Chapter VIII: Book III: Becoming (2)

For fifteen nights, fifteen days, fifteen years my heart has been crying that you are dead and that it has lost the hope of ever seeing you again in your clothes exactly as you used to look, with that manner of yours.... Fifteen days since I have been trying to learn again, begin all over again, and call everything into question again. Fifteen days of impotence. I see only what is.

There is earth on your hands, on your eyes, on every part of your body wherever it may be. Your feet are cold and gray like the feet of a pauper, your skin is bloated, worms are preying upon you. I don't want to--I cannot see you as you are. When I think of you I have a false vision of your living self with your cheeks of the color of life and your dear natural gestures. How can I help being all bewildered? Nothing is left. Even the memory of you changes from day to day. I can no longer recall the right tone of your voice. Your corpse is hidden. It is as if I were suffering for no reason at all.

Not to know how to suffer, perhaps that is what suffering is.... Not to divine where you are, is that your death?

The sparkling hearth-fire has scattered and gone out. Fire has devoured fire. A few embers reddening here and there, a porous heap of fanciful firebrands.

And now, and now, my beloved, if I no longer see you, I do see the consuming truth. I see it and here it is: I let you go. I consented. There's no doubt of it, it was _I_ who killed you....

X

I felt a great need for fresh air and light. What the nature of this hunger and thirst was I cannot tell.... The sunshine suddenly lighted up the window-frame. Its golden rays coming through the open casement and falling obliquely upon the objects in my room filled it with numerous fires. It was a salute.

To be out of doors, to walk, to feel the sun on my skin!

I had a letter to mail. The thought of it brought me to my feet, impatient, ready.

Should I take the little one along? But how about a good long walk, the semblance of distraction?... I decided to go alone.

With my eyes close to the image in the mirror, I powdered my face and puffed my hair on each side under my hat as I used to do. How the least prinking helps a woman! Instead of the really ugly pointed little face smeared with pallor, which, without arousing my shame, had visibly lengthened these past weeks, there was a face of warm, even whiteness and of an oval not so pronounced, eyes which, even if dark-rimmed, had lost their fixity, and a shower of red tendrils like coppery breaths blown on my forehead.

The early spring was making itself felt. A raw wind was raising the dust of the streets. Assailed at the first step by the blue, dancing, swirling air, I walked falteringly, like a prisoner who has just been released and doesn't know where to turn.

Everything the same. The old bridge still stretching its badly joined planks from the paved street to the road where the wistaria bloomed. The patched, mossy roof of the old wash-house a few steps from the mill still displaying its dog's-eared edges. The same vistas across the green breaches between the houses.

Every corner of the town held out a memory to me--here a two-year-old memory, here a distinct vision crouching. I called to the vision and welcomed it. My life was not dead, and my heart was open and there was still a man to love me....

I had been unjust in the black moment of despair. My share of love and light still remained. Did he know I was a widow? Since he had been taken prisoner six months ago, no news had reached me and I didn't know if he had received any of my letters.

The broad sunshine expanded my chest and warmed up a vision so tender--a hope or a memory--that I was stung by a pang of remorse and almost felt like chasing it away.

I reached the center of the town, where there were more people and especially more well-to-do people.

Feminine figures, which I recognized, came toward me at a dull gait. I knew them; I had seen these old ladies at prayers two years before. They wore the same dresses and the same hats, the sort you don't see anywhere except in the provinces.... Hypocritical hands as I passed the houses, lifted the crocheted curtains. I was preceded by mystery and followed by whisperings.

Every passerby seemed to be blaming me for the dazzling sunlight which my eyes were embracing; every house scowled, and the whole street, in spite of the pleasant weather, wore veritable mourning, not mere sadness and solemnity, but mourning, and the people looked as though they were in a slow funeral procession, the women strangled in black, upholstered in crepe, and buried alive in their hoods and veils.

The Cathedral square was resplendent with profane joy. The birds swooped from one to the other of the great, white-dappled plane-trees, and every now and then one perched on the statue in the fountain, a clumsy girl with petticoat of stone and turned-up sleeves, a decent bosom bared, a sheaf in one arm, and an eternally dried-up urn in the other arm. Through its high lanceolate windows and the tracery of the two rose-windows Notre Dame was drinking in light and making mock of its ancient front.

It was a brilliant day, and the world rejoiced. I tasted the savor of living. In spite of myself I fell into the nervous, elastic step of old and drank in the living air like an intoxicating elixir.

An idea took lodgment--he was familiar with this scene, these crabbed shops, hostile promenaders, and square of bourgeoning; he had walked on these cobblestones; and at the edge of the town was his little summer villa. The idea went round and round, very fast; and I was weak; so I clutched at it for support.

* * * * *

Another veiled woman in black....

That figure tending to heaviness but graceful and in the very mould of femininity is not unfamiliar. I have seen the woman before. You can tell from a distance that she wears the mark of the widow, a hood-like hat faced with white.

