I’ve read it written in my mind, and I still see it there printed, like a judge’s sentence, in bold small capitals . . . Ah, I’ve just taken the measure of my paltry love and released my true hope: to escape.
How can I manage it?
Everything’s against me.
The first obstacle I run into is this recumbent woman’s body blocking my way, a voluptuous body with closed eyes, a body voluntarily blind, stretched out, prepared to die rather than abandon the place where it’s been happy . . . That woman, that dumb animal hellbent on pleasure, is me.
“You’re your own worst enemy!”
Oh, I know, God how I know!
Will I also conquer someone a hundred times more dangerous than the greedy animal: the deserted child who trembles within me, weak, nervous, ever ready to hold out her arms and beg,
“Don’t leave me alone”?
This child fears the night, solitude, sickness, and death; in the evening she draws the curtains over the black panes that frighten her, and languishes from the mere ailment of not being loved sufficiently . . . And you, my beloved adversary Max, how will I get the better of you, while tearing myself apart?
All you’d have to do is put in an appearance, and . . . But I’m not sending for you!
No, I’m not sending for you. That’s my first victory . . .
The stormcloud is now passing above me, shedding, drop by drop, a lazy, fragrant liquid.
A star of rain splatters on the corner of my lip and I drink it; it’s warm and sprinkled with a sweet dust that tastes of jonquils . . .
*** Nimes, Montpellier, Carcassonne, Toulouse . . . four days without repose, and four nights!
I arrive, I wash, I eat, and I dance to the sound of musicians unsure of themselves and merely sight-reading; I go to bed (is it worth the trouble?), and I leave again.
I get thin with fatigue and no one complains: pride above all!
I change theaters, dressing rooms, hotels, and hotel rooms as unconcernedly as soldiers on maneuvers.
My makeup case gets chipped, and its tin base shows.
My costumes get threadbare and, cleaned hastily with gasoline before the show, give off a sour odor of rice powder and petroleum.
I repaint with carmine the cracked red sandals I wear in Dominance, and my Dryad tunic is losing its acid shade of grasshopper- and meadow-green.
Brague is splendid in his multicolored filth: his embroidered leather Bulgarian breeches, stiff with the artificial blood that spatters it nightly, resembles a newly flayed oxhide.
Onstage, the Old Caveman is scary in his tow wig, which is shedding, and his discolored, smelly hare skins.
Yes, very hard days, in which we gasp, between a blue sky swept by occasional long, thin clouds which seem to have been shredded by the wind from the Alps, and a soil cracking and crazing with thirst . . . Besides, I have a second load on me.
When my two companions reach a new town, they free their shoulder of the strap that’s been weighing it down and, unburdened, think of nothing but a foaming pint of beer or an aimless stroll.
But for me, there’s the hour when the mail arrives . . . The mail!
Letters from Max . . .
In the glass pigeonholes, or on the greasy tables on which the doorkeeper scatters the mail with a backhand stroke, I am immediately electrified to see that flowery round handwriting, that blue envelope: goodbye to repose!
“Hand it over!
That one! . . .
Yes, yes, I tell you it’s for me!”
Good Lord, what’s in it?
Reproaches, supplications, or perhaps only,
“I’m on my way . . .”
I waited four days for Max’s reply to my letter from Nimes; for four days I wrote to him affectionately, concealing my profound agitation in a wordy affability, as if I had forgotten that letter from Nimes . . . At such a distance, you’re forced to carry on a spotty epistolary dialogue, you express your melancholy by fits and starts, haphazardly (though sadly) . . . For four days I awaited Max’s reply, impatient and ungrateful when all I found was my friend Margot’s old-fashioned but graceful tall “Italian hand,” or old Hamond’s minuscule scrawl, or Blandine’s postcards.
Ah! I finally have that letter from Max, and I now read it with a palpitation that I know only too well, a palpitation made more painful by a recollection: wasn’t there a time in my life when Taillandy, “the man that no woman has ever left flat,” according to his own description, suddenly became infuriated at my absence and silence, and wrote me love letters?
The mere sight of his jagged handwriting made me turn pale, and I felt as if my heart were very small, round, and hard, and thumping—just like today, just like today . . .
To crush this letter from Max without reading it, to take a deep breath like a hanged man who’s been cut down in time, and to run away! . . .
But I can’t . . . It’s only a brief temptation.
I’ve got to read it . . .
May Chance be blessed!
My friend didn’t understand.
He thought I was going through a fit of jealousy, the alarm of a flirtatious woman who wants to receive from her beloved the most flattering and formal reassurance . . . He gives me this reassurance, and I can’t help smiling, because he praises his “adored soul,” at times as if she were a highly respected sister and at times as if she were a pretty mare . . .
“You’ll always be the most beautiful!”
No doubt, he believes what he’s saying. But could he make any other reply?
Maybe, at the moment he wrote those words, he raised his head and looked at the deep forest in front of him, with an imperceptible hesitancy and suspension of thought.
Then, I imagine, he shrugged his shoulders, as if feeling a chill, and he wrote gallantly, slowly:
“You’ll always be the most beautiful!”
Poor Max! . . .
The better part of me seems to be conspiring against him now . . .
The day before yesterday, we were departing at dawn and, in the railroad car, I was resuming my repose in snatches, interrupting it and recommencing it twenty times, when a salty gust, redolent of fresh seaweed, opened my eyes again: the sea!