TEN

Imagine to yourself, reader, that you are a murderer. What is it that makes a murderer? Is it the bloodstained weapon, the scratches inflicted on one’s face by the struggling victim, the guilty heart, the inexorable police inspector, the bad dreams? No, it is not necessarily any of these. All these conditions can be absent. The murder may be colorless, bloodless, conscienceless, unpunished. All that is needed is that one has committed the act of murder. It is nothing in the present, only something in the past that makes one a murderer.

Still, I looked for consequences; for how else can we assure ourselves of the reality of the past. Upon awakening, I examined my sleep for a dream. I scanned the morning paper, and found a paragraph on page eleven reporting the fire. But there was no mention of Frau Anders, and of course no obituary. I wondered if there were someone who would come to apprehend me. No one appeared.

You must not imagine that I felt guilty, or craved punishment. But I should have liked some token from my life to register this act. I considered a confession, but felt it would surely lack credibility. What could I say? That I had murdered a woman that I had two years before abandoned into slavery, who had returned to the city clandestinely, who had been recognized by no one? How would I convince anyone that Frau Anders had returned at all? The only person who had any evidence of her presence was Monique. Would I say: I have set fire to the house and thereby to the woman who sent you that letter? Would we visit the ruins of the house and poke among the ashes? Would Monique demand that I surrender myself to the police? Perhaps she would merely admonish me that I had been unfair.

When I returned to Monique’s arms the following evening, I averted my face, my gaze was troubled. I did not know if I embraced my confessor, my judge, or my next victim.

“Did you keep your rendezvous?” she inquired icily.

“I did.”

“Is this woman very important to you? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

“She is my shadow. Or else, I am hers. It doesn’t matter. In either case, one of us doesn’t really exist.”

“Don’t you think you ought to find out which one of you it is that exists?”

“That’s exactly what I have done,” I replied. “You are embracing the victor at this moment.”

“God be praised for that,” she said sarcastically. “Are you sure?”

“I have made sure, quite sure.” I put my arms around her and pressed her to me more closely. Desire, mixed with an obscure resentment, moved me. Monique sighed and lay still, her head in the hollow of my shoulder.

“You don’t want to see her again?” she murmured.

“No.”

“Then we can be happy. I feel it. Don’t you?” I shook my head. She sat upright suddenly, looked at me sharply, and then buried her face in her hands.

I stroked her back, and spoke as gently as I could. “Don’t suffer, my dear one. I cannot yet be reconciled to happiness. A fierce irony has me by the throat. It invades my dreams. It drives me to terrible, useless acts. It makes me take myself too seriously, and ends by preventing me from taking anyone else seriously—except the accomplices and mentors of my dreams.”

“That woman—” she sobbed. “Is she one of your … accomplices?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am even less real to you than her?” she cried. Her eyes became wide and unseeing. I saw the dull look of fantasy capture her features. “And if I took a lover? If I made you jealous?” By this time she was on her feet, and pacing before the foot of the bed. “I hate you,” she said finally, drying her eyes. “I want you to leave me.”

Obediently I rose and dressed. I had never felt more warmly toward my poor red-eyed mistress, more willing to please her; yet I was incapable of doing so. When I tried to embrace her, she pushed me away.

“Perhaps you’re doing the right thing,” I said sadly. “Would it console you to learn that the lover you are rejecting is a murderer?”

“I don’t believe you. Just get out.”

“How do you know I’m not a murderer? I know it doesn’t show, but I assure you—”

“How do I know?” Her look hardened. “If you mean that you have killed my love for you, you’re right…”

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean real murder. The opposite of procreation. The coming together of two people, with the result that there is one left, not three.”

“Get out,” she said again, sullenly.

I had no choice but to leave, and return to my own apartment. The next evening, when I called on Monique, she refused to let me in, but slipped a note under the door informing me that we needed a separation of some time. I was to return only when I had changed. This proposal did not give me hope, for I doubted if there would ever be any greater change than had already taken place. A few days before I was not a murderer, now I was. What greater difference in myself than that could I ever aspire to?

