HE WAS told he suffered, but he never believed it. Once he had kissed the golden shoes of an artiste. This gold didn’t shimmer, instead it simply lay pale, as if applied like a thin, vacuous coating of varnish. For a time his eyes had something of a flickering blaze in them; he didn’t know whence that came. Others behaved towards him as if he were a child; he gladly considered himself a lad. The lineaments of aging didn’t prevent him from this kind of make-believe. He saw a girl crying, and with the most agile effortlessness believed she was crying because of him. Never had he made anyone laugh, since he acted like a poor sinner, and in people who consented to deal with him, he instilled the chilling impression he was heartless. His sveltenesses entitled him to entertain cheerful and conceivably candid relations with a very modest parlormaid of a manor, who fancied he had never been unhappy or done anything unpleasant. To her he seemed unsmart because he smiled prettily, which he accomplished due in part to her drollery, in part to his having sporadically read certain amusing works. With a novelistic coherence he told her stories she fell for word for word. A thousand conquered aggravations clothed him like a garment of frivolousness and elegance, as if wistfulness lay over his manners and mode of being, as if he didn’t know what to do with his brio. His resiliencies resulted from his finding boredom not unbearable but always somewhat useful or edifying. Something about his kindnesses encouraged fawning. In winter he went sledding, he went snowballing; life’s summer he seemed never to have known; in the spring little flowers moved gracefully, tremblingly into his autumn, the autumn that he perhaps always was. Only once in the course of his life did a woman treat him as if he were a perfect gentleman, an event that remained forever in his memory.
By the way, he never tried to be a man of the world.
(1928–1929)