I have no future, my angel. Neither has the universe, and that, when all is said and done, is of no importance at all. It would be so much simpler to write you promises… I am hungry and thirsty. A big storm is frightening the city. They’re forecasting close to thirty centimetres. I tell you so that you’ll understand the mood I’m in. Happy. Your mother and I ate two hours ago already and I’m still hungry. I’ve turned on the radio; the neutral voice of a newsreader is recounting the misfortunes of whales, then the intransigence of the government over a file everyone will have forgotten by tomorrow. Mustn’t forget the sorry adventures of an idle princess whose breasts were displayed in a British tabloid. Mustn’t forget either the hostages in some banana republic, the suicides of the young, and the amorous escapades of a member of parliament we had all thought upright and good. The world, if you ever see it, my angel, is a curious symphony. We advance in small steps, on the tips of our lips, along the road of atoms and axioms. All of us try, I think, each in his own way, to hold back the answers, to play the blind man, to behave like optimists and heroes, to live out our fate while refusing to submit to it.
I say my prayers to you. I want to talk to you while you are not yet of this world.
Your mother is behind me, in the bed; she’s dozing. Her hair makes a light veil across her face, ready to change shape at the slightest dream. The room, kept in half-darkness, seems to be sleeping like your mother. My lamp is the only witness to any activity at all. It lights me, throws my shadow across the bed and thereby invites me to go and join the woman I love.
We have been married two years. The days with her are like a song. Now the refrain, now new words, now the refrain again and the everyday. I think we can describe ourselves as happy. We have our problems, of course. Me, for instance — it’s going badly at the office, because I’m bored there more than anything else; I’m confined to colourless work and I’m losing the red of my cheeks over it, the strength of my neck. I’m bending and I’m ageing. It frightens me. Your mother, for her part, is impatient, waiting for an answer from an important client. If the negotiation she’s leading comes off, we’ll have a good deal of money ahead of us and we could, as our dream keeps pushing us to, leave for Thailand.
We are protected from winter by the radiators and by our electricity bill being paid up. I have money. I earn a good living, even if I’m bored and looking for another way of doing things. We are lucky, or — to use my mother’s terms, and my mother’s prayers — we are privileged. Since we have no child yet, we allow ourselves the happiness of nonchalance; we lounge about in bourgeois preoccupations. Your mother is solid gold, and she is warm flesh, a substance I can’t do without. If one day I stray, she has my permission to kill me. Symbolically, that is. Violence is of an incompetence inside our heads. I say this gently, because that is how one must live one’s passions. Lovers are so close to each other’s hearts that a single needle would be enough to wound them. But perhaps I’m straying. I’m trying to record the present moment, to make a promise of it.
The storm isolates still further this room that is already so quiet and private. It’s very dark outside. The radio announcer goes on with his litany of bad news. There are wars far away; men, encouraged by their silent wives, are killing one another for an honour that liars have lent them. I saw some of them on the television yesterday, blood on their faces, disbelieving or famished. I have never tasted other people’s blood. Stolen blood, the kind that spurts out of an open wound, inadmissible. Elsewhere, or perhaps in the middle of those quarrels, people are managing to smile at one another, to make love to each other prudently or violently, to tell each other they will probably love one another all their lives, or only for a few moments, while promising each other eternity all the same, shocked because they know that life will one day be unfaithful to them. Their sighs do not reach me. The evening is beautiful and discreet, warm, occupying nothing but the seconds that belong to it by right. I complicate my sentences as much as I please, when what I would like is to look you straight in the eye and make you understand what time is doing to my veins. I speak to you like an adult, in half-words, prudish, intelligent and out of breath with so much composure.
Your mother is beautiful. She sleeps like a cat, feline, curled up in her dreams but ready to spring. She stretches; her nap is coming to an end. She yawns loudly. She’s amusing herself already. I hear the sheets wilting while she shifts position. She mumbles: “What are you doing?” I don’t answer; she doesn’t want an answer. I go on writing. She seems to fall back asleep, since I can’t hear her any more, and then suddenly, in the cold of a silence, she says to me in her voice blurred by sleep: “Make love to me.” I smile. We both know she is fertile at this moment; she has hatched and opened the doors of her eggs.
