that it is this idea precisely that lies at the dead center of our night together: that nothing is more important than the existence of what does not exist; that I would rather see two shadows flickering inside the head than all your flaming sunrises set end to end. There you have it, the theory to which I hold as does the wasp to his dart. Without it, we would have no choice but to diffuse the last of our time together by passing between us the fuming bottle of cognac bought and freshly opened for just this occasion. But thanks to my theory we are spared such an intolerable waste. There shall be no slow maudlin loss of consciousness for you, for me. After all, my theory tells us that ours is the power to invent the very world we are quitting. Yes, the power to invent the very world we are quitting. It is as if the bird could die in flight. And unless we exercise this power of ours we merely slide toward the pit feet first, eyes closed, slack, and smiling in our pathetic submission to an oblivion we still hope to understand. But for us it will be different, cher ami. Quite different.