He was pretending to be there. His body was there, but his soul was absent: it had escaped by a hundred fissures, it was in flight, towards the past, or towards to-morrow, everywhere or anywhere which was not here, now. He was very sick. It would be impossible to find him, to unite with him.
We looked at each other across miles and miles of separation. Our eyes did not meet. His thoughts enwrapped him in glass. This glass shut out the warmth of life, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of life, shut out the breath of things that came too near, shut out the odor of men, the real sound of their voices, the smell of their words, of their clothes, the warmth of their bodies. It shut out all the exhalations of life, the temperature. He had built a glass house around himself, a glass invented to shut out the evil rays of the sun. He wanted life to filter through, to come to him distilled, not crude, juicy, perspiring, but sifted, arranged, digested. The glass wall of his thoughts was a prism which eliminated the bad, the fetid; and with this artificial elimination of the bad life itself was affected, altered. With the bad was lost the warmth, the nearness. It was a glass which human breath could not stain. It was created out of a desire not to be touched by life in the flesh, a desire to keep his body perpetually out of the reach of pain. And it had grown too thick. He did not hear me coming near him, he could not feel the hot breath of human love…
There was no change in his love, but the mask was back again as soon as he returned to Paris. The whole pattern of his superficial life began again, his artificial ideal law-making began again. He said: “We must work, we must give ourselves wholly to work.” He made an austere inhuman pattern. Slaving. The opium of work. I did not want to write all day. I wanted my life, my loves, my relationships, people, warmth. He made no room for life. He had to live by a pattern. This period in Paris, he determined, was to be a parenthesis between escapades to the south. Three months of severe work, of austerity, of no communication. He could never live except absolutely on one side of his nature. In the south it was all openness, tenderness, sensibility, confession, intimacy. Now it was work, celebrity, the public, his “business.” He could not keep both going as I did. Or slide easily from one into the other.
To-day it was time to work, to cover up a secret sorrow of some kind, a sorrow which was in reality a kind of sullenness towards the limitations, the imperfections, the flaws in life.
He had stopped talking as we talked down south. He was conversing. It was the beginning of his salon life. There were always people around with whom he kept up a tone of lightness and humor. In between the salon talk he worked intensely as a teacher. There was always singing or violin playing in the salon.
He made this absolute, inflexible plan without regard for what I expected, without regard for life. Life would flower again in the south. Meanwhile it was to be ignored. I was to write, write, write. I was to be alone, and in the evenings appear in his salon and talk with the tip of my tongue about the surface of my life, about everything that was far from my thoughts. There was to be no more intimacy and no more exploration of the bottoms of the sea. Whatever was in my mind must not be shown, shared, mentioned. In that salon, with its stained-glass windows, its highly polished floor, its dark couches rooted into the Arabian rugs, its soft lights and precious books, its silver cigarette boxes and piano shining like jet, the self, chaos, feelings, were as out of place as a horse and carriage, as a drunken sailor or a cow.
This was the winter of artifice. One could not be oneself and at the same time a fashionable musician bowing on the stage with stard shirt and tabac blond on one’s handkerchief. So he discarded his real self altogether and left me stranded in the company of an ultra-civilized man leading a court life of ceremonies.
At least he would have left me stranded if I had kept my promise to break with all my friends.
In reality I did not suffer because of the fact that my father was working and bowing and conversing; the truth is I began to suffer an imaginary sorrow, a remembered sorrow. I began to suffer what I imagined I might have suffered if I had counted entirely on my father for a human relationship. While I reproached him inwardly for having no gift for human relationship, he reproached me aloud for eluding him because he sensed I was not living up to our pact of isolation.
Although in reality he had not abandoned me, but simply resumed his artificial role. I felt impelled to act out the scene of abandon from beginning to end. I wept at the isolation in which my father’s superficiality left me. I told him I had surrendered all my friends and activities for him. I told him I could not live on the talks we had in his salon. Each phrase I uttered was almost automatic.
It was the scene I knew best, the one most familiar to me even though it had become an utter lie. It was the same scene which had impressed itself on me as a child, and out of which I had made a life pattern. As I talked with tears in my eyes, I pitied myself for having loved and trusted my father again, for having given myself to him, for having expected everything from him. At the same time I knew that this was not true. My mind ran in two directions as I talked, and so did my feelings. I continued the habitual scene of pain: “I cannot live this way, I need warmth and gestures. I do not believe in love which does not express itself. I do not believe in life unless it has continuity.” And the other voice he could not hear saying: “I gave myself to you once, and you hurt me. I am glad I did not give myself to you again. Deep down I have no faith at all in you, as a human being.”
He received all this very sadly. Said he had never been able to do two things at once: either he was a human being in love, obsessed with feeling, pouring all of himself into a relationship, or he was the pianist Paris loved who had to play the role of homme du monde.
I wanted to laugh and say: “You know that’s all untrue, I never isolated myself at all.” But the scene which I acted best and felt the best was that of abandon. I felt impelled to act it over and over again. I knew all the phrases. I was familiar with the emotions it aroused. It came so easily to me, even though I knew all the time that, except for the moment when he left us years ago, I had never really experienced abandon except by way of my imagination, except through my fear of it, through my misinterpretation of reality.
There seemed to be a memory deeper than the usual one, a memory in the tissues and cells of the body on which we tattoo certain scenes which give a shape to one’s soul and life habits. It was in this way I remembered most vividly that as a child a man had tortured me; still I could not help feeling tortured or interpreting the world to-day as it had appeared to me then in the light of my misunderstanding of people’s motives. I could not help telling my father that he was destroying my absolute love; yet I knew this was not true because it was not he who was my absolut love. But this statement was untrue only in time; that is, it was my father who had endangered my faith in the absolute, it was his behaviour which I did not understand as a child which destroyed my faith in life and in love.
I knew I had deceived my father as to the extent of my love, but the thought in my mind was: what would I be feeling now if I had entrusted all my happiness to my father, if I had truly depended on him for joy and sustenance? I would be thoroughly despairing and ready to die. This thought increased my pain, and my face showed such anguish that my father was overwhelmed.
After this scene he continued his marionette life. Life was a chain of concerts, of soirees, of hairdressers and shirtmakers, of correspondence, of newspaper clippings, of scrap books being fed, of files being fattened, of telephone calls during which he talked like a man interested in who would attend the funeral more than the fact of death itself. He liked me to visit him in my astrakhan fur, shedding perfume, so that he might introduce me as a Polish princess. The women were distressed. I seemed to have been given a privileged place which had never been offered to them. They felt uneasy and wondered if their own place was endangered, diminished, why it was that little noses, faience eyes, porcelain hands, marquise feet and lace gestures did not retain his attention as they had before.