I shouldn’t have bothered.
For me her name is ‘a girl, every girl, every young woman’ who’ll be my rival a little later, soon, tomorrow.
Her name is the unknown female, younger than I, the one I’ll be compared with cruelly, lucidly, and yet not so cruelly or clearsightedly as I myself shall do! . . .
“Triumph over her?
How many times?
What does triumph mean when the battle wears you out and never ends?
Understand me, understand me!
It’s not suspiciousness, it’s not your future infidelity that is crushing me, my beloved, it’s my own decline.
We’re the same age; I’m no longer a youngster.
Beloved, picture your good looks as a mature man, in a few years, alongside my mature state!
Picture me still beautiful, but in despair, and maddened, in my armor of corsets and gowns, in my rouge and powder, in my brittle youthful coloration . . . Picture me as lovely as a mature rose that mustn’t be touched!
One lingering look that you bestow on a young woman will be enough to lengthen the sad furrow on my cheek that my smiles have dug there, but a night of happiness in your arms will be even more disastrous to my departing beauty . . . As you know so well, I’m approaching the age when women become more passionate.
It’s the age when they commit terrible follies . . . Understand me!
Won’t your persuasive, reassuring ardor lead me into the false sense of security characteristic of women who are loved?
In an amorous woman whose needs are satisfied, an affected ingenue is reborn for brief, perilous moments, and she indulges in a little girl’s games which make her heavy, desirable flesh tremble.
I once shuddered at the lack of self-knowledge displayed by a fortyish woman friend of mine who, when she was undressed and out of breath after sex, used to put on the kepi of her lover, a lieutenant of hussars . . .
“Yes, yes, I’m rambling, I frighten you.
You don’t understand.
This letter should have a long preamble with all the thoughts I’m concealing from you, thoughts that have been poisoning my existence for so many days now . . . Love is so simple, isn’t it?
You never saw it with this ambiguous, tortured face?
We fall in love and give ourselves to each other, and then we live happily ever after, isn’t that the way it goes?
Oh, how young you are, and worse than young, since your only suffering is to wait for me!
Not possessing what you desire: that’s the limit of your hell, which some people endure for as long as they live . . . But to possess what you love and to feel your sole treasure crumbling, melting, and vanishing like a golden powder slipping through your fingers! . . .
And not to have the awful courage to open your hand and let the whole treasure go, but instead to clench your fingers together more tightly all the time, to cry out, to implore, so that you can hold onto . . . what?
A little precious trace of gold in the hollow of your palm . . .
“You don’t understand?
Little one, I’d give anything in the world to be like you, I wish no one but you had ever made me suffer, I’d like to cast away my old distress caused by experience . . . Help your Renee as best you can, beloved, but if my hope is henceforth only in you, am I not already half-despairing? . . .”
My hand is still clutching the bad, too-thin penholder.
On the table, four big sheets testify to my haste in writing, as does the disorderliness of the letter, in which the handwriting rides up and down, getting wider or narrower—handwriting responsive to my thoughts . . . Will he recognize me in this untidiness? No. I’m still concealing things. I’m telling the truth, yes, but the whole truth?—I can’t, I mustn’t.
In front of me, in the square swept by a breeze that was strong a while ago but is now weakening and dropping like a weary wing, the curving wall of the Nimes amphitheater raises its roughened, russet stones against an opaque, slate-colored slice of sky that foretells a storm. The stifling air lingers in my room.
Under this heavy sky, I want to revisit my elysian refuge, the Jardin de la Fontaine.
A rattling cab and a worn-out horse haul me to the black gate that guards this never-changing park.
Hasn’t last year’s springtime magically lasted, awaiting me?
This spot is so enchanted, with an unalterable springtime suspended over it all, that I’m afraid of seeing it crumble and dissolve into mist . . .
Ardently I touch the hot stones of the ruined temple, and the burnished leaves of the spindle trees, which feel wet.
The Baths of Diana, which I lean over, are still reflecting, and always will reflect, Judas trees, terebinths, pines, paulownias with mauve blossoms, and bushes of purple double thorn . . . An entire reflected garden is upside down below me and, decomposed in the aquamarine water, changes into dark blue, the violet of a bruised peach, the brown of dried blood . . . This lovely garden, this lovely silence, in which only the imperious green water splashes with a muffled sound, this transparent, dark water, blue and gleaming like a vigorous dragon! . . .
A harmonious double avenue of trees ascends to the Tour Magne between clipped walls of yew trees, and I rest for a moment beside a stone trough in which the clouded water is green with slender cress and tiny croaking frogs with delicate little hands . . . Up there, at the very top, a dry bed of fragrant pine needles welcomes me and my torment.
Below me, the lovely garden looks flat, its open places arranged geometrically.
The approach of the storm has driven away every intruder, and the hail, the hurricane, ascend slowly from the horizon, in the ballooning flanks of a dense cloud rimmed with white fire . . .
All this is still my kingdom, a small portion of the magnificent wealth that God bestows on passersby, nomads, and the solitary.
The earth belongs to whoever stops for a moment, observes, and passes on; all of the sunshine belongs to the naked lizard basking in it . . .
In the depths of my worried mind, a vast trading is taking place, a spirit of barter that is weighing obscure values and half-hidden treasures; it’s a debate that’s rising and confusedly blazing a trail toward the daylight . . . Time is of the essence.
That whole truth, which I had to conceal from Max—I owe it to myself.
It isn’t beautiful, it’s still weak, frightened, and a little treacherous.
As of now, it can only utter laconic sighs to me:
“I don’t want . . . I mustn’t . . . I’m afraid!”
Afraid of growing old, of being deceived, of suffering . . . A subtle choice guided my partial sincerity while I was writing that letter to Max.
This fear is the hairshirt that cleaves to the skin of Love when he’s born, and gets tighter on him, the more he grows . . . I’ve worn that hairshirt, it doesn’t kill you.
I’d wear it again if . . . if I couldn’t help it . . .
“If I couldn’t help it . . .” This time, the formula is clearly stated!