Still, I persisted. For several weeks I visited Monique daily. Sometimes she let me in, but she never allowed our quarrels to have their natural terminus in bed. Sometimes she even forgave me, but with the same acrimony that she condemned me for my heartlessness. I know I should not have let things come to this pass. But, I was under the impression that love was necessary, and if not love, then at least the appearance of it. Why else would it be that all the time I spent with Monique—or with anyone else—I had to look at her and she at me, and neither of us could look at ourselves. Since this was the case, our eyes not being planted on the near side of a screen projecting from our foreheads so that we could gaze at our own faces, but instead set in our heads so that we were condemned to look outwards—from this anatomical fact, I concluded that human beings were designed for love. The only exception to this design is dreaming. In a dream we do look at ourselves, we project ourselves on our own screen; we are actor, director, and spectator all at once. But of this privileged exception, I did not inform Monique.

Perhaps this is why our affair failed, and why we did not become reconciled. I had never dreamt of Monique, and I had never told her about my dreams. Neither could I bring myself to tell her of that act of murder, which seemed more and more like a dream—all throbbing image, no consequences.

*   *   *

This brief period of renewed solitude was interspersed with variations of my “dream of the piano lesson” in which sometimes, to my confusion and dismay, I did not kill the Mother Superior; and a new interest in the game of chess. I tried not to question the means by which I had dismantled the dream—acting it out.

I thought then that I knew what my dreams were about.

Rather, the problem of interpreting my dreams had been replaced with another topic—why I was preoccupied with them. I concluded that the dreams were perhaps a pretext for my attention. Very well, then, the more enigmatic the better.

I became interested in the form of my attention, and in attention itself.

Why not take the dreams at face value? Perhaps I did not need to “interpret” my dreams at all. As it had become obvious to me in this most recent dream that, in order to profit from the Mother Superior’s instructions, it was better never to have learned to play the piano, so it occurred to me that in order to extract the most from my dreams, it was better never to have learned to interpret them. I wanted to enact my dreams, not simply observe them. And that was what I had done.

A total attention was all that was required. In a state of total attention, there are no dark corners, no sensations or shapes that repel, nothing that seems soiled. In a state of total attention, there is no place for interpretation or self-justification or propaganda on behalf of the self and its revolutions. In a state of total attention, there is no need to convince anyone of anything. There is no need to share, to persuade, or to claim. In a state of total attention, there is silence. And, sometimes, murder.

*   *   *

Jean-Jacques said to me one day, “To be an individual, that’s the only task.”

There was no one in whom I could confide now, not even Jean-Jacques. I could tell him only in the most indirect ways about myself. Still, our conversations held great interest for me.

“To be an individual,” he repeated. “But do you know, Hippolyte, you’ve made me realize that there are two entirely opposite ways of becoming an individual?”

I asked him to explain.

“One way,” he said, “is through accretion, composition, fabrication, creation. The other way—your way—is through dissolution, unravelling, interment.”

I think I understood. “And you think your way,” I said, “is the way of the artist?”

“I’ll say yes. Then what?”

“To be an individual,” I replied, “does not interest me. I am not in your sense interested in a distinguished or artful life.”

“Neither am I,” he protested. “What do you take me for?”

“You spend so much time, Jean-Jacques,” I said, warming myself to my argument, “protesting against banality. Your life is a museum of counter-banalities. But what’s so wrong with banality?”

“Really…”

“Look,” I said, “do you grant me that art doesn’t consist primarily in creation but in destruction?”

“If so, then…?”

“Then mine is the greater art, the more intense individuality, since I’m learning not what to collect but what to destroy.”

“And what will be left of you?” he smiled.

“Your smile,” I said. “If I have not offended you already.”

“No, of course not, mon vieux.”

“Your smile. And my peace.”

He smiled again.

“Let me tell you something,” I said, somewhat embarrassed as I recalled the incident but encouraged by his seriousness. “You asked me before how I’ve occupied myself this week. I’ll tell you. I have been attending the national chess tournament which is being played at the Palais de ——. There I have seen the greatest artist in our country, a boy of only sixteen. His game is a revelation to me. He plays so relentlessly that his game seems—no, is—entirely mechanical and without thought. He marches the pawns over the board, the horse jumps to the attack, his bishops close in like pincers, his castles move like tractors, his queen is a bloodthirsty despot.”

“What did you decide about your despotic queen?” asked Jean-Jacques.

“I am not talking about Frau Anders,” I replied coldly. “I am not talking about the willfullness of justice, but about the mechanism of perfect play. I’m talking about the game of a champion.”

