"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 havenothing to dolook 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.
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...."
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 seesherselfin 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 seenmyself; 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.
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: toliveis 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 Iliveyou 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:
"Nothing changes here below; nothing can possibly change: love goes on from age to age, death was and will be, life is forever the same, and man is always man." To express this the word "eternal" has been invented.
I do not know. I came, I, a woman, and like every other creature, I too began by loving. Life wasnotthe same, I swear it was not the same. Life had a different taste, I shouldered it differently, and my death, while resembling other deaths, does not exist by the same idea.
I am; everything is changed.
And even if I had never lived, other women are ready to change the earth. You can't tell yet what the women of my generation are capable of. They themselves don't know altogether.
The memory of what they have always been told weighs upon them. Man is a fierce, greedy lover. With bloodshot eyes like a blind man, he has fallen upon the feverish couch where lies the vanquished enemy. He has brought his boiling sap, and between his clasped arms a great tenderness. When he has risen from the couch, he has been sad, his eyes have been wasted, his tenderness worn out. And he has said: "This is woman."
This has lasted long. I do not know if there hasn't been some reason for it. I simply say I live. I am honest, exact, I have muscles of steel, I like people to say what is, I am loyal, willing, I earn my living, and I am inured to suffering. What truth does one fail to recognize when it shows its face?
I think. I want. I know.
It has taken me a long time to take in the humble things I now know. I commenced with very little; my youth passed in chaos, I had to suffer very much. So it is not chance, random truths that I follow. I do not set limits to them. Even my death will not disprove them. Thus, a few scattered fragments hover. I snatched and caught them in moments of alert intelligence, I held them fast with my willing heart, I gripped them between clenched teeth to keep from losing them.
The wind rises on the right. Is it not the wind that has extinguished those dots of gold, the houses, without deepening the dark of the town?
I see the wind, it is blowing near. And here, immobile, upright in my heavy rectitude, I share with the wind the moments which are driving it on. One by one. I fly with them, one by one.
I go where they are going, even elsewhere, and my death perhaps is far from reaching its limits. It has been on the way a long time, it will stop when I am completely tired out, when there will be nothing more for me to do, when my breath will not be an indispensable breath. Then that will be all. They say it is hard to die. Does that mean that the world holds something more tragic than life?
The wind has swollen the whole sky. The sky is ready to drop down from on high—ah, let the sky fall! The wind pins itself to my face. It has become so violent that I cross my arms on my breast to brave it. The infinite future, as though it too were swollen, approaches the houses.
How can I tell what the future holds? No use searching the violet depths of the horizon or breathing in the whole of the sky. The times to come are beyond my reach. They give no sign.
There, below, all I see is my own existence. But how I see it! Flashing, assiduous, full of free spaces, brooding, crimson in my veins, paling slightly at the horizon, departing in the starless wind, and returning in haste to my limbs.
The woof of the night has changed color again.
Can it be that what I am is a promise of something that should be?
The wind blows stronger.
No, it is not for nothing that to-night I am drawing a deeper breath than on all other nights, a breath stronger than my strength, rising up over my life.
Night passes, as pure as a summoning voice.
Then it must be, Lord, that soon, perhaps at dawn, you must go further than your journey and, in flashes of your being, reach heights higher than everything you have said, live to the last drop of your blood, live more than life?
Here I am.