It’s normal. The doctor advised me to stop smoking, but that is part and parcel of my life, and it’s been so for a long time too, just like teardrops that cause atrocious bitterness on the top of the palate, just like vitamin A tablets that make me nauseous, sleeping pills, analgesics, febrifuges, anti-inflammatory and tranquilisers, which are as many tips about the seriousness of my condition. To each his own fate; individual fates may look alike but they differ in the details as much as handwriting or fingerprints. The noxiousness of sleeping pills is such I wake up not really conscious, and weak to the point of having practically no strength to batter my eyelids or move my fingers. The symptoms of insomnia and the symptoms of amnesia look like identical twins. You hid away my packet of cigarettes on a bookshelf and when I found it I took a cigarette, lit it and blew the smoke into your hair and I repeated, altering it a little, Churchill’s memorable formula, The cigarette is my eleventh finger. You sulked in your inimitable way. All the books I lend you smell of cigarette, you said indignantly, but then you endeavoured to calm down. To begin with, you suggested we should only eat vegetables and fruit (Good grief, another one!) and you only ate fruit, hardly ever tasting sweets (Actually, you were sick of sweets because your mother made them to sell them, that’s all.) and, to enhance the conversation, you quoted that trivial saying, You are what you eat. I opened my mouth wide derisively. You didn’t reply. You were Brutus, I was Mark Antony.
You were moved by the Stoic philosophy and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations was your bedside book. You made a photocopy of it at the library, which you put under a plastic cover and brought me with the hope I’d be as moved. I told you I was moved by stoicism as well as by Epicureanism and I was an epicurean who hardly ever thought of Epicurus, that lugubrious ascetic. In reality, confronted to stoicism, I realised I was too gay to be stoic and, confronted to Epicureanism, I realised I was too sad to be epicurean. Brutus was a nice and bloody boring fellow. Mark Antony was a lovely bastard. Ashley in Gone with the Wind is a nice and bloody boring fellow and Rhett Butler a lovely bastard, Melanie a nice and bloody boring woman, Scarlet O’Hara a lovely slut. You are a nice and bloody boring woman, I am a repulsive bastard. No, don’t. No need to analyse me. I can very well analyse myself, thanks. Analysing oneself is so easy compared to having to hear others analysing you. Smart people prefer to analyse themselves first. Besides, it’s a way of showing one’s virtue and preserving one’s dignity. But I wasn’t vile enough yet, I know it perfectly well, for if I’d been vile enough, I would have crushed you well before that. If I kept hesitating, it was because you were not fast, you were no slut and I didn’t want to harm someone good. When I say I didn’t want to harm someone good, it isn’t at all to sing my own praises, but I’m a human being and all human beings have a good side. But all the same, there were times when I felt like shouting at you at the top of my voice for you to disappear from my life. I wasn’t sure. I did have an inkling of the complications that would ensue. If possible, I didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone and I didn’t want anyone to have anything to do with me. Relationships between the others and me are complicated. I try to deal with others as little as possible. I don’t trust myself. At the time, I was beginning to tell myself it was high time to teach the world a smarting lesson before leaving it. Maybe because you were getting on my nerves, I wanted you to disappear once and for all. Or maybe I wanted to show you I had aberrant impulses and you couldn’t take the risk of getting involved. But you didn’t know or pretended you didn’t. You said, as if to pacify me, that no matter what, you kept believing, as Gandhi used to say (Gandhi whom you qualified as the greatest of stoics), that an eye for an eye makes man blind the world over. I retorted that in that case a tooth for a tooth makes man toothless the world over. If an extraterrestrial notices it, he’ll deduce that man eats too much toffee. But you wouldn’t let go of it. You went to borrow Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy for me to read. You told me Look, there’s a section where Russell imagines a controversy between the Buddha and Nietzsche. You said that after giving it a lot of thought, Russell concluded that in the history of mankind only your Buddha was able to stand up to Nietzsche and Look at this, you said, Nietzsche is cornered and beaten hollow. Then you took a pencil and ticked the various lines that had Nietzsche beaten hollow. Then I took the pencil and ticked other lines to demonstrate to you that Russell was prejudiced against Nietzsche, wanted his downfall and sided with the Buddha. No but do you realise? He dares to write that Nietzsche advises the Buddha to read Heraclites! You kept silent while I let out a stream of outrageous sarcasms, as a demented painter lets out demented colours on the demented canvas of his demented imagination. You were a worthy stoic. Stoicism, the philosophy of the search for happiness from sufferings of all kinds, including toothache… But you couldn’t remain stoic until the end. You were too weak to be so to the end. Women can’t be philosophers. Women don’t like to think things through. In the history of philosophy, there isn’t a single woman philosopher. Women painters there have been once in a while. Women poets there have been once in a while. Heroes of the female gender there have been once in a while, who are then called heroines. Philosophers of the female gender there are none. The science and art of thinking is the monopoly of men. There’s no founder of religion of the female gender. Women in the past were nothing but some sort of property for men, along with domestic animals and arable land. It’s only in the contemporary period that woman has begun to become valuable and been in a position to demand higher bids, as a slave among slaves.