She too;...

I am interested in her. In the country you are interested in everybody you meet.

Who is she, I wonder. She seems to be about forty, but neither her hair nor her cheeks have lost their freshness. Who....

My heart bursts, alarm comes rushing, misfortune approaches.... She walks toward me--she is only a few feet away.... If she would only stop ... it is she ... his wife!

* * * * *

In the time it takes to walk only a few feet you can undergo the acutest agony. I held my breath and for a second time felt death strike me with its thunderbolt. I had time to become a widow too.

She advanced terribly: it was death advancing along the sidewalk. I felt I must detain and implore her. With jaws set I restrained a great convulsive outcry and flung myself in her way.... My lips gave a sort of cluck.... She fixed her eyes straight ahead and turned away deliberately as if from a drunken beggar.

I looked and looked after her....

* * * * *

She departs--forever--her skirt grazing the ground. Her veil carries away the remnant of my joy, leaving me there stupefied and convulsed, alone under the sun. She departs....

My God!...

XI

My son is growing up.

He has reddish-brown ringlets, his cheeks are vermilion, the blue of his eyes radiates seraphic calm. He is probably going to be very handsome. Often people stop me on the street to tell me how lovely he is, and for a moment I feel some pride.

He is beginning to show human traits; he talks, he expresses a desire to touch and possess things, and likes to listen to stories, which used to make no appeal: "And then, Mamma? Tell me, what next?..." I always begin by kissing him.

My heart has grown with him. I have just begun to feel that his existence is rooted in my own existence. What welds me to him are not only the pains I take for him, or my perpetual anxiety. I am welded to him by the kisses he already gives me. When he says "Mamma" in his inimitable way, I am proud and overwhelmed; when he puts his arms round my neck, it is as if I were usurping a reward too perfect for me.

The terror with which he filled me when he was so little and frail is disappearing. I have rocked him, watched over him and suckled him; he has strong legs and a strong body; nevertheless a much greater terror is growing in me.

The greatest terror of my life. To bring up a child, to hold in your hands not only what he will be, but what he may be; and to decree everything, the colors he looks at, the words he hears! To give birth a second time to a living creature. To be worthy of it....

And to have nothing to help you but a heart wise yet too intellectual, the heart of an adult.

To have this timid heart, the maternal heart, too prompt and misleading.

Not to have anything else!

XII

I was sitting on the grass beside the rugged, windswept path which follows the curve of the sea. Instinctively I straightened up out of my careless attitude into the attitude of a woman in danger.

He is coming closer, he is very near....

He forces himself to assume the indifferent, I don't-know-you air of some one happening to be passing by, but he shortens his strides, and in spite of himself his face dilates and beams with the delight of the hunter striking the trail. A little more, and he'd let out a whistle.

Should I try to escape through the woods by cutting across the railroad track? Should I?...

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?"

The man is handsome, decidedly handsome, even in the full light, and I smile at his coming as I smiled a few moments ago when the sun climbed over the slope.

I had always seen him in the dusk when he returned to his smart white house held fast in a coil of green. He would stop a moment at the rusty gate and give me a lingering glance out of his long-lashed eyes. Yesterday evening when we passed each other on the road, his eyes were like black enamel, but now in the bare light of the morning they are of a more crystalline gray than the sea.

A tragic duel of looks ... a thousand questions asked and answered ... wonderful understanding ... dizziness ... unbearable dizziness.

He stands balancing himself on his feet searching the ground for the nascent lie. Then he puts a direct, confident question--is this magnificent weather going to last? I in my turn dissemble and scrutinize the silent, motionless horizon.

Safe! Hypocrisy between us. He has found a suitable topic and exploits it cleverly in jerky little phrases, rather sensual, like the kisses you give a child. He points his three-cornered head at me and tosses back his thick black mane.

He shuffles his feet. "Answer me," beg the glittering eyes. "Answer me.... I am asking you a question...."

No, I don't want to answer. A word thrown out now and then with the fervent assurance one always has under a desirous gaze; also the defensive attitude men force upon you. I lean over and begin to pluck the rich grass methodically, producing a fine, fresh scent and the dry, peaceful sound of a browsing beast. Two bare spots in the velvety slope and several light blades zigzagging in the wind....

Will he go?

He understands. His chest collapses like a pair of bellows and he draws his two long legs together ostentatiously.

Why this tricky manoeuvring? Why thoughts unspoken? I am a part of the tender landscape to him, and I realize he is looking at me tenderly. Why not dare to make a pure, natural confession?

"Good-bye?"

"Good-bye."

I can't be irritated with this man; I haven't the courage to; the weather is too lovely.

When you see the jolly morning frolicking on the road in cap-and-bells and look over where the blue curve of paradise lovingly touches the brown curve of the earth, all you feel is a warm indulgence.

