It was raining hard when he came to see me and we both looked through the windows and commented on Parisian summers, hot and so often wet, and we agreed that they have a way of breaking one’s heart as if for no apparent reason. We tried to talk about something cheerful but somehow everything seemed bleak and we gave up. We looked at each other, and we could have been lovers, for we had been friends such a long time that the air between us was always standing still.
I will call him Wassef, because that’s the name he should have had – don’t ask me why.
While the rain stopped and the sky remained dark I made him a cup of coffee. I tried to put on the radio for some music but he showed such displeasure that I stopped searching for a good station. He told me, in the form of a question, that he was on his way to Stockholm. ‘Do you know that I’m going there?’ he asked, and went on talking.
Suddenly I was sure that he was going with the single purpose of looking for Erica, and I didn’t speak much. It rained again, and then the sky lifted, just a bit, just a shade, and we couldn’t find things to say, and eventually he left, leaving the door slightly open. I had no reason to cry; but I did.
I later learned from him that he searched frantically for Erica but couldn’t trace her, and that just when he was resigned to go back to Damascus he received a note at his hotel from a relative of hers whom he had contacted, telling him on a little piece of ordinary paper scribbled in black pencil that Erica had died, exactly two weeks before his return to Stockholm.
Wassef’s tone of voice over the telephone belonged to a man who was close to losing his mind. ‘Come back to Paris,’ I suggested, ‘and let’s talk it over.’ He went on rambling and for one long hour he reviewed the main events of his youth. Yes, he studied in Sweden and met Erica when they were at university; yes, they discovered love together, and she was a virgin when at the end of his first year at the School of Engineering they went north and didn’t sleep for days and made love as if the hours didn’t exist, with the curtains drawn, their bodies quivering with fatigue and happiness.
One would think that there is nothing new to love stories, but Wassef was recalling his life with such intensity that the world was being created anew through his pain, although sinking also in an abyss of frightful proportions.
I knew that when he got his degree he had left Erica, returned home and eventually got married. But his wife had died in childbirth and he remained in his parents’ house where they helped him bring up his child. He used to come to Paris quite often, but had never returned to Sweden.
His voice over the phone was hard to bear, his sorrow was too cruel; in fact, cruelty was hurrying in through the windows until I felt I would suffocate. I begged Wassef to come immediately so I could be reassured while taking care of him. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll write you a letter.’ He hung up.
As I knew him too well, I filled in the spaces of his life. He convinced himself, for years, that he had forgotten Erica, as he never liked to burden himself with feelings of guilt. He also had some excuses: for years his country had experienced incredible upheavals; revolution and repression had been his daily bread for so long that he never allowed himself the luxury of a past. And now, like a door slamming in his face, the past was catching up with him.
His letter arrived:
I am walking through transparencies night and day, and each time I stop I discover a particular moment of the life I had with Erica. Sometimes she walks near me, like she used to do, and the sun creates shadows under her eyelashes and she looks at me, a bit later, stares at me while we sit face to face to have lunch, and in the afternoon she lies on our bed and she takes her time and then we lose ourselves in each other and I carry her voice within me and I hear it now telling me she loves me and I believe her, now more than I ever did, but then I know she died recently, as her cousin wrote to me, and I refuse to go to her grave because I’m afraid to imagine the state of her body in it, and it is hot and luminous outside while I write you this letter, but I have to tell you that she just came in and she’s playing with my hair and the smell of her body is filling the place and it’s overwhelming me and I may faint any moment as I may also never send you this note.
But listen. Never in my life have I felt that I could lose control of my reason but I do now because her life and her death are mingling and I don’t know where she really is, if she’s hiding somewhere on this earth or if she’s really dead; then where is she and would I ever find her if I died too, but this universe is so big, so vast, so out of reach in its infinite dimensions, where would I have to go to follow her and find her and see her once more, beg her forgiveness, and please my heart, see her once more, a minute, a second, a fraction of a second, once, just once, even if she has to appear as a ghost and frighten me and fill me with bliss, come under unbearable lights or in the deepest darkness that my eyes and my mind could sustain.
