I can’t bring myself to go home. When I came out of the café the storm seized me and made me wander, to the limits of endurance, towards another warm establishment. My dogs have been waiting for me a good ten hours now and are certainly impatient to get outside. Patience, my beauties; your master is exploring his own doldrums.
I’m cold now. The place is packed. The clientele is much younger than in the other café. I don’t feel really at ease here. Beside me, two adolescent girls are talking about their teachers, and about boys as well, that goes without saying. The music is soft, astonishingly at the opposite pole from the natural brusqueness of these young people. Simple, a little repetitive, it hovers over the yellow and blue heads like a summer wind over a field of wildflowers. I look like an old reef that the waves splash against so as to go back and play in the ocean. Every day I tell myself the same thing: that I am going to die, that I am going to die, that I am going to die. I write myself poems and prayers about it, and by dint of tormenting myself I end by pacifying myself, by bending to that reality. I fall in love with the happiness of being alive and I do nothing else at all, stunned, dumbfounded.
These young people send me back to my own desires, remind me that I haven’t yet slaked them all. Will I have the time to live everything? Will I have the time to love again? To find again the pleasure, so soft and so riverine, of a human warmth? We shall see. I still have time, or I don’t. I can’t see who is holding the threads of my existence. The Muses, the Fates, Visa?
A young boy is watching me furtively. He’s the sort to have heaps of unconfessed secrets. I feel like telling him that I’ve been there, but what good would it do? That certainly isn’t what he wants to hear. Another boy comes over to him; their looks light up and enter at once into osmosis, a kind of spontaneous Casimir effect, a quantum harmony of bodies, of senses that, without demanding either the hands or the tongue, manage to promise each other a secret place, a crater on the moon in which to drink the water, held frozen, of their secret passion. Let one lean forward and the other inclines imperceptibly. Let a joke make them laugh and they have the reflex of looking at each other, of going to fetch the other’s agreement. So it is with the other alliances, more permitted, concocted in this place. These young boys and these beautiful girls are playing hopscotch with their hearts; they know by instinct — an instinct born of a long apprenticeship, more than a thousand years old — that the joust of love begins in the arena of the eyes.
Those eyes… yes, those errant windows. Those eyes are guilty of being unequal to our will. And so much the better. They betray us; they go off on their own, against the times, and settle their attention on whatever makes them tremble. Let someone observe them and their secret emotion has trouble getting away. A look is naked and alterable in front of another look. The eyes let each person’s mystery speak. For all our insistence, the eyes bar the road to us; we must stay on the threshold of the temple, gazing blissfully as the stained glass of the portal throws back at us the reflections of the sacred heart. Of the life that holds its breath for fear of being caught. To see into another’s eyes is to hear the beating of his desire, the wind of his flight, the trampling of his interminable questionings.
We tremble for eyes. At the mercy of time, people cast their looks, give them away, and question. The answer of the observed is sometimes fury, sometimes phlegm, duplication. The instant when two visions overlay each other, a conclave begins, a figure takes shape. The line is made, the matter takes form. And yet we tear up the sheets we have drawn on; we rub out the better to begin again, never satisfied, always anxious to plunge back into other eyes, other drugs. The face, savage, lets its shadows dance. We are carnivores of looks. Seizing the shadows of strangers sates us. Eyes are banquets, lyres, lightning. They bring hope as wine sets souls free. They are precious; they blaze; they are surrounded by carbon.
They are so royal that thought can only build kingdoms for them. We say that we see when we believe we understand. The eyes lose themselves when they love, and they see nothing any more, understand nothing any more, when the seeds begin to move.
The eyes? They go grey if our thought is plotting. They are the first to degenerate when decadence settles into our life. For everything that is beyond price is as close to purity as it is to the impure. Fragile, subtle and greedy, the eyes shatter at the least strong wind. They become vengeful then, cynical, perfumed. Nothing is nearer to us than our eyes. They are our brothers in death. They vitrify then like church glass, like one last host offered to life.
I live for the ritual that is the bread of visions and of thoughts. The music of others quickens my smiles. To ask for more than their looks would be to demand something other than life. I cannot understand what the blind feel. Nor do I want them to envy me. If nature invented the eyes to allow us to hope, perhaps she gave to those who are deprived of them the power to see with the intense night of what lives.
I exist, and I stretch my gaze over my hopes. I want nothing else than the simple satisfaction of blushing for eyes, of envenoming for eyes, of burning naive for eyes. Then morbidity will have no place left. Only the unique and perishable love, to swallow up time and to paint all the space there needs to be.