From then on I didn’t get out of bed until dusk; in the night, my infernal refuge, I indulged in roving fantasies.
A***’s presence was stolen from me by images. While we were together, I was jealous of all that had engrossed A***. I hated the television, detested those frivolous parties and their cortèges of ostentatious, superficial people. All the time stolen from me by those hours spent shopping, at the jeweler’s, the hairdresser’s, all of that dissipated time. Although, to be fair: some moments of pure pomp had fascinated me as well, the times I watched A***’s body mutate into an image. What price did I pay for them, in suffering? When we lived together, I always interrupted my eternal, languishing reverie to spy on the slow ceremony of applying makeup in the bathroom—the brushstrokes that highlighted the cheekbones, the sharp line of the pencil, the superimposition of different colors on the eyelids to intensify the socket. But I would lose myself in the distance of the gaze, closing myself off in mere vision. Little by little, my gaze, isolated in the mirror—a living enclave—became petrified in the glass facade formed around that face.
Everything stole A***’s presence from me: the infinitely expanding circle of high society friends, A*** playing the role of social butterfly no matter where we went. I salvage crumbs of A***’s presence, captured fragments snatched from the brutal dissipation of that life. From this debris, I recreated an entirely other life, the one I would have liked to live in A***’s company if it had not been for the seduction of anything and everything that sparkled. The time we spent together was dedicated to this imaginary, deflected, and diverted reconstruction of every act, gesture, and word, with the secret intention of thus being able to appropriate and incorporate A***. The strange sensation of never being able to grasp or embrace A*** except in the painting I was reconstructing from those idealized fragments of real life. The strange temptation to recreate a life in which I had felt only barely included: it seemed as though none of A***’s words or gestures had been for me. I was the shadow of a body that ignored me; I was also the source of light that produced that shadow. All that came back to me was a projection of myself. A*** was merely a parasite interposed between my consciousness and my unfailing tendency to diffract the real.
The one I loved I saw as dead, had to imagine as dead, had to think of in the past tense in order to bring about my own satisfaction from this living cadaver, a fulfillment that the real being had unconsciously refused me, for I was incapable of enjoying reality. I knew this was a morbid exercise, and had often been afraid that A*** would notice the crumbling happening underground; I was mining a life. How could I have only derived pleasure from my vision of A*** by imagining that all I saw already belonged to death? How could I have seen A***’s death as a side effect of my happiness in our life together? Before, I was mourning the present; today I mourn a past that was never present. I mourn a funereal existence, devoted to the vampirization of the flesh that made me feel an agonizing impotence because I was not able to take possession of it except through murder and mummification. Like a parasite, I fed on the images that stole A***’s presence from me, images that, in this henceforth deserted world, are incapable of restoring to me even one iota of A***’s presence.
All those who captivated me thereafter always irremediably betrayed or disenchanted me. The spark they held in my eyes would pass too quickly, consumed, vanished, leaving me as nothing but a heap of dismal flesh, enlivened by a furious access of pettiness or hysteria.
I appear to myself in the guise of the hero of that 1950s novel entitled, for reasons I no longer remember, La Chute. A pure soul, all grandeur in a heroic mask, suffering and cheaply acting out the sublime in a chaotic confusion of good intentions and pious lucidities. However, something of my true self remained: the intimate sensation I derived from these passions, soon shattered by the aftertaste of falling out of love.
The strange sensation of always feeling as if I were at the dreadful edge of some imminent break…This sentiment is the very foundation of all that is intractable in me: a sort of inebriation, bitter from drawn-out solitude, the inevitable tendency toward a final disenchantment with all idylls. And I can’t explain why, or how. I’ve never expected much from those I love. I would have given all, conceded all, pardoned all the wandering of anyone who accorded me the space and time for my discreet tenderness. So much did I fear smothering those I cherished that I never made a fuss, which was doubtless the reason for my repeated falls and defeats. I carry my silence—this constant withdrawal into a suffering that I thought of perhaps mistakenly as immoderate and obscene—as a cross that has never promised any redemption, a calvary without deliverance, an involuntary sacrifice made in vain.
Was I incorrigible to always lock away my grievances, wishing my partner would do the same? In silence I endured all transgressions, from the most trivial to the most serious (and my partner never understood which were the most serious for me, accumulating them innocently and obviously, but hiding those betrayals that didn’t matter to me at all: this burglary of the truth, more than the fault concealed, was what made me suffer). And because of my attention to decorum and my fear of a vulgar lover’s tiff, I never dared to counter this extreme violence with anything of the same order. I deployed an irony that harmed only me, opening more fully the wound it was attempting to bandage.
My obsessive fear of this imminent fall was always hovering over me. How often did I imagine myself gripped with terror, collapsing, tumbling from the height of the relative safety of whatever promontory I had been occupying? A fall brought about by a purely internal and continually foreseen rending, imminently suspended on a final thread that never broke but which, taut and twisted unbearably, never ceased to tremble. The agonizing tension of always being about to crack without ever feeling the relief of chaos—for I denied myself even the obscene plenitude of annihilation.
In those moments when it seemed the dreaded, desired fall was drawing close, I don’t know if I fled. At the least I retreated from its too-pressing arrival, as far as possible from whatever was seeming to provoke it. Somehow, I escaped. Probably through desertion, an abdication that threw me back into its core: an indissoluble knot of lonely meditation and troubled absence (I often imaged asceticism as being trapped inside a bedroom in a foreign town: New York, somewhere relatively high up, a decaying skyscraper in a pool of ruins, shaken from its foundations by the rhythm of African American voices: a syncopated version of Stendhal syndrome). By distancing myself from the world, I was squandering my destiny: such was the malediction of recognizing the world’s infamy but not allowing myself to spit in its face.
The passion of my inner secret cohabited violently with the constant exhibitionism demanded of a social life, and I was unable to escape from it, to defend myself against it, or to decline its imperative invitation. My mind was too supervised and civilized for this world that had become savage, imprinted with savoir-vivre, with a restraint that has become outdated but that remains the sole condition of civility. A drama was playing out and I was the battlefield. Who has resisted the temptation, the contempt evoked by this old Europe recalling the nostalgic charm of naphthalene? With a pure soul and the face of a martyr, I jeered at it, and yet I wasn’t composed of anything better. The whole dialectic of Reason, the confused potage of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful was suddenly overthrown, tossed into the impetuous cloacum of a world that breaks through old barriers and overflows its first cradle, twisting and restless with tumults and tremblings provoked by these unseen, submarine restraints.