Wary trees were barely hazarding their first buds, and the light in the frayed willows by the river had a hint of green, when you and Camille first laid eyes on water the colour of weeping. It was the first day of May, and you were in Paris, among those subtle people in whose veins ran blood with a family resemblance to yours and who mirrored a region of your spirit. The dance at La Horde that night would celebrate the matins of springtime so, not surprisingly, you donned a shabby costume, along with Atanasio the Greek,12 Larbaud,13 Van Schilt, and Arredondo from Jujuy.14 The rented costumes retained a rancid odour of sweat from past festivities; a silence compacted from all the dead laughter seemed to fill the hollows of the masks, prostituted many times over. All in all, there was too much noise in everyone’s soul, yours and those of your friends, and when Van Schilt put a red beard on his pirate-like chin, Camille’s laughter tinkled a good while, along with sounds of surgical tape and rusty bells. Night, a parenthesis of madness! What knot had let go within your heart? The immense hall glittered beneath a hundred chandeliers; musicians inspired by ancient barbarity made brass instruments shout and woodwinds wail. A tribe of monkeys outrageously plastered in makeup then dragged you mid-room; you struggled, laughing, among arms and abdomens slick with oil; you gave and received blows to the face; one of your lips was already bleeding, and your fingers clutched shreds of artificial beards and wigs. Then, when the festivities celebrating your baptism of madness were over, you joined the monkey-inititates, and the notion of time evaporated in the dance hall. Hurrah! Foreheads heavy as fruit, alert minds, sleepless wills, and bruised memories broke riotously free of their prisons. Hurrah! Your being had overleapt its frontiers and foundered, a drunken ship on a chaotic sea of absurd forms, brutal nakedness, unspeakable gestures, colours that scraped eyeballs, and words that shattered eardrums. Now you wonder: what knot had let go in your heart? And you think: there was too much noise in our souls. The spell was broken at dawn, when you arrived with your companions at the Café du Dôme: just as the ocean withdraws and leaves the beach strewn with monstrous remains torn from its depths, so the ebb tide of night had deposited on the terrace the cold scraps of a drunken witches’ sabbath. At the threshold of the café, an organ-grinder smiled, glass in hand, an ancient and good-hearted inhabitant of dawn; an exultant chestnut tree on the boulevard was showing off its first leaves to the café terrace. And then Larbaud seized the hurdy-gurdy and began to turn its crank, the organ-grinder looking on benevolently; the ghosts of the Dôme, redeemed in that music, began to dance around the springtime chestnut tree. Later, you returned to your room, a posy of muguets in your lapel. Old Melanie was on her knees, slithering and scrubbing as usual, tiny amid her brooms. You made her stand up and, tearing the posy from your lapel, you made her a gift of those portentous little white flowers. When Melanie, reduced to tears, pressed them to her desiccate lips, you understood how a whole primaveral season can be gifted in a handful of lilies-of-the-valley.
Fragrant mornings in Sanary by the Latin sea! Monsieur Duparc, your fencing master, is already going down the rugged path among the fig trees: you’ve just had your morning lesson on a platform of greenery, beneath pines creaking in the wind like so many brigantine masts. Still with mask and foil, you contemplate from above the little universe of forms singing for the sun. To your left is the estate house; on the terrace, Badi, Morera, and Raquel are painting with eyes turned to the sea. Behind the building, hidden in the tangled vegetation, Butler15 sets up his easel, already absorbed by a colour, the enigmatic green suggested by the olive groves. Further off, the round threshing floor can be seen. Madame Fine, the villa owner, is seated at its edge. She counts, chooses, and adores her narcissus bulbs. Around you, sunny hillsides, vineyards, and olive trees bathed in radiance extend to the horizon. In front lies the Bay of Sanary: purple-coloured sea, backdrop of mountains. Houses — white, sky-blue, pink — are perched along its shoreline like a flock of sleeping doves. You begin to feel a euphoria purer than wine, and something like the prelude to a song flutters in your being as you follow the path through the fig trees down to the sea. Beetles black and blue flee from between your feet. Pebbles roll, seashells crunch beneath your sandals. Snails draw their shiny trails across steep, mossy rock faces. High in the sky now, the sun arouses all vital juices, and a resinous fragrance descends, as do you, from earth to sea. And suddenly, a great indigo revelation among the cypresses: the Mediterranean. There, as usual, Yvonne is waiting for you. No bond exists between you and this subtle adolescent girl, only curiosity and amazement, the exchange between two strange worlds that meet by chance. You do not know how you appear in her eyes, in what measure or form; but in yours, this grave creature is no more than an object of contemplation, and your spirit is tranquil as you look at her now, as you might regard a palm tree shimmering in the noonday sun. She is stretched out on the sand, friend of the sun, blood-relative of the water; her nudity has that taut, contained aspect of the bud before it can be called a rose; the sun plays on the golden down that covers her; and as you look at her, a memory comes to mind — in the orchard in Maipú at siesta time, a colour of velvety quince. Yvonne’s eyes are green and childlike, eyes of a mountain falcon, like those of Queen Guinevere; but through the infancy of those eyes emerges a deep light, as though many buried eyes were yet peering out from them. The voice of your companion is sylvan and childlike, but it has a refined quality of delicately wrought music, as if through her voice myriad other voices, long dead, were still singing. She speaks to you of her château, in Avignon, and of a solitude established amid old smells, cold suits of armour, and the eternal gaze of portraits. Or she talks about her grandfather, the commodore, adrift in a dream of Asian springtimes, of which he retains withered memories and evergreen melancholy. You respond by evoking the pampas of your country, or by offering fragments of an inchoate song thrumming within you, which now becomes a hymn of praise for the glades of Provence, in whose shade you might have conversed with a centaur. Or your praise is for this sea, its murmur perhaps resonant of the ancient voices of Jason or Ulysses; the same sea where, on a bed of coral and sponge, still lies the cranium of old Palinurus, who one night fell asleep at the helm of Aenaeus’s ship. And as you talk on, Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, watches you from afar in silent desperation. Then you enter the sea, with Yvonne’s hand in yours, the warm surf roiling and curling round your knees, and you have the impression of making your way now, as in Maipú, through a hot, dense flock of lambs.
