The Kindly Ones

I was gradually reaching the limit of my abilities to contain the disconcerting rushes, the incompatible surges that were sweeping over me. I roamed aimlessly through the house, I spent a whole hour caressing with my fingertips the polished wooden ornaments decorating the doors to von Üxküll’s apartments, I went down to the basement with a candle to lie down on the hard dirt floor, damp and cold, I inhaled with delight the dark, stale, archaic smells of this underground chamber, I went to inspect with an almost forensic meticulousness the two ascetic bedrooms of the house servants and their bathrooms, Turkish-style toilets with carefully polished corrugated foot rests, set far apart to leave ample room for the intestinal discharge of these women whom I pictured as strong, white, and well built, like Käthe. I no longer thought about the past, I was no longer at all tempted to turn back to look at Eurydice, I kept my eyes firmly in front of me on this unacceptable present, which was swelling endlessly, on the innumerable objects cluttering it, and I knew, with an unwavering confidence, that she, she was following me step by step, like my shadow. And when I opened up drawers to go through her lingerie, her hands passed delicately beneath my own, unfolded, caressed these sumptuous underclothes made of very delicate black lace, and I didn’t need to turn around to see her sitting on the sofa unrolling a silk stocking, adorned at midthigh with a wide band of lace, on that smooth and carnal expanse of white skin, slightly hollowed out between the tendons, or else putting her hands behind her back to hook her bra, in which she adjusted her breasts, one by one, with a quick movement. She would have carried out these gestures in front of me, these everyday gestures, shamelessly, without false modesty, without exhibitionism, exactly as she must have carried them out alone, not mechanically but with attention, taking great pleasure in them, and if she wore lace underwear, it wasn’t for her husband, or for her lovers of a night, or for me, but for herself, for her own pleasure, the pleasure of feeling this lace and this silk on her skin, of contemplating her beauty thus adorned in her tall mirror, of looking at herself exactly as I looked at myself or wanted to be able to look at myself: not with a narcissistic gaze, or with a critical gaze that searches for defects, but with a gaze that is desperately trying to grasp the elusive reality of what it sees—a painter’s gaze, if you like, but I am not a painter, any more than I am a musician. And if she had stood thus in front of me in reality, almost naked, I would have looked at her with a similar gaze, whose desire would only have sharpened its lucidity, I would have looked at the texture of her skin, the weft of her pores, the little brown flecks of beauty spots strewn by chance, constellations yet to be named, the thick strokes of veins that surrounded her elbow, climbed her forearm in long branches, then came to swell the back of her wrist and hand before ending up, channeled between the joints, disappearing into her fingers, exactly as in my own man’s arms. Our bodies are identical, I wanted to explain to her: aren’t men the vestiges of woman? For every fetus starts out female before it differentiates itself, and men’s bodies forever keep the trace of this, the useless tips of breasts that never grew, the line that divides the scrotum and climbs the perineum to the anus, tracing the place where the vulva closed to contain ovaries that, having descended, evolved into testicles, as the clitoris grew unrestrainedly. Only one thing was actually lacking to be a woman like her, a real woman, the mute e, in French, of feminine word endings, the extraordinary possibility in that language we shared of saying and writing: “Je suis nue, je suis aimée, je suis désirée.” It’s this e that makes women so terribly female, and I suffered inordinately from being stripped of it, it was a flat loss for me, even harder to compensate for than the loss of that vagina I had left at the gates of existence.

From time to time, when these inner tempests calmed down a little, I took up my book again, I let myself be carried peacefully away by Flaubert’s pages, facing the forest and the low, gray sky. But, inevitably, I came to forget the book on my lap, as the blood rose to my face. Then to gain time I again took up one of the old French poets, whose condition must not have differed much from my own: I know not when I am asleep / Or when I wake, unless I’m told. My sister had an old edition of Thomas’s Tristan, which I also lazily leafed through until I saw, with a terror almost as keen as that of a nightmare, that she had marked the following lines in pencil:

Quant fait que faire ne desire

Pur sun buen qu’il ne puet aveir