The Face of Days
Me, myself. I hung in air, the papery skin of death making mockery of my features, the glowing eyes screaming not of life’s triumphs and acquired wisdom or the consolations of experience but of death, of the death of flesh and the death of the mind, of the end to wisdom and the cessation of all consolations and the termination of memory.
I shrieked.
Within my mind, at the very least, I shrieked. I cannot say if my mouth opened, or if Jacqueline turned to stare at me in my momentary agony: but somewhere within me, if not everywhere within me, I shrieked.
The bed inched again nearer the door of the apartment.
I shook my head, kissed Jacqueline when she turned her head, pushed myself to the bedside table and opened the brandy, poured a small glass and sipped it, found myself sleepy again, sipped more, and slept, then, troubled by odd dreams of childhood.
A slowly-turning wheel of light and shadow appears over the small crater lake of Chambon, beyond Saint Nectaire-le-Bas; and pale light plays across the leaves of the region’s beeches, faintly illuminating their white trunks. In the region between Etampes and Fontainebleau, globes of light travel among the fields and float between outcroppings of dark rock. Across the Rhine from Valence, against the cliff bearing the ruins of Crussol, small, intensely-shining figures move, as of gracefully gliding gulls crossing the river in darkness.
Jacqueline, when she left to attend to her position in a hotel in the morning, left me a specimen of her writing. It gave one of the more interesting rationales I have encountered for the spectral turn of events in the world.
She lived the character of her greatest writing, by day, creating a Jacqueline Lefort of tranquil exterior, a woman apparently happy yet miserable inside at her success—at her ability to make good in a crass, commercialized world, while her truer nature and artistic ability withered within her. By night, she wrote short stories and prose poems: footnotes to the novel she lived.
Older than I first thought, she had reached her mid-thirties, only some sixteen years younger than me. She grew up in the region between Dordogne and Garonne, in the Entre-deux-Mers kingdom of the vine: her childhood memories, she told me, were of a neatly kept village constructed around the square contours of a Middle Ages bastide, and of dusty roads that connected well-spaced white houses and the organized landscapes of vineyards. Even the gardens of the villas, she remembered, followed the pattern of undulating rows seen in grape fields that seemed endless and enchanted to her as a child. She never saw a sky that same color anywhere else, nor a soil that texture or smell. As a teenager she sought her fortune along the Mediterranean coast and found it, after a fashion.
She wrote the following while I prepared a breakfast for the two of us, making an omelet to accompany the bread a maid brought on a tray, with tea.
“Pascal,” wrote Jacqueline, “told us how we dissemble happiness—how we cannot avoid hoping for happiness—how we distract ourselves with ways of making ourselves happy—simply because of a failure—a failure to do anything about unhappiness. Our parents put us in this world where death is irrevocable, where other parents have spawned others who know nothing beyond their noses, where despair seems the rational response. So we try to be happy.
“And all those diverted thoughts–
“They go toward the bright and the good and the cheerful.
“And those others–
“Those thoughts from which we divert ourselves–
“Where do they go?
“Do they have a place?
“If it is not too absurd, imagine a binary stellar arrangement:
“I mean a star, shining, and its neighbor, a depression of gravity, a lightless pit, a black hole. The two revolve around each other, the one radiant and visible across the galaxy, the other one invisible. The invisible one slowly steals the light and fire from its dancing partner. So heavy is the dark star that it attracts the very light rays of the bright one. It eats light. It circles the nuclear brilliance of the companion, and steals all it can. It is a dull bird gathering bright pieces of foil. It is the ragged urchin pinching jewelry. It is a dark star eating light. It eats, eats, eats.
“Such things as these exist.
“We know how they came to be. Such a mass of matter existed at one time that it collapsed into itself. Is it a universal law, then, that nothing can be made so great it cannot fall into its own attraction?
“What then of our thoughts–
“Those thoughts from which we have so long diverted our eyes–
“Those dismaying thoughts of misery and ignorance and death–
