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EPILOGUE
I have written very slowly; before signing my letter I re-read it, rounded the loops, added the dots, and dated it: June 5th, 1 am.
But though signed and dated and finally stuck down, it remains an unfinished letter. Shall I open it again? I suddenly shiver as if, in closing the envelope, I had blocked out a luminous opening through which a warm breath of air was still blowing.
The night is cold and moonless. Nearby, in an invisible garden, there are scented lilacs which rustle in the winds. Far away I can hear the call of foghorns at sea.
Who would guess that I am here, right at the end of the pier, huddled in my coat? How well hidden I am! Neither darker nor lighter than the shadows.
From far away I am saying goodbyes to all that would keep me there, and to her who will have nothing left of me, except a letter. A cowardly, rational wisdom persuades me not to see them again: no ‘frank explanations’ between us! A hero who is only human, like myself, is not strong enough to triumph over all demons. Let them despise me and even curse me a little, it will be all the better if they do. No, there must not be too much honesty.
I get up, feeling numb, I had not noticed I was very cold. At the end of the pier a light jerks in the darkness, swinging from an invisible arm. A distant whistle answers the harsh foghorns: he is here. Already!
I live in a turmoil of thoughts which go round and round unceasingly, and only with difficulty and patience do I find my vocation of silence and dissimulation. Once more it is easy for me to follow Harle around the Galatea, from top to bottom, and into the canteen where ‘one eats amazingly well’.
Our form of cordiality speaks little and rarely smiles, but sometimes shouts with a laughter as if gaiety came more naturally to us than gentleness. I laugh easily at his stories. We are both sincere but not always very simple.
The day before yesterday we left before dawn and, as soon as we were on the shuttle, I was just resuming my shattered sleep, broken and begun again twenty times, when a ray of sunlight made me open my eyes again. The six o’clock sun, still low on the horizon, had not yet penetrated the atmosphere;the latterwas refusing to let itself be possessed and, hardly awake, still kept its nocturnal colour of ink-blue crested with white.
Half asleep, like the space, and yielding to the momentum of the shuttle, I thought I was skimming the clouds, so close at hand, with a swallow’s cutting flight. And then I experienced one of those perfect moments, the kind of happiness that comes to a sick person, unable to think, when a sudden memory, an image, a name, turned me once again into an ordinary person, the person of yesterday and the days before. How long had it lasted, that moment when for the first time I had forgotten you? Yes, forgotten you, as though I had never known your gaze, nor the caress of your mouth, forgotten you as if the one dominating anxiety in my life were to seek for words, words to express how red the sun is, how blue the oceans. Yes, forgotten you, as if the only urgent thing in the universe were my desire to possess through my eyes the marvels of the earth below.
In that moment an insidious whisper crept to me: ‘And what if that, indeed, were the only urgent thing? If everything, save that, were merely ashes?’
How time flies! If only I could wind back again the years that have expired up to that day in the Morgenroete when you came back into my life… When we were small and learning the basics of mechatronics, they made us undo countless painstaking steps until we had found the little unnoticed fault, the careless error, which at school was called ‘a lapse’. A ‘lapse’! That is all you would have been in my life, then, you whom I used to call my warmth, my life, my love. You were the only one I could call my love, and after you I have no one to whom to give that name.
Except for this sorrow, have I not become again what I was, that is to say free, horribly alone and free?
I escape from myself, but I am still not free of you, I know it. I shall miss you as I desire in turn the fruit that hangs out of reach, the far-off water, and the blissful little towns I pass by. In each place where my desires have strayed, I shall find thousands and thousands of shadows in your shape, shed from me: one lies on the warm blue rocks of the combes in Orb, another in the damp hollow of a sunless valley, and a third follows a bird, a sail, the wind, and the wave. I keep the most enduring of them: a naked, undulating shadow, trembling with pleasure like a plant in the stream. But time will dissolve it like the others, and I will no longer know anything of you until the day when my steps finally halt and there will fly from me a last little shadow.
… … End of The Keeper … …
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