My friend allowed his curiosity to be thwarted. “His game overwhelms you because you don’t play chess as well as he,” said Jean-Jacques.

“No,” I exclaimed. “That’s not important, for I understand the secret of his game, even though I can’t anticipate his moves. The secret of his game is that he is entirely destructive. Each day I have gone to watch him, and only him.”

“I’ll go with you tomorrow,” said Jean-Jacques.

“No. I am not going tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Because today he looked at me. Every day I have sat in the spectator’s gallery and watched his pale, relaxed face. He never looks up, but today he did, he looked directly at me. I tried to hold my gaze, to answer his. But I couldn’t. His look was too destructive, and I lowered my eyes in shame.”

What did I read in the boy’s eyes? Contempt as well as indifference, perfect attention, an energy which burned away all words. I had met my master in crime. But all this would have been exceedingly difficult to explain to Jean-Jacques who, I thought, would probably want to explain my fascination with the chess player as the heat of sexual attraction.

“Don’t say it,” I said to Jean-Jacques sharply.

“I won’t!” He was annoyed at being the one whose mind was read. “You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t lust which you felt for this … champion?”

“No,” I said. “Lust and awe are incompatible. I can only desire what I can imagine myself possessing, or at least imagine can be possessed.”

“You know what you discovered in your chess player, Hippolyte?” Jean-Jacques sat far back in his chair. “Another blank soul. Rather, a mirror for your own blankness.”

“And yesterday the mirror looked back,” I mused somberly.

“Precisely. And that’s against the rules of the game.” He stared at me a moment, as if he understood something I was not telling him. It was a long, inquisitive stare, speckled with disbelief. Then he shook his head and grinned at me in the old teasing way. “But come, I’m being too cooperative. You don’t need me to explain you to yourself. Let’s play chess ourselves. Or we might pick up a shopgirl for you to dally with, unless you’re being faithful to that dreary lady agitator of yours. I know! Have you seen that charming American film about the ape-man that’s showing on the boulevard? You must see it.”

Jean-Jacques was suddenly so boyish and ebullient in his little projects for amusement that I could not refuse him. I liked him better as a playmate than as a mentor. So we strolled along for an hour, with Jean-Jacques stopping many times to greet people and then amuse me with brutal gossip about them after we had passed on. Eventually we went to the film.

*   *   *

One day I received a letter from my father, which indicated that his health was failing and that he would like to see me while still in the full possession of his faculties. I made the trip home immediately, relieved to have an excuse for leaving the city. I had been waiting to flee, but no one pursued me. To be summoned away at least gave me a sense of activity. I left without telling my concierge or Jean-Jacques or Monique, so that I might enjoy the semblance of flight.

This was my first time home, since I left to take up residence in the capital a decade before. My father was not in bed, but he was confined in a wheelchair in which he moved himself about vigorously. His character had changed since his enforced retirement, I noticed. I remembered him as a robust, matter-of-fact, and jovial man; he was now querulous and easily distracted. His illness moved me to pity, and I agreed to a prolonged visit. My brother, busy with the new responsibilities of totally managing the factory, was happy not to have to spend so much time with the old man and account to him continually. His wife Amelie was plainly exasperated with the chores of nursing the invalid, preferring to devote herself to her children. They were delighted to turn him over to my custody.

At first I found the company of the old man tedious. I had little sympathy with his fear of dying, and did not understand what he had become. My duties were simple. For several hours a day I read to him, within the limits of his now highly specialized taste, for he liked only novels which took place in the future. I must have read him a dozen. I imagine that they gave him a taste of immortality—and, at the same time, comforted him by their grim prognostications: it would not be so bad a thing to miss that future which they described.

One afternoon, while I was reading from a novel about life in the thirtieth century, a time when according to this author cities will be built of glass and the people in them fashioned from plants by priest-artisans, he interrupted me. “Boy,” he said, brandishing the walking stick which he kept on his knees, “what would you like to inherit from me?”

The question was painful to me, not because I found the idea of losing my father insupportable, but because I dreaded the railing against death which would inevitably follow my answer.

“If you would continue the support which you have given me, Father,” I answered, “I would be more than pleased.”

“I own some property in the capital, you know. A house.”

I did not reply.

