The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  At dawn, as soon as the last demands of convention permitted it, I ran to Yvane’s windows. I didn’t want to lose a single minute. Still entirely possessed by my nocturnal errors, I thought her dead, and every time, my first kiss was like a kiss that one deposits on a lifeless face in a mortuary chamber. And I had the indescribable joy of seeing that face come back to life, of feeling two arms of flesh entwine around my neck, of finding Yvane as true as ever.

  She had meekly given in to my demand that she not stray far from La Colle, and not to approach the coast on any pretext. No more excursions by boat, no more sea-bathing. I pretended to be jealous; I wanted her all to myself, to be with me every moment of the day.

  One night, I woke up covered in an anguished sweat; while half-asleep, I had just remembered the reservoir that I had forgotten. Level with the ground, it was a permanent threat. I got up immediately, went to open the drainage tap, and did not leave the place until the reservoir was dry.

  To be sure, it’s commonplace to associate death with love. But in this instance, it wasn’t a question of literature, and never were those two divinities interlinked as intimately and as authentically as they were for me as the days went by. The thought of death stirred in my heart as if to extract, with an unexpected intensity, all the passion of which a human being might be capable. I was in love, so much in love that I might have died of it myself.

  Gradually, the days were passing by, and I recovered hope. As I was distanced from the moment of the horrible confidence, as I saw Yvane, happy and very much alive, trusting in the infinite affection that I evidenced for her, I began to doubt, to forget. All my precautions had been taken. I mounted a vigilant guard. The nightmare became less painful. I maintained a strict consistency, striking out each passing day on my calendar, the bearer of a black accolade extending from the May 24 to June 22. The days passed without incident. The month of June was delightful, in its light and coolness.

  “Will you hold me prisoner much longer?” Yvane asked me, during the long pale evenings when the Sun seemed unable to decide to disappear.

  To tease me, she proposed a little excursion by car on the coast road, but when confronted by the effect that any such proposition immediately had on me, she did not persist, only murmuring: “A bizarre trial, like no other…”

  I only lived for her, and with her. I refused to see any other resident of the château; I did not want anything to disturb the dream in which we were taking refuge. Forgetting the external world gave me more confidence in the powers of the heart. Yvane was there, always there. Her supple figure, which I felt like a firm and living liana at my side, was a certainty that helped me to chase away the somber torments of the night. Calmer, less anxious regarding the immediate, I could watch her live, with more curiosity about her mind. It appeared to me that her thought-processes, which had always been rather mysterious, did not allow themselves to be enveloped in the immense affection that I draped around her body and her heart. On the contrary, as if assured that someone—who was partly herself—was standing guard over her flesh, freeing her from the concern of maintaining everyday contact with reality, she seemed to be using the possibilities of her leisure to extend her dreams toward more distant horizons, where I had difficulty following her. Silently, I remained half-way to those heights, like a shepherd who allows his flocks to frolic on the summits, sure that when evening comes he will find them again on the path to the valley.

  “Is happiness—the thing is more mysterious than the word—a closed shelter or a trampoline that facilitates bouncing?” she mused, aloud. “Being happy, I never felt so light, so disposed to bounce…beyond my happiness, if I might put it like that. As in dreams, I could almost believe that it would be sufficient for me to extend my arms to fly like an arrow into the sky, to become a skylark, or a cloud…” Meanwhile, her hand was playing with my hair. “Pierre, Pierre, with a name so hard, how can you be so tender?”

  The strange thing is that it was necessary to hear that, the significance being in the intonation, almost as a reproach, as if the word “affection” signified carelessness or laxity…

  In the course of one of the walks by means of which I tried to make her forget our seclusion, I sat down on the side of a hill. She came to wedge herself between my knees, lying back against my breast—in her armchair, she said—and I inclined my head over her neck, tasting in the cleavage of her blouse the savor of her warm and supple flesh. My arms were folded around her breasts.

