To the man who wants everything, and to whom even everything, were he to obtain it, would not suffice, to receive but a little appears as no more than a cruel absurdity. Now we understand that it was a generous gift from her whom our despair, our irony and our perpetual tyranny had not disheartened. She was always kind. Several of her remarks, mentioned to us only today, strike us as indulgently exact and full of charm – remarks made by the woman we thought incapable of understanding us because she did not love us.
Whereas we spoke about her with so much unfair egotism and severity. In any case, do we not owe her so many things? If that great tide of love has withdrawn for ever, nonetheless, when we take a walk within ourselves, we can pick up strange and magical shells and, raising them to our ears, hear with melancholy pleasure and without any pain the vast roar of bygone days. Then we dwell, with a sudden feeling of tenderness, on the woman who, as our ill fortune would have it, was loved more than she loved. She is no longer “more than dead” for us. She is a dead woman, whom we remember with affection. Justice requires us to redress the idea we had of her. And by the powerful virtue of justice, she is raised in spirit within our hearts, to appear before that last judgement which we deliver far from her, tranquilly, our eyes filled with tears.
22
Real Presence
We loved each other in a remote village of the Engadine, with a name of twofold sweetness: the dreaminess of its German sonority faded into the sensuousness of the Italian syllables. All around, three lakes of a mysterious green bathed forests of pine trees. Glaciers and peaks barred the horizon. In the evening, the diversity of perspectives made the effects of light so varied and gentle. Will we ever forget the strolls by the lake of Sils-Maria, as the afternoon drew to its close, at six o’clock? The larches, so black in their serenity when set against the dazzling snow, held out towards the pale blue, almost mauve water their branches of soft and shining green.
One evening the hour was particularly propitious to us; in a few moments, the sun, as it sank, made the water pass through every hue and our souls partake of every successive delight. Suddenly we made a movement, we had just seen a little pink butterfly, then two, then five, leaving the flowers on our shore and flutter over the lake. Soon they seemed an impalpable haze of pink as they swept away; then they reached the flowers on the far shore, and returned, recommencing their hazardous crossing, sometimes hovering as if tempted by the lake’s wonderful and subtle tints, like those of a great fading flower. It was too much for us, and our eyes filled with tears.
These little butterflies, as they crossed the lake, passed to and fro across our souls – our souls, quivering with emotion at the sight of such varied beauty, ready to vibrate – passed to and fro like the bow of a sweet violin. The lightness of their flight did not graze the waters, but caressed our eyes and our hearts, and at each beat of their little pink wings we felt faint. When we saw them coming back from the far shore, thereby revealing that they were playing, and taking their pleasure as they floated across the waters, we could hear a delightful harmony; meanwhile, they gradually came back, taking a thousand whimsical detours that varied the original harmony and drew the outline of a melody filled with magical fantasy. Our souls, like sounding boards, could hear in their silent flight a music of enchantment and liberty and all the gentle intense harmonies of the lake, the woods, the sky and our lives accompanied it with a sweet magic that made us dissolve in tears.
I had never spoken to you and you were indeed far from my eyes that year. But how much we loved each other at that time, in the Engadine! Never could I get enough of you, never would I leave you at home. You accompanied me in my walks, you ate at my table, you slept in my bed, you dreamt in my soul. One day – can it be that some sure instinct, some mysterious messenger never alerted you to those childish amusements with which you were so closely associated, and which you lived through, yes, truly lived through, so much did you have within me a “real presence”? – one day (neither of us had seen Italy), we were as if thunderstruck by these words which someone said about the Alp Grüm: “From there you can see right into Italy.” We set off for the Alp Grüm, imagining that, in the spectacle laid out before the peak, just where Italy started, the harsh reality of the landscape would suddenly end, and that, against a dreamlike background, a deep-blue valley would open up. On our way, we reminded ourselves that a frontier does not alter the terrain and that even if it did, it would happen so imperceptibly that we would be unable to notice it easily or all at once. Somewhat disappointed, we nonetheless laughed at having been so childish a few moments before.
But when we reached the summit, we were dazzled. Our childlike imaginings had come true before our very eyes. At our side, glaciers sparkled. At our feet, torrents zigzagged down a wild, dark-green Engadine landscape. Then there was a rather mysterious hill; and after that, mauve slopes afforded and then withheld glimpses into a real, blue land, a sparkling avenue stretching towards Italy.
The names were no longer the same, and immediately harmonized with this new soft sweetness. Someone pointed out the lake of Poschiavo, Pizzo di Verona, the Val di Viola. Then we went to an extraordinarily wild and solitary spot, where the desolation of nature and the certainty that we were here inaccessible to everyone, invisible and invincible too, would have heightened to a frenzy the pleasure of loving each other in that very place.
Then I plumbed the depths of my sadness at not having you with me in your material species, other than enrobed in my nostalgia, in the reality of my desire. I went down some way as far as the place, at a still high altitude, where travellers came to take in the view. In an isolated hostel there is a book in which they write their names. I wrote mine and, next to it, a combination of letters that was an allusion to yours, since just then I found it impossible not to provide myself with some material proof of the reality of your spiritual closeness. By putting something of you into this book it seemed to me that I was relieving myself to a corresponding degree of the obsessive weight under which you were suffocating my soul.
And then I had the immense hope of taking you there one day to read those lines; and then you would climb even higher with me, to avenge me for all that sadness. Without my having to tell you anything about it, you would have understood everything, or rather you would have remembered it all; and you would let yourself go as you climbed up, leaning on me a little so that I could feel more fully that this time you were really there; and I, between your lips with their slight but persistent savour of your oriental cigarettes, I would find perfect oblivion. We would utter senseless words aloud, just for the sake of shouting without anyone in the far distance being able to hear us; tufts of short grass, in the gentle breeze of the heights, would quiver alone.
The ascent would make you slow down your steps and get rather breathless, and my face would draw near so that I could feel your breath: we would be quite ecstatic. We would also go to where a white lake lies next to a black lake as snugly as a white pearl lies next to a black one. How deeply we would have loved one another in an isolated village of the Engadine!
We would have let only mountain guides near us – those men who are so tall and whose eyes reflect things that are not seen by the eyes of other men and are as it were of a different “water”. But I no longer care about you. Satiety came before possession. Platonic love itself has its points of saturation. I would no longer like to take you to this country which, without understanding or even knowing it, you evoke for me with such a touching fidelity. The sight of you preserves but one charm for me, that of reminding me all at once of those names with their strange sweetness, both German and Italian: Sils-Maria, Silva Plana, Crestalta, Samaden, Celerina, Juliers, Val di Viola.
23
An Interior Sunset
Like nature, intelligence
