Aminadab 0803213131 (31 page)

"I cannot leave the room," he said, pointing to the paper, which the girl was folding and unfolding dreamily. "After the statement that 1 have just signed and that makes it impossible for me to go back, the other parts of the house have ceased to exist for me. Everyone would refuse to receive me, and there would be no place for me. Everything has, so to speak, collapsed in the wake of my passage. Have you thought of this difficulty?" "It's glaringly obvious," said Lucie, "and you have probably not grasped how serious it really is. Not only have you made yourself undesirable in the rest of the building, in that you have politely and definitively taken leave of everyone you have encountered here - this past has disappeared, and it is best never to refer to it again -but you have likewise nearly been driven from this room, which cannot be separated from the other rooms or floors. By now you have but one foot on the ground, and when 1 look at you somewhat distractedly, 1 see you half suspended in the void and barely hanging onto the tip of a cornice. Rest assured," she added, noticing how her words were terrifying Thomas, "that is only an image; you are in no real danger. And yet that is how it stands with you, and there is no need to get upset about it. Such a situation is all to your honor." "Really?" said Thomas timidly. "Your statement is very beautiful," said the girl, tapping the paper gently on the desk. It powerfully attracts me to you. Thus, whatever problems it may cause, it should remain in your eyes a source of pleasure and satisfac tion. Contrary to custom, 1 will even let you hold it for a moment. It will bring you comfort. On the other side of the paper, 1 can feel the imprint of the letter you traced. You inscribed it in the most magnificent way. It establishes a true point of contact between us." The girl laid the document on a corner of the desk and placed a large inkwell on top of it, forgetting to give it to Thomas. He was on the point of reminding her of her promise when she leaned toward him and touched his shoulder with the end of her penh ol der "Would yo u," she said, "take a look behind yo u ? It seems to me tha t nigh t is coming on. " Thomas had to lie down on his back; raising his head a little, he looked at the first room and noticed an intense ray of light falling on the orna ments of pearl and silver decorating certain pieces of furniture, giving them a resplendent glow; but the wall hangings remained very dark. "Not at all:' he said, turning back around, "night is still far away. The day has not dimmed."
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Lucie listened attentively, then asked him with a troubled look: "Could you, if it came down to it, justify your presence in this room?" "Certainly," said Thomas, "nothing could be simpler. Even though I am not a domestic, I am nevertheless attached to you." "You are?" she said. "I am also very attached to you. Your eyes are bright, and you have large, beautiful hands. I would like to look at you more closely. Could you stand up?" Thomas thought that with her help it would be possible. "Wait," she said, seeing that he was already trying to move. "You must first know what you are getting into. Feelings are always very simple, but if one gives in to them without reflection, it is easy to lapse into danger ous and careless things. If our relations ever became serious, you would have various obligations to fulfill, obligations that you can only accept with joy, since they prove the solidity of your attachment. Do you wish to learn about them?" Thomas nodded yes. "Perfect," she said. "Naturally I have no intention of explaining to you in detail all the conventions concerning which we must first be in agree ment. That would be tedious, and my pride could not bear it. On your side, you may have some suggestions to make. A few examples then; that is all I will tell you about for the moment. First, I will ask that you speak as little as possible; words are of no use between us. For you it would be a cause of fatigue, for me a source of anxiety. Since the house is nothing but an immense sonorous cage, in which everyone hears what everyone else is saying, I would always have the impression that we are still exposed to the general throng and that when you tell me the secrets you keep for me, you want at the very same time to let your old acquaintances take advantage of the opportunity. Nothing could be more unpleasant. As for myself, I would end up thinking that you are still down below, and of course that would not be conducive to our relations. Second point: I will ask you please not to look at me. We still hardly know each other, and however much you may wish to please me, you cannot see me as I am. When your eyes turn to me, they are caught by one or two details, which they observe with a jealous care, and of the rest they grasp only a vague resemblance, which they fill out with imperfect recollections. Thus I am sure that right now you have a completely false image of me. You think that I am tall and energetic and that my bearing is majestic, whereas I am quite short and endowed with 1 74