  “Nothing, nothing can tear her away from me,” I whispered, in the shadow of her hair.

  After a long silence, I heard her murmur: “It’s beautiful, beautiful—as if I were about to die…”

  I cried out in protest.

  “Why?” she went on. “Happiness is so much greater than life, that when one confides oneself entirely to someone, one surpasses life, and death no longer has any meaning.”

  “No, Yvane, that’s a blasphemy. You mustn’t tempt the gods.”

  She reflected for a while. “You value my flesh more than I do,” she said. “Isn’t the person who loves the most the one who goes furthest, driven by happiness?”

  So great was the power of the spell that several times, on the evenings of those days, I forgot to strike out the elapsed day on the calendar. The second fortnight of June had begun. We decided that we would make an ascent of a neighboring mountain on the day of the summer solstice. On the longest day of the year, we would see the last sunset of spring, and we would walk all night to reach the summit and see it reappear at dawn: the summer sun, already fleeing from us….

  Narda drove us in the car to the foot of the mountain, treating us as lunatics because we had refused to take anything with us.

  “I want to walk with my arms free, aware of nothing but my own weight,” Yvane had said. “Every precaution, every preparation, is an insult to the landscape, a weapon against nature…”

  We started along the path at 8 p.m. The day was still warm. I let her walk ahead of me to set the pace, which was more than slothful, and to keep her in sight, like a spectacle of which I never wearied: the sway of her figure, the play of her long bare arms, naïve in design. Sometimes, she passed over an obstacle with a rapid bound, revealing a pale calf beneath her short dress, chaste and hollowed by the effort. With the hands that she had wanted to liberate she caressed the berries of arbutus trees as she passed by, or tested the tips of aloe-leaves, turning round abruptly to reassure herself of my presence, and replying with a smile to the smile with which I accompanied her every gesture.

  The last lizards were abandoning the place; the vegetation was becoming sparser, the path narrower. With our backs to a section of a wall of rock, still warm, we watched the sunset. The view extended through the depths of the valley to the sea, grey and shin in the distant mist: the sea, my secret enemy, sullen within the décor illuminated by the red earth of the mountains, as if I had snatched away the prey that it hoped to claim. With the satisfaction of a victor, I took the bare arm of that prey, who was standing silently beside me. It had been grazed in places by the dry branches of juniper bushes. To erase the white marks are restore its natural polish, I caressed it with my palm, as one does an object made of precious material.

  “So you, too, don’t think it necessary to consent to the marks imprinted by life?” she asked.

  I took time to reflect before replying: “The same life that inflicts them also erases them, better than our ministrations.”

  She had tilted her head back toward the zenith, which was already turning a dark violet. “The clouds don’t soil the sky,” she said.

  Darkness rose in the east. There were no more birds. A belated sparrowhawk passed below us, fleeing toward the valley.

  “Well be the only two living, thinking beings on the mountain this evening—that’s a great responsibility,” she said, ironically. “Here’s the night—I can feel it coming, warmer…” She turned toward me and added: “The first night when we shall be together.” Then, abruptly: “I’m gl
ad; there’ll be moonlight.”

  A pale clarity became visible on the peak facing us.

  “You divine everything,” I observed. “You see everything before me. For myself, I only want to see you…but it’s as well that you’re in advance, interrogating things, like my infinitely sensitive watchman.”

  She put her arms around my neck and laid her head on my shoulder. “Carried by you, I see better and further—alone, I would never have come so far. And everything here is so calm! What are we going to find at the top of the mountain? What if we meet angels?”

  “Are you happy?” I asked.

  “Enough to forget to live,” she replied.

  We resumed our march. Our mountain had nothing immense or painful about it, but it had a peak, and its inoffensive slope brought us closer to the stars. The air became still and the rocks retained around them a little of the warm atmosphere of the day, impregnated with thyme. Little by little, in the lunar light, forms lost their excessive precision. The world of the night was born around us.

