Breakfast with Astre. Trembling knees. Tristan can smell her scent everywhere, in the white of the bread, in the steam from the tea, her softness in the butter, her sweetness. He can smell her on his fingers, in his mouth. He doesn’t dare look at Mrs. Klimt. He thinks she’s angry. How does she know? And what does that mean for him? He focuses on his hostess to avoid thinking about what’s making him suffer: What will his life be like afterward?
He has sunk into the pain of initiation. How can he think about anything else? How can he do anything else? Or want to do anything else? Astre has become his goal, his destination. She is both question and answer, hunger and satisfaction. She is his universe.
She’s going to leave in a few minutes. She has already put on her coat. She eats everything she finds on the table. With disgust, Tristan observes her shiny chin, her thick nose, which moves strangely when she chews. She is unattractive. But she is his master, his god, the condition for his existence.
So, when she heads to the ground-floor bedroom to get her suitcase, Tristan springs up after her, glues himself to her back, slips his hand under her coat, under the belt of her pants. She turns around brutally and pushes him with all her might. He falls backward.
“Are you crazy? Maniac!” she shouts.
Mrs. Klimt hurries over.
“It’s nothing,” says Tristan in English, in a shaky voice. “I fell.”
He gets back up and thinks, I fell.
Astre leaves.
“I hope you rot, you old tramp,” she croons tenderly in French while giving Mrs. Klimt a hug.
The days that follow seem coated in mud. Light can’t filter through anymore. Tristan regrets his past frivolity, the peaceful sweetness of his solitude, his anonymous wanderings through the streets of London. He can’t read, nor can he concentrate in Hector’s lessons. He watches women, wonders how to attain them, touch them. He carries his desire like a grail, heavy and sacred. He is the knight, the lady, and the dragon all at once. Shut away, excluded.
How do they do it? Tristan wonders. The pedestrians, the ticket inspectors, the mothers, those adults he passes in hundreds, in thousands, on the streets—those who, like him, have done it. How do they manage to cross the boulevards, accomplish their tasks, speak, listen? What is this power holding them back, chaining them to themselves, forbidding them from throwing themselves on top of one another in a permanent embrace?
That’s exactly what I was saying, the rabbit mumbles in a faraway voice, as though now expressing himself from some hereafter. Your kind lives under the curse of sex. Your fall is constant. It doesn’t get you anywhere, because the movement is endless. You’ve kept your instinct, but you’ve emptied it of its meaning. That’s why your existences are fated to misery, your brains to foolishness, your bodies to degeneration. You’re never appeased; you’re never satisfied. The more time I spend near you, young man, the more I love my life. I’m full of delight with the idea of being an animal. Just the thought that I escaped the pitiful human destiny fills me with joy. Your kind is the ridiculous exception. You’re born losing. Young man, you give me so much in opening up to me. You give me the desire to be me, to live and to die, whether from a bullet or the jaws of a fox, the wheel of a car or a stone thrown by a child.
In the blackness of the cave, Tristan follows his divergent paths. He has separated in two. Point and counterpoint. On one side, the faceless face-to-face with Dumestre, who’s now roaming around their cramped abode, happy with his rediscovered mobility, joking, threatening, incomprehensible. On the other, the mute conversation with the rabbit, who seems to be breathing with more and more difficulty at the bottom of the gamebag.
Before the wheel fully starts to turn, before his companion reveals the nature of his scheme, which Tristan feels can only be deadly, he would like to find the way to defend his condition, to think up the arguments of an appeal for his species.
What’s the point of stopping the fall? Tristan asks. What’s the point of looking for a purpose if the fall itself is good? Why must we aspire to satisfaction? Your brain is too small and your heart too lazy to understand the beauty, the grandeur, the glory of the energy that motivates us and permeates us. I wouldn’t trade anything for my fall. I’m intoxicated with speed, and sometimes, when the chance for a moment’s respite distracts me from it, it just makes me taste my comfort more, because I know it is fleeting.
Little rabbit, you will never know victory over the absurd, something we accomplish every day, every second of our existence. What renders our exaltation superior to yours is that, contrary to you, we are desperate. I know, I understood, you’ve convinced me: I accept that your kind possesses a consciousness of death; I’m even ready to make myself its herald, to bring the news to my own kind. You know you’re mortal, but you’re saved by direction. Each of your actions is logical, useful, efficient. Let’s call it the law of nature. What relief, certainly, but what boredom! I’m going to tell you what you will never have, what you must envy us for, the nugget you must bring back to your kind: what you’re missing is the possibility to do anything you want, to act in spite of common sense, to wring the neck of productivity, reason, causality. We alone have the power to act against our own good, but sometimes, believe me, by heading toward our loss, we access a supreme good, a superior quality of being, a real presence more intense than anything you could ever see or feel. We are constantly fighting, against ourselves, against our instincts: we search, we wander, we make mistakes, and, thanks to these detours, these refusals, we raise ourselves up; even from within our fall, we fly, we transcend.