little resistance; my face is not oval or elongated, as you imagine it, but bony and large. Likewise, if my mouth is small, in accordance with your impression, my lips are thick, fleshy, and very red, which you do not seem to have noticed. As for my hands, I will say nothing about them; you saw them more or less as they are. These errors, for which you are not respon sible, can only cause misunderstandings if, instead of eliminating their causes immediately, you stubbornly attempt to correct them. You would then be falling from one mistake into another. I have sometimes been told that right next to me there is a second, more easily approachable person on whom I have placed the burden of welcoming my friends and to whom their eyes are naturally drawn. I am sure that this is a legend, but it shows you the kind of explanation a person may be driven to by the desire to see me and by the feeling that this vision does not do justice to the truth. Since, if you continue to observe me, you will soon admit that I am not always the same, you too will be tempted, in the long run, to doubt my presence, and your suspicions will intensify our disagreements and will make me suffer for nothing. Even now I feel them in the most painful way. Your gaze con stantly gives me the impression that I am absent for you and that instead of contemplating me, you are forming relations with someone else, rela tions from which I am excluded. To whom do you direct your admiration, your need for sympathy, your friendship? Alas, to all those you have seen before me; despite your promise, it is their images that you unconsciously seek with your eyes." Lucie stopped for a moment; Thomas continued to look at her. "It distresses me greatly," said the girl, "to reproach you with this when I see how much you like to look at me. But it is necessary and precisely in the interests of this vision that you want to preserve at all cost. If it is too unpleasant for you to lower your eyes, you can begin by looking only at my shadow; it will still be visible for a little while longer; night will not be long in coming, but if it leaves you only a few moments, I will light a lamp, and even in the darkness you will know that I am here. Now I would like to draw your attention to the third item in our contract. Are you ready for me to tell you?" she asked, as if she needed Thomas's assent in order to bring this question to her lips. "Good," she said, seeing that he was still listening. "A few words and I will be finished. Beginning from the moment when our union shall begin, you will be obliged not to think of me. This is a strict obligation that will suffer no relaxation. This prohibition applies above all 1 75

to any friendly thoughts that you may wish to address to me and that may show through on your face, giving your presence a kind of reality com pletely at odds with the already precarious situation that you must come to accept. It is necessary, if circumstances require it, that I be able to claim that you are not here and even that I do not know who you are. For this purpose, your legal absence must to some extent coincide with your real absence. A few precautions will therefore be useful. If you continue to mur mur my name within yourself, or if you wonder at every moment what I am doing, you will not be able to prevent your features, your gestures, and even your clothes from betraying the impressions to which you are subject and which will reveal to any well-informed observer that if you are think ing of me, then you are also close to me. I myself cannot disagree with this opinion. On the contrary, what will happen if you strictly follow my rec ommendations? I can see nothing but advantages to be gained. First, ma terially, your situation will be greatly improved. By emptying your mind, you will gradually eliminate from your person whatever is still somewhat rough or even crude. Your features will be refined and will take on an ap pearance that better suits them. Your eyes will become softer and grayer. Everything that makes it such that no one wants to see or hear you any more - because when one saw and heard you before the impression was too strong - these excrescences, this brilliance devoid of delicacy, these violently emphatic contours will disappear. Your physique will be perfect. I t will then be very pleasant, especially for those who, like me, will not look at you, to know that perhaps their senses have registered you but that they were neither harmed nor affected by your presence. Yet another advantage, and I will be quite certain that you belong to me and that our intimacy will not be disturbed in any way. Not to think about me: that will mean think ing about me without there being anything to separate us. By refusing me the gift of a few particular thoughts, you will be offering me not only all your other thoughts, not only your thought and attention as a whole, but also your distraction, your absence, and your distance; you will absolve me of all that is yourself, and you will open up to me all that is not you. That, then, is what I ask of you, because I want to remain as close to you as pos sible. Neither silence nor night nor the deepest repose will stand in the way of our friendship, and this room will be for us a favorable place for sleep." Thomas renewed his efforts to rise by holding on to the foot of the desk. He was very frustrated with his legs, which would not bend, but he thought 1 76