His letter went on and on, becoming utterly desperate, bringing no order to his emotions or to his thoughts. Often he was delirious, mixing the present with the past, speaking of hallucinations, threatening suicide. He also described the weather, carefully, obsessively, the Swedish summer he remembered and the one he was again experiencing. Here in Paris the rains were hot, as if the skies too could be irrational, and I read and reread his pathetic words.
He called again on the phone, asking me to go to Stockholm and see him, saying: ‘I need somebody here who can understand the pain I’m going through. I need you.’
I turned in round and round in my flat, went to the Luxembourg Gardens, drank coffee after coffee … I had no choice, I had to go to Stockholm. I left a message at his hotel, booked a room at the same address and made a plane reservation, giving myself one more day in Paris before my flight.
I am one of those people who still links Sweden with Nordic legends and black-and-white movies, although the night before I left I went to the Champollion and saw Niagara, that old Marilyn Monroe flick which throws together a lot of water, passion and doom. I saw the many close-ups of Marilyn’s face and wondered if each of her films was not about her own destiny. She played her own role: I watched, until fiction became real, and she left behind her the image, repeated ad infinitum, of our own impossible loves.
It wasn’t planned as such, but it was the real beginning of my trip.
I won’t say that I was happy to find myself in Stockholm so suddenly. Wassef is dear to me, yes, I was worried and eager to see him, but travel in the European summer has about it something deflating: Europe is European in the winter, it always seemed so. Since early childhood in Damascus I viewed Europe as a land of grey skies and frozen fountains, with a lot of electricity shining in the night. But what of Stockholm in the summer? A city which sizzles in a country considered cold, a no man’s land subverted by melancholy, the monstrosity of sunshine on the heart’s deserts.
My hotel room was comfortable, but Wassef was not there. He had left a note telling me that he would be back soon. He didn’t say what he meant by ‘soon’ – a few hours or much longer.
I waited. I turned on the television, but other than the Grand Prix Formula One races there wasn’t much that I could understand. Of course there was the news, and I could watch what I already knew. The Grand Prix was fun: it took my mind away from Wassef for a few laps. Schumacher won the race and there was his trophy, followed by Germany’s national anthem. The guy who came in second was utterly miserable. The whole thing was taking place in Belgium where it was raining: the cars were sliding and the energy flowing. It all looked like science fiction but it was real, for all that reality’s worth.
I had lunch, then dinner, at the hotel’s coffee shop. I tried to read Michael Sell’s work on Ibn’Arabi – I’d been in the middle of the chapter on the ‘Garden among the flames’ before I left Paris – but it was useless: my peace of mind had been shattered. I drew the curtain tightly and tried to sleep, but light continued to seep through. I remembered past tiresomenesses, but that was of no help. I knew that I was in the middle of an endless luminosity and that the day was stretching on until midnight, ending where the next one was waiting … I didn’t sleep the next day either, and the third went by, anxiety filling my time like rising water. I couldn’t even get myself to be mad at Wassef and return home.
One late afternoon, a knock on my door: Wassef was back. He stood before me haggard, crazed, shaking, the whole of his being solidly engulfed in some irradiating darkness that was made particularly conspicuous by the extra glare of light that his entrance brought into the room.
Oh, why did he arrive in such bad shape! He didn’t excuse himself for his absence, didn’t ask if I was worried or angry with him. He remained contained within his own world without making the slightest effort to reach out. He smelled of alcohol and sweat and the bad odour of defeat. After a moment I said: ‘Wassef, please sit down on this chair,’ but he paced the room, alternately opening the curtains, looking out, and closing them, until I asked him again, this time more firmly, to take a seat. At last he sat down on my bed, took off his shoes, then his jacket. He was wearing a pink shirt which I shall never forget, partly because it endeared him to me, and partly for some other reason I couldn’t define.
