Soon I dreamt that in front of me the sunset was shedding its light on the sand and the sea in the distance. Twilight was falling, and it seemed to me that it was a sunset and a twilight like all twilights and all sunsets. But a letter was brought to me; I tried to read it and couldn’t make anything out. Only then did I realize that in spite of this impression of intense and widespread light, it was in fact very dark. This sunset was extraordinarily wan, glowing without clarity, and on the magically illumined sand, the darkness had become so deep and dense that I had to make an intense effort to recognize the shape of a seashell.
In that twilight particular to dreams, it was like the setting of an ailing and discoloured sun on some polar strand. My sorrows had suddenly evaporated; my father’s decisions, Pia’s feelings, my enemies’ bad faith still held me in their thrall, but they no longer crushed me; it was as if they were a natural and now indifferent necessity. The paradox of this dark gleam, the miracle of this magical truce granted to my problems inspired no mistrust in me, and no fear – but I was wrapped, bathed, drowned in a growing sweetness whose intense delight finally awoke me. I opened my eyes. In wan splendour, my dream stretched all around me.
The wall in whose shelter I had curled up to sleep was brightly lit, and the shadow cast by its ivy fell as clear and vivid as if it had been four in the afternoon. The leaves of a white poplar, quivering in the barely perceptible breeze, glittered. Waves and white sails could be seen on the sea, the sky was clear, the moon had risen. Every so often, light clouds passed in front of it, but then they became tinged with a delicate blue, whose profound pallor was like that of a transparent jellyfish or the heart of an opal. And yet my eyes could nowhere grasp the brightness that was shining all around. Even on the grass, which shone with a mirage-like intensity, the darkness persisted.
The woods, or a ditch, were totally black. Suddenly, a slight noise rose as slowly and surely as a growing anxiety, rapidly grew louder, and seemed to come rolling across the wood. It was the rustle of the leaves quivering in the breeze. One by one I heard them unfurling like waves against the vast silence of the huge night sky. Then even this noise diminished and faded away. In the narrow meadow stretching before me between the dense avenues of oak trees, there seemed to flow a river of light, contained within these two riverbanks of shadow.
The moonlight, as it conjured up the gamekeeper’s house, the foliage or a sail from the night in which they lay buried, had not awoken them. In the silence of sleep, it illumined merely the vague phantom of their forms, without it being possible to distinguish the outlines which restored them to me in their full daytime reality, oppressing me then by the certainty of their presence and the permanency of their banal proximity.
The house without a door, the foliage without a trunk and almost without leaves, the sail without a ship seemed, instead of being a cruelly undeniable and monotonously habitual reality, the strange, inconsistent and luminous dream of the sleeping trees immersed in the darkness. Never, indeed, had the woods slept so deeply; the moon gave the impression of having taken advantage of their slumber to throw a great but subdued party, sweetly spectral, silently unfolding over the sea and the sky.
My sadness had vanished. I could hear my father scolding me, Pia making fun of me, my enemies hatching plots – and none of this seemed real. The only reality lay in this unreal light, and I summoned it with a smile. I did not understand what mysterious resemblance had united my sorrows to the solemn mysteries being celebrated in the woods, on the sea and in the sky, but I felt that their explanation, their consolation, their pardon was being proffered, and that it was quite unimportant that my intelligence had been left out of the secret, since my heart understood it so well. I called my holy mother night by name, my sadness had recognized in the moon her immortal sister, the moon shone on the transfigured sufferings of night, and in my heart, whence the clouds had dispersed, there had risen a great melancholy.
II
Then I heard steps. Assunta was coming towards me, her white face hovering over a vast dark mantle. She said to me, almost under her breath, “I was afraid you might be cold, my brother had gone to bed, I came back.” I went up to her; I was shivering, she took me under her mantle and, to hold it in place, put her arm round my neck. We walked a few steps beneath the trees, in the deep darkness. Something shone in front of us; I did not have time to step back and went round it, thinking we were going to walk into a tree, but the obstacle vanished beneath our feet; we had walked into a pool of moonlight.
I leant her head against mine. She smiled, I started to weep, I saw that she was weeping too. Then we realized that the moon was weeping and that her sadness was in unison with ours. The gentle, poignant accents of her light went straight to our hearts. Like us, she was weeping, and, as is almost always the case with us, she was weeping without knowing why, but feeling her sweet and irresistible despair so deeply that she dragged down into it the woods, the fields, the sky – which was again reflected in the sea – and my heart, which at last could see clearly into hers.
10
The Source of Tears That Are in Past Loves
The way novelists or their heroes hark back to their defunct love affairs, so touching for the reader, is unfortunately quite artificial. This contrast between the immensity of our past love and the absolute nature of our present indifference, of which a thousand material details make us aware – a name recalled in conversation, a letter discovered lying in a drawer, an actual meeting with the person or, even more, our belated and, as it were, retrospective possession of that person; this contrast, so painful, so full of barely contained tears when represented in a work of art, is something we can register with cold detachment in life, precisely because our present state is one of indifference and forgetfulness, because our beloved and our love no long afford us any pleasure other than an aesthetic one at most, and because, together with love, our emotional turmoil and our faculty of suffering have disappeared. The poignant melancholy of this contrast is thus merely a moral truth. It would also become a psychological reality if a writer were to place it at the beginning of the passion he is describing and not after its end.
Indeed, when we begin to love, it is often the case that, forewarned by our experience and our sagacity – despite the protestation of our heart which has the feeling or rather the illusion that its love will last for ever – we know that one day the woman the thought of whom constitutes our whole life will be as indifferent to us as are, just now, all other women apart from her… We will hear her name without any thrill of pain, we will see her handwriting without trembling, we will not change our route to catch a glimpse of her in the street, we will meet her without being affected by the encounter, we will possess her without ecstasy. Then that sure foreknowledge, despite the absurd and yet powerful premonition that we will always love her, will make us weep; and love, the love that will still be hovering over us like a divine morning, infinitely mysterious and sad, will offer to our pain some of the expanse of its great and strange horizons, in all their depth, and some of its enchanting desolation…
11
Friendship
When we are filled with sorrow, it is sweet to hide in the warmth of our beds and, now that all effort and all resistance have been abandoned, pull our head under the blankets, and completely let ourselves go, groaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is an even better bed, filled with divine perfumes. It is our sweet, our deep, our impenetrable friendship. When my heart is feeling sad and frozen, I shelter it in our friendship, shivering in the cold. Burying even my thoughts in the warmth of our affection, perceiving nothing more of the world outside and no longer seeking to defend myself, disarmed, but by the miracle of our tender affection immediately fortified, invincible, I weep with pain, and with the joy of having a trusting soul in which I can lock it away.
12
The Ephemeral Efficacity of Sorrow
Let us be grateful to the people who give us happiness; they are the charming gardeners thanks to whom our souls are filled with flowers. But let us be more grateful to the spiteful or merely indifferent women, and to the
