In spite of everything, I seem to be getting better all the time at writing about what happens to me. Too bad I’m also doing worse.
The Dream
In a dream that stretched on and on, I was in a bedroom, at night, seated in a chair next to a large bed. In the bed, under the covers, sat a girl. She was at the uncertain age between the child and the young woman. She was busy playing with some things that she seemed to think interested me, in constant motion, arranging the things around her. I found it hard to believe she could be so absorbed in her play, like any little girl busily engaged in the sort of activity that makes little girls happy, and at the same time feel the almost purely spiritual pleasure of a deep love like the one I knew she felt for me. At times she seemed to be reading my thoughts and carrying on intentionally: she liked to show off for me. But then suddenly she would stop playing and put her face very close to mine, with imploring eyes in which there was a hint of precocious sadness and pain. And suddenly she would slip me a quick kiss and go on playing as before, and I was convinced again that she was almost entirely absorbed in that game of hers which I couldn’t figure out, with things I couldn’t name, but which I pretended to watch with great interest, the way one feigns interest in a child’s play when what one is really interested in is the child. At such moments she was just a child to me and I forgave her for what she was doing, the way one forgives a child who doesn’t realize what a bother he’s being. Her constant movement disturbed me by causing flickering interruptions in the waves of light and shadow coming from the footlamp with a green shade that stood opposite me, across the bed. There was also a touch of malice and premeditation in my forgiveness, because I knew that after indulging her for a while by showing an interest in her play I would ask for a kiss and she would cover me with hugs and kisses. Yet the minute I found myself kissing her, I felt I didn’t love her, that I had been less than honest with myself, and that I was only trying to make the best of a complicated situation I had gotten myself into. Then I kissed her on the cheeks, trying to avoid the big tears pouring down them, because when I came in contact with them I felt obliged to lick them away and they were getting heavier and saltier all the time.
At moments, it seemed, I was in the chair pulled up very close to the bed, at other moments at some indefinite distance from the bed, watching myself seated on the chair in a light suit. When I was in the chair, with her next to me, I felt the reality of things without being aware that I felt it and I was in anguish, knowing I would catch myself either staring at her or doing things I hadn’t meant to do. At other times she was playing so far away from me that not a sound came from any of her movements, which were like the gestures in silent movies shown without music. But then I became aware of that silence, and my own, and realized I couldn’t say a word because the person sitting in the chair next to her probably wasn’t me but someone else: her boyfriend, whom her parents knew and therefore allowed into her room to talk to her.
When I was far from the bed, watching myself seated in the chair, wearing my light suit, I was less anguished because she and “I” — the “I” at an indefinite distance from me — were much more in harmony with each other.
One of the times I was next to her, she had a baby’s body and a very large head. She was playing with a sheet of paper, wrapping it around her shoulders or sometimes her entire tiny self. The paper made a loud crackling sound. Her parents, who were in the next room, leaned over the foot of their bed to watch us through the connecting door, which was open. Suddenly the mother appeared before me in her nightgown and said, “I never would have expected this victory of you.” How those words made me suffer!. . I felt my betrayal and the pain of the person betrayed as she yielded the victory to me. . I looked for my hat, which was in a different place each time I reached for it: I couldn’t get hold of it or leave. But then — suddenly I thought of this lie — I said: “My dear lady, the fact is that I’m very much in love with one of your daughter’s girlfriends and I’ve stopped by to ask your daughter about the woman I love. I was going past the house and I saw the light on inside, so I was encouraged to ring the bell and she let me in.” No sooner had I spoken than the girl was crying her eyes out and what I had said was beginning to come true. .
“As usual, I understood only when I woke up. Then I began to put things together and it was like the pieces of a puzzle falling into place: her parents had been awakened by the crackling of the paper, she had cried because she knew I loved another woman, and so on. But what most amazed me when I woke up was to realize that her mother was really my mother.
“I was thinking about physical and human laws when I remembered an impression I’d had just before falling asleep and, again, as I came out of the dream: that I was watching my desires go by like clouds in a checkered sky. As the dream unfolded, the pattern had broken up, but I had gone on thinking and feeling as if it were still whole, the fragments somehow held together, forming a picture so well disguised behind another picture that my mother could be hidden in hers. .”
The young man does not want to relate events in the order in which they occurred, nor does he want to speak about the characters connected with the woman he loved, not even the members of her family. Instead, he feels like doing something ridiculous, like describing her nose:
“Often while living at her side I concentrated all my attention and my adoration on her nose. It seemed to me, as well, that many strange thoughts drifting by in the air got into my head and came out my eyes to settle on her nose. I was convinced, then, that the way she sat, perfectly upright, the way she raised her head, sticking out her chin, and everything else that was physically and spiritually beautiful in her was a trick her nature played on the mind and soul to incline them toward adoring her nose.
“Her nose stood out in her face like a passionate desire not openly declared, rather, just barely insinuated and perhaps even taken back a little after having been insinuated, not without malice. When I looked her full in the face and her big blue eyes were half closed, her nose showed how sensitive it was to the tears streaming from those eyes and drying on it, their traces still faintly visible in the two tiny pale bumps shining on the very tip of the nose.
“When I was the one insinuating passionate desires — with words, now: clumsy words coming out to be heard like grotesquely shy men stepping out to dance for the first time — it was her nose that seemed to be listening and — since her eyes were almost shut — even looking at me. And when she leaned out the window to see what was going on in the street, it seemed her nose was waiting for the opera glasses that would slowly settle on it.”
“I can’t spend time thinking why I need to explain the horrible thought floating around in my mind today. The fact is that right now I feel like spreading it out on this page.
“First I sat on the bed and gazed at the little table with the walnut stain, then I looked around at the number of other things in my room. . I realize I feel like saying what all the things in my room are like so I can put off remembering exactly how the thought came to me, but I won’t torture myself all that much over it, since it’s only the first time I have to remember it. . Suddenly I felt a clear space inside my mind, where a sort of airplane was floating. I’ll assume my eyes were looking outward as well as inward and that, being round, when they moved looking inward they also moved looking outward, which explains why I was — if only vaguely — aware of the objects in the room. But I was focusing my attention on the airplane floating in the clear space inside me.