that if he could reach the board that served as a writing surface, he could grab onto it, and even if it fell on him, he would not let go of it until he was completely upright. The desk was heavy, and if the girl held him steady, it would have been enough to make the maneuver much easier, but, on the contrary, she moved farther away, so as not to risk being struck by the repercussions of these dangerous oscillations; then, having stood up, she merely flashed a friendly look in Thomas's direction. Contrary to all reasonable expectations, the desk did not fall; it was more solidly attached to the floor than one might have believed; perhaps the girl had screwed it down when she put it back in its place, and the oscillations no doubt had another cause - such as the wind that was violently blowing outside and that gave rise, in this part of the house, to some considerable shaking and trembling. Once he was standing, Thomas thought about what Lucie had just said to him, but a moment later he thought he had begun to fall asleep, for he jumped with a start upon hearing the girl say in a loud voice: "Who's there? Who knocked?" Yet it did not seem to him that anyone had knocked at the door. The silence was even more complete than before, when at times there seemed to be distant sounds of people coming and going in the house. Now there was absolute peace. "No one is there," said Thomas, after listening intently for a moment. "Are you expecting a visit?" He asked this question only to emphasize the extraordinary quality of such an idea. "But there is someone. Listen," said Lucie, « someone knocked." Thomas listened again, but no more now than before was the slightest noise to be heard; it is true that, turned toward the desk, he was better situated to hear what was happening in the bedroom than to pick up the muffled sounds from the hallway. Since there was no use in contradicting the girl, he remained silent but without appearing to take any part in her waiting, and soon Lucie too abandoned her expectant attitude, saying in a promising tone, in order to forget these few moments of distraction: "Now the night will not make us wait much longer. There is already a thick fog in the vestibule, and the stained glass windows are beginning to shine with the first flames lit by the guardians. I will go draw the curtains and close the doors. Stay here until I return." Thomas wanted to say to her: Do not bother with the room; it needs 1 77

no care; there will be time enough to watch over it later. But he thought that such suggestions would not be sensible and that, since he could no longer fulfill his functions as a domestic, he should be grateful to the young woman for performing them in his place. As for the night, that was cer tainly a mistake. There was, on the contrary, more light than when he ar rived, and the presence of the fog could be explained by many other causes, particularly the bad ventilation of the building. Besides, if it really was almost night, the wind would not be rising in such gusts, to the point of shaking the roof and rattling the vaults; everything would have been much more calm. After moving a few steps away, the young woman abruptly turned around and said: "Our conversation has been most useful. You have understood perfectly what I wanted, and I feel that we are in agreement on every point. So do not lose confidence. Your fidelity will be rewarded." Thomas heard her walk away and listened to her footsteps until the on slaught of wind had drowned out their last echoes. The racket that shat tered the silence from time to time - making one think of demolition work being carried out by bungling laborers - seemed deeper, more desolate, more foreign to all efforts at comprehension than the calm, already so empty, that it drove away. "I am probably lost," he said to himself. "I no longer have the strength to wait, and if ! could hope to overcome my weak ness again for a short while, as long as I was not alone, now I have no more reason to make any new efforts. It is of course a very sad thing to come so close to a goal without being able to grasp it. I am sure that if I reached these last steps of the stairs, I would understand why I have struggled in vain to search for something I have not found. It's a stroke of bad luck, and I am dying of it." He fell clumsily to the floor and was unable to pro tect his head with his hand. When he regained consciousness, he heard through the beating of his heart the distant sound of clanging metal; it sounded like the grating of a lock. He attributed this noise to the rattling of the room's framework as it was shaken by the wind. Was someone opening the door? He lifted his head, which he had buried in his arms, and saw that his fall had landed him next to the first step of the little set of stairs. There was no consolation in this. It was rather the supreme insult, this invitation to take the last steps, whereas he was already digging a pit for himself in the floor. At this moment, the door opened with a clatter, and although it was far away, he smelled the icy humid air from outside. "It looks like I didn't have the right key," he said to himself. "How could I have fulfilled 178