It is too beautiful. The trees mingle their branches, the rays of sunshine mingle their warmth, the birds mingle their songs. Down below, the tide is coming in with the rush of clanking chains submerged by a host of swift, frisky little waves....

And this man with the knavish eyes is nothing more than a black particle blown by the wind to the end of this promontory where a few clustered pines taper into the azure.

It is too beautiful. All you can do is close your eyes.

I close them--to shut out for a while the dazzle of the water in the indigo basin, the thousand golden bubbles in its centre, the thousand silver teeth biting at its edge. I don't want to think any more. All I want to feel are the warm darts which pierce my hands resting on the grass and the peculiar sense of well-being which takes the place of everything else....

Have I really slept?... Sweetness, the sweetness of lips kissed by breezes, a sweetness complete and overwhelming ... a delicious life.

But ... this black gown ... my dead ... I have nothing but my grief, nothing but my grief. What wrong have I perpetrated that my grief should forever sing in my ears?

Ah, just to forget.... Everywhere the earth breathing happiness, the blue, blue rolling waves, the almond trees veiled in faery whiteness, everywhere the nuptials of joy.

Grief, where are you? Everywhere space terribly alive, with hope in every color and death just died for the last time.

XIII

It happened as it does in novels. The man suddenly feels the beast of prey panting within him and yields to it hotly; the woman writhes under the fiery coercion and gropingly reassumes the ancient ways that have come down from time immemorial....

Even to the words I used. Where did they come from, the words that cut him like a lash, whipped up his desire, and then fell on his face like drops of ice water?

I was ashamed. I straightened my hair and left the room. How was it nothing warned me that I must be on my guard against the man alongside of whom I had been working daily? Had I been blind? I tried to extract something significant from my recollections ... but no....

I am going to leave him soon, and I must speak to him.

His disappointment gives him a humanizing air of meekness. It inclines me to him. You feel intensely that other doors are open and, if you wanted to, you could knock and gain admittance.

This grim laconic man, whose ways are confined to the ways of command, who has been sterilized and handcuffed by the barren power which money confers, looks at me intently with eyes raised like a child's. Women are wrong in supposing that a man forsakes them when he renounces his desire.

I speak to him disconnectedly, but I am leading up to what I want to say. And he moves his face a little forward and still a little further forward; it's as though he were drawing closer, step by step, step by step. And everything external about me is effaced by degrees, my sunshiny hair, my mouth, my body present but concealed, my entire femininity. An infallible instinct tells me this. He takes in my voice alone, and is surprised that my voice talks nothing but sense. But he is going to know if it will talk sense straight to the end, so he settles himself more comfortably in his armchair, lets his eyebrows relax, and loses all thought of himself. His logic is being appealed to.

"Now as to your money ... you know if I married you it would not be for your love.... Your money?... It doesn't count? You're right, it doesn't count.... I might not have discovered it at once. I might have said, as I did the other day, that I don't love you. I might also have thought of my aversion to the idea of marriage. Don't look like that. Marriage as it is to-day is immoral and stupid. Don't say my marriage was perfect. The man I lost was a rare soul. For ordinary people like you and me marriage brings nothing but misfortune and mediocrity.

"To marry is to lie, to deceive both yourself and the other one; and when a man and a woman harbor infinite hopes, when they look out upon perpetually changing horizons, when they have the choice of all the roads in the world, and the whole of life spreads out before them, it is absurd to suppose that they can ever subject themselves to each other.

"You marry, you pledge your soul, you promise your flesh. Once imprisoned, you maim yourself, and should the call of love some day become too strong, what other alternative than to lie or break the chains? Deceit or catastrophe; there is no choice. Love does not reconcile the primitive hatred between man and woman: on the contrary, it sharpens it; and for two people to venture upon the impossible enterprise of joining together two opposite destinies the full length of their courses, requires a spirit that neither you nor I possess, a spirit greater than nature bestows; it also takes the intellect of a God. I assure you it does....

"Perhaps you would have waited till the very end to bring out your trump argument. But I would have rejected your seductive words angrily. They would not be to the point. The point is, that if I were to become your wife, my lot would be as I have described it.

"You lean forward, you approve what I say.

"The simple fact is, I couldn't live. There would be no use my trying. I should not have the strength every day to witness a real death unless I had the tiredness and the sort of forgiveness that come from hard work. I simply couldn't eat with appetite, I couldn't sleep in peace.

"And in the morning, if I did not know that this exultation, this unruly vigor, this swarming of scattered inclinations could not be controlled, dammed and curbed by laws ... no, I would not dare to begin to live again....

"In a single day there are too many temptations, in a single body too many feelings; the inner life, remote and _secondary_, must learn through humble duty to subdue itself by merely keeping its attention fastened upon the external life. If we listened to the goodness, the heaven we all carry round within us, what would become of us? I for my part would not be capable of resisting long.... I believe you understand me. You yourself have felt what a help and support your daily routine is. I never paid much attention to you, you were only one of the many supernumeraries on the stage of my work, but I respected you because you made a part of my efforts, and you too took great pains with your work.

