The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust (25 page)

I came home in the morning and I went to bed, freezing and also trembling with an
icy and melancholy delirium. A while ago, in your room, your friends of yesterday,
your plans for tomorrow (just so many enemies, so many plots hatched against me),
your thoughts at that time (so many vague and impassable distances), they all separated
me from you. Now that I am far away from you, this imperfect presence, the fleeting
mask of eternal absence—a mask quickly removed by kisses—would apparently suffice
to show me your true face and satisfy the strivings of my love. I had to leave; I
had to remain far away from you, sad and icy! But what sudden magic is causing the
familiar dreams of my happiness to start rising again (a thick smoke over a bright
and burning flame), rising joyously and continuously in my mind? In my hand, warmed
under the bed covers, the fragrance of the rose-scented cigarettes that you got me
to smoke has reawakened. With my lips pressed against my hand, I keep inhaling their
perfume, which, in the warmth of memory, exhales dense billows of tenderness, happiness,
and “you.” Ah, my darling beloved! The instant that I can get along without you, that
I swim, joyful, in my memory of you (which now fills the room), without struggling
against your insurmountable body, I tell you absurdly, I tell you irresistibly: I
cannot live without you. It is your presence that gives my life that fine, warm, melancholy
hue, like the pearls that spend the night on your body. Like them, I live from and
sadly draw my tinges from your warmth, and, like them, if you did not keep me close
to you, I would die.

The Shores of Oblivion

“They say that Death embellishes its victims and exaggerates their virtues, but in
general it is actually life that wronged them. Death, that pious and irreproachable
witness, teaches us, in
both truth and charity, that in each man there is usually more good than evil.”

What Michelet says here about death may be even more applicable to the death that
follows a great and unhappy love. If, after making us suffer so deeply, a person now
means nothing to us, does it suffice to say that, according to the popular expression,
he is “dead for us”? We weep for the dead, we still love them, we submit at length
to the irresistible appeal of the magic that survives them and that so frequently
draws us back to their graves. But the person who, on the contrary, made us experience
everything, and with whose essence we were saturated, can no longer cause us even
a hint of pain or joy. He is more than dead for us. After regarding him as the only
precious thing in this world, after cursing him, after scorning him, we cannot possibly
judge him, for his features barely take shape before our memory’s eyes, which are
exhausted from focusing far too long on his face. However, this judgment on the beloved
person—a judgment that has varied so greatly, sometimes torturing our blind hearts
with its acumen, sometimes also blinding itself so as to end this cruel discord—this
judgment has to carry out a final variation.

Like those landscapes that we discover only from peaks, it is solely from the heights
of forgiveness that she appears before you in her true worth—the woman who was more
than dead to you after being your very life. All we knew was that she did not requite
our love, but now we understand that she felt genuine friendship for us. It is not
memory that embellishes her; it is love that wronged her. For the man who wants everything,
and for whom everything, if he obtained it, would never suffice, receiving a little
merely seems like an absurd cruelty. Now we understand that it was a generous gift
from the woman, who was not discouraged by our despair, our irony, our perpetual tyranny.
She was always kind. Several remarks of hers, quoted for us today, sound indulgently
precise and enchanting, several remarks made by the woman whom we thought incapable
of understanding us because she did not love us. We, on the contrary, spoke about
her with so much unjust egotism, so much severity. Do we not, incidentally, owe her
a great deal?

If that great tide of love has ebbed forever, we nevertheless can, when strolling
inside ourselves, gather strange and beguiling shells, and, when holding them to one
ear, we can, with a mournful pleasure and without suffering, hear the immense roaring
of the past. Then, deeply moved, we think about the woman, who, to our misfortune,
was loved more than she loved. No longer is she “more than dead” for us. She is a
dead person whom we remember affectionately. Justice would have us revise our opinion
of her. And by the all-powerful virtue of justice, she can be mentally resurrected
in our hearts so as to appear for that last judgment that we render far away from
her, render calmly and tearfully.

Physical Presence

We loved each other in the Engadine, in some remote village with a doubly sweet name:
the reverie of German sonorities languished in the voluptuousness of Italian syllables.
All around, three unbelievably verdant lakes reflected the fir forests. Peaks and
glaciers closed off the horizon. In the evening the delicacy of the light was intensified
by the variety of those perspectives. Will we ever forget the lakeside strolls in
Sils-Maria, at six o’clock in the fading afternoon? The larches, so darkly serene
when bordering on the dazzling snow, stretched their branches, of a sleek and radiant
green, into the pale-blue, nearly mauve water.

