We’ve already crossed paths two or three times with this tall twenty-two-year-old fellow who walks like a snake-man, as if boneless, and swings such heavy fists from his thin wrists.
His face is almost pretty, below his blonde hair cut in a bang, but his nervous, wandering purple eyes speak of acute neurosis, close to madness.
His constant refrain is,
“I’m bored to death!”
All day long, he waits for the time of his act, during which he forgets his woes, enjoys himself, becomes young again, and has the audience in his pocket.
He doesn’t drink or play around. He invests his money and he suffers from ennui.
Barally, who’s booked for a season at the Celestins, got tipsy talking, laughing (showing her beautiful teeth), and telling stories about the enormous sprees of her youth.
She described the theaters in the colonies twenty years ago, when she sang operetta in Saigon in an auditorium lighted by eight hundred kerosene lamps . . . Now penniless and already old, she embodies an outmoded bohemianism, incorrigible and likable . . .
A nice dinner, all the same: you get warm, you huddle for a moment around a table that’s too small, and then goodbye, a goodbye with no regrets: you’ll forget one another by tomorrow, or in a little while . . . Finally you leave again!
Five days in Lyons are endless . . .
Cavaillon accompanies us to the Kursaal; it’s too early for him, he can make up in ten minutes, but, gnawed by loneliness and one again mute and somber, he hangs onto us . . . The Caveman, delighted and a little drunk, is singing to the stars, and I’m dreaming, listening to the black wind rising and blowing down the Rhone embankment with a roaring like the sea.
How is it that tonight I’m pitching on an invisible surf, like a ship that the ocean sets afloat?
It’s a night for sailing to the other side of the world.
My cheeks are cold, my ears are frozen, my nose is moist: my entire animal being feels fit, robust, adventurous . . . until we reach the threshold of the Kursaal, where the mildewed heat in the basement chokes my cleansed lungs.
Gloomy as civil servants, we reach those peculiar dressing rooms, which resemble either attics in provincial houses or servants’ garret rooms, with their wretched gray-and-white wallpaper . . . Cavaillon, who has ditched us on the staircase, is already in his dressing room, where I catch sight of him seated in front of his makeup shelf, leaning on his elbows, his head in his hands.
Brague tells me that the comic spends his mournful nights that way, prostrated, taciturn . . . I shudder.
I’d like to dispel the memory of that man sitting there and hiding his face.
I’m afraid of getting to resemble him—stranded and unhappy, lost in our midst, fully aware of his loneliness . . .
“April 18
“YOU’RE AFRAID I may forget you?
That’s something new!
Max dear, don’t start ‘acting like a harlot,’ as I put it!
I think of you, I look at you, from afar, with an attention so keen that at moments you ought to be mysteriously aware of it. Isn’t that so?
Across the distance, I make a deep study of you, and I never tire.
I see you so clearly!
It’s only now that the hours of our rapid intimacy no longer have any secrets for me, and that I am reviewing all our words, all our silences, our glances, our gestures, faithfully recorded with both their pictorial and musical values . . . And this is the time you choose for being coquettish, with one finger at the corner of your mouth: ‘You’re forgetting me! I feel that you’re farther away from me!’
Oh, that second sight which lovers possess!
“I’m getting farther away, it’s true, my friend.
We’ve just passed Avignon, and yesterday, when waking up in the train after a two-hour nap, I thought I had slept for two months: spring had arrived on my path, the springtime one imagines in fairy tales, the exuberant, ephemeral, irresistible springtime of the south, rich, fresh, bursting out into sudden greenery, into grass that’s already tall, which the breeze sways and makes iridescent, into purple Judas trees, into paulownias the color of gray periwinkles, into laburnums, wisteria, and roses!
“The first roses, my beloved friend!
I bought them at the Avignon station; they had barely opened, their sulfur yellow was highlighted with carmine, they were as translucent in the sunlight as an ear tinged with bright blood, they were adorned with soft leaves and curved thorns like polished coral.
They’re here on my table. They smell of apricot, vanilla, very good cigars, and well-groomed brunettes—the very fragrance, Max, of your dry, dark hands . . .
“My friend, I’m letting myself be dazzled and reanimated by this new season, this vigorous, hard sky, the particular golden hue of these stones which the sun caresses all year long . . . No, no, don’t pity me for departing at dawn, because in this part of the world dawn emerges, nude and purple, out of a milky sky, and is refreshed by the sound of church bells and by flights of white pigeons . . . Oh, please understand that you mustn’t write me ‘tidy’ letters, that you mustn’t think about what you’re writing!
Write anything, what the weather is like, at what time you get up, how cross you are with your ‘salaried Gypsy’; fill the pages with the same loving word, repeated like the call of an amorous bird to its mate!
My dear lover, I need your disorder to correspond to the disorder of this springtime, which has burst through the soil and is consuming itself in its own haste . . .”
I rarely reread my letters.
I did reread this one, and I did let it go out, but with the odd impression that I was doing something wrong, making a mistake, and that it was on its way to a man who shouldn’t read it . . . I’ve been a little giddy ever since Avignon.
Back there, the lands of fog melted away, behind the screens of cypresses bent by the Alpine wind.
The silken rustling of the tall reeds came in through the lowered window of my railroad car, that day, along with a fragrance of honey, fir, shiny buds, lilacs still unopened, that bitter smell of lilacs before they’re in blossom, a mixture of turpentine and almonds.
The shadow of the cherry trees is violet on the reddish earth, which is already cracking with thirst.
On the white roads that the train crosses or runs along, a chalky dust rolls in low “devils” and powders the bushes . . .
The murmur of a pleasing fever constantly hums in my ears, like the buzzing of a far-off swarm of bees . . .
Defenseless, open to this (foreseen) excess of aromas, colors, and heat, I allow myself to be caught off guard, carried away, persuaded.
Can such sweetness possibly be free from danger?
The deafening Canebiere is teeming at my feet, below my balcony, that Canebiere which rests neither day nor night, and on which aimless strolling takes on the importance and self-confidence of office-holding.
If I lean over, I can see, gleaming at the end of the street, behind the geometric lacework of the ships’ tackle, the water of the port and a fragment of thick blue sea dancing in small, short waves . . .
My hand, on the edge of the balcony, crushes the latest note from my friend, in answer to my letter from Lyons.
In it he recalls, out of context, that my colleague Amalia Barally doesn’t like men.
Like the “normal” and “well-balanced” human being that he is, he didn’t fail to cast some joking aspersions on my old friend, and to label as “vice” something he doesn’t understand.
What would be the good of explaining it to him? . . .