"Every time I left you, I felt gentler. Though fatigued I felt free to think of myself, buoyant, wiser, unloaded, as if my sins had been forgiven me.... I had paid my debt; I owed nothing.

"I do not know if work in itself is a good deed. God probably never meant it for us. Not to lie does not mean to discern the truth, and to work is not to find the truth, but it is to have the right to advance toward truth and put oneself in a state of grace and health.

"Then remember that you dared to offer me this miserable fate, me who in doing the same work lived beside you as if under the same roof, who felt imbued with an austere ardor. But you saw nothing, learned nothing, understood nothing. You horrified me. What you did yesterday! Good heavens! You attacked, I defended; we are quits.

"And the money spread out glitteringly to gag me at night....

"You must be just. While you were going through your day's work it never occurred to you that I had my day's work too, and my strong arms and the energy and chastity deep-seated in my body.... What was the value, the slight importance I possess as a person to you? What was my peace to you?

"Even if you make fun of the exigencies of the soul, do you think it's a question of the soul alone? And how about one's relation to other people? You go out of your house on to the street, you see the crowds on their way to shops, offices and factories. You have to look the working-people in the face.... Tell me, how do the men and women who have _nothing to do_ look the workers in the face?

"I see this doesn't touch you. You are withdrawing. To keep you leaning toward me, I myself and I alone have to be the subject under discussion. I must be uncovered, laid naked, by what I say...."

I felt a sudden surge of blood to my cheeks and my lips; our looks crossed like swords.

* * * * *

Here I am with nothing more to do, my arms hanging at my sides, the sudden weight of my useless words on my shoulders. The man follows my example and rises.

"I shall go away, very far away. Don't mind. That's the good of being a woman who works; you're not afraid. You may be at the mercy of misfortune, which is always lurking, but not at the mercy of human beings....

"That's all, I'll go now...."

In the silence that cuts in I feel how this man is wishing I'd never go--wishing it so strongly that for a moment he touches love and a path is opened along which I could take a step, but only a single step, no more.

My eyes stare into space. I hear the mournful, eternal good-bye you say to things--this table at which I worked, the afternoon sunlight laughing through the window, all the familiar objects, which reel slightly from the separation now beginning, from the nascence of everything that is to be....

He presses my hand. And I think of all the men you could convince if you wanted to take the trouble....

If you had the time....

If life were not a choice.

XIV

Her head is nodding and dropping lower and lower, her fingers are gently loosening their hold on the square of embroidery: my mother has gone to sleep.

She comes to see me frequently now, and always arrives panting, loaded down with luscious fruit or bottles of golden wine "from your father." When she prolongs her stay after dinner too late to return home that night, I give my room up to her. You can tell--poor mother--that her visits are undertaken for duty's sake--pilgrimages on which she never fares forth without a preliminary struggle: "That child--you can't leave her all alone--you've got to be sorry for her."

When I opened the door for her this evening, I could see there was something on her mind. Her face was drawn, and contrary to her wont she kissed me two or three times. Was there going to be a battle?

Dinner was over, but I still waited.

"Oh, by the way, my dear, this idea of yours--your plan to go away--it isn't serious, is it? How about your position? Are you really going to carry things to such extremes? Your obstinacy is very annoying. What whimsies you used to have when you were a young girl, that faddy notion about earning your own living ... and marrying against our will--yes, against our will.... Your poor husband is dead; so you've paid, and your father and I are willing to let bygones be bygones. If you come and live with us, you know you'll lead a nice quiet life and have everything you need. Your room will be kept in order for you, I will help you bring up the boy, you will be able to go out as much as you want to. We will give you perfect freedom.... And you mustn't forget you still have a future, you're young.... Why don't you say something? Am I an enemy? Am I not considering your good?"

My mother floundered for more arguments. So to avoid idle discussion I threw my arms around her neck.

She smiled a good full smile, thinking the battle was won and everything was settled without much difficulty.... Now that she was satisfied, her best arguments came crowding: she had known from the start that I would agree with her.

"You haven't only just yourself to consider, you see. When a woman has a child, she doesn't do any and everything she feels like doing."

Now I had to explain!

"Mamma, dear...."

I was biting my lips and probably wore the same obstinate look I did as a little girl, because she pushed me away and her eyes flashed.

"And what about us? In what sort of a position do you think it places us?... Think a little. People will see you suddenly running away as if we had refused to take you in. What do you think we'll be taken for? And you, my goodness! How will it look for a young woman to go away all by herself, on an adventure?"

Her face was purple, her voice came out in a rush, her arms extended beyond her shadow. She was quite beside herself.

I don't know what made me do it, whether my worn nerves or my terror at always, no matter what I did, seeing a gulf yawn between us--I burst into tears.

