forever, and the morning light penetrated at unwonted hours to the dusty black curtains of passive resistance, the last remaining vestiges of the war. But beneath the little lamp still lighted at the head of the bed, the hand holding the pencil raced over the paper without the least concern for the hour or the light. The girl was writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you’ve held back the words of love too long and they flow at last.
=46or the first time in her life she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, or discarding, she was writing the way one breathes, the way one dreams. The constant hum of the cars grew fainter, one no longer heard the banging of doors, Paris was slipping into silence. She was still writing when the street cleaners came by, at the first touch of dawn. The first night entirely spent the way sleepwalkers doubtless spend theirs, wrested from herself or, who knows, returned to herself.
In the morning she gathered up the sheets of paper that contained the two beginnings with which you’re already familiar, since if you are reading this it means you have already taken the trouble to read the entire tale and therefore know more about it today than she knew at that time. Now she had to get up, wash, dress, arrange her hair, resume the strict harness, the everyday smile, the customary silent sweetness. Tomorrow, no, the day after, she would give him the notebook.
She gave it to him as soon as he got into the car, where she was waiting for him a few yards from an intersection, on a small street near a metro station and an outdoor market. (Don’t try and situate it, there are many like it, and what difference does it make anyway?) Read it immediately? Out of the question. Besides, this encounter turned out to be one of those where you come simply to say that you can’t come, when you learn too late that you won’t be able to make it and don’t have time to tell the other party. It was already a stroke of luck that he had been able to get away at all. Otherwise she would have waited for an hour and then come back the following day at the same time, the same place, in accordance with the classic rules of clandestine lovers. He said “get away” because they both used a vocabulary of prisoners whose prison does not revolt them, and perhaps they realized that if they found it hard to endure they would have found it just as hard to be freed from it, since they would then have felt guilty. The idea that they would have to return home gave a special meaning to that stolen time, which came to exist outside the pale of real time, in a sort of strange and eternal present. They should have felt hemmed in and hunted down as the years went winging by without bringing them any greater degree of freedom. But they did not. The daily, the weekly obstacles-frightful Sundays without any letters, or any phone calls, without any possible word or glance, frightful vacations a hundred thousand miles from anywhere, and always someone there to ask: “A penny for your thoughts”-were more than enough to make them fret and worry and constantly wonder whether the other still felt the same way as before. They did not demand to be happy, but having once known each other, they simply asked with fear and trembling that it last, in the name of all that’s holy that it last … that one not suddenly seem estranged from the other, that this unhoped-for fraternity, rarer than desire, more precious than love-or which perhaps at long last was love-should endure. So that everything was a risk: an encounter, a new dress, a trip, an unknown poem. But nothing could stand in the way of taking these risks. The most serious to date, nonetheless, was the notebook. And what if the phantasms that it revealed were to outrage her love or, worse, bore him or, worse yet, strike him as being ridiculous? Not for what they were, of course, but because they emanated from her, and because one rarely
=46or the first time in her life she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting, or discarding, she was writing the way one breathes, the way one dreams. The constant hum of the cars grew fainter, one no longer heard the banging of doors, Paris was slipping into silence. She was still writing when the street cleaners came by, at the first touch of dawn. The first night entirely spent the way sleepwalkers doubtless spend theirs, wrested from herself or, who knows, returned to herself.
In the morning she gathered up the sheets of paper that contained the two beginnings with which you’re already familiar, since if you are reading this it means you have already taken the trouble to read the entire tale and therefore know more about it today than she knew at that time. Now she had to get up, wash, dress, arrange her hair, resume the strict harness, the everyday smile, the customary silent sweetness. Tomorrow, no, the day after, she would give him the notebook.
She gave it to him as soon as he got into the car, where she was waiting for him a few yards from an intersection, on a small street near a metro station and an outdoor market. (Don’t try and situate it, there are many like it, and what difference does it make anyway?) Read it immediately? Out of the question. Besides, this encounter turned out to be one of those where you come simply to say that you can’t come, when you learn too late that you won’t be able to make it and don’t have time to tell the other party. It was already a stroke of luck that he had been able to get away at all. Otherwise she would have waited for an hour and then come back the following day at the same time, the same place, in accordance with the classic rules of clandestine lovers. He said “get away” because they both used a vocabulary of prisoners whose prison does not revolt them, and perhaps they realized that if they found it hard to endure they would have found it just as hard to be freed from it, since they would then have felt guilty. The idea that they would have to return home gave a special meaning to that stolen time, which came to exist outside the pale of real time, in a sort of strange and eternal present. They should have felt hemmed in and hunted down as the years went winging by without bringing them any greater degree of freedom. But they did not. The daily, the weekly obstacles-frightful Sundays without any letters, or any phone calls, without any possible word or glance, frightful vacations a hundred thousand miles from anywhere, and always someone there to ask: “A penny for your thoughts”-were more than enough to make them fret and worry and constantly wonder whether the other still felt the same way as before. They did not demand to be happy, but having once known each other, they simply asked with fear and trembling that it last, in the name of all that’s holy that it last … that one not suddenly seem estranged from the other, that this unhoped-for fraternity, rarer than desire, more precious than love-or which perhaps at long last was love-should endure. So that everything was a risk: an encounter, a new dress, a trip, an unknown poem. But nothing could stand in the way of taking these risks. The most serious to date, nonetheless, was the notebook. And what if the phantasms that it revealed were to outrage her love or, worse, bore him or, worse yet, strike him as being ridiculous? Not for what they were, of course, but because they emanated from her, and because one rarely
Similar Books
