No reflection is now dancing over there, on the roof of green tiles.
The sun has moved away; the lake of the sky, blue a moment ago between two narrow, motionless cloudbanks, is softly fading, changing from turquoise to lemon green.
My elbows and my bent knees have gone to sleep.
This unprofitable day is about to end, and I’ve made no decisions, I haven’t written, I haven’t torn out of my heart even one of those irrepressible urges whose stormy impetus I once accepted freely, even ready to call such an impetus “divine.”
What am I to do? . . .
For today: write a brief letter (because time is short), and tell lies . . .
“Darling, it’s almost six, and I spent the day fighting off a terrible headache.
It’s so hot, and the heat arrived so suddenly, that it makes me moan, but, like Fossette when the hearth fire is too strong, I bear no grudge.
And then, there was your letter, to boot! . . .
It was too much sunshine, too much light all at once, both you and the sky overwhelmed me with your gifts; today I have only just enough strength to sigh, ‘Too much! . . .’ A sweetheart like you, Max, and a lot of love, and a lot of happiness, and a lot of money . . . You think I’m a strong person?
Usually I am, it’s true, but not today.
Give me time . . . “Here’s a photo for you.
I’ve just received it from Lyons, where Barally took this snapshot.
Am I dark enough for you in it, small enough, looking enough like a lost dog, with my arms crossed and that air of having been beaten?
Frankly, my beloved friend, this tiny passerby finds it hard to bear the excessive honor and wealth that you’re promising her.
She’s looking in your direction, and her mistrustful fox’s muzzle seems to be asking you, ‘Is all that really for me?
Are you sure?’
“Goodbye, my darling friend.
You’re the best of men, and you deserve the best of women.
Won’t you be sorry that you merely chose
“RENEE NERE?”
I have forty-eight hours ahead of me . . .
And now, fast!
Get dressed and made up; have dinner at one of Basso’s outside tables in the cool breeze amid the aroma of lemon and wet mussels; then dash to the Eldorado down the avenues bathed in pink electric light; and finally, for a few hours, snap the string that’s tugging me back there, ceaselessly . . .
*** Nice, Cannes, Menton . . . I tour, pursued by my growing torment: a torment so sharp, so constantly present that I’m sometimes afraid I’ll see the shape of his shadow next to mine on the yellow sandstone of the piers along the sea front, or on the hot sidewalk where banana peels are rotting . . . My torment lords it over me; it comes between me and my pleasure in living, in observing, in drawing deep breaths . . . One night, I dreamed I wasn’t in love, and that night I slept well, rescued from everything, as if in a gentle death . . .
Max replied to my ambiguous letter from Marseilles with a happy, calm letter, one long declaration of thanks without any corrections, in which love became friendly, trusting, proud to give all and receive more—in short, a letter that could make me believe I had written saying,
“On such a day, at such an hour, I’ll be yours, and we’ll go off together.”
Are things settled, then?
Am I so deeply committed?
Is it impatience, is it haste, this nasty mood which, day after day, city after city, night after night, makes me find time so heavy on my hands? . . .
Yesterday in Menton, in a family boardinghouse slumbering in the midst of gardens, I was listening to the awakening of the birds and the flies, and the parrot on the balcony.
The dawn breeze was bending the palms like dead reeds, and I recognized every sound, all the music of a similar morning last year.
But this year, the whistling of the parrot, the buzzing of the wasps in the rising sun, and the breeze in the stiff palms, were all receding, becoming distant from me; they seemed to be murmuring like an accompaniment to my troubles, serving as a pedal point to my idee fixe—to love.
Under my window, in the garden, an oblong bed of violets that the sun hadn’t reached yet looked blue in the dew, beneath mimosas yellow as a chick.
Also, against the wall, there were climbing roses, from whose color I guessed that they had no fragrance; they were slightly yellow, a bit green, of the same undecided shade as the sky before it becomes blue.
The same roses, the same violets as last year . . . But why, yesterday, was I unable to greet them with that involuntary smile which reflects a harmless felicity that is half physical, that felicity in which the silent happiness of solitary people is expressed?
I’m suffering. I can’t attach myself to the things I see.
For one minute more, and then one minute more, I’m caught up in that greatest of all follies, the incurable unhappiness of the rest of my life.
Bowed and clinging like a tree that has grown on the brink of an abyss, and whose blossoming will cause its destruction, I’m still resisting, but who can say whether I’ll succeed? . . .
When I calm down, when I abandon myself to my brief future, completely entrusted to the man awaiting me back there, a little picture, a little photo, casts me back into my torment, into my rationality.
It’s a snapshot in which Max is playing tennis with some girl.
It has no significance: the girl is a passerby, a neighbor invited to lunch at Salles-Neuves; when he sent me that photo of himself, he didn’t even think of her. But I do, and I was already thinking of her before I’d seen her!
I don’t know her name; I can hardly see her face, which is dark, tilted backward in the sunlight, in a cheerful grimace displaying a shiny white row of teeth.
Oh, if I had my sweetheart here at my feet, or in my hands, I’d tell him . . .
No, I wouldn’t say anything.
But writing is so easy!
To write, write, to hurl across the white sheets the rapid, uneven handwriting that he compares to my changeable face, exhausted by an excess of expressiveness.
To write sincerely, or nearly so!
I hope it will bring me some relief, that sort of inner silence which follows an outcry or a confession . . .
“Max, my beloved friend, yesterday I asked you the name of that girl who’s playing tennis with you.