Woman and her chemical properties… You didn’t love me at all. I couldn’t be your lover. You were someone with high ideals. You were someone who gave a totally limpid meaning to the notion of spiritual elegance. You were interested in man but not in men. I wasn’t the only man you were close to. You thought about me as a companion on the way to wisdom. You were sure of it. You didn’t say it so directly. You were careful about how you expressed yourself. But I did nothing except imagine you naked. I ran a fever from walking in the rain and I kept to my room. You came to look for me and when you saw me in bed and bathed in sweat, you prepared a glass of hot cocoa for me and you dipped a towel in cold water and wiped my face. Outside it was still raining. You’d left the umbrella open wide outside of the room. You said you were going to go out to buy me a remedy against the cold. I told you there was no need. I took your hands. I pulled you into my arms and kissed you. Outside the rain was still falling as in a love scene in a novel or a film. But no: it was falling because it was the rainy season. You resisted, you struggled, you pushed me away, you rained down punches on me. You looked at me with that angry stare that usually froze me with fear. You cried, but I didn’t care about anything any more except your naked body. I wasn’t pretending to have a fever. I stammered I love you, I love you, don’t be afraid I’m going to rape you. But heck, if I was asked whether I raped you, it’d be hard to answer. Fifty-fifty. If asked whether you were willing, it’d be hard to answer. Fifty-fifty. In my room, which was dark and warm. The rain outside was abating but kept falling in silent lines. In the next rooms, there was no one. It was late in the morning of a dark day in October. The maze of crummy alleyways downstairs was deserted. In the entire area of slums around the university precinct, peopled with unemployed men looking oddly absent and melancholy, rowdy and rude workers, petty civil servants, caretakers and penniless students mostly from upcountry, it seemed there were only you and me. It was a cramped and confused world like the train of thoughts of a mental patient or the milling around of a shackled wild beast pulling obstinately on its chain for the sole purpose of recovering its freedom. Inside the room, intimacy increased when I lowered the slatted blind. With burning breath, droplets of sweat all over the body, eyes reddened by insomnia, I kissed you avidly and hugged you like a python smothering its prey. I looked deep into your eyes while repeating I love you. And I remember: you lowered your eyelids like a flower folding its petals. You turned up your face
. Your lips red and wet with my kisses slightly opened to reveal the sparkle of your teeth. Your chest under your white blouse heaved in rapid gasps. I heard the alarmed beat of your heart. If I hadn’t told you first that I loved you, would you have let me sleep with you? Surely not. You can’t go and see a woman and ask her to sleep with you just like that without telling her you love her. I mean, a good woman, of course. And when you enjoined Let go of me! But let go of me! you were hugging me so fiercely I could no longer breathe. And I was saying as if under hypnosis, Sooner or later you’ll sleep with a man. So there’s nothing strange about your sleeping with me here and now. I know the art of sexual union fairly well, you know. Sure, that was an insulting and vulgar way of putting it. And I let out a laugh, the dry-throat laugh of a sick man. You slapped me with all your strength. You were beyond yourself. It was indeed the first time I saw you unable to control yourself. You asked how I dared behave with you like that. You were deeply sorry to have always trusted me and you beseeched me to release you, but when your plea was ignored, you threatened me by displaying all the power you used to have and when that didn’t work you started to sob, all dishevelled, your glasses aslant on the bridge of your nose, blouse buttons torn off, skirt crumpled. You didn’t dare shout out. You were no longer saying anything, seemingly astounded and oppressed, and no longer struggling, no longer resisting, but remained lying motionless, your face turned away, and you said as a sign of surrender If you dare, well then, do it. If you are animal enough for it, well then do it. I stiffened, briefly overcome with remorse. It was a feeling strong enough to stop everything and make me apologise to you in all sincerity. But I compelled myself to counter that thought in the same instant. If I apologised to you and let you go, what would be the result? You’d no longer want to see me or you’d no longer meet me or even talk to me. You’d be terrified and keep away as if you’d never met me. It would be a discordant and vexatious end and eventually you’d manage to act as if there had never been any relationship between you and me. This kind of thinking scared me and made me decide rashly. I couldn’t allow for it to be like that. With things having gone this far, there was no turning back, but on the contrary I had to forge ahead to the destination, in spite of all obstacles, no matter what happened and even if I had to regret it later on. I should have understood what your acknowledgement of defeat meant, but I was less experienced than the first reptile to creep on the skin of the earth. I remember you were crying. In my memories of you sometimes there are only tears like cold season dew, so sad and saturated with fog. And you went on crying like that even when our bodies found themselves naked, bracketed together and forming but one at long last. Having slept with you that one time meant I was able to sleep with you innumerable times henceforth. What was the point of counting anyway, I told myself. In the beginning, I slept with you as often as opportunities presented themselves by way of compensation for having procrastinated for so long. You were very bad in bed. You had, it seemed, an insurmountable prevention against sexual pleasure. You’d fallen entirely under my power, even though you’d never wished it at all. That had me look at you with pity – that’s all there was to women! But I was incensed every time I saw that, even in your moments of languor, you remained dry like hell and I yelled at you in my heart while you were under me, Will you stop just once being an anti-sex puritan! Luckily, I kept that to myself. You are kind to me. No one has ever been as kind to me as you have. You are impressed by the social ideal of the one husband and the one wife. You demanded that I never pay attention to any other woman again. Only the weakest women speak like this. Actually, I too wanted to behave correctly with you. But I had a notion that in the immensity of the sea across invisible shores, one by one the waves of the bitterest boredom were getting increasingly close and inevitably, for lack of being able to metamorphose them into anything else, they’d eventually swallow and devour me.
The White Shadow Page 23