‘Please, keep the light out of this room,’ he begged, and remained silent afterwards. I drew the curtains together as closely as I could and lit the lamp, but the electricity was useless for we were sitting in an endless twilight.
‘Where were you?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘I am here for you, to help you, if you need me.’
‘I never needed anyone.’
‘Well, I’m here, we can talk.’
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘No, it’s not true. I will need a lifetime to repeat it again, to say it all, and I can’t, of course … Do you believe that I ever had a life?’
‘Wassef, try to answer your own question.’
‘Yes, I had a life, I have one, and it’s miserable; I’m probably going mad and I don’t know it.’
‘You are not in any danger, I would think. Just tell me where you were these last days and then we’ll start.’
‘Start what?’
‘This story about your life.’
‘My life ended long ago,’ Wassef said, ‘long ago, the day I decided to go back to Damascus, but I didn’t know it, it took me a lifetime to realise that I was dead, a ghost seemingly happy. Erica cried and she was sweating, her hair all wet, her face like under pouring rain, and she was looking at me intensely, and kissing my face, falling into a deep silence, and then weeping, again and again, like a newborn animal, and then everything stopped while I felt paralysed, wondering if I would ever get out of that room, that tiny space in which I experienced incredible happiness, a sort of bliss which used to turn into a warm current feeding my veins, and her skin was soft under mine, and her breathing even, soft like her voice, and I was lost in her hair, and in between her lips, and my heart was beating, it was a messenger bringing good news, and her legs were long and smooth and always warm and, even in the dead of winter, she was burning and radiating a slow, steady fire, and here I was, pulling myself away from it all and her own blood was receding towards her chest and she looked pale and her breathing was becoming difficult and I started looking at the door and she understood that it was over, for no reason, it was all over for her, and for me too, and I don’t know how I went through that door never looking back, never to see her again.’
It was obvious that something had broken down within Wassef, a sustaining wall, a dam, something was pouring forth that nothing could stop, so I had to sit and wait and listen to this old friend, this man who was racing back to his youth, erasing some forty years of his life in order to reach the two or three years of intense happiness he’d experienced. Erica’s death broke his will to pieces, and the deeper truth that he had hidden so successfully from himself was shining now to shattering effect. He’d never stopped loving her, but it took her ultimate disappearance for him to come back to her.
I decided to go out for a while, just walk. I asked him to stay and wait for my return or go to his own room, but he remained numb. I opened the door, went down a couple of flights and met the street with relief. I came to a corner café and gulped down two tall mugs of beer, soon realising that it was the last thing I should have done, as the beer reinforced the effect of the grey luminosity that was sticking to the walls. But I drank some more, thinking it would help me to sleep.
When I got back, I found my friend spread out on my bed. He was barefooted, with his shirt unbuttoned, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t move when he heard me come in. Suddenly, like a snake, he threw a question, startling me: ‘We only see things that don’t exist, don’t we?’
Then he went on: ‘Now I know for sure that I won’t lose her again. In her solitude, she is mine, all mine, forever, like before, years ago, as if it were yesterday, and that she’s here, in this room, facing me, then moving around, yes Erica, we shall go to Uppsala, do you remember the summer we went, sometime in June, you are in Queen Christina’s Palace, that grey hall we visited, and you’re sitting on the throne and I am the Ambassador from Syria, I brought you perfume and dates, you will wear the one and eat the others, and everybody knows I love you, they’re looking at us, and then we went to our hotel room, we made love, and I tried to do it again, you told me you were exhausted by the trip, the heat, the light, but I tried again, I thought that would help you fall asleep and you were fighting the light and got nervous, and so did I, and we started to turn on our bed and you made little sounds and I was fighting some invisible element, it was the light intensified behind the shutters, pressing itself, and you were burning with fever, begging me to stop because you loved me, and loving me was enough, and we didn’t need to make love on and on when she could barely breathe, and that my own energy had been spent, and our eyes would stay open, and then I put my head in the hollow of her neck and tried to rest and she laid her hand on my back and we were outside the limits of time in a country with a never-ending summer which wears out its lovers as if they were meant to be doomed.
