The Inferno | Page 9

the leaves cast
upon her face a reflection of whiteness and thoughtfulness.
I watched her bosom rising and falling, and her motionless face, and
the living book that was merged with her. Her complexion was so
brilliant that her mouth seemed almost dark. Her beauty saddened me. I
looked at this unknown woman with sublime regret. She caressed me
by her presence. A woman always caresses a man when she comes near
him and they are alone. In spite of all sorts of separation, there is
always an awful beginning of happiness between them.
But she went out. That was the end of her. Nothing had happened, and
now it was over. All this was too simple, too hard, too true.
A gentle despair that I had never experienced before troubled me. Since
the previous day I had changed. Human life, its living truth, I knew it
as we all know it. I had been familiar with it all my life. I believed in it
with a kind of fear now that it had appeared to me in a divine form.


CHAPTER IV
I went for several days without seeing anything. Those days were
frightfully warm. At first the sky was grey and rainy. Now September
was flaming to a close. Friday! Why, I had been in that house a week
already.
One sultry morning I sat in my room and sank into dreamy musings
and thought of a fairy tale.
The edge of a forest. In the undergrowth on the dark emerald carpet,
circles of sunlight. Below, a hill rising from the plain, and above the
thick yellow and dark-green foliage, a bit of wall and a turret as in a

tapestry. A page advanced dressed like a bird. A buzzing. It was the
sound of the royal chase in the distance. Unusually pleasant things were
going to happen.
. . . . .
The next afternoon was also hot and sunny. I remembered similar
afternoons, years before and the present seemed to be that past, as if the
glowing heat had effaced time and had stifled all other days beneath its
brooding wings.
The room next to mine was almost dark. They had closed the shutters.
Through the double curtains made out of some thin material I saw the
window streaked with shining bars, like the grating in front of a fire.
In the torrid silence of the house, in the large slumber it enclosed,
bursts of laughter mounted and broke, voices died away, as they had
the day before and as they always would.
From out of these remoter sounds emerged the distinct sound of
footsteps, coming nearer and nearer. I propped myself up against the
wall and looked. The door of the Room opened, as if pushed in by the
flood of light that streamed through it, and two tiny shadows appeared,
engulfed in the brightness.
They acted as though they were being pursued. They hesitated on the
threshold, the doorway making a frame around those little creatures.
And then they entered.
The door closed. The Room was now alive. I scrutinised the
newcomers. I saw them indistinctly through the dark red and green
spots dancing in front of my eyes, which had been dazzled by the flood
of light. A little boy and a little girl, twelve or thirteen years old.
They sat down on the sofa, and looked at each other in silence. Their
faces were almost alike.
. . . . .

The boy murmured:
"You see, Hélène, there is no one here."
And a hand pointed to the uncovered bed, and to the empty table and
empty clothes-racks--the careful denudation of unoccupied rooms.
Then the same hand began to tremble like a leaf. I heard the beating of
my heart. The voices whispered:
"We are alone. They did not see us."
"This is about the first time we've ever been alone together."
"Yet we have always known each other."
A little laugh.
They seemed to need solitude, the first step to a mystery toward which
they were travelling together. They had fled from the others. They had
created for themselves the forbidden solitude. But you could clearly tell
that now that they had found solitude, they did not know what else to
look for.
. . . . .
Then I heard one of them stammer and say sadly, with almost a sob:
"We love each other dearly."
Then a tender phrase rose breathlessly, groping for words, timidly, like
a bird just learning to fly:
"I'd like to love you more."
To see them thus bent toward each other, in the warm shadow, which
bathed them and veiled the childishness of their features, you would
have thought them two lovers meeting.

Two lovers! That was their dream, though they did not yet know