On returning to the hotel, I met some young women, mostly from Austria, who had come to Venice to enjoy the first fine days of its flowerless spring. One of them had features that, without reminding me of Albertine, appealed to me through the same freshness of complexion and the same cheerful, humorous eyes. Soon I felt that I was starting to say the same things to her as I had said to Albertine at first, and that I was hiding the same pain when she told me that she would not see me the next day, for she was going to Verona, and immediately I too felt the desire to go to Verona. It was not to last, she was due to return to Austria and I would never see her again, but I was already vaguely jealous, as one is on starting to fall in love, and, while watching her charming, enigmatic face, I wondered if she too loved women, if what she shared with Albertine, the luminous complexion and bright eyes, the friendly, open airs that seduced everyone around her, and which arose as much from her total lack of interest in the actions of others as from the exaggeratedly childish lies with which she attempted to disguise her own actions, was not part of the morphological constitution of women who love other women. Was this the part of her that escaped my rational analysis, attracted me and caused me anxiety (perhaps the deeper cause of my attraction through its drive toward potential suffering), that gave me when I saw her so much pleasure and sadness, like those invisible magnetic elements in the air of certain countries that cause us to feel so ill at ease? Alas, I was never to know. When I tried to read her expression I would have liked to say, “You should tell me, I would be interested to learn one of the laws of human natural history,” but she would never tell me; she professed a particular repulsion for this vice and maintained a studied coldness with her female friends. This might even have been evidence that she had something to hide, perhaps she had been teased or ashamed because of it, and the airs she adopted in order to prevent people believing it were like the eloquent distance kept by animals from men who have beaten them. As for finding out about her life, this was impossible; even in Albertine’s case I had taken so long to discover the slightest thing! It had taken her death to loosen people’s tongues, so prudent and circumspect had Albertine been in her behavior, just like this young woman! And was I sure of knowing anything even about Albertine? And then just as the conditions of life that we desire the most become of no interest to us if we cease to love the person who unknown to us made us desire them because she allowed us to live by her side and, as far as we were able, to give her pleasure, so it is with certain kinds of intellectual curiosity. The scientific importance that I placed in knowing what kind of desire was hidden beneath the pale pink petals of her cheek, in the sunless light of her pale eyes glowing like early dawn, in the days that she never discussed, would doubtless disappear when I no longer felt the slightest love for Albertine or when I no longer felt the slightest love for this young woman. In the evenings I went out alone, surrounded by this enchanted city where I found myself in the middle of unknown neighborhoods like a character from the Arabian Nights. It was most unusual for me not to chance upon some spacious, unknown square of which no guide or traveler had informed me. I had plunged into a network of alleyways, the calli. In the evening, with their tall, waisted chimneys turning the brightest of pinks as they were caught in the sunlight, there was a whole garden in flower on the roof-tops, with such a variety of shades that it looked as if a connoisseur of tulips from Haarlem or Delft had planted a garden on top of the city. And moreover the sheer proximity of the houses made each window the frame which a kitchen-girl looked dreamily through, a girl sitting having her hair combed by an old woman, whose face, half-hidden in shadow, seemed that of a witch—creating from the poor, silent individual houses, huddled together because of the extreme narrowness of the calli, a virtual exhibition bringing a hundred Dutch paintings together. Squeezed up against each other, these calli divided each part of Venice, sectioning it between a canal and the lagoon into a branching lattice of cracks, as if it had crystallized into this myriad of fragile, intricate forms. Suddenly, at the end of one of these little streets, the crystalline matter seemed to have produced a swelling. A vast, sumptuous campo of a size that I certainly could not have guessed, let alone found room for in this network of little streets, stretched out before my eyes, surrounded by enchanting palaces, in the pale light of the moon. It was one of those architectural ensembles toward which in other towns you are guided by streets that lead there, pointing the way. Here it seemed deliberately hidden in a criss-cross of alleyways, like those palaces in Oriental tales where a character who was led there by night and taken back home before morning is unable to find the magical dwelling and finally believes that he saw it only in his dreams. The next day I set off in search of my beautiful nocturnal palace, I followed calli which all looked the same and refused to give me the slightest indication, except to lead me further astray. Occasionally a vague allusion that I thought I recognized led me to believe that I would then see appear, in all the solitude of its silent and solitary confinement, the beautiful, exiled square. At which moment the evil genie, having taken on the appearance of a new calle, caused me to retrace my steps against my better intentions, and I suddenly found myself led back to the Grand Canal. And since between the memory of a dream and the memory of something real there is no great difference, I finally started wondering whether the strange drift into this somber fragment of Venetian crystallization, revealing to my moonlit meditations a great square surrounded by Romantic palaces, had not occurred while I was asleep.