With her stubborn patience my mother often went to extremes, but she could not resist the argument of tears. She was taken aback. I had conquered. She put her arms round me in a large, warm, cradling embrace, planted short little kisses all over my hair, comforted me in my distress. "Come, dear, don't cry, don't cry."

I made a tremendous effort to shake off a frightful impression. If I had had to pay with my life to get rid of it, I would have paid with my life. But drop by drop the poison filtered into my heart and changed it into a bitter heart which seemed unlike my own.

With all the appearance of humility in her drooping shoulders and bowed head, armed with the tricky sweetness of a person accustomed to yielding, my mother drew our chairs closer together and tried to console me at any price by talking of something else. She held out her needlework.

"A tray-cover. I noticed you haven't got one.... Rows of hemstitching with a square of filet in the centre. Do you like it?"

I dabbed my eyes, forced a smile, and leaned over to watch her draw the threads. "Wonderful," I said, "marvellously fine, and such tedious work." I forced myself to fill up the gaps in the conversation.

The evening flagged slowly and gently. The oil in the lamp was giving out. A drowse gradually laid itself upon the delicate maternal face; under the scant light beginning to smell of smoke, it looked almost like a mummy's.

She is asleep now.

* * * * *

My imagination is free; the frightful impression carries me far back to a time shrouded in dimness which resembles my childhood days.

A mere baby still. At night caressing hands tucked me in bed. I held up my forehead for the kisses of a fairy....

A little girl who ran and fell and hurt her forehead and palms and flew with her troubles to the living Providence. "Did you hurt yourself?... Ah, you're bleeding!" I felt the thrill of the miraculous wound because she caught me in her arms and pressed my undeserved suffering to her heart. Then she tended me, oh, so gently. When she finished, I secretly regretted that the hurt was assuaged and I had no more blood to offer, red flowing blood, in exchange for the doting tenderness that it brought raining down upon me.

A long illness. A veritable angel hovering all the time. Clouds in my room, clouds on my bed, and a constant buzzing in my ears. When the angel moved, a current of freshness reached me, a magnificent hand raised the head which weighed like a ball of fire, and the heavenly voice said in the tone of ordinary mothers: "Drink, darling!"

* * * * *

When my memory brings me up to the moments of effort, the real moments which count, I find myself an orphan.

No, you were not there, mother, when my inner life developed, nor the first morning when I saw clearly, nor when my love came. You were never with me at any time when my good will acted, never, never. It was you who stayed behind and left me. I went on my way. Should I have stopped to stay behind with you?

You idolized my littleness, my tears, my naughtinesses. You covered them all up, I know. But one can't keep on being ill, or naughty, or a little tot.

You are the mother, you pardon everything. When father scolded us, you came with a kiss to absolve us in secret, and sometimes, gritting your teeth and darting the defiance of a she-wolf from your eyes, you'd say: "I would forgive you all your faults. I would say you are right when you are wrong."

But see here, mother, this is what I have done: will you forgive me this:

I have invoked the truth, I have taken pains, I have climbed up, I have striven, I have had radiant moments, days of flowering, and happiness was the same age as myself. Mother, have you forgiven me this?

I am not better-hearted than you, but it is the life about me which demands that one do more, love more. This is what differentiates and actually divides us.

Everything that sings and invites one out into the good old world, the "out-of-doors," seems pernicious to you. What you would have wanted was to stand barring the door with your arms crossed and refuse me the fresh air. You yourself avaricious but destitute would have liked me to salute your avarice and praise your destitution. "Will you set yourself up in judgment over your father and mother?"

Mother, when children grow up, their eyes open.... And if my son sees me fallen lower than his love, lower than my own love, let him accuse and condemn me.

No, it will not always be the same thing, as you say, for that depends neither upon him nor you, but only upon me. You do not know, you do not know!

With its expiring breath the lamp sends out a blackish, leaping light, which splashes shadows on the pendulous surroundings.

I had never noticed the puffiness of her lids, nor the sharpness of her cheekbones, nor the drooping corners of her tender mouth, nor the flatness and thinness of her hair, which used to be full and flaming as my own. Never before had I remarked the tragic similarity between the dead and the sleeping. And I did not know that immutable Truth sometimes has the ring of a curse and makes you cry, and yet is Truth.

* * * * *

The scissors gliding to the floor awakened her with a start. "What, still crying?"

She gave the lamp a shake to force a bit of light and said in her resigned tone, instinctively but unconsciously touching my horrible thought: "Wipe your eyes, dear ... the dead have to be forgotten...."

XV

The storm raked the streets and stunned the houses.... All night long it raged; and once the thunder crashed so close by that I jumped out of bed terror-stricken to make sure the shutters were closed.

The morning dawned sullen, dragging lazy, gray wings on the earth and taking flight only at the furious onslaught of the wind.