He then questioned me, as to how I had used my income, how I justified even this amount of support. I decided not to embellish my life in the capital with a false luster of activity, and explained the modest preoccupations which filled my day.

“And women?” he said, nudging me with his stick.

“There is a young woman, Father, who now refuses to see me, because I did not assure her we were happy.”

“Give her up.”

“She has given me up, Father.”

“Then win her back, when you return to the city, and then give her up.”

“I couldn’t do that, Father. I bear her no malice, and her betrayal would not relieve me.”

He made no answer to this, and motioned me to continue reading. After some more pages, which related how the dictator of Nova Europa orders all children between the ages of twelve and fourteen tattooed and sent to colonize an abandoned continent, it was I who interrupted. “Father, what is your opinion of murder?”

“Depends who you murder,” he said. “Don’t know whether I’d rather be murdered, or just get old and ill and die. Best thing would be to be murdered when you’re already dying.”

“What about being murdered when you’re already dead?” I inquired cautiously, hoping I would not be asked to explain.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Continue reading. I like the part where the moon pauses and Europe is submerged in water.”

I read to him long after my voice was tired, for he insisted I finish the book. Then I took him in his wheelchair about the estate as I did every day at this hour. The garden was no longer unkempt and luxuriant as I remembered it from my childhood, but was strictly arranged so that he could check daily on the conscientiousness of the gardener’s ministrations. “I like order, my boy,” he said to me the first day we had made the tour. “I’d like to put order into everything in this house, but they won’t let me. Outdoors I am master, though. You’ll see what I’ve done to this—jungle.” I saw indeed. The year before, when he first became ill, the whole garden had been replanted under his instructions. It was now an alphabetical garden, for him; though for me, it was still a chronology of my evacuated childhood. Nearest the house were the anemones, then came the buttercups, then the carnations; here I had spied on the maid and the butler embracing in the kitchen. Marching round the sides of the arbor were an equal number of rows of daffodils, eglantine, foxglove, and gardenias. Then came the hyacinths, irises—halted by the pagoda where I used to set up my lead soldiers. Then the jasmine, knotweed. There were lotuses in the old well, and on the far side of that, marigolds. In the little pond where I sailed my toy boats, narcissuses. Then came the orchids, and a small square bed of poppies. “Had to stop here,” he muttered. “No flower that begins with the letter Q.” I think that tears came to my eyes at this moment, on the first day. I do not know whether I wept for the failure of my father’s absurd, endearing project, for the lack of flowers to complete the alphabet, or for the pangs of remembering my childhood in the company of my childish father.

Did I say that I found that his character had changed? Perhaps you will see that I have understated the matter. I discovered with a shock of pleasure that my father had become eccentric, willful in his sickness and old age. He waved the walking stick which he kept across his knees at his grandchildren as if he longed to maim them. He screamed at my brother and his wife that he was disinheriting them, spat out the food which was served to him, and dismissed all the servants each Sunday after they returned from mass. But he treated me affectionately. His behavior toward me when I was a child was tolerably severe. Now it was real affection which I received from him, and not just because I was his son, but because he liked me. If my older brother fulfilled my father’s expectations when my father was mature, hale, and active, I was my father’s heir in his old age. We had much in common now.

My father had two only sons. How delightful it was to be one’s father’s only son, however belatedly!

I stayed with my father three months, during which his physical condition remained unchanged. His illness seemed to be arrested and the doctors said he might live for several years, but he was sure he would die before the year was out. “Go away,” he said to me, “I don’t want you to see me die.”

“I’ll read you more novels,” I replied.

“I don’t want to hear any more.”

“I’ll go to the National Library, and find a flower that begins with Q. I’ll send for a seedling, from no matter how far.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Go back to your woman, and try to be happy.”

I bid him a loving and painful farewell, and returned to the capital. As soon as I had unpacked, I went to Monique’s apartment, eager to see her after our long separation. It was a weekday, and mid-afternoon, so I assumed she would be at work, but I was going to wait for her and then take her to dinner. I let myself in with my key, and discovered her there with a man in his underwear who was bent over a typewriter.

She was very calm, much calmer than I; and the man even calmer than she. He sat there during our halting tearful conversation, aimlessly fingering the typewriter keys. Occasionally he struck one by accident; then he cursed, took a typing eraser from one of the desk drawers, and neatly erased the errant letter from the first page and each of the carbons. He seemed anxious to resume the typing which I had interrupted. Monique ignored him, stricken with a shame which I did not attempt to relieve. I, I felt no shame at all for my intrusion, but a little embarrassment, yes.

