Leave the street to those whose souls are troubled.
Albert Samain.
“And why one,” said he to himself, “when there are the others? What primitive commandment makes this one my destiny, instead of that one? I will not be the slave of a single flesh; I wish my desire to be expansive, I wish to release it to the pursuit of unknowns by routes unknown.…”
His diseased imagination experienced a very real suffering by virtue of the multiplicity of women. Sometimes a brain-fever of eroticism excited him to the point where he would cry out, helplessly: “There are too many of them! There are too many of them!”
He would have liked to summarise in the draught of a kiss upon a chosen set of lips the entire essence of Femininity, but the accomplishment of that Neroesque desire would have killed Desire just as surely as roses are killed by cutting down a rose-bush, just as surely as a smile is killed by cutting off a head.
As well might one hope to draw in by a single inhalation the ultimate breath of Love, the ultimate perfume of Life and all its fecundity; to master the ultimate volition of the soul and its ultimate sensuality.
These crises of unreason sometimes laid him prostrate; at such times he would laugh at his fantasy so as not to be frightened by his folly, and his licentiousness would be calmed for a while by innocent dreams. He would conclude that his lover of the moment was decidedly adorable, and that she would be the only one, the one who would be set above all others – and he would confirm it by praising to the limit, albeit with an indecisive smile, her mysterious and delicious absence of promise:
“Your magnificent stupidity,” he would say to her, “makes you one with the Infinite; you fraternise with the Absolute, and the nullity which mortifies itself within your eyes, like the light of a dead star, proves to me that it is possible both to be and not to be, at one and the same time.…
And Nothingness has made me a soul like yours.
“…But understand what this means: in being nothing, you are everything – and everyone.”
The poor lover in question would willingly have fled out the door, but she was invariably in awe of him, and he would profit by her fear to pluck her from the rosary of the fugitives.
This was the second stage of his madness.
He would say:
“Ah! I will tell you the stories of all of those who are within you. I have seen them, I have captured them, I have placed them within you: they are the women of the street, the women who pass by, the unknowns which go by – who knows where? – who go about their business by unknown paths. They are within you, but you know nothing about them; and for myself, I know only this: were I to touch you they would free themselves from you and revert to their mysterious selves. Those who are within you are not really there: they are but a dream within a dream – but I have told you this, my darling, only out of politeness, so that there can be no legitimate excuse for you to be jealous.
“Frankly, you are actually too tiny to contain so many dreams and so many desires. Those whom I love are innumerable; I will tell you their stories:
“One has the precise and muscular gait of a huntress – what fine straight legs! She has exactly the kind of flesh necessary to preserve the harmony of her form, as supple as the branch of an ash-tree. When she swoons, as love dawns in her, at the foot of some ancient comforting oak, in some remote forest which the sun does not dare to disturb, I am not there! I never will be there! Oh, I am mortified by desire!
“Another has such beautiful hair, which carries all the colours of the rainbow, and her belly – how I wish that she were mine! – is as white as a cloth woven out of asphodels … but she is no more mine than the other, and never can be!
“Green eyes … yes, the one which I see now has green eyes, the eyes of a succubus, the eyes of a phantom, the eyes of a stormy night … but I will never see them opening and raging in the dusk!
“The others …?
“There are too many! It is all too much! All those wrapped up against the cold of winter, reminiscent in all their furs of the silken-haired Mongolian goats, disquieting beasts which fascinate men! … All those unhooked and unbuttoned, hardly dressed at all in the summer months, their lukewarm, scented palpitating flesh! … It is too much! It is all too much! … Oh, that unfamiliar female who passes by and goes on her way, whom one might never touch – and who would surely fade away, if one could touch her; for her charm lies in being unknown and untouchable. If one were actually to take them in one’s arms, one would cease to love them; one would think of others, of all the others, of the fugitives … always, always of others!”
While the lover wept, sad and vexed, he would continue:
“But if my dream were ever to be realised, if I had had them all, even the others, if I had drunk from the lips of the Only One all of femininity, all love and all life – there would still remain the Unattainables. There would still be Helen of Troy, there would still be Salomé, there would still be Madeleine, there would still be Ophelia – and all the others whom the poets have made eternal!”
At this the weeping and vexed lover would laugh in her turn. And the lover of infinity, the ostentatious drinker of souls, would pacify his grandiose desires, collapsed upon the complaisant flesh of a very plain girl, who might have been anyone.