To comb my hair I seated myself close to the window with my face to the mirror on the wall.

Outside, the downpour and incessant sharp rattle, the blue-lacquered roofs, the wan drift of the clouds. In front of me, an image which had my name.

The more eager a woman is to please, the less she sees _herself_ in the mirror. What she sees is the idea others have of her, a sort of consciousness of her power, the irrepressible desire to attract.

When I sat down before the glass just now, I must have seen _myself_; suddenly I felt afraid.

I had raised the tumble of ringlets from my forehead and saw a gleam--my first white hair. Then I scanned my face closely, pitilessly. At the outer corners of my eyes a place was preparing for a fine meshwork which would close up when I laughed.

A mad need fell upon me--to see myself again and again. Around each corner of my mouth an invisible line had chosen its pathway; the perfect oval of my face slipped slightly from its frame; under the chin there was an imperceptible mass which would never yield to any amount of massage.

I wanted to run away, I wanted to look, I wanted.... I tell you my heart was leaping from between my ribs, so that you could have taken it in your hand.

How many years are there left?... Ten years?... Eight years?... Perhaps only six in which to continue to be the very same woman I am.

A day will come immersed in the other days, similar to the other days, when this woman will be dead while I shall live.

I try to question space. I turn in every direction. The storm has increased. The rain is coming down in sheets and rebounding in mist. The polished pavements are cracked by quivering little ripples. The tempest drives the people ahead like leaves.

Whence this dread which blows like a typhoon from the future, breathing on my youth and freezing my blood? Whence these two words which gnaw at my breast like a canker? Six years....

No, no, it is impossible. I believe in the deluge, in the thunder, in misfortune, in oblivion. Not in that. Why should this face of mine with its curves, its marble purity and its color change? Why? I have always had a fair amount of courage, I have always done what I had to do, but this renunciation, this hideous acquiescence. I haven't got the courage for that, no, I haven't.

I am prepared to accept death. If necessary, I will stretch my hands out to it. Let the one moment of my life which wipes out the other moments flow into nothingness. Take, strike, I am prepared....

But that "six years, no more," should be written on my face, that people should see my face and I should hold it up smilingly like a ruthless gift to those I love, that I should bear the signs upon me of dull decay, wrinkles, falling hair, withered cheeks, and dimmed eyes.... What if I refuse?...

I could no longer bear to look into the mirror and see what was going to be. I held my face to the pane on which a dismal music was drumming.

I have had deep feelings as plentiful and coming as thick and fast as these drops of rain; some feelings have been vaster than the soul itself; but the only feeling truly like woman, the only feeling essentially woman, which weds her soul while wedding her body, is the immense desire to be beautiful. I have lived through my love of others, I love my child as though I were still carrying it, yet all the time, from waking up in the morning until going to bed at night, year in and year out, from as far back as I can remember, I was cloaked and upheld by a will to please.

I was not more beautiful than other women, but I wanted to be. In spite of me and in spite of themselves, the men hovered about me, lavish of their glances. I moved like a ray of joy, life was a festival redder than war; I expressed myself without saying a word, all hearts were ready, they gave me more love than I asked for and almost as much as I needed.

That was the air I breathed and had to breathe. Is it good, is it bad? It is an instinct which keeps turning rapidly round and round in you. If you were to pull it up, it would sprout again.

Then how can it be that some day, though I shall have done nothing to bring it on, the territory of this indestructible instinct will be clouded over and made barren forever after? How can it be that I shall no longer please if I still want to please?

* * * * *

The rain is beating upon the streaked window-pane and glides down against my cheeks in long transparent tears. Every chink in the room is an inlet for the wind. Around me there is a wailing as if drawn from a sad, dreary bowstring.

Is it the woman of the mirror? Is it the woman that I am? You can't tell which woman is speaking to the other woman....

"So you're of the sort to let yourself be disheartened?

"You thought you had said all the good-byes there are to say in life. There is one left, even more awful than the others. You have dragged yourself over mouldering graves, yet when you arose you found something to keep you alive. But as yet you are unworthy of this last good-bye: To survive it, you need a grandeur you don't possess, a more solid strength than the furtive power you're proud of. You believed you were pure, and you were quite sure you lived in your entirety. Look!..."

How ashamed I am, O God. What a stranger the woman opposite me is....

* * * * *

At the outset I said to the husband I chose: "I shall cherish your happiness as much as I cherish my love for you; and if ever your happiness assumes the features of another woman, that woman shall be dear to me."

When another woman approached, I knitted my brows and formed a secret vow to blacken her in his eyes.

* * * * *

He loved me as you love your life, as you sing, as you kiss. And I reproached him for not leaning over close enough and telling me tender things over and over again every day. I had plighted my troth; in order not to take it back, I needed actions, words; to keep it, I had to put his heart to the proof.

* * * * *

When I came to know another love, my instinct could not rise to the height of my idea. I did not know how to bring the two men together, nor did I know how to make the woman who loved him receive the truth.