Have I made it perfectly clear? Monique had married. The typist in his underwear was a translator from obscure Slavic languages, possessing the most admirable political sentiments. Together they would translate the whole world into their wholesome, hopeful idiom. I congratulated them. Monique kissed me on the mouth. The young husband rose gravely and shook my hand. I let myself quietly out of the apartment and waited on the next landing until I heard the sound of the typewriter again. I did not have to wait long.

*   *   *

I returned to my solitude, and to my dreams. Poor Hippolyte! I had been rejected in the circumstances in which rejection hurts most, thinking it would be I who would do the rejecting, lacking even the distractions of an unrequited love to console me. For the first time in my life, I felt painfully alone. All I had to do was what I had judged impossible for Frau Anders: to begin a new life. It was not so easy. Yet I believed my case was different. After all I was hale and fit, only a little past thirty. If one could not begin anew at my age, when was it possible?

Only, you see, I kept dreaming my “dream of the piano lesson.” I kept dreaming of a commanding woman who ordered my life, and of a man in a black bathing suit who urged me to jump. I had killed the woman, I had jumped. But, as in the dream, bitter were my feelings as I fell.

The first time that Frau Anders had left my life, I had felt relieved of a great burden. Now there was only a space, the space further enlarged by the absence of my well-intentioned Monique. If this were a dream, I thought, I would summon Frau Anders back. I would explain to her why I had killed her. I might even ask her permission. A failure of nerve? Perhaps.

But as it turned out, all this was unnecessary. The murder of Frau Anders was not a dream, although for all purposes it might just as well have been. For one day she simply appeared. It was a dreary spring day, still cold with winter. I was sitting in a café, indoors and in back where it was warm, cupping a brandy with both hands, when I saw a face pressed against the window pane. I had just exchanged a few words with the waiter, who had gone away. And then there was this face, a strange ravaged face that seemed all a blur to me because of the pane of glass and the dim interior of the café that separated us. It was a face I remembered, and it was all faces that peer and scrutinize and judge. I picked up my newspaper, and put that between us as well. Then I looked again. The face was still there. It was smiling, or making a spiteful expression; but the expression was either not well defined or unsuccessful. Then a hand reached up to rub the pane of glass where the face’s breath had clouded it. The face was clearer then, but still not clear.

When you want to determine whether or not someone is dead, I know, you put a mirror or any piece of glass to the mouth, and see if the glass records a blotch of moisture from the breath. To breathe on glass is the signature of life, in the appearance of death. Then I knew. It was a resurrection. It was Frau Anders.

She entered the café and walked determinedly to my table. I had a moment’s impulse to call for the waiter or to fling myself under the table.

“Don’t run,” she said sternly, seating herself. “I want to talk to you.”

“It’s a dream,” I whispered to her.

“Don’t be an ass, Hippolyte! No one is more real than I.”

“That’s true,” I said, in bewilderment. “How indestructible you are.”

“No thanks to you! I suspected you’d do something like that. I was watching you all the time, and slipped out the back door, stepping right over your clumsy bundles of kerosene-soaked rags, while you were busily touching a match to the front of the house. My dear, you’re no better as a murderer than as a white-slaver.”

“What have you been doing all this while?” I murmured.

“I’m not answering any more of your questions. I’m here simply to inspire remorse in you. But you may tell me what you are doing. What, for example, were you doing the very moment I caught sight of you?”

“I’m waiting for my father to die,” I said, sadly.

“I hope you are not helping him in this final project of his,” she said, in a tone of severity.

“What do you take me for, a parricide?” I replied indignantly. And I told her briefly about the three months which I had spent nursing the old man.

“Well,” she said. “I shan’t ask you to nurse me. I’m doing very well, thank you.”

“But your wounds,” I exclaimed.

“Look to your own. I can take care of mine.”

“And where do you live?” I asked, humbly. She paused, and looked into my face. “I’m not asking you to tell me your address,” I added quickly.

“If you must know, I rent a portion of the apartment of an impecunious titled lady. I have the ballroom and several antechambers. There are many mirrors in these rooms, but I don’t mind. I am learning to be brave.”