  She put her mouth close to my ear to murmur: “Listen—in its progress over the earth, the night is marching from summit to summit, and I’m sure that we’re going toward the place where its bare foot will rest…”

  I knew that in her, excitement took the form of a return to childhood. I too felt myself gradually entering into the enchantment. A diffuse fatigue inclined me to follow all the solicitations of the imagination, and I was able to see the elves gliding between the pools of moonlight, in good faith.

  I proposed a halt.

  “No, higher up,” she said, “higher still.”

  I followed her white shadow, which scaled the final scree-slopes at a run.

  “The summit!” she said, stopping suddenly, open-mouthed before the fantastic décor of standing stones that crowned the plateau we had just reached. She was breathing hard. A moonbeam, catching one of the crystal buttons of her dress, shimmered like a pale star.

  “You’ll have a heart attack, child,” I said, placing my hand on her breast.

  “It doesn’t matter. Poor heart, it’s carried me this far. It’s yours, keep it. Me, I belong to the night.”

  The night surrounded us with its infinite silence. Very close to my ear, a murmur became audible: “I shall never consent to cease being happy. Now, I’m so happy, so intoxicated to have come so far, so high, that I’d like to dance, to dance solo for the night.”

  I scarcely recognized her voice.

  She tore herself away from my arms, bounded a few paces away, and, abruptly taking off her dress, seemed to flee into the starry sky.

  A white form in the moonlight, leaping from stone to stone, momentarily motionless, slender beneath the immense sky, then bounding through the shadows to reappear at the far side of the darkness beneath the dark blue vault, sometimes pausing on an altar of stone, sometimes gliding more smoothly between the grey monsters of crouching rocks…

  One might have thought her the priestess of some strange cult, understood and celebrated by herself alone. What spirit emanated by that antique earth had taken possession of her body thus? What sacred flame, reborn from the ashes of the past, had returned to life in her? A chaste Bacchante, in love with the great secrets of nature, she seemed to be offering herself to the caress of the heavens…

  The queen of the elves danced on the mountain that night. A spark of flesh bounded within the confines of the earth and the sky. My eyes saw her, beneath the stars that cannot see at all.

  I dared not intervene. Something there surpassed me, whose gravity I felt more than understood—something, however, of great and profound significance.

  I received in my arms and rested on my knees an exhausted form, half-unconscious with fatigue, streaming with perfumes of the earth and juices distilled by her flesh.

  Like an obscure acolyte of some great mystery, I piously gathered from her temple, amid her sticky hair, the sweat poured out by that body as a libation to the spirit of the night. The heart that had been abandoned to me was still palpitating with the emotions of an excessively mad endeavor; I cradled its repose gently, until the return of the dawn.

  By the light of the paling sky, mauve rings were visible around her closed eyelids. Her hollowed cheeks took on ivory tints. The new day revealed to me another face, which I scarcely recognized: a perishable face, but one whose very frailty made me love her even more than hers glorious image even more. I loved her in a way that touched the utmost depths of human affection, delirious with joy.

  She opened her eyes, and, confronted by the silvery, more distant stars, murmured: “It’s ended, already…” before burying her face in my bosom.

  I wrapped her in my jacket. The first coolness of the day was threatening us. We began to descend. She walked with closed eyes, leaning on me like a sleepwalker. “How far it is!” she sighed. I wanted to carry her in my arms. To march at dawn, carrying the object of one’s love! In my intoxication, I would have lifted up the world…

  When the summer Sun rose, I looked at it with pride, as an equal.

  I did not leave her until we reached the threshold of her room, in the shelter of the familiar frame. One last time, I hugged her as if to stifle her. Happiness was streaming through me, impregnating me to the most distant fibers of my being. I went to throw myself down on the divan in the summer-house, to resume the dream…

  Later, while I was half-asleep, I heard a voice calling: “Pierre! Pierre!” I sat up. It was Narda’s voice. I raced to the threshold. Narda was running up the slope toward me.