But it was the desire not to lose for ever certain women, rather than certain squares, that kept me, for as long as I was in Venice, in a state of agitation which turned feverish the day my mother had fixed for our departure, when at the end of the day, our trunks having already left for the station by gondola, I read in the hotel register of guests due to arrive at the hotel the name of the Baroness Putbus and her entourage. Immediately the impression of all the hours of carnal pleasure that our departure would cause me to miss raised this desire, lying endemic within me, to the status of an emotion, in a flood of vagueness and melancholia; I asked my mother to postpone our departure for a few days; but the expression on her face, showing that she did not for a moment entertain my plea, or even take it seriously, aroused in my nerves, already exacerbated by the Venetian springtime, my old desire to resist a fictitious plot hatched against me by my parents, who imagined that I would be forced to obey, awakened that urge to struggle which formerly drove me brutally to impose my will on those whom I most loved, even if it meant that I would hasten to obey their wishes as soon as I had obtained their submission. I told my mother that I would not leave, but she, believing it more subtle to look as if she thought that I was not speaking in earnest, did not even deign to reply. I insisted that she would soon see whether I was in earnest or not. The porter came to deliver three letters, two for her, and one for me, which I put in my wallet with all the others without even looking at the envelope, and when the time came for her to leave for the station, followed by all my effects, I asked for a drink to be served me on the balcony overlooking the Canal and settled down to watch the sunset, while a musician, on a boat moored opposite the hotel, sang “O sole mio.”23 The sun sank lower in the sky. My mother would have nearly arrived at the station. Soon she would be gone, and I would be alone in Venice, alone with the sad knowledge that I had upset her and without her presence to console me. It was nearly time for the train to leave. My irrevocable solitude loomed so large that it seemed to me to have already started, and to be absolute. For I felt alone in the world, alienated from all things, and I was not calm enough to detach myself from my palpitating heart and impose some stability on the world around me. The city I saw before me was still Venice. Its personality and its name appeared to me as mendacious fictions that I no longer had the heart to relate to its stones. The palaces appeared reduced to their congruent parts and their portions of indifferent marble, and the waters to a combination of nitrogen and hydrogen, eternal and blind, anterior and exte
rior to Venice, ignorant of Turner and the Doges. And yet this unexceptional place was as alien as a place where you have just arrived, which does not yet know you, or a place that you have left and that has already forgotten you. There was nothing now that I could tell it about me, nothing of mine that I could invest it with, it forced me to withdraw within myself, I was no more than a beating heart and a mind anxiously following the words of “O sole mio.” However much I tried to anchor my thoughts to the familiar and beautiful curve of the Rialto, it appeared to me both proven and banal that the bridge was not only inferior, but as alien to the idea that I had gained of it as would be an actor whose blond wig and black doublet failed to persuade me that essentially he was Hamlet. Like the palaces, the Canal and the Rialto were bereft of the ideas that made them original and were dissolved into their crudely material elements. But at the same time this mediocre place seemed far distant from me. In the dock of the Arsenal, for a perfectly scientific reason, its latitude, things took on a peculiar aspect, as they do, even when they seem similar to those of our own country, once they are exiled to foreign climes, revealing their otherness; I felt that this horizon, however close, barely an hour away, was a far-flung curve of the Earth’s surface which the vagaries of travel had moored close beside me; so that the Arsenal dock, however trivial and distant, filled me with the same mixture of fear and disgust that I had experienced when as a child I accompanied my mother to the Deligny baths;24 for in that fantastical site composed of dark waters, delimited neither by the sun nor by the heavens and yet whose cabin-bound surrounds made us feel in communion with invisible depths lurking beneath human bodies clad in bathing-costumes, I had wondered whether these depths, hidden from ordinary mortals by a series of sheds that prevented them from being seen from the street, did not provide a direct entrance to the neighboring ice floes of the polar seas which already flowed through them, and if this narrow space were not precisely the open seas of the poles; this unsympathetic Venice, where I was to stay alone, seemed to me no less isolated and unreal, and it was my distress that the song “O sole mio,” rising like a lament for the Venice I had known, seemed to call to witness. Doubtless, if I had wanted to catch up with my mother and take the train with her, I should have stopped listening to it, I would have had to make up my mind to leave without an instant’s hesitation, but that was precisely what I could not do; I stayed motionless, incapable not only of rising to my feet but even of deciding that I wanted to stand up. My thoughts, most likely to avoid taking any decision, were entirely taken up in following the progress of the successive verses of “O sole mio,” mentally singing along with the singer, anticipating the moments when his voice would soar in flight, and letting myself rise and then fall back with him. Doubtless I was not in the slightest bit interested in this trivial song, which I had heard a hundred times before. Listening to it religiously all the way through brought pleasure neither to myself nor to anyone else. And, finally, none of the motifs of this vulgar romance, all of which I knew in advance, could help me with the decision that I needed to