I’m not a rosy spirit, her belly is not a church, and my hands warm at the idea of taking her in my arms — but if I tell you, my angel, that I am prudish, and that sometimes life seems to me close to blasphemy, you’ll certainly laugh at me, because you may be twenty-five when you read this letter and you’ll probably have nothing to do with all those artificial inseminations that hide behind thought and wisdom. You’ll be young and you’ll want to hear nothing; you’ll want to dive in without putting on gloves, to cross the mire, to run through the viscera and reach the tabernacle of a rare warmth, of a sacred enclosure where the mystery arrives at the offertory covered in filth. I already have the feeling of no longer being that age, even if I am, biologically, still very young. I answer your mother: “Not just now.” She says: “Ooh! Ooh! The big bad wolf with the beer belly is coming to see the fragile little girl under the sheets and he’s going to do nasty things to her…” She laughs. I repeat gently: “Not just now, please.” She falls silent after a sigh.
Beer belly! Well I never! If one day you read this letter — I’d have to shut it in a box that you would open (by chance?) after rummaging among the old things left lying about in your old father’s house — I would like you to know everything about the storm that is bellowing, about the year that is withering, about the century that is already bored, about the wars I cannot hear while your mother moves, stretches again, unfolds her legs, opens them, lets the damp of sleep evaporate to leave nothing but the salt of desire. I watch her in the little mirror on my desk. She knows I’m watching her; we often play this little game. I open my own legs a little too. But I go on writing.
Stoic, the universe rumbles. As things stand, they are neither easier nor worse than before. One only has to carry on, to fight cancer and the sun, the freedom to love and the plague of sex. We are caught between two fires and an ocean. We were told that slaking our thirst was sacred, and now the mountains are angry and unease shows our desires to the door; they say we have offended the balance of the Earth. There are liars somewhere…
The trees, which you too will see one day, when you’re old enough to think that your own breath counts for as much as their branches — those trees are swinging their arms in every direction. They seem to be listening to the music of the seasons and hoping it will never end, so beautiful is it, so tonal, like those church chants that little eunuch voices used to sing in the old days for the good pleasure of boggy popes. I hope there will be no crucifixes left when you are old enough to believe, when you are old enough — man or woman, I don’t yet know which you’ll be — to know that the other slope of the hills is waiting for you, and that this means you will have to be fertile, ready to conscript your happiness if need be, so as not to become one more fool who will have seen nothing of his life. The only thing that matters, believe me, is to bear fruit.
Your mother sits up in the bed. Her hair falls apart to reveal the oval of her face and the sharp curve of her nose. She looks like an Egyptian dipped in milk. Her breasts swell as she lifts her arms very high; her armpits breathe. She jumps out of bed and heads for the bathroom, then goes to the kitchen. I call to her: “Will you bring me some biscuits and some milk?” I hear her open the refrigerator and a cupboard, set a plate on the counter. She comes back with the biscuits and the glass of milk, puts them down on the table, gives me a kiss on the mouth. She lingers a few moments on my eyes and goes back to bed. I smiled at her, saying: “You’re letting me write.” It wasn’t an order, since she obeyed it. She answered me, sighing with contentment: “I’ve always let you write, my angel.”
Yes, she calls me “her angel,” and I call you the same. We are all of us angels, white or black, usually grey when we let the night take hold of our wants; we are all anonymous and androgynous beings in this age whose borders we take pleasure in marking out arbitrarily. I have no future, my angel, because all of us, however many we are — and the number frightens you when you think about it — have only a few solar circumferences to undertake. Nothing has changed in the best or the worst of this world. Would that be a wisdom? Probably, since nobody listens to it. Each one goes, each one leaves.
It’s like this neighbourhood I can watch from the window. There are grocers, tavern-keepers, junk dealers, passers-by. Once there were grocers, peasants, towns. Life follows simple rules and the people of this neighbourhood do as other people do; they supply oil to that mill we call, for want of a paradise, a universe.