  “Pierre!” she cried. “Come quickly!”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Yvane—come quickly! Yvane, in her bath—she’s not moving. She’s very cold.”

  Dream or reality? I tottered. Abruptly, facing the midday sun, I understood, and collapsed, unconscious.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The medical examiner requested an inquest, which returned a verdict of accidental death. An electric hair-drier dipped into the bathwater had provoked an initial electrocution, whose work had been completed by a prolonged immersion of the body in the cold water. On emerging from my faint, I had not wanted to see the woman who was no more. No image of death ought to tarnish her memory. I didn’t want to see anything or hear anything, but to continue to dream.

  I decided to go away, to leave the summer-house forever. I was taken to a railway station. I got on to a train. When the train stopped, I got off in a city. For two days I lived in a world that I no longer recognized. There was nothing; nothing remained. I could not extract myself from my hallucination. I said to myself: “Do I need to eat? Oh yes, I need to eat. So what? I need to eat.” Or “Sleep? Do I need sleep, then?” But slumber would not obey me. If, by chance, I succeeded in becoming drowsy for a few hours, my awakening was all the more atrocious. “What’s wrong, then?” I asked myself, for long minutes, having lost all memory. Then I remembered the horrible appeal; I thought I heard Narda’s cry for help. Every time, there was the same shock to the heart, the same fall into the void, the same gulf to the bottom of which I was precipitated. The broken thread could not be reattached. My mind remained astray. An individual is measured by the void they leave behind. With Yvane gone, the void was so great that it swallowed the world.

  I could not continue to live like that. I returned to the summer-house. There, at least, I recovered memories; there, shadows were still floating beneath the branches, with which I could hear myself, and which might perhaps invite me, little by little, to accept that to which, with all my forces in revolt, I still refused to submit.

  I rarely went out, awaiting the hours disdained by humans, the hours of complete darkness, or dawn, to deliver myself to pilgrimages of a sort, in the course of which I reshuffled dreams endlessly. I feared no ridicule. I went to find the dogs in their kennel to talk to them about Yvane. Those animals, which I could scarcely go near before, now accepted me as their companion, as if they understood.

  I slipped into the garage to revisit the
little car in which I had seen her for the first time. I caressed its seat and its steering-wheel, pressed my lips upon the handgrip of the gear-stick that had been polished and worn by the palm of her hand, and, with my eyes closed, clutching that cold, absent hand in mid-air, I worked my way through the rosary of memories associated with her: her tanned hand on the table of the inn; her movement, always with the left hand, to push back the rebellious wisps of hair behind her ear; her hand on the tiller of the boat; or, again, her fingers extended as if to catch hold of the distant notes of a keyboard, gripping her forehead—that was the day when we went up on to the loggia that revealed the red mountains…

  At the turning of a pathway, a gust of honeysuckle stopped me in my tracks; I thought I heard her voice again, saying: “I prefer it to all the orchids on Earth.” She was about to appear, her white socks rolled down over her ankles, well-secured in large yellow shoes, her blonde curls escaping from her headscarf to float over her sunburnt nape, all of her beautiful face bright, transparent, illuminated by her pale blue eyes…

  On finding a glove that I thought was hers beneath a garden table, I thought I would faint, and my distress as so visible that Narda, whether it was true or not, protested loudly that the glove was one of hers.

  I recreated her, initially determined to add nothing that did not belong to her, but also not to conserve anything of her but that which we had in common. A form lighter, more diaphanous, easier to manipulate in my dreams, with which I could continue to pursue the dream in which I had lived. Thus a sleeper snatched from slumber tries, with all the resources of his awakened imagination, to reconnect the broken thread of the dream that had enchanted him. Fragments of our conversations came back to mind. Little by little, I invented others, imaginary ones, in which I asked questions and made replies, guiding myself by the intonations of her voice remaining in my memory to find the words that she would have pronounced. It often happened that I cursed the makers of legend, but I was forced to recognize that certain individuals compel legend-mongering.