Yes, yes, responds the rabbit in a voice pushed with difficulty through his throat by his slowing blood. “Transcendence,” a word as long as a day without wild thyme. I’ve heard it spoken of. It’s… What do you call it? Believing in God…
Just the opposite: Believing in nothing. Believing you’re finished, kaput, at your limit, and weeping in the face of the rising sun, because of its beauty. Trying to reproduce this feeling, to summarize it. Being in love.
Love? pronounces the rabbit, his voice becoming more and more ethereal.
Tristan thinks about Emma and the moment when, so long ago, they entered her garden-level apartment, drowned in gray half-light because of the storm. They were soaked, hardly knew each other, had spoken to each other only three times on the bench in Brockwell Park. For some time already, he had renounced that thing he didn’t have a name for: girls, love, sex? I’m too young, he had said to himself. Too foreign, too isolated to hope for it to happen—looking at them, yes, maybe, he does that sometimes in the cafeteria at the university, where he started taking classes in September, but to slip his fingers there where it smells sweet, acidic, like the sea air, no, that will never happen to him again. He contents himself with reading books, certain books in particular, to contemplate the pictures, to be his own alpha and omega. He isn’t suffering anymore. He isn’t waiting anymore. It’s like he’s in exile, at the outskirts of the world in a place he will never leave, because he doesn’t know anyone, no one knows him, he’s foreign and no one taught him what to do.
But Emma spoke to him, and each time she opens her mouth, he feels curious, alert, as if he is about to make an important discovery. He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t dare, doesn’t think about it. Her act of speaking creates a sort of veil, a wall. He hears her voice, her French voice with its blunt consonants, its evasive syllables. She says words like “bougie” for bourgeois, refers to drugs by their street names, pronounces words that none of his professors here ever uses. He doesn’t understand what’s happening to him and even forgets to wonder why this comforts him so much. He doesn’t realize that he misses French. What importance do words have? What importance does an accent or intonation have? Did he sleep with Astre out of a love for his native tongue? Is it because Emma speaks the same language as his cousin that he takes so much pleasure in listening to her? A strange pleasure, without expectation, immediate and complete. He desires nothing more, there on the bench. On the second evening they met, he pictured himself in the same situation with Astre and it didn’t work. Astre is so rude, he thought, surprising himself with this judgment. Astre is mean. She has a viper’s tongue. She called my mother a slut and Mrs. Klimt an old hag. She speaks only to insult people.
“Wanna do it again?” All the same, that was something. Music, power, honey, poison. He can hear her voice all too clearly expressing the irresistible proposition. “Wanna do it again?” That was nice; that was magical. But insufficient. Emma speaking, that’s another sound, no serpents, no pearls either. He searches and searches, and here’s what he finds: vigor, honesty, vision. Emma speaks, and the world finds itself simplified, clarified, expanded.
And then, one day, she kisses him on the mouth, on the bench, and he tells himself that he should have done that, he could have taken that initiative. Just as soon, in this kiss, he feels that he hurt her, because he waited, because he forbade himself from thinking about it.
Everything has always failed with Emma.
Soaking wet, they enter the apartment where gray half-light reigns, and, soon, their bodies are dyed the same shade of gray, urban and stormy. They don’t know how to approach each other. They bump into each other, jostle, fall, get hurt. Their hands lag behind their mouths. Is it shyness that makes their blood pump? What is this solemn thing that hurts, that takes the heart like a bear claw and crushes it?
Tristan doesn’t know. He doesn’t have a name for that either. With his head on Emma’s chest, staring, marveling one of her plum breasts, he wonders how in the world he’s going to protect her, his eyes full of tears, his jaw tightened against a sob born from his gratitude, from his fear of losing her, from the idea that one day, even a long time from now, she will die.
That’s just what I was saying, grumbles the rabbit, exasperated. You separate. You split up. You think you’re superior for this reason, but you’re only fooling yourselves. I feel so much tenderness for you, young man, but I’m ashamed when I listen to you. I’m ashamed of the fragmented existence you lead. Absence of continuity. Sterilizing classification. Categorizing is murder. This woman, Emma, if everything has failed with her, leave her. And don’t tell me about love. As if I don’t know what it is. Your awkward passion, your distance, the respect she inspires in you. Bullshit.
You don’t understand, Tristan responds, his hand on the animal’s neck. I’ve found what separates us, you and me. Your kind and mine. You’re aware of your own finiteness, I accept that, I can agree, but you’re completely unaware of the finiteness of others. That’s where love is born.