And listen, listen to me, I left her. I ran away. By the end of that summer, when nights started to return to relieve us of the sun’s power, when things had a chance to brighten up, I told her, with no warning, like a thief, a coward, a traitor, that I was leaving the very next morning for home. That night, while making love, she cried, and didn’t say a word but kept quivering, she didn’t kiss me but remained placid like the sea’s surface on an August morning, she stopped crying and looked at me for a long time, for ages, and she got up before me, earlier than usual, not having slept, she dressed, made coffee, I ate and she didn’t, didn’t even take a sip from her cup, and a few hours later I found myself on a boat, and she was standing on the quay, and then I never saw her again.’
‘And now,’ I interrupted, ‘you’re back, after all these years, or where are you? Why did you suddenly think of her, what triggered all this pain, these memories?’
‘These are not memories!’ he shouted. ‘You must realise that the past has come back, that something has disappeared, I mean the years between the moment I left her and the moment I was told that she had died. She is here in front of me, young and full of the future, she loves me and she’s my universe, the whole of it … and I will never sit facing her, laughing, drinking in her presence, abolishing anything which is not her.
I am today the man I should have been, now that the walls of the kingdom have fallen down and that she’s invisible to all but myself, after having received all these messages that she kept sending these last years, telling me that she would die and give this earth back to its wretchedness.
But what did I do? I lied to myself. I looked for women, intensely, taking advantage of the travels that my work required, in many European capitals I paid women to spend nights with me and thought that I was satisfied, until that night in Berlin, about a year ago, when I picked up a young girl about the same age as Erica when I left her. The girl was new to the streets, shy, embarrassed and embarrassing. I don’t know why I kept asking her to repeat during the night that she loved me. ‘Please keep telling me you love me,’ I begged, and she kept saying it in German, then I taught her to say it in Arabic, she said it, then reverted to German … and fell asleep. In the morning she told me that I was a strange fellow and that it should have been obvious that she couldn’t love me, like that, just like that, and when I told her that I knew it well but that I needed to hear that sentence so that something in me could believe it, or half-believe it, she kissed me gently on the forehead, refused to take my money and left. An hour or so later I gave that money to the woman who came to clean the room and she thanked me many times, and I tried strolling aimlessly in the streets but nothing worked, then I dealt with my business and returned to Damascus certain that I was a man destroyed.’
I tried to distract his mind and suggested that we take a walk, but he complained about the persistent summer light. Then I said let’s go and see a film, and that suggestion turned out to be disastrous, touching some raw nerve. He plunged deeper into a world all his own, his voice trembled and he continued:
There was in the Damascus of my childhood a cinema – do you remember? – where you had to go down a few stairs, and in there – I was twelve – I entered a universe of beautiful women, they were not women but magic, unattainable, private, all for myself. I saw Jean Harlow then Marlene Dietrich – the most impressive ones – they were blonde, as silky as a river’s surface, and I would come home with fever then take one with me in my bed, the first women I had aged fifteen or sixteen, I made love to the most enchanting images in the world, and I would cling to my sheets which were as smooth as the screens on which they appeared, and disappeared, and they haunted me in the classroom, their pictures hiding in my books. The world was full of them, I thought, I will grow old and travel and join them, which one I didn’t know, but it will have to be in a place like in the films, with stairways, moonlights, music playing in the background and stopping when we are kissing. Then I left with a scholarship for Stockholm.
