If distorting his memories provoked such anguish in him, even deeper and more secret was the reason why, the next day, his anguish was gone. The reason was the same one that made writing the story necessary for him and more intensely pleasurable than he could explain. Just as his mind had erased the ugly memory of the toy shop manager rudely breaking into his most cherished thoughts, so now it hid from him his deepest and most desperate reason for wanting to write the story. His mind was able to hide the reason from him in spite of himself, using the interminable arguments he had developed in the passage he was writing, but he knew what it was: that she no longer loved him.
“The person I was before meeting her was too worn out to feel anything but indifference. If we had met years before I would have consumed my energies in loving her, but, not having found her then, I had consumed all my energies in thinking: I had done so much thinking that I had discovered how vain and false thought is when it regards itself as the preeminent force directing our lives. And yet, despite knowing this, I had gone on thinking, wasting my energies in thought, until I felt unpleasantly worn out. The person I am now can find rest in the anxiety of loving as he pleases, but between the 19th of May — three days after our story began — and the 6th of June — the day I myself interrupted the story because early the next morning I had to leave the town where she lived — in the space of the eighteen days between those two dates, I found rest as well in her large blue eyes. There was a wide space, too, between those eyes and their brows, and from this vaporous blue vault with its dab of light blue shadow seemed to come whatever it was in her eyes that released me from my thoughts and made me love her and reach out toward her with my whole being.”
Although his mind hid the reason for writing the story from him, he may have felt something like a breath of misfortune following close behind him. It was, after all, his own mind that was preventing the impression that she no longer loved him from entering his thoughts, not only by burying it under the arguments with which he explained his motives for writing the story but also by clinging to the dates, as if securing them could also secure time and ensure her love for him. But that night of the 6th of June, after he had been with her, when he was in the hotel room with me, there was a moment when I detected the small burden of doubt still covertly weighing on his mind. It happened when he was telling me about her, wondering how long it would be before he saw her again, and, looking at the calendar, he noticed the number 6, which marked the day we were on, and said, “What a strange 6! It’s like an animal sitting there. . with its tail curled around it.” That was when I saw the small burden of doubt still covertly weighing on his mind, and it must have been when he felt the breath of misfortune following close behind him.
Many years before, when his thinking had begun to torture him, he had found rest in another pair of blue eyes. From among the things he wrote then I have chosen the ones that best gave me the feeling for what he knew about himself. They were three fragments: The Visit, The Street and The Dream.
The Visit
Last night I was forced to attend to some thoughts. At moments they tired me and then I wanted to ignore them, if only for a few seconds, but I knew how important they were and that I couldn’t overlook them. I allowed myself to rest only if someone interrupted me to ask me something; doing anything to distract myself would have been cheating. It was all right when some spontaneous event interrupted my thoughts, but I mustn’t be lying in wait for the opportunity, on the contrary: even if the opportunity presented itself and I was glad for the rest, I had to regret the interruption. Something similar used to happen to me as a child when I had to recite a lesson I didn’t know: if I needed to cough I was glad because it postponed the torment and, meantime, something important might happen to get me off the hook, but if I coughed on purpose the teacher caught on. Back in those days it would have seemed incredible to me that now, as a grownup, I’d oblige myself to do something as if the teacher were inside me.
Late in the night, my sisters brought a friend home with them: a blonde girl with a big, clear, happy face. Before the night was out I told the girl that, looking at her, I had found rest from some thoughts that had been torturing me, and that I hadn’t even realized when the thoughts had left me. She asked me what the thoughts had been like, and I told her they had been useless thoughts, that my head was like a gym where the thoughts were exercising, and that when she’d come in the thoughts had jumped out the windows.
The Street
Today I was remembering something that happened to me a few nights ago. That night I had met a woman and we were walking along a deserted street with forbidding white walls — factory or warehouse walls — on either side. The sidewalks seemed to have been born from the foot of the walls and were pleasant and friendly, but the streetlamps, which also seemed to have been born of the walls, wore little white hats and looked ridiculous. Since it was a moonless night, the lamps provided the only light, and it seemed that all they lit up was the air and the silence.
We were walking slowly. I had asked her not to speak to me for a while because I wanted to think about something. But I couldn’t concentrate on that thought because my head was busy anticipating the moment when we’d leave one spot of light only to be caught up in the next one waiting to welcome us with the same stupid glow.
Suddenly I stopped and turned to look back at a train going by, several blocks behind us. She took a few more steps before stopping. I don’t know what went through her mind. I had always been interested in the spectacle of the train going by, perhaps that was why I had turned to have another look at it; but, as it happened, that night I didn’t feel like seeing it and hadn’t meant to turn: it seemed as if at that moment I’d had someone else inside me who had come out without my consent, awakened by the clatter of the train. But then I became aware of yet another character, also sprung from me, who had gone on looking in the direction in which I had been walking and who was trying to impose his will on the previous one and pull me forward. If neither of these characters made sense and both wanted to break away from me, it was because I, my central character, was lost in my own complications. When I discovered this I tried to banish them both, get a grasp on reality and do something positive: so I looked at my hands. Then, on an impulse — it was another way of acting normal, coming back up to the surface of things — I caught up with her, and, since the street was still deserted, I kissed her. But her face was so strange when I kissed her that I realized it had been the same as with the train: I hadn’t felt like kissing her, she had been kissed by the character who had turned to look back. And when I recovered and tried to be positive once more and took her arm to go on walking, I felt it was the character pulling straight ahead who had taken over again. After proceeding a few steps, I stopped to consider what was happening to me. I reached for a cigarette, put it between my lips, and, since the emery of the matchbox was worn and I couldn’t get a spark, I left her in the middle of the street and went to strike my match on a wall.
When we had left the street behind and I was still thinking about what had happened to me there, I decided it wasn’t the same street now as before, because my match had left a scar on a wall and gone on burning after I’d dropped it on the sidewalk born of that wall. Later, as if awakening from a dream and understanding what had happened in it, it seemed to me that the forbidding white walls had exchanged a look across the silent air lit by the lamps with the ridiculous little hats. Yet I can’t say what the air or the silence was like that night in that street.