What will your country be? I don’t really want to know, because I’d be afraid of glimpsing the shadow of politicians threatening your hopes; I only want to tell you about the storm working itself up, far from politically correct talk. I don’t have to play the great seer to predict that the poor will still be poor and the rich still as patriotic as ever. I, your father, will always be a pessimist — while your mother calls to me again, lectures me: “You write too much… you won’t be able to get it up any more…”
I smile again. We wrap our coming pleasures in small premonitory happinesses. I answer her: “So it’s my cock you want, is it?” Throwing the pillow at me: “Macho!” — and then, gently: “Your cock and your lips, your arms and your arse, your eyes and your balls, your feet and your nose, your hair and your toes.” I stop her: “I’m writing.” She laughs; I hear her burrow under the sheets, put the pillow over her head, singing in her false-soprano voice: “He’s wriiiiiting…!!!!” It sounds like an Arab chant. Or the cry of a mother wanting to give birth. Everything drives me towards you. Your mother never stops laughing at this mixture of gaiety and sadness that lives in me. I am made of these alloys of feeling as your mother is made of a single desire to live. If only you could have her vitality — but if only you could have my eyes, so that I might see myself in them one day. I am proud. I wouldn’t want to die without having been able to show you what I am capable of, to impress you with my courage and my lies. Damn it! Your mother has just thrown the second pillow at me!
My angel, my child, my son, my daughter — I give you my future so that you can, in your turn, hand it on to your own children. Hold it high, that future; don’t let it touch the throng of men with their glorious pasts. Don’t invent institutions for yourself; don’t believe people who wish you well for as long as they haven’t yet wept in your arms. And don’t trust those tears any further if you see that they are guided by the desire to have more.
I hope you’ll have the courage to admit your fear of dying, and be brave only when nobody is asking you to be. No doubt I say this because I know I haven’t got there myself, and don’t know either whether I’ll ever reach that assurance the books teach. And I say it again: be wary of priests; the light they claim to possess casts, in any case, a shadow over something else, and the rape of innocents goes on.
Now your mother comes over without a sound, slides her hand down my back, leans against me, puts her arms round me, then goes to fetch the first pages of this letter, which I’d set aside. She lies down again. I have time to think and to look outside, and then to write you every word I breathe. I change sheets of paper; your mother says: “Give.” I obey. She begins to laugh a little. Then she throws the pages on the floor, hums. The half-darkness of the room seems willing to listen to her. Time examines her, feels her skin, ages her a little every time it touches her. What else could I tell you? It’s as though everything were being rubbed out, as though I could go on pushing this pen in every direction and your mother would go on throwing every page on the floor just the same. Everything evaporates so fast, is forgotten and then lives again, years later, sometimes in the form of vast works, more often in the form of sentences flung into the lottery of competitions, in a hurry to make one’s mark, hoping the universe will feel flayed and eternally struck by our gestures.
Your mother gathers up the pages she threw, puts them back on the table, playing with them, mixing them up, a smile at the corner of her mouth, her eyes proud of being so frank. Planted in front of me, her feet nailed to the floor, she says: “It’s heavy and pretentious.” I smile at her. She pulls a face at me and goes back to bed. Her judgement weighs down my hand, even if I know that cathedrals were built this way, and that wars are stirred up because of this obstinate pretension of the human race to want to conquer. Today our combat differs hardly at all from the old ones; we merely dress our wish to people the universe in plastic. That won’t stop the young — the ones who will have managed to pierce the condom that barred their road — from being bastards and mistrustful. Life, death and the great questions will haunt us always, and will flout again and again those who come after us. Like you, my angel, who at twenty-five will perhaps already be clean and refined, will have chosen your colour, white or black, keeping grey in reserve for yourself as well, to become at night a cat or a wild beast. You will know then, as we do — adults trying to harden ourselves — that reality floats on an ocean of multiple interpretations: now a Strauss lied, now a load of washing. We all breathe the same air, which we vainly try to recycle. And that is quite all right.
I love your mother, and beyond my intentions that is all that counts. Nothing in the torment of this century is any different from the weeping of the women of Troy. The farniente of terrible days goes on, while our feelings struggle to get used to the innocence of the hours that amuse themselves by staying young. Nothing, not even my true and heavy thoughts, will be able to hold back my desire.
Your mother is growing impatient. The storm is big. The flakes make marshmallow stains on the window. I kiss you, and I sow blindly.