When I met Erica she belonged to the movies, she created an atmosphere overheated with tension, the promise of unending nights and surrender, and this became true, my dreams granted as to no one else, her body had a horse’s madness, she would smile and her smile would change the weather, draw me in, her teeth were the frontier of my happiness. And one day I gave her up, for what, I don’t know. I would give anything to know what really happened, in which one of my soul’s layers … I buried myself in Damascus, in work, then in a marriage which was interrupted, as you know. I entered the pitiful routines of visits to whorehouses, in Madrid, Hamburg, Amsterdam, cheap versions of my childhood cinemas. I was spending an hour or two with women whose names I wouldn’t even ask, doing intimate things and never seeing them again, I was leaving with a heart blank and stilled, worrying about such things as train schedules and business appointments while I was even forgetting that I was still alive.
Wassef couldn’t cope with himself. Sweating heavily, getting red in the face, he was becoming incoherent. His monologues were signals of such desperation that they made me slide and sink into a strange sadness made of sympathy and fear, and my inability to absorb his pain made me feel hard and inadequate. At some point I managed to persuade him to return to his room, and I remember the panic in his eyes; but he turned his back, opened the door and moved his heavy frame out and down the stairs. The next day I called him and there was no answer: the reception desk informed me that he had gone out quite early but that his belongings were still in his room. I was happy that he hadn’t checked out – he was just away. That same day I decided to return to Paris, and wrote him a few awkward lines to let him know that I had to leave and that he could always contact me at home as usual. I felt a bit shameful. I was running away. I tried to convince myself that by having stayed a couple of weeks in Stockholm for his sake I had done all I could and hoped that he would follow me to Paris or go back to Damascus now that there was nothing he could do, nor anyone he could see with whom he could talk about Erica.
Once in France, not a day went by without my trying to reach him. He was not there. One day, at last, I was told that he came to his hotel that very morning, took his baggage and left – they had no further information. I felt utterly cut off. The summer, I thought, had indeed ended.
Then one dismal and rainy morning I found a letter from Wassef in my postbox. It was posted from Stockholm and written in a troubled hand. I went up to my apartment, waited for a while, tried to do a few things, made some calls, washed some dishes, put on some music;, but nothing would alleviate my confused fear of this unopened envelope … Then, I read:
Dear, dearest, I’m here, and you’re my only friend, you know it, you’ve known me for so long, you remember the days when Damascus still had a river, and we loved it, it was a galloping torrent in the winter, and now they’ve covered it with the same kind of cement that covers their souls, but my own soul, where is it, where, do I have one, who am I? I have to talk to you about Erica, you’ll understand, since her death everything is so clear, crystal clear, her death has brought an excruciating clarity upon the world and now that I know that she isn’t here, it’s late, always too late, it’s useless, I know that only love matters, absolutely so, and how can I tell her that she freed me, by her dying, that now I can love her, as she did then, back then, she loved me as I love her now, and I’m hurling my head against a wall, her absence is a wall and I’m breaking myself against it, dearest, I’m suffering beyond anything I ever knew, beyond what one can bear, the world is flat and silent, there’s so much light, this dead light of Sweden, which is unbearable, I am alone with her and she’s a ghost, lying there in her tomb, starting to rot, and they wouldn’t tell me where she’s buried, I won’t touch that grave anyway, I will have to have it opened, it will make her death real, it would, it’s as well that I don’t know where she is, she’s everywhere, here, in my head, my eyes, in front of me, once in a while she comes in my sleep and never stays for long, and I am given back to her absence.
I have to let you know something I did, like an ultimate effort towards total illusion, and at this point I can’t understand if I’m a monstrous being, if I had always been a wicked failure hidden behind what people called my gentleness, but we have to come to the point where we know who we are and why we did whatever we did, and if it could have been otherwise, where did everything go wrong, or is it rather that things had to be what they have been, and in both cases it’s terrible, it’s maddening. I could have had a long life with Erica, come every night to her bed, her body, her presence, her luminosity, and I lost her by my own doing … Good God, was it impossible from the beginning, given who I was, a young man with no sense of the future, no means to think other than of the passing moment, tied by ancestral timidity, and defeat must have been inbuilt in me if I had to turn my back on the only happiness I experienced.