One evening, the hour was especially favorable to us: within moments the setting sun
brought out all possible nuances in the water and brought our souls all possible delights.
Suddenly we gave a start: we had just seen a small, rosy butterfly, then two, then
five, leaving the flowers on our shore and fluttering over the lake. Soon they looked
like an impalpable rosy dust sweeping along the surface; then they reached the flowers
on the opposite shore, fluttered back, and gently resumed their adventurous passage,
stopping at times, as if yielding to temptation upon this preciously
tinged water like a huge, fading blossom. This was too much, and our eyes filled with
tears. In fluttering over the lake, these small butterflies flickered to and fro across
our souls (our souls, which were tense with agitation at the sight of so many beauties
and about to vibrate) and passed again and again like the voluptuous bow of a violin.
Their slight flittering did not graze the water, but it did caress our eyes, our hearts,
and we nearly fainted with each quiver of the tiny, rosy wings. When we spotted them
returning from the opposite shore, thereby revealing that they were playing and freely
strolling on the surface, a delightful harmony resounded for us; they, however, returned
slowly by way of a thousand whimsical detours, which varied the original harmony as
a bewitching and fanciful melody. Our souls, now sonorous, listening to the silent
flight, heard a music of enchantment and freedom and all the sweet and intense harmonies
of the lake, the woods, the sky, and our own lives accompanied it with a magical delicacy
that made us burst into tears.

I had never spoken to you, and I had even lost sight of you that year. But how deeply
we loved each other in the Engadine! I never had enough of you; I never left you at
home. You came along on my strolls, ate at my table, slept in my bed, dreamed in my
soul. One day (could not a sure instinct, as a mysterious messenger, have notified
you about that childishness in which you were so intricately involved, which you,
too, experienced, yes, truly experienced, so profound was your “physical presence”
in me?), one day (neither of us had ever before seen Italy), we were amazed at what
we were told about Alp Grün: “From there you can see all the way to Italy.” We left
for Alp Grün, imagining that in the spectacle stretching out beyond the peak, there
where Italy began, the hard, physical scenery would halt brusquely, and an utterly
blue valley would open up in the depths of a dream. En route it struck us that a border
does not alter the soil and that even if it did, the change would be too subtle for
us to perceive it all at once. Though a bit disappointed, we laughed at ourselves
for being so childish.

However, upon reaching the summit, we were dazzled. Our juvenile imaginings had come
true before our very eyes.
At our side, glaciers sparkled. At our feet, torrents cut through a savage, dark-green
Engadine landscape. Then a slightly mysterious hill; and beyond it, mauve slopes kept
half-revealing and concealing in turns a truly blue region, a radiant avenue to Italy.
The names were no longer the same; they instantly harmonized with this new softness.
We were shown the Lago di Poschiavo, the Pizzo di Verona, the Val Viola. Next we went
to an extraordinarily savage and solitary place, where the desolation of nature and
the certainty that we were utterly inaccessible, as well as invisible and invincible,
would have increased the voluptuousness of our loving each other there, intensified
it into a delirium. I now truly and deeply felt my sadness at not having you with
me in your material form, not merely in the apparel of my regret, but in the reality
of my desire. I then descended a bit lower to the still towering spot where tourists
came for the view. An isolated inn has an album in which they sign their names. I
wrote mine and, next to it, a combination of letters alluding to your name, because
it was impossible for me not to supply material proof of the reality of your spiritual
presence. By putting a trace of you in that album I felt relieved of the compulsive
weight with which you were suffocating my soul. And besides, I nurtured the immense
hope of someday bringing you here to read that line; then you would climb even higher
with me to compensate me for all that sadness. Without my saying a word, you would
grasp everything or, rather, recall everything; and, while climbing, you would depend
fully on me, lean heavily against me to make me feel all the more concretely that
this time you were truly here; and I, between your lips, which keep a faint scent
of your Oriental cigarettes, I would find perfect oblivion. We would very loudly holler
the wildest things just to glory in the pleasure of yelling without being heard far
and wide; only the short grass would quiver in the light breeze of the peaks. The
ascent would then cause you to slow down, puff a bit, and I would lean toward you
to hear your puffing: we would be insane. We would also venture to where a white lake
lies next to a black lake, as gently as a white pearl next to a black pearl. How we
would have loved
each other in some remote village in the Engadine! We would have allowed only mountain
guides to come close, those very tall men, whose eyes reflect different things than
the eyes of other men and who are virtually of a different “water.” But I am no longer
concerned with you. Satiety occurred before possession. Even platonic love has its
saturation point. I would no longer care to bring you to this countryside, which,
though not grasping it, much less knowing it, you conjured up with such touching precision.
The sight of you retains only one charm for me: the magic of suddenly remembering
those sweetly exotic German and Italian names: Sils-Maria, Silva Plana, Crestalta,
Samaden, Celerina, Juliers, Val Viola.

Spiritual Sunset