“Do you see other people?”

“Why do you ask me so many questions? Haven’t you asked enough?… I see mainly doctors. At a certain clinic I am recovering the use of my right arm.”

“And Lucrezia? Do you see her?”

“That frivolous child? Never! She would despise me.”

“Don’t be afraid,” I said gently. “I’ll help you. I promise. I’ll devote myself entirely to your welfare, without imposing on you in the least.” She regarded me suspiciously. “It will take a little planning, but when I am finished, I shall present you with a great surprise.” A marvellous idea had occurred to me. I began to talk more rapidly. “Within a year, after certain things have happened which will free me to pursue your welfare and give me the means to do it, I shall be able to present you with something that you will have for your whole life. A life,” I concluded, “which I shall do everything in my power to make as long as possible.”

“You’re going to give me something?”

“Yes.”

“Something I want? Something I will have by my side, something I can keep all my life?”

“Yes. You will keep it, and it will keep you.”

She smiled. “I think I know what it is.”

“Do you? I wonder how. I myself just thought of this solution.”

“Women are very intuitive, you know,” she said archly. “How long must I wait?”

“Oh, it might be a year or more. It partly depends on my raising a certain sum of money.”

“I have money,” she said eagerly. “That needn’t stand in our way.”

“No,” I replied firmly. “It must be my money. You believe that women have a monopoly of intuitiveness. Surely you will accede to the equally conventional pride that a man feels in being the one who dispenses the money.” She sighed. “Will you wait?” I asked.

She nodded. But then she added, “I’m a trifle afraid of you.”

“And I of you,” I said. “But in this meeting of fears, I also love you.”

“How strange,” she murmured. “When I came in the door of this café, I hated you so much. No, it was worse than hatred. I felt contempt for you. And now your imperturbability quite seduces me. I think you do love me, in your own impossible way.”

“To be entirely candid,” I replied, “I may be simply mistaking fear for love. This is an error I often make in my dreams.”

“Why should you be afraid of me?”

“Because you are there,” I answered curtly.

*   *   *

You may wonder what present I had in mind for Frau Anders. It was this. As she had been sitting across from me in the café I reflected that I had twice over made her homeless—first, by being the agency of her leaving her husband and daughter; and second, by burning down the poor house in which she recently lived. What better recompense could I offer than a house in which she could live undisturbed by me or anyone else. All that I needed was the means which I would acquire upon my father’s death.

The painful news came the following January when I had just turned thirty-one: my father died, and I came into my inheritance. Not wishing to be encumbered by the things I might be tempted to buy, I arranged to dispose of the cash and negotiable securities. My father’s lawyers were instructed to divide the sum between two persons who were to remain ignorant of the identity of the donor. Half was to go to Jean-Jacques; the other half to a young poet just done with his military service whose first book I had read and admired greatly. Why did I give the money anonymously? Because, with Jean-Jacques, I did not want our friendship to be disfigured by either gratitude or resentment; and, with the ex-soldier whom I had never met, I felt it would be inauspicious to begin an acquaintanceship with an act of benefaction. You must understand, the giving away of my legacy was no great sacrifice. I still had the monthly income from shares in the family business on which I had lived ever since I came of age and left home. What mattered to me in my inheritance was the house my father bequeathed to me, as he had promised. He had acquired it some years before with the intention, never carried out, of having a residence in the capital several months during the year.

I did not immediately install Frau Anders in the house, for I intended to remodel it and furnish it for her use. I have always had an interest in architecture that expresses the most intimate longings of its inhabitants. While I vowed to keep my fancies within bounds, I could not resist an almost voluptuous feeling of anticipation when I had determined on this project. Such were the pleasures of my idle life, and the ease with which I assuaged my guilt.

I remember the building project which hitherto had given me the most pleasure, although I had nothing to do with it. There lived, year round, on the island where Frau Anders and I had stayed for the winter on our trip south, an elderly English spinster. She had a small immaculate white house, just outside town overlooking the sea. One day, as she was walking the stony road into town, she saw a woodcutter ferociously beating his horse which was lying prostrate on the ground. The old lady attacked him with the grey silk parasol which she always carried. Imagine her horror when she learned that the flogging was only preparatory to shooting the horse, which had stumbled and broken two of its legs. The old lady, not in the least inured to the cruelty with which the islanders habitually treat their animals, immediately offered to buy the horse. Too astonished by the absurdity of such a transaction to be in form for protracted bargaining, the woodcutter settled quickly for a price twice what he had paid for the horse, and went away, hauling his cart himself, to get drunk in the port and relate the story to his friends.