take; although each of the verses which went by in turn became an obstacle to effectively taking that decision or rather obliged me to take the contrary decision not to leave, for it kept me waiting. In this way the intrinsically pleasureless business of listening to “O sole mio” became imbued with a profound, almost desperate sadness. I knew well enough that, in sitting there without moving, I was really taking the decision not to leave; but admitting to myself, “I am not leaving,” which I was unable to do in such direct terms, became possible for me in these other terms: “I want to listen to one more verse of “O sole mio” but the practical significance of this figurative language did not escape me, and while I was telling myself “All I am doing, actually, is listening to one more verse,” I knew that this meant: “I am going to stay in Venice on my own.” And it was perhaps this sadness, resembling a kind of cold numbness, which constituted the desperate but fascinating charm of the song. Each note that the singer launched, with a voice almost muscular in its strength and ostentation, struck me to the very heart; when the phrase with its low notes was consummated and the piece seemed to be over, the singer was not satisfied, and repeated it on a high note as if he felt bound to proclaim once again my solitude and despair. My mother must have arrived at the station. Soon she would be gone. I was choking with the anguish caused by this banal Rialto that was no longer the Rialto, with its view over the Canal that had shrunk now that the soul of Venice had drained away from it, by this song of despair that “O sole mio” had become, and which, thus declaimed before the inconstant palaces, finally made them crumble and reduced Venice to ruin; I was watching over the gradual realization of my misfortune, constructed artistically, unhurriedly, note by note by the singer, watched by the astonished sun, which had stopped still behind San Giorgio Maggiore, so that this crepuscular light was for ever to forge my trembling emotions and the singer’s voice of bronze into an equivocal, unchangeable and poignant alloy in my memory.
In this way I remained motionless with my will-power dissolved, taking no apparent decision; doubtless at such moments the decision has already been taken: even our friends can often predict it. But we ourselves cannot, otherwise we would be saved much suffering.
But at last, from caverns darker than those from which more predictable comets are launched—thanks to the unsuspected defensive powers of inveterate habit, and the hidden reserves that it can suddenly mobilize and throw into the ring at the very last moment—my action suddenly materialized: I ran for dear life and reached the train after the doors had closed, but still in time to get on board and find my mother, flushed with emotion, holding back her tears, believing that I was not going to come. Then the train left and we saw Padua then Verona move up to the window, coming nearly into the station to wave us good-bye, and, since they were not leaving, they let us move away and went back to their usual occupations, one in her fields, the other on her hillside.
The hours passed. My mother was in no hurry to read the two letters which she had merely opened, and she tried to prevent me from getting out my wallet straight away to take out the letter that the hotel concierge had given me. She was always worried that I would find a journey too long and too tiring, and she put off until as late as possible, so as to give me something to do during the last hours, the moment when she would unpack the hard-boiled eggs, pass me the newspapers and unwrap the packet of books that she had bought to surprise me. First I watched my mother reading her letter with astonishment, then she raised her head, and her eyes seemed to struggle with a whole series of separate, incompatible memories that she could not manage to reconcile. Meanwhile I had recognized Gilberte’s handwriting on my envelope. I opened it. Gilberte announced her marriage to Robert de Saint-Loup. She said that she had sent a telegram to me in Venice on this subject but had received no reply. I remembered how unreliable the Venetian telegraph service was reputed to be. I had never received her dispatch. Suddenly my brain felt a fact that had lodged there in the guise of a memory leave its place to make room for another. The dispatch that I had recently received and that I had thought came from Albertine was from Gilberte. Since the rather factitious originality of Gilberte’s handwriting consisted principally in placing, in the line above the line she was writing, the crosses on her t’s, making them look as if they were underlining the words higher up, or making the dots on her i’s look as if they were breaks in the sentences of the line above, and on the other hand to insert in the lines below the tails and the curlicues of the words that were written above, it was natural enough that a telegraph clerk should have read the scrolls of the s’s or the y’s of the upper line as a final “ine” closing the name of Gilberte. The dot on the i of Gilberte had ridden up to make a dash. As for her G, it had the appearance of an A in Gothic script. The fact that in addition to this, two or three words had been misread, entangled as they were (besides, I myself had found some incomprehensible), was enough to explain the details of my error, and it was
not even necessary. How many characters in each word does a person read when his mind is on other things and when he is already sure that he knows who the letter is from? How many words in each sentence? We guess as we read, we invent; everything stems from one initial error; those that follow (and this not only in reading letters and telegrams, not even only in all acts of reading), however extraordinary they may seem to someone who does not share the same starting-point, are natural enough. Thus it is that a great deal of what we believe to be true, not to mention the ultimate conclusions that, with equal perseverance and good faith, we draw from it, results from an initial misconception of the premiss.
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