Small Lives (24 page)

Nevertheless I did see her once, in Palaiseau, in July 1963. I was about to leave for England where a friend awaited me, girls much dreamed of, and even more appealing vistas than on this side of the channel. I was welcomed into the home of distant cousins, cheerful and stoic, who ate lunch outside between the autoroutes and the deafening flights from nearby Orly; I was full of hope; I wanted to embrace it all. One afternoon alone in the small garden, I got drunk on radiant things: my youth begun and still incommensurable, the entirely new excitement of wine and women, the summer sky open to my desire, burning like my desire, and the objects of my desire surely just as true, scented, profuse, and as ready to be crushed by me as these suburban flowers that I was shredding in my hand; I wanted to take the whole sky by one end and draw it to me, with its fresh flowers and mirage buildings, its changing blues, its planes high above and the pulp of clouds behind them left to play with the evening in the eyes of the living, the sky from the hillsides of Massy to Yvette where it gave way; I wanted to roll it up just like parchment, like the bibliophilic angel of the Judgment rolls it himself, when all is written, when the universal work is concluded and each is judged on his own works; to enjoy everything and write
everything nevertheless; that is what I wanted and would be able to do. Swallows flew over. I wheeled in that drunkenness, my eyes came to a halt; from the neighboring garden, so close that if I extended my hand I could have touched her, looking straight at me, attentive and solid but at the mercy of a breath, at the edge of the shade fixed among the wallflowers and sweet peas though nevertheless so far from Chatelus, she was observing me. It was really her, “the little dead girl, behind the rose bushes.” She was there, before me. She held herself naturally, enjoying the sun. She was ten years old in earth years, she had grown, less quickly than I had, it is true, but the dead can take their time, no frantic desire for their end draws them forward anymore. I held her passionately in my gaze, hers bore me for an instant; then she turned on her heels and the little dress danced in the light, she went away quietly, with small, decided steps, toward a house with a veranda; the little serious feet struck the sand of the walkway, disappeared, without me hearing the sandaled steps in the enormous din of a Boeing taking off, all the walls of air below it staggering, the summer embracing its silver flanks, the invisible, impassioned threads of the celestial machinery bearing it headlong toward the high, vague paradise behind the apartment buildings. In that thunderous roar, she drew the door closed after her. The blazing rose bushes never moved.

I flew to Manchester; nothing significant happened there; I kept my first journal and this event was the first that I recorded. Youth is full of boasting, but this was different; my sister, yes, that child appeared to me as such at the very instant that I saw her; I recognized her and named her with the same quiet certitude that I named the wallflowers under her feet and the light around her; and I could not say by what
aberration, which was then, in my eyes, proof, a daughter of working class suburbanites in a summer dress lent body to the paradigm of all the dead, to their occasional appearance in the air that they thicken, in the hearts that they wound, on the page where, stubborn and forever duped, they beat their wings and bang at the doors, they are going to enter, they are going to exist and to laugh, they hold their breath and trembling, follow each sentence, at the end of which perhaps is their body, but even there their wings are too light, a heavy adjective frightens them off, a defective rhythm betrays them; brought down, they are forever falling and are nowhere, returning almost eternally kills them, they despair and bury themselves, are once again less than things, nothing.

That a just style may have slowed their fall, and that perhaps mine will be slower; that my hand may have given them license to marry in the air a form however fleeting created by my tension alone; that bringing me down, those who hardly existed and once more become hardly anything may have lived higher and more clearly than we do. And that perhaps, astonishingly, they may have appeared. Nothing captivates me like a miracle.

Did it really take place? It is true; this penchant for archaisms, these sentimental shortcuts when the style is inadequate, this desire for quaint euphony is not the way the dead express themselves when they have wings, when they come back in the pure word and the light. I tremble that they grow even more obscure. The Prince of Darkness, we know, is also the Prince of the Powers of the Air, and playing the angel suits his purposes. That is fine; one day I will try some other way. If I set off again in their pursuit, I will relinquish this dead tongue, in which they may not recognize themselves at all.

In searching for them however, in their conversation which is not silence, I took joy, and perhaps that was theirs also; often I was nearly born in their aborted rebirths, and always I died with them; I would have like to write from the heights of that vertiginous moment, from that trepidation, exaltation, or inconceivable terror, to write as a child without words dies, dissolves into the summer, in a great unsayable emotion. No power will decide that I have achieved nothing of that. No power will decide that nothing of my emotion bursts forth in their hearts. When the laugh of the last morning strikes the drunken Bandy, when the fictive deer carry him off in a bound, I was certainly there, and why should he not appear eternally in return – even if these pages are buried forever – in the bread he is seen consecrating here, in the decisive gesture with which he gathers up his cassock here before mounting a motorbike, unconsoled but smiling, revving up in the bright sun, tousled in the highway wind, remembering? I believe that the gentle lindens white with snow leaned close in the last look of more than mute old Foucault; I believe it and maybe it is what he wants. That an infant girl is forever born in Marsac. That the death of Dufourneau is less final because Elise remembered or invented it; and that the death of Elise is eased by these lines. That in my fictive summers, their winter hesitates. That in Les Cards, in the winged conclave that stands over the ruins of what could have been, they exist.