You might have prolonged that beautiful time and used the best of those summery hours to build an eternity. But the sun has entered Libra, and the grapevines are turning red with the approach of autumn. In the morning and afternoon, you and your friends have been picking grapes in Madame Fine’s vineyard. Bunches of dust-covered grapes have enriched wicker baskets, and now they’re in the winepress, awaiting their Dionysian transformation. At night there will be a rustic dance on the hill. Badi, Morera, and Butler are busy preparing the house, while Madame Fine methodically explores the nooks and crannies of her wine cellar. It is the eve of your departure, and in the appearance of things you seem to divine a gesture of farewell. Hours later, in the middle of the night, you guide the guests along the path to the house. Darkness, silence, and remoteness have moved Madame Aubert to tell a somber ghost story, and the imagination of your companions is already aroused when you all arrive at the hill. The big iron gate opens, creaking lugubriously… Well creaked, gate! One by one, the guests cross the threshold, their eyes adjusting uncertainly to the dark. Suddenly the women shriek: they’ve just bumped up against the dangling legs of a hanged man. Then they laugh, knocking down the two or three rag dolls that Badi has hung from the fig trees. And then a Bengal light sputters suddenly in the olive grove, hurts the eyes, flickers mercurially in the shadows, and illuminates the dance of two phantoms that cavort on the threshing floor, while someone, human or demon, howls among the still pines. When silence and darkness have been restored, all the lights of the house come on, and music breaks out. Madame Fine, on the terrace, offers the arriving guests the first wine of the evening. Couples spin on the terrace: Lieutenant Blanchard, almost a child, dances with Yvonne, who looks distant and alone in his arms. In the right corner of the terrace, the elderly dames, glass in hand, reminisce about their bygone glory days. In the left corner, three adolescent girls from Nîmes bring their golden heads together to exchange anxious impressions about a world not yet accessible to them, as their long fingers pick at the black grapes in a serving dish set out on the railing of the terrace, placed there by Butler with the intention of painting a still life. When the music stops, a chorus of voices can be heard in the pine grove singing an old harvest song, as well as the excited whispers of children assailing the fig trees under cover of dark. Later, as the moon rises over the hills, the dance continues on the wheat-threshing floor. You dance with Yvonne, and once again Lieutenant Blanchard, after giving you an anxious look, goes off among the olive trees in the orchard. You must speak to him tonight and tell him what the woman means to you. But when you go out to find him in the olive grove, you tell him only that you’re about to go away. You read surprise, pleasure, confusion in his childlike face. And hearing the fervour in his words, you feel you’re already far away, as if you’d left hours ago. But Lieutenant Blanchard doesn’t want to say goodbye yet; he wants to see you off tomorrow from his battleship. And so the next day you cross the waters of Toulon in a canoe that flies among the grey ships of war. You clamber up the ladder onto the deck of the Bretagne, where Blanchard leads you among the shadows of big cannons. To be sure, many vague toasts were then drunk in the officers’ canteen. Later, in his cabin of iron, Blanchard read you a few of his poems, in the tone of Rimbaud. Now it’s the final afternoon in Sanary, and you are alongside the Phoenician tower that still rises from the tip of the promontory: the sea laps at the rocks covered with black barnacles, and although there’s no wind, the pine trees lean in a combative posture, as if bent by an invisible mistral. Two shadows, Yvonne’s and yours, grow longer in parallel. You haven’t known what shape you assume in her eyes, but those eyes weep at the moment of truth. And finally you go back, solitary in body and soul. “Could have been! Could have been!” howls a demon from the distant hills.