I want you also to know something of the nightmare I’m going through. You see, when this love for Erica surfaced, engulfed me, it possessed me with such a force that one afternoon, when I saw myself in the mirror, I looked young again, with the face I had when she and I were together, clouds and turmoil crossed my eyes, women were staring at me in the street and I felt that I could conquer any of them, as I did for a period of my life, and I found out that it is precisely because you are madly in love with a woman who is absent that you can most likely say yes to any other adventurous one, thus desire becomes a fire that will burn any piece of wood, and that did happen. I met a young woman while I was at the coffee house. She was sitting at the table next to mine. She smiled and I answered her call, I was feeling young again and we walked aimlessly until dinner time, but the summer light lingered on, and getting tired, I invited her to come to my room and she accepted, and then it happened, I enveloped her with my desires, my passion for Erica appeared to be meant for her, and I let the poor girl believe so because I needed to believe it too, and we made love furiously.
I moved next to her own place, she was going to the university and I was waiting all day, dreaming simultaneously of two women, mixing their images, and sometimes crying.
For the first time in my life I felt grateful, unreservedly, allowing myself to be disarmed, but I didn’t let my heart feel sorry for this young person to whom I knew I would never give much of anything and I wasn’t embarrassed to be living as an impostor. Things just happened, instant after instant, and I was watching her when I noticed some stormy ocean within her blue eyes and a broad smile breaking for no reason whatsoever, and she was moving her head on the pillow, pushing back her hair without touching it; then I became a traveller on an unknown road, at a crossroads I took a side road and I was with Erica again, looking for her under the skin of my new conquest. It was both awful and exhilarating, I thought that a dream of resurrection could only be fulfilled by death, the death that had already happened, it was all over, and possibly something else would break through, a disclosure, the resurrection of time, the repetition, the sacred repetition of what had been sacred, and new ideas rushed forth, they interfered, they required an answer. In the heat of my spirit’s wilderness, while I was kissing an innocent face, suspicions arose, I wondered if Erica had done anything to have inhibited me and that I had stored in my mind’s deepest recesses. Would it be possible that she had been the source of a desperation that I felt and never formulated, did she make me sense from the beginning that our relation was transient in essence, an absolute with no roots in this world? Must I bear my guilt alone? But I know, I know that she loved me desperately, totally, like a cloud loves another cloud and merges into it, why must I keep playing a game, now, when I’m under her death’s absolute power, having lost the very notion of my own self? …
Yes, we went dancing one late evening, the air was motionless, the sky a canopy of fog and indifference. We found a little place where youngsters were drinking and there was a jukebox and I found an old tango and we danced while I was aware that the young people were sneering at us, at my greyish hair; and then a small miracle happened, I found an old American song which used to be Erica’s favourite, a smashing success back in the fifties, it was ‘Kiss of Fire’. She often danced alone to this tune, with such independence in her body that I went crazy with envy and desire while she moved, sure of herself, enjoying her power over me, but my partner was hearing this music for the first time and she liked it because it seemed to please me. We danced some more, and came home, and I watched her eyelashes which at a certain angle made shadows on her cheeks, and her eyes looked as if through a veil, and I wondered if she wouldn’t give me at last the illusion that Erica was alive, in my hands, just for a while, just for me, even if it had to be only for a fraction of a second.
The next day I bought a dress, a deep blue silk dress with little flowers on it, and in the evening I gave it to her and asked her to wear it; she giggled and looked beautiful, and we went out and drank a lot when something suddenly upset me, heavy showers descended over my soul and we hurried home. Once in bed I fell asleep immediately and dreamed of doors which remained closed while dead fish were being unearthed from a patch in the garden that my grandparents owned in Damascus. The following day my body kept shaking not with fear but with apprehension, I tried to eat lunch but had just coffee with a cheese sandwich, and felt old. Then I was seized with the frantic desire to find the perfume that Erica used to like. I needed it. I searched in many stores; a French perfume quite famous in the old days, our days. I found out that it was still on the market, the salesgirl threw a strange glance in my direction, and I bought the little flask and waited impatiently. That evening I gave it to my little girlfriend, my mistress, she asked, ‘What’s this again?’ I replied that I had just bought it casually, and I lied by telling her that I was indeed eager to discover its smell.
