I wrote very slowly; before signing my letter, I reread it, I closed loops, I added dots and accents, and I dated it: “May 15, seven in the morning . . .”
But even when signed, dated, and finally sealed, it’s nevertheless an unfinished letter . . . Shall I open it again? . . .
All at once I shiver, as if, by sealing the envelope, I had closed off the bright spyhole through which a warm breath was still wafting . . .
It’s a sunless morning, and the winter chill seems to have taken shelter in this little parlor, behind the shutters that have been locked for forty days . . . Sitting at my feet, my dog silently looks toward the door; she’s waiting.
She’s waiting for someone who won’t be back . . . I hear Blandine moving the pots and pans, I smell the aroma of freshly ground coffee: hunger is sullenly tugging at my stomach.
A threadbare sheet covers the couch, a damp blue mist clouds the mirror . . .
I wasn’t expected back this soon.
Everything is veiled in old linens, in dampness, in dust; everything here is still wearing the somewhat funereal garb of departure and absence, and I walk through my apartment furtively, without removing the white covers from the furniture, without writing a name on the velvety layer of dust, without leaving any other trace, as I go by, than this unfinished letter.
Unfinished . . . Dear intruder, whom I tried to love, I’m sparing you.
I’m leaving you your only chance to become nobler in my eyes: I’m going far away.
On reading my letter, you will merely be chagrined. You’ll never know what a humiliating confrontation you’re escaping from, you’ll never know what a great inner contest had you for a prize, a prize I now reject . . .
Because I do miss you, but I choose . . . anything else but you.
I’ve already grown acquainted with you, and I recognize you.
Aren’t you a man who thinks he’s giving, but monopolizes everything for himself?
You had come in order to share my life . . . Yes, share: to take your share of it!
To be a partaker in everything I do, to infiltrate the secret sanctuary of my thoughts at all hours, isn’t that so?
Why you rather than anyone else?
I have sealed it off from everybody.
You’re kind, and you claimed, with perfect honesty, to be bringing me happiness, because you found me destitute and solitary. But you failed to reckon with my pauper’s pride: I refuse to look at even the loveliest lands on earth reduced in size through the lens of your amorous glances . . .
Happiness?
Are you sure happiness is enough for me now? . . .
It’s not only happiness that makes life worthwhile.
You wanted to illuminate me with your run-of-the-mill dawn, because you pitied my state of darkness.
Yes, I was dark, if you like: like a room viewed from outdoors.
Dimmed, not dark.
Dimmed and adorned, thanks to my watchful sadness; as silvery and dusk-loving as a screech owl, as a silky mouse, as a clothes moth’s wing.
Dimmed, with the red reflection of a heartbreaking recollection . . . But in your presence I’d no longer have the right to be sad . . .
I’m escaping, but I’m not yet rid of you, I know.
A vagabond, and free, I shall sometimes wish for the shade of your walls . . . How many times shall I look back toward you, as the beloved support I rest on, while wounding myself?
For how long shall I conjure up all you could have given me, a long sexual embrace, now suspended, now rekindled and renewed . . . a winged fall, a swoon in which my strength would be reborn from its very death . . . the musical hum of my maddened blood . . . the fragrance of burnt sandalwood and trodden grass . . . Oh, for a long time you will still be one of the thirsts along my path!
I shall desire you: now as a fruit hanging out of reach, now as a distant stream or the little happy house I encounter fleetingly . . . In each place that my wandering desires lead me to, I leave behind a thousand, thousand ghosts that resemble me, that have fallen from me like petals, one on the hot blue stones of my native dells, one in the moist hollow of a sunless valley, and another that follows the bird, the sail, the wind, and the wave.
You retain the most tenacious of them: an undulating blue shadow shaken by pleasure like a green plant in the brook . . . But time will dissolve that shadow like all the rest, and you’ll know no more of me, until the day when my footsteps come to a halt and one last little shadow flies away from me . . .