Sylva

I approached her; she did not move. I squatted down next to her. I pressed her to my shoulder. She did not protest. She was shaking. I murmured quite close to her ear, “Come… come now… what’s the matter?” But I knew, I knew too well that neither her vocabulary nor her embryonic intelligence would enable my vixen to answer such a question. However, she turned a stricken face toward mine. And meanwhile her hand rose with unsteady, almost frightened slowness, moved gropingly for a moment over her body, over the soft curve of her breast. And then her fingers began to climb along the slender, supple throat, like a quivering spider. They hesitated on her cheeks, her chin, her ears, her nose-a blind man’s exploring fingers gently deciphering a face. She thus deciphered it slowly and fearfully-discovered it or verified it?-and at last, at last she murmured, in a very small voice, in the tone of a question she might put to me in a quite small, anguished voice:

“Syl… va?”

For the very first time she was stammering her own name, and her hand, her fingers became motionless. And she waited, pressed more tightly against me, visibly expecting me to answer, “Why yes, my little Sylva, it’s you, of course…” and indeed that’s what I said. I said it very softly and then she was clinging to my chest with the abruptness of a child who feels the ground giving way under its feet, and I decided to push her a little. I got up and dragged her once more toward the bathroom. But she resisted, and I had the greatest trouble in making her move forward. She protested, “No! No!” in a stifled tone of dread, and I began to get irritated, to think that she was really too stupid. Why, what a to-do about recognizing oneself in a mirror! What an idiotic fear! In a moment she would be amused by it, would laugh with pleasure.

As if in response to my unspoken thoughts, she seemed momentarily to yield, but then, stepping closer, she suddenly dived, slipped between my hands, escaped me, ran toward the door, left, slamming it behind her, and I heard her dashing along the corridor and clambering up the stairs that led to the attic.

Should I go after her or not? Was I wrong to force her? But, for heaven’s sake, what a bizarre idea, to be frightened to death by one’s own likeness! I decided to let her sulk if she felt like it, and returned to bed.

But sleep evaded me more than ever, and strangely, I become more stirred, more intrigued by my vixen’s behavior than I had ever been before. Gradually, in this state of semiconsciousness in which I hovered once again, it seemed to me that I could guess or understand her better, that I could better identify myself with her, with what she felt. Or rather, I imagined what she had been, half an hour ago: an unconscious, carefree little being, absent from itself, who, as Dr. Sullivan had said, lived and acted without even knowing that it existed, without really distinguishing itself from the rest of things.

Ever since childhood, we ourselves have been accustomed to, been trained to, see ourselves and distinguish ourselves in this way, and this separateness is so natural to us that we never think of it. But a fox! Had I ever figured to myself what it could be like to discover suddenly that one is isolated, separated, exiled from tutelary nature with whom one had hitherto formed one warmth, one breath, one flesh? And I imagined too for the first time the dreadful revelation it must have been for our distant Neanderthal ancestors, for those bearded, shaggy primates who had no mirrors, to become self-conscious, who had to discover themselves in the eyes of others, in their shouts, their threats, their gesticulations and their hostility-and who discovered themselves as they were- fragile and naked and solitary, with nothing but their own strength in the midst of frightening forests…

At that moment, as if to illustrate those barbaric imaginings, an earsplitting pandemonium broke out. I sat up. The din started again a little farther away, with a noise of broken glass. I jumped out of bed and dashed into the corridor, where I found the two wall mirrors in pieces. At the same instant, the racket broke out downstairs, coming from the living room. Then from the hall. Then from the study. Nanny, in turn, popped out of her room, in dressing gown and curlers.

“It’s Sylva smashing the mirrors!” I shouted and hurled myself down the stairs.