The old woman had the horse carried to her house. She sent for the local veterinarian, who bound the animal’s legs in splints and prescribed some medicines for its fever. Not content with these ministrations, she then called a veterinarian from the mainland, who pronounced the animal a hopeless cripple.

Now comes the part of the story which I like best. The horse was quartered in a small wooden shed behind the house. The old lady fed it every day herself, massaged its legs, and gave it its medicines. Gradually its fever subsided, and it began to stagger about in a determined but helpless way. The old lady had no thought of challenging the doctor’s prognosis. She was delighted that the horse could walk in any fashion at all, and she now set about to construct a permanent residence for her companion. The bare rectangular shed in which he lived did not seem a happy enough place for a horse who would forever be deprived of the pleasures of walking, cantering, and pulling a woodcutter’s cart. “Horses like views,” she told the people in town, who had nothing to reply to such a singular assertion. She then proceeded to hire masons and bricklayers, and had built a small tower, about six meters in height on the other side of the garden. Around the tower was a spiral ramp which led to a comfortably-sized room at the top. The horse went to live in this room. In the morning she would bring it down, and tie it to the fence; in the heat of the mid-day sun she would return it to the tower; and at tea time she would lead it down again to stand or lie beside her while she rested in her hammock in the garden. Soon the horse’s way of dragging itself about became stronger and more surefooted, so that it could negotiate the ramp by itself. It would clamber up and down from its tower at all hours, without ever straying from the old lady’s property.

After some months of life in the tower, watching the blue sea, the horse’s wretched gait could actually be described as a walk, albeit with a severe limp, and the old lady began to lead it by the bridle back and forth with her into town when she went to market. Everyone laughed at her amiable folly, and no one noticed that the horse’s limp was steadily diminishing. One day, an occasion which I was lucky enough to witness, she made an appearance in town riding sidesaddle. The horse bore her calmly through the port streets without the trace of a limp. Whether it was the fine view of the sea which was its privilege, or its gratitude to the old lady, the truth was that the horse was entirely cured. In fact, both the foreign residents and the islanders said its legs had never been so slim and straight in its previous existence as a woodcutter’s drayhorse. Such are the curative powers of the right dwelling, with the appropriate architecture.

I thought a great deal about this story, when I undertook the architectural commission for Frau Anders. I believe I was undertaking to build her a house in the same spirit as the old lady built a tower for the horse. I thought how this house might open new vistas for Frau Anders. Why, she might recover her health entirely, find love and happiness, abandon her rights to beauty, prosperity and acclaim, under the impulse of a novel architecture. Thus, far more acutely than when I plotted to murder her, I experienced the sensation of power—such as a magician must feel when he is beginning his exorcism, or a doctor when he starts a delicate operation, or an artist when he faces the nude canvas. I imagined the house enclosing Frau Anders, transforming her, allowing her to enact her secret fancies, whatever they might be.

You see my weakness, my vice, of that period (I freely confess it): I could not help wanting to aid others, but I know it appeared as an outrageous tampering with their lives. Others saw this more clearly than I did. I remember, for instance, Jean-Jacques’ reaction when I told him of this new project, without mentioning the double injury which I had caused to Frau Anders of which the house was the merest gesture of restitution. I did, however, tell him that Frau Anders was not well, and that I hoped the house would cheer, perhaps heal, and, at the very least, shield her. I also related the story of the old lady, the horse, and the tower. At first he laughed, I thought approvingly, but then he said, “Hippolyte, you are laboring under the friendliest but least plausible of all delusions, that everybody is like you.”

“No,” I replied firmly.

“Now I understand,” he continued. “This is why you don’t suffer.”

I don’t know what I said to him in reply, but I remember that I thought: It’s not true. I don’t consider anyone like myself. Neither you, Jean-Jacques, nor Frau Anders, nor my father and brother, nor Monique. I want to let them be what they want to be. How could Jean-Jacques be right? Why, I don’t even think I am like myself, much less do I think other people are like me. Though I try to be like myself—and for this reason pay so much attention to my dreams.