I opened the bottle. I could as well have opened a tomb. I sniffed. The perfume was heavy but mixed with a lighter one. Its scent seemed, at first, neutral, then it spread and made me feel disoriented, dizzy. It was slightly nauseating. When she rubbed some drops on her skin I entered Erica’s smell like one enters a chapel or a vortex – and this young woman smiling at me was not aware that I was using her to recapture a ghost. I pushed her onto the bed, my urge becoming violent, confused. I was at once unspeakably happy and desperate. I had entered again the chaos of love, its matrix, holding my breath and breathing it, holding under me a woman who was real and alive while making love to a phantom, until that absence mingled with the present to recreate the primordial night … My eyes closed, their lids fused, so that I could see that resurrection was happening, that I was recovering my sense of ecstasy … Erica’s body was pulsating like neon lights all over mine, as well as over my young lover’s, and I was growing old with this perfumed and innocent body, while in my mind emanations of death were gradually and irrevocably being mixed. I was begging salvation from this abused woman. I poured more perfume on her, renewing an old addiction, trying to recapture that state of bliss that I used to know with Erica, wishing that Erica was there, and mine, for one night, at least, one long night lost in the ocean of time, and I called ‘Erica!’, and the young girl shook me off her body and cried out loud with bottomless anger that I was now taking even her name from her, and giving her one which wasn’t hers, but all I knew with unbearable clarity was that Erica was lost forever, that time had indeed lapsed, that I was only an old man with a knowledge now so useless that it had to be thrown into a wastebasket, and I came close to killing her. I think I did it, within the smell of death, sniffing like an animal and pressing hard at the top of her breast, at her neck’s tender line, I was pressing so hard that her face was obliterated from my sight, I was sweating and licking her perfume which was turning sour, I couldn’t tell if my young victim wasn’t sleeping forever, like Erica was already doing. I was learning with that same unbearable clarity that to kill is just another way of crying, blood replacing the flow of the tears.
My dearest, I could go on and on with this letter, even if it were only to postpone the moment when this is over, this conversation with you, this agony. Listen, I told you that I won’t visit her grave, but there’s no grave for her, that’s what I learned recently, it’s hallucinating, they took her away from me, for sure, they cremated her so that I can never find her, never, and so many forces are fighting around my head, all of them invisible, so I don’t see why I should go on living … and still, I am in a state of prostration and while you read this letter I may very well be under arrest, or thrown into a world lonelier than a prison cell, hopelessly devoid of any horizon. Yes, all threads are broken, the tiniest ones too; we’ll have total darkness again. I’ll remain in this city for a while at least, getting out of my hole just to prowl the night. There must be a wisp of smoke, some particle of hers that I can breathe, they burned her and her fumes will be eaten by me, swallowed, made one with my flesh, I will descend, Oh God help me if you exist!, I am not Orpheus but I will follow her, somewhere, and she won’t be there, I know, I’m sure, but I’ll keep searching. She used to call me her baby, but that baby died long ago, and that’s also going to be true of the old man I am now, the sooner the better, here, or in the underworld, I’ll drown in my sorrow, I don’t know, I don’t want anything, I can hardly move, but I will stay although I’m already left with nothing, I mean nothing.
I went through this letter. I read and re-read it, then I opened the window, later read it again … and Paris was soft and in the dark a thin rain was wetting the air and I phoned Wassef’s old hotel. I needed some connection with Sweden, with him, but have been told that they haven’t heard from him for quite a while, and, just to add something, I asked about the weather and they told me it is still fine. Anyway, I know that the summer is over and that the Swedes are about to start their long descent into winter and its uninterrupted darkness.