死寂

I feel, as one does with the dead, that I’ve left something unfinished, a conversation, and we go on with that conversation, addressing ourselves to the dead, even if a certain haziness of memory clouds our wake over these conversations we never had. If their faces are forgotten, if certain features have faded, as in a painting, all that remains are our own voices, which we feel can’t be answered. Yet, from somewhere, the dead do answer. Or they refuse to out of spite. Like stubborn schoolgirls who won’t speak. We go on speaking. We are aware of moving our lips, though there is no one there. But is there any way of thinking without words? As if humanity were a language primer and every human being made up of letters. I wouldn’t want to dwell very long on these reflections, which in some sense follow on from my discussions with Frédérique. Though partly they’re things I’d never thought of before. I was in a wild hurry to be living in the world, and the halos of death had to do only with the past. The future meant the gates that must open and the walls that must turn into carpets. the last line she ‘embraced me with affection’: a formal expression, a static gesture. We never embraced, nor did we use the word affection when we spoke to each other. Her note was a sermon in a way, she recognised certain qualities I had together with an inclination to destruction. I didn’t keep the two sheets of paper like a relic, nor did I tear them up in that dark, restless spring, tossing them away into the void. For a while I kept them in my pocket, then they got crumpled, the paper shrivelled up, it tore, the ink faded. Frédérique’s words were headed for burial. We can put a cross against certain words and place them in our minds with a file card. her father seeped out of her flesh like a second voice.