by
Anne Serre
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Still, it’s strange that Guillaume didn’t do more to get her back. She’s baffled by this. He had suffered a terrible blow, of course, when she told him about her passion for Jude the Obscure: but after that? Why did he lend so much credence to her story? Why didn’t he just say to himself: I’ll place my body between them, I’ll lead Anna away, I’ll take her on a trip somewhere, move her out of harm’s way and get her back? In the past, the moment a tiny thunderstorm appeared on the horizon he would leap into action, with Anna under his arm; nothing, but nothing, could be allowed to jeopardize their great romance. So why hadn’t he intervened this time round? Had he immediately thrown in the towel — this man who never gave in? Had he panicked, overwhelmed by the novelty of the situation? Or had he simply grown a little tired of this relationship where there was never a cloud? Were she to question him about this, he would undoubtedly reply, “No, no, it’s not that at all.” But why had he made so little effort of late? Why had he made so little effort to please her and charm her? Did he think she’d be smitten with him forever? Yet it wasn’t like him to rest on his laurels. Impulsive, overflowing with life, Guillaume always wanted to explore new paths, to push on just for the pleasure of advancing and feeling himself at work. What on earth had happened in the secrecy of his soul that he should let go of Anna and allow her to escape? Might there have also been another woman? Or had he, too — since they were so well-aligned that even the most trivial incidents in their lives ran curiously parallel much of the time — found himself at a turning, a crossroads, at precisely the same moment as her? Perhaps he was just desperate to break away? Perhaps things weren’t so awful after all?
[...] She has always liked people who slave away at things. She likes it when they go to great lengths to realize their full potential in the execution of some colossal task, like Guillaume scaling some incredible peak. She has perhaps done this herself, in order to survive. So she watches Thomas making this considerable effort to convene his entire life and all of his dreams — without moving a finger, without batting an eyelid — while they stroll about, sit at a table together eating carpaccio, thumb through a book or two at a flea market, or admire a beautiful door in the street. It gives her food for thought and it moves her.
[...] no one likes to abandon a book they’re writing, you want to abide there, to be in that river forever. It was so beautiful to have found it, so unhoped-for, so grandiose. It’s not every day you find a book to write, a love affair to experience. In general, they’re things that elude you, you spend your time chasing after them, saddened to be exiled. [...]
[...] But after a while, doesn’t one feel something truer to life and more authentic establishing itself in your existence? Can a life without sorrow really be called a life?
My education was still not complete. After the school on the island where being happy was the first rule, a last college smoothed out my seventeen years. A domestic management school [...] I was to learn to keep house, to cook, to bake cakes. I had already learnt a bit of embroidery, at eight. It was now expected that I prepare myself to become a housewife. They found a school near a lake, Lake Zug, renowned for its cherry flans.
made me chuckle
— Would you like a coffee? She asked as a pretext to get him to come in.
He stayed on the threshold. She was standing, in a short and transparent nightdress. He was going to say: “you can sleep easy now, I found a way to get him to go.” But before he said that he stopped short, his lips pursed, and looked her up and down. Finally he said:
— I’ll call in the morning.
With the despair of a woman scorned, she heard his car pull away.
Ulisses’s gaze robbed her of sleep. She looked herself all over in the mirror in order to figure out what Ulisses had seen. And she found herself attractive. Yet he hadn’t wanted to come in.
And so you didn’t want any more of that. And you stopped the possibility of pain, which no one gets away with. You just stopped and found nothing beyond it. I’m not saying I have much, but I still have intense searching and violent hope. Not that quiet and sweet voice of yours. And I don’t cry, if I need to one day I’ll scream, Lóri. I’m in the middle of a struggle and much closer to whatever people call a poor human victory than you, but it is a victory. I could already have you with my body and soul. I’ll wait for years if I must for you too to have a soul-body in order to love. We’re still young, we can waste some time without wasting our whole lives. But look at everyone around you and see what we’ve made of ourselves and considered our daily victory. We haven’t loved, that most of all. We haven’t accepted what we don’t understand because we don’t want to look stupid. We’ve hoarded things and reassurances because we don’t have each other. We don’t have any joy that hasn’t already been catalogued. We’ve built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, we’re afraid they’re traps. We haven’t surrendered to ourselves, because that would be the start of a long life and we’re afraid of that. We’ve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you’re afraid. We’ve organized smiley clubs and associations where you are served with or without soda. We’ve tried to save ourselves but without using the word salvation in order to avoid the embarrassment of being innocents. We haven’t used the word love so as not to have to recognize its contexture of hate, love, jealousy and so many other contradictories. We’ve kept our death a secret in order to make our life possible. Many of us make art because we don’t know what the other thing is like. We’ve disguised our indifference with false love, knowing that our indifference is disguised anguish. We’ve disguised with a small fear the greatest fear of all and that’s why we never speak of what really matters. Speaking about what really matters is considered a blunder. We haven’t worshipped because we have the sensible pettiness to remember on time the false gods. We haven’t been pure and naive in order not to laugh at ourselves and so that at each day’s close we can say “at least I didn’t do something stupid” and that way we don’t feel confused before putting out the light. We’ve smiled in public about things we wouldn’t smile about alone. We’ve called our candor weakness. We have feared each other, most of all. And all this we consider our daily victory. But I escaped that, Lóri, I escaped with the ferocity of someone escaping the plague, Lóri, and I’ll wait until you too are more ready.
ulisses monologue
— Yes, said Ulisses. But you’re wrong. I don’t give you advice. I just — I—I think that what I’m really doing is waiting. Waiting perhaps for you to give yourself advice, I don’t know, Lóri, I swear I don’t know, sometimes it seems like I’m wasting my time, sometimes it seems that on the contrary, there’s no more perfect, though worrisome, way to use time: the time of waiting for you. Do you know how to pray?
— What? she asked with a start.
— Not pray the Lord’s Prayer, but ask something of yourself, ask the maximum of yourself?
— I don’t know if I know, I’ve never tried. Is that a piece of advice? she asked with irony.
He looked flustered:
— I think it was. Forget what I said.
— My mystery is simple: I don’t know how to be alive.
— Because you only know, or only knew, how to be alive through pain.
— That’s right.
— And don’t you know how to be alive through pleasure?
— I almost do. That’s what I was trying to tell you.
[...] She knew the world of people who anxiously hunt down pleasures and don’t know how to wait for them to arrive on their own. And it was so tragic: you only had to look around a nightclub, in the half light: it was the search for pleasure that doesn’t come by and of itself. She’d only gone with some of her men from the past, maybe two or three times, and hadn’t wanted to go back. Because the search for pleasure, when she’d tried it, had been bad water: she’d put her mouth on the tap, which tasted like rust and only gave two or three drops of lukewarm water: it was dry water. No, she’d thought, better real suffering than forced pleasure. She wanted Ulisses’s left hand and knew she wanted it, but she did nothing, since she was enjoying the very thing she was needing: being able to have that hand if she stretched out her own.