7
“Captain,” said his orderly, a few days after the little house had been made ready for him to live in, now that he had retired, until the day he died (a heart disease meant that this would not be long), “Captain, perhaps now that you can no longer make love, or go into battle, a few books might provide you with some entertainment; what should I go and buy for you?”
“Don’t buy anything; no books; they can’t tell me anything as interesting as what I’ve done, and since I don’t have long for that, I don’t want anything to distract me from remembering it. Give me the key to my big trunk; its contents will give me plenty to read every day.”
And from it he took out letters, a whole sea of letters, flecked with white and sometimes grey in hue. Some of these letters were very long, some of them just a single line, written on cards, with faded flowers, various objects, notes to himself to help him remember what had been going on when he received them, and photographs that had been spoilt despite his precautions, like those relics that the very piety of the faithful has worn away with too frequent kisses. And all of those things were very old, and some of them came from dead women, and others from women he had not seen for over ten years.
In all this there were small things that bore the precise memory of episodes of sensuality or affection fabricated from the most insignificant circumstances in his life, and it was like a vast fresco, depicting his life without narrating it, selecting only its most colourful and passionate moments, in a way at once very vague and very precise, with great and poignant power.
There were evocations of kisses on the mouth – that young mouth where he would unhesitatingly have left his soul, and which had since turned away from him: these made him weep for a long time. And despite the fact that he was very weak and forlorn, when he emptied at one draught a few of these still-vivid memories, like a glass of warm wine matured in the sunshine that had devoured his life, he felt a nice lukewarm shudder, of the kind spring gives us when we are convalescing, or the winter hearth when it warms our languor.
The feeling that his old worn-out body had all the same burnt with the same flames gave him a new lease of life – burnt with the same devouring flames. Then, reflecting that what was stretching out its full length over him was merely the immense and moving shadow of those things – so elusive, alas! – and soon to be mingled together in eternal night, he would start to weep again.
Then, even though he knew that they were only shadows, the shadows of flames that had flickered away to burn elsewhere, and that he would never see them again, he nonetheless started to worship those shadows and to lend them a cherished existence, as it were, in contrast to the absolute nothingness that lay in wait.
And all those kisses and all those locks of hair he had kissed and all those things of tears and lips, of caresses poured out like an intoxicating wine, and the moments of despair as vast as music or eventide, filled with the bliss of imagining that they could touch the infinite and its mysterious destinies; this or that adored woman who held him so tightly that nothing existed henceforth except that which he could employ in the service of her adoration… she held him so tightly, and now she was leaving him, becoming so indistinct that he could not hold her back, could no longer even retain the perfume that wafted from the fugitive hems of her mantle: he made every effort to reliving it all, trying to bring it back to life and pin it down in front of him like a butterfly.
And each time it grew more difficult. And he had still not caught a single one of the butterflies – but each time his fingernails had scratched away a little of the mirage of their wings; or rather, he could see them in a mirror, and banged vainly against the mirror in his attempt to touch them, but merely tarnished it a little each time, so that the butterflies simply became blurred and less enchanting to his eyes. And this mirror of his heart was so tarnished that nothing could wipe it clean any more, now that the purifying breath of youth or genius would no longer blow over it – by what unknown law of our seasons, what mysterious equinox of our autumn?…
And each time he felt less sorrow at having lost them – those kisses on that mouth, and those endless hours, and those perfumes that once had made him delirious.
And he was filled with sorrow at feeling less sorrow; and even that sorrow soon vanished. Then all his sorrows left, every one; no need to send his pleasures packing; they had fled long since on their winged heels, without looking round, holding their flowering branches in their hands; they had fled the dwelling that was no longer young enough for them. Then, like all men, he died.
8
Relics
I have bought up all of her belongings that were put on sale – that woman whose friend I would like to have been, and who did not even condescend to talk to me for a few minutes. I have the little card game that kept her amused every evening, her two marmosets, three novels that bear her coat of arms on their boards and her bitch. Oh, you delights and dear playthings of her life, you had access – without enjoying them as I would have done, and without even desiring them – to all her freest, most inviolable and most secret hours; you were unaware of your happiness and you cannot describe it.
Cards that she would hold in her fingers every evening with her favourite friends who saw her getting bored or breaking into laughter, who were witnesses to the start of her liaison, and whom she threw down to fling her arms round the man who thereafter came every evening to enjoy a game with her; novels that she would open and close in her bed, as her fancy or her fatigue bade her, chosen by her on impulse or as her dreams dictated, books to which she confided her dreams and combined them with the dreams expressed by the books that helped her better to dream for herself – did you retain nothing of her, and can you tell me nothing about her?
Novels, she dreamt in turn the lives of your characters and of your authors; and playing cards, for in her own way she enjoyed in your company the tranquillity and sometimes the feverishness of intimate friendships – did you keep nothing of her thoughts, which you distracted or filled, or of her heart, which you wounded or consoled?
Cards, novels, you were so often in her hands, or remained for so long on her table; queens, kings or knaves, who were the still guests at her wildest parties; heroes of novels and heroines who, at her bedside, caught in the cross-beam of her lamp and her eyes, dreamt your silent dream, a dream that was nonetheless filled with voices: you cannot have simply let it evaporate – all the perfume with which the air of her bedroom, the fabric of her dresses and the touch of her hands or her knees imbued you.
You have preserved the creases left when her joyful or nervous hand crumpled you; you perhaps still keep prisoner those tears which she shed, on reading of a grief narrated in some book or experienced in life; the day which made her eyes shine with joy or sorrow left its warm hues on you. When I touch you, I shiver, anxiously awaiting your revelations, disquieted by your silence. Alas! Perhaps, like you, charming and fragile creatures, she was the insensible and unconscious witness of her own grace. Her most real beauty existed perhaps in my desire. She lived her life, but perhaps I was the only one to dream it.
9
Moonlight Sonata
I
I had been worn out less by the fatigues of the journey than by the memory and the apprehension of my father’s demands, of Pia’s indifference and of my enemies’ relentlessness. During the day, the company of Assunta, her singing, her kindness to me (even though she barely even knew me), her white, brown and pink beauty, her perfume which continued to hang in the great gusts of wind from the sea, the feather in her hat, the pearls around her neck had taken my mind off those problems.
But, around nine in the evening, feeling overwhelmed with fatigue, I asked her to go back in the carriage and leave me here to rest awhile in the open air. We had almost reached Honfleur; the place had been well chosen, against a wall, at the start of a double avenue of great trees which gave shelter from the wind; the air
