One morning — by then we’d known each other for about ten or eleven years — we were once again sitting on the covered terrace of a café in St-Germain. He’d acquired a certain nobility of appearance and had discovered a way of combing his thinning hair, which did not look thin so much as lighter in colour. He seemed in good spirits after the misfortunes of recent years and he told me about the enormous progress he’d made in his writing. He had, he said, borrowing my ironic tone, completed eighty-three point five per cent of his entire body of work. Then he put on his confidential face and grew more serious: he had only two texts to complete now, a novel to be entitled Saturn and the long-postponed essay on pain. Given the novel’s technical complexities, he would leave that to last and he now felt strong enough to return to his experiment and again stop taking his medication. He thought that, this time, he’d be able to last out long enough and be able to start writing as soon as he’d learned whatever it was he needed to learn. “Over the past few years working in my profession I’ve seen a lot of pain, I’ve even controlled it; I’ve both fought it and permitted it, according to what was in the patient’s best interests; I’ve suppressed it completely with morphine, as well as with other medications and drugs that can’t be found on the open market and to which only doctors have access. Many are as closely guarded as state secrets; what you can buy in pharmacies and dispensaries is only a tiny fraction of what’s available, but there’s a black market in everything. I’ve seen pain now, I’ve observed it, gauged it, measured it, but now it’s my turn to suffer it again, and not only physical pain, which is commonplace enough, but psychic pain, the pain that makes the thinking brain want only to stop thinking, but it can’t. I’m convinced that consciousness is the source of man’s greatest suffering and there’s no cure for it, no way to blunt it, the only end is death, though even that you can’t be sure of.” This time I didn’t try to dissuade him, not even in the oblique, jokey way I had when he first announced his intention of embarking on this personal research. We had too much respect for each other and so I just said: “Well, keep me posted.”
I can’t honestly say that he did, in that he didn’t keep me informed of his progress or of his thoughts on the subject, perhaps because he could only talk about it indirectly, by describing feelings and symptoms and states of mind, which he didn’t in the least mind discussing and so, in the letters I received in subsequent months — I was commuting between Madrid and Italy at the time — he never said much about what was happening to him or what he was thinking, his letters were even more laconic than usual, but he did sometimes let slip the occasional disquieting remark — explicit or enigmatic, confessional or cryptic, depending on the context. I’ve just today been re-reading some remarks of his that fall into the second category, remarks that usually came at the end of his letters, just before he signed off or even after that, in a postscript: “Pain thought pleasure and future are the four numbers necessary for and sufficient to my interest.” “Nothing sullies one more than an excess of modesty: pay up rather than be your own Shylock.” “Let’s just do our best not to fall off the back of the train.” “If you don’t desert the desert, the desert will desert you, not in the sense that it will leave you, but in the sense that it will make a desert of you.” “Best wishes and don’t let anyone have it easy. They might make you pay for it.” That’s the sort of thing he wrote. There was more of a sense of continuity, even a kind of progress, in the first category of remarks: “I don’t feel like writing, I don’t feel like working or travelling or thinking or even despairing,” he said and then, in the next letter: “I read so as to give some semblance of being occupied.” Some time afterwards, I thought that perhaps he’d recovered slightly, for he spoke openly — for the first time — of the experiment on which he was engaged: “As for my ethical experiment in endogenous pain, I’m still waiting for the explosion of the time bomb I set ticking at the beginning of summer, but I don’t know the day or the hour it’s due to go off. You see how things are, but don’t waste too much time thinking about it, it’s too pathetic to merit any deep consideration, and if there can be said to be something titanic about all this, the truth is that I feel more like a midget.” I don’t know what I wrote in reply nor if I even asked him about it, for we forget what’s in our own letters the moment we put them in the letter box, or even before that, while we’re still licking the envelope and sealing it down. He continued to give me only the bare outlines of his inactivity: “A bit of medicine, very little wielding of the pen, rather more withdrawal. Dead wet leaves.” I remembered that, on his first and failed attempt, he’d mentioned a period of six months as the time he would need to go without his medication in order to achieve what he was after, and so, with the arrival of winter, I expected that his time bomb would either explode or he’d have to stop the experiment, even if that meant being rushed into hospital again. But that season only contributed to a worsening of his suffering, which he nevertheless still judged to be insufficient: “For two months now I’ve been more dead than alive. I don’t write, don’t read, don’t listen, don’t see. I hear the distant rumble of thunder but I don’t know if the storm is approaching or moving off, whether it’s in the future or in the past. I’ll close now: the vulture is already pecking at my left hemisphere.” I assumed he was referring to the migraine tormenting him.
Another two months passed by with hardly any news and, at the end of that time, I received a phone call in Madrid from Eliane. After their separation I’d lost all contact with her but I still couldn’t manage to feel surprised, instead I immediately thought the worst. “Xavier asked me to call you,” she said, and since there was no indication as to when that had happened, I wasn’t sure whether he’d asked her to do so before he died or if he’d asked her that very moment, assuming he was still alive. “He suffered a serious relapse and he’s in hospital, possibly for some time, but he can’t write to you for the moment and he didn’t want you to worry too much. He’s been very ill, but he’s better now.” Her words were as acceptably conventional as one would expect in such a phone call, but I did manage to ask her two things, even though that meant obliging a memory, that is, someone who was a memory twice over, to speak: “Did he try to kill himself?” “No,” she replied, “it wasn’t that, but he has been very ill.” “Are you going to go back to him?” “No,” she replied, “that’s not possible.”
During the final two years of our friendship, Xavier and I wrote and saw each other less frequently, I only went to Paris once and he never again visited Madrid. He often either neglected to answer my letters or took a long time to reply, and everything requires a certain rhythm. There are other things I could say about him, but I don’t want to talk about them now, they’re not things I actually experienced. The last time we saw each other was on a very brief trip I made to Paris. We had lunch at Balzar; he’d got a bit fatter — his chest had filled out — and it rather suited him. He smiled a lot like someone for whom going out to lunch is something of an event. He told me cautiously and briefly that, during our silence, he’d finally written his essay on pain. He said he felt sure it would be published, but said nothing about the text itself. Now he was working, continuously but with enormous difficulty, on his last book, Saturn. It all felt rather remote: for me, his life had become even more fragmentary, more spectral, as if, on the final pages of the defective book, there was now only punctuation, or as if I’d begun to feel that he too were merely a memory or some fictitious character. Although he was almost bald by then, his face was still handsome. I remember thinking that the veins on his forehead, even more prominent now, stood out like high relief. We said goodbye there, in rue des Écoles.