And I allowed useless people, useless existences to come to me. I saw them fighting around me like quarrelsome, chattering sparrows around a tree; I saw them pillage and carry away in their beaks the ripe fruit of my days. To know how to live is to know how to choose. I did not know.

* * * * *

Everywhere shame. Everywhere in the past, the hell of what I have lost.

These hands capable of everything have done almost nothing. I contented myself with little and believed in humility.

I silenced nearly every appeal within me. I let regard for others govern and restrain me. I still feel how the imperious look of an unforgettable passerby once tore me; the rude superior deprecation in that look was like a cry rising above the night. Several indifferent persons were about me, my spirit fixed upon them. Perhaps it was the last of my life which a stranger mercilessly carried off in the depths of his being. I let him pass.

* * * * *

I believed myself beautiful. Beauty is a promise which no woman has ever kept. I have seen my features in the glass, but I have not looked for the mission to which I was appointed. What human being ever perceives that he wears a distinctive badge?

The wind redoubles in strength and howls in the face of the sky. The rain-spout near the window is choking, the drops rap-tap-tap on the pane: "What have you done? What have you done?"

Lord, I am looking myself in the face. While waiting for the light to appear and the clouds to scatter, for the damp air to shine between the drops of sunlight, for the good genius who must teach us to grow old, for the inaccessible perfection for which I was built, I look and look at myself....

* * * * *

I went to the window to watch the storm and smoothe my hair. Leaning toward the mirror it was God I found.

God is there, I see Him approaching when I approach and smiling when I smile, God who carries me and whom I carry, God palpitating with faith, God who lowers His head....

I believe in myself.

XVI

I cannot sleep.

There's no good-bye to say, it is late, everything is ready, and yet I am stifling in this empty room, which lives only through my sleeping son and me.

But he sleeps....

I hardly recognize him when he sleeps, and I have to go close to him. He fell asleep a moment ago and is lying exactly the way I placed him, with his arm outstretched. Is there anything tenderer and frailer to behold than this little rounded face with its fine veins and pearly curves? Beneath his sleep and the warmth of his cheeks, life is working, and what a hurry it is in!

I lean down closer, almost touching the fine down of gold on his forehead, his velvety warmth, his scarcely perceptible breath. As always, I feel both terrified and transported by this immense littleness, and consumed by a longing to put my lips to him.... I draw back: I must not wake him up.

* * * * *

I move away from the crib. The will to question the present which is passing takes a stronger hold of me this evening than usual.

No, it is not to you I turn, my child.

The best in me, the true, God, and my soul do not concern you.

Perhaps I am too hasty in saying this. Perhaps I have paid too much attention to the gulf between my generation and the old blind generation. Probably the gulf between your generation and mine is not so deep, but when I look carefully I do not find that you are the profound motive.

Nothing holds out the promise that in the future we can really give each other a single day. When I look at you, I am astonished that I gave you life--it is such a miracle to have caused a creature to live. I am at the verge of the space separating us. I do not find you there. I go my way, you go your opposite way, and though there be nothing impossible in the world, our mutual understanding is impossible. I shall never attain to your height.

You were born to contradict, since you must surpass, the palpitating question that I am, my acts, their purpose. You, whom I carried in my womb nine months, will never be anything but a stranger in my wet eyes and to the kisses of my lips, a stranger who departs with my blood in his veins.

You have come. But I did not sink into the fatal pit that engulfs mothers, the inevitable snare. It's so hard to resist the weak little thing which can't talk. How can you be expected to resist? A woman eclipses herself for the sake of the child she brings into the world, and at the first cry, the mother is in danger. It is the mother we should try to save. There's no need to be afraid that the mother-instinct will cool off. The earth will cool off sooner!

To have children. Love is born with them, but love is not enough. And to try with all your might to fulfill your own destiny. And misfortune if the children fall behind!

Sleep, my little one....

* * * * *

I have opened the window; the night breathes upon my face. In the wide outdoors, where the darkness is naked and the freshness is blue, the expanse opens out like a river. Below, the clustered houses--a sombre vegetation, a confused, winking mass, a starry profundity, vast and chaotic, with no boundary lines between city and sky.

My eyes look tranquilly upon the black future piled up at my feet. My eyes are no longer restless, because now I know for all time what the future holds. I know that soon I shall be tired and go to sleep, and when I wake up in the white daylight my son will put his arms round my neck so prettily. I will smile, then the time for parting will come. The hidden days contain the unknown.... But forever and ever it will be suffering.

The future is not a question you ask; it is the suffering that awaits you. Suffering is the answer to every question, and every instant claws the flesh. If you listen intently, you will hear that the echo of everything is a sob.

It is suffering. Suffering does not find a vent, it does not bleed in any cry, it clings to you, and nothing reveals it because it is omnipresent, so present and so plain that you can't look for or find it. It is not the tears choking your throat, nor the groan at night, nor the knell of a parting footstep, nor the mourning which stifles you, nor the heart in your breast, for that would be too little. When suffering begins with exuberant sunshine and mornings like a flourish of trumpets, it is even more terrible because it is further away.... Suffering is more. It is unlike anything else. It is regular, steady as the breath, amazing, tolerable, and it is not the last word you say, it is also the first word; it follows its mortal, monotonous course, and you realize it has no name: to _live_ is to suffer.

Is it human misery? No, human suffering. Stammering nights, groping footsteps. Whither and why? No, there's no time to lose, you jump up and go, go, because you haven't suffered enough yet. Look.

When I leave to-morrow with my suffering in my breast I shall go in advance of suffering. I shall not hesitate in the doorway. Looking back into the room I shall not say what I have often said: "You are a bit of myself, good-bye. Since my eyes will no longer be here to see you, give them a picture of yourself to take along."

Suffering is self-sufficient. You don't associate things with it, I shall have my back turned, my body will be impatient to lean forward. I no longer care for memories.

* * * * *

Not one. Not even the memory of you, my two dead lovers. Other dead are further on, where I am going, or rather, other suffering. And your suffering is over because you are dead.

The pictures I have of you rise less and less frequently in my memory. How I cherished them at first! Some especially.... That little station-platform where we met ... the transparent morning flew ahead of your footsteps, the spring was intoxicated, I ran into your outstretched arms.... And the path where I cried, the sunset sinking away between the branches, my head grazing your shoulder like a fruit falling from the tree.... And another.... And another....

It is over. I carry you differently. Some of your ways, which I acquired, stick to me from habit. My voice often has your inflection, and when I am animated I feel I have made some of your ideas my own. If I don't remember you so clearly, it is because I _live_ you and the legacy you left me rises and falls with my breathing.

In my fierce survival I have preserved only what is of use to me. All the rest has decomposed; it is nothing to me any more. We should break away from this burden of the dead. The dead are the living who have abandoned us, and sooner or later, whether we wish to or not, we forget them.

* * * * *

I loved my dead dearly, so dearly that it seemed to me my being inclined towards them the moment they appeared--so dearly that because of them, who have gone, love has remained.

Love proclaims its law. You must show your love, it cries.

Somewhere in the world to-night there are faces lying dormant for me, persons to whom I have things to say. I am waiting for them, I stretch my arms out to them, I know they will come because of my need for embraces, a desire for caresses, so strong to-night that I jump up with a start. It is as if half of my body were missing. I see myself deserted and frightfully widowed, and my mouth quivers with hunger and thirst for another mouth.

I know a man is on the way. I shall recognize him. I shall have the somewhat bitter audacity you must have in order to confess yourself the immense thing you are. I shall stir him, I shall do everything; you can go the full lengths of the sublime that dwells within you.

As soon as he will rise above the horizon he will realize from my mere expression that I have long lost the trick of lying.

And when I read the first glance he gives me, when desire bewilders him a little and forces him back within himself, I shall be happy to be beautiful. Beneath his eyes my sound healthy self will brace up again, my inexhaustible twenty-seven years, my rounded limbs, everything which goes slightly to pieces when love is absent. Here is the offering, blond, slim, laughing, which I already present to you.... He will perceive uncomprehendingly that if I am a little more beautiful than myself, it is because by virtue of loving one comes to resemble the love one feels.

When he will have looked at me long, I will explain what each of my features means; I will speak. Because silence is beautiful after the last words, and it is the woman who has the most to say.

I may have a stronger expression than other women, perhaps a slightly more taciturn expression, too. My solitude would account for this. Women are not sufficiently alive to the fact that one should live alone, depart alone, and return alone, and that there is no one outside one's self. No one. In going to meet love again, I who have been twice widowed and have my child to make me feel more isolated, shall find nothing but another solitude. To be sure, there will be kisses, meetings, a symphony of voices. Yet in spite of everything to know you're alone, all the time....

All the time....

If I had reached this secure kingdom through my own power I should be very proud. But I don't deserve the credit. My dead lovers gave me this awful superhuman gift. For there comes a moment when you have taken from some one else everything there was to be taken. Without his noticing he becomes useless, he must disappear. Who resigns himself to this?

My lovers bestowed upon me the love I was capable of, attentive and complete, they bestowed upon me the intelligence of my blood, my tears and my words.... And then they gave me up. They performed this supreme deed.

And now when enlarged by love I desire love again, I give it its place. Love is not the essential thing. I have often said: "Life, my life." The phrase has assumed the shape of my lips because it says the essential thing. Love, after all is nothing but the most beautiful moment.

I summon all the moments of my life. Even the least thrilling cling just as deeply by roots of flesh.

Life wishes to become what it never has been: It is ready, it is empty.... Until to-night human words filled it saying: