It was a mild June day, so mild, so casual that it could inspire only the laziness to dream about it. A ray of sunshine played over the carpet, then moved up onto the bed and settled on my legs, bathing them with a soft and indolent light. It was a very ordinary day, very like my life, unruffled and mild, surprised ocasionally by a gleam of warmth or a slight breeze. And I didn't want to do anything. I didnt want to read, or listen to a record, or go out. I just wanted to be lazy, to feel this sunshine on my legs, this light on my skin. I wasnt bored. I only felt bored when I was with other people.
 

                                  To have problems of conscience
                                  you must have leisure.
                                                                     - Celine.
 

   Silly, actually, for Nicloe was one of the few people i knew who thought she was happy, or at atleast didnt wonder about it. Which is perhaps the very condition of a certain happiness; or at least one form of it. With her husband, her children, the cooking, her dresses and the endless little domestic problems of a very  humdrum life, Nicole was sufficiently occupied not to be aware of the futile emptiness of this life. I added to her happiness the ability to talk abotu it. How could one resist the satisfaction of at last being useful to someone!

   During lunch I let Nicole talk. We got on well. Besides we didnt listen to one another. I was a past master in the art of being a good listener without being too exhausted or irritated by her eternal chatter and the fatuity of her remarks. It was enough for me only to look at her with an attentive and approving expression, and to acquiesce with a nod and a meaningful gesture whenever she interrupted her monologue to say to me:"Dont you think so? You really do agree with me?" This acquired discipline allowed me to escape into my own thoughts - so cheerful that day! I had retained the childish habit of imagining in advance the physical appearance of people whom I didnt know.

   I had bought the Scarlatti record. It formed the sound track for my series of reconstructions. I'd lie on my bed, close my eyes, and Francois was there. I did not miss him. I was at that stage of dawning love when the imagination can be enough to re-create the one who is loved and replace him. I would close my eyes, and images brought back colors and shapes to me with a precision almost enhanced by a dream quality.

   To preserve my self-respect I tried to find excuses for Francois. His work was one and, on reflection, fairly plausible. Love is often a question of time, and idleness makes one available for the passions. Would I hae loved Francois so quickly if I had not been so free? Perhaps. But I would nt have had time for thinking only about him, which my present unoccupied state made possible. This love would have been one of the elements in my interior life, instead of filling it entirely to the point of merging with it.

   Maybe it wouldnt be better, but it'd still be more absorbing. You cant think about yourself unless you've got the time for it. Wise words of advice. Only, you can't improvise material worries and a large family for yourself overnight. And I had neither aim, nor ambition, nor needs, nor desires. There was no solution.

   I suffered, but sometimes, in a flash of lucidity, it would happen that I dreaded the day when I wouldnt be unhappy any more, the day when I would find myself alone again.

   Pierre took in this criticism, but went on in the same calm, friendly tone.. "You're right; its not a question of age but of character. Its even rather a question of a gift. I believe that certain people are gifted with indifference. But you have to realize very quickly that its a fatal gift." He reflected and added thoughtfully, "Unfortunately, the people who possess such a gift rarely k now how to deny themselves the pleasure of developing it."

   So, little by little, I found myself again, I found my nonexistence again, mildness, other people. Without relief, without delight, with a convalescents weariness. The image of Francois remained juxtaposed on the images of my ife, but it was already gradually fading; it was no longer the fog which had choked me, but a discreet and melancholy veil. I had grown used to my suffering, I was getting used to this emptiness that was forming within me: my forgetting.

   I would congratulate myself abot this forgetting; I would attribute its cause and rapidity to my absence of sensitivity, to my will power. I was rather proud of myself. Actually, it wanst very serious: neither a tragedy nor a great love. Francois was nothing, a passing fancy, no more; enough to occupy me for two months. 

   "Ah ha! So you want me to be serious? Okay, here goes. Can I make you a long speech about the solitude inherent in every human being, on the impossibility of genuine contacts even with, and especially, the people one prefers? No? All right, something else. I can tell you that no love is happy for long, that one party is always above or below the other, never at the same pitch. I can admit to you that Laurence and I, for our own sakes and for other people, play at satisfying oeurselves by respecting each other's solitude. That every kind of life is ridiculous and that, in any case, we go on living it, so whats the use of making yourself miserable by noticing it. That the flesh is sad and I've read all the books. 

   
   He drew me against him and said solemnly, "I'm proud of you."

   I remained leaning against him. I moaned softly. "Pierre, it hurts."
 
   "My poor darling! Have you got a soulache? It's a sickness to which I'm immune; my soul was condemned at the start of my earthly life to roast in the flames of hell. Then it was offered to the angels of paradise. They found it tough; it wanst a choice dish!"

   "Ashamed?"

   "When I've made an exhibition of myself I' always furious the next day. I cant bear people who let others see them in a state when they've lost control of themselves."

   I had hurt Sylvain unnecessarily. It was easy to be cruel. Too easy. Almost tempting. Someone in love who isnt loved in return is so fragile! The meal was interminable; I avoided Sylvain's gaze and Pierre avoided mine. I was furious. After all, I thought, its not my fault if Sylvain loves me and I dont love him! Ive no cause to repoach myself,   I didnt reproach Francois. But  I recalled with emotion Francios's heartbroken face. "Anne, forgive me. I didnt know. I didnt want to." But I knew, I had deliberately sacrificed Sylvain in order to make him into the moral of a fable for my own personal use. I felt myself becoming aggressive.

   Try to make that effort of abandonment, of confidence, of availability, which is the touching condition of love? I was closed, opaque - no, I couldnt do anything for Sylvain, as Francois hadnt been able to do anything for me.


   "None-neither loving you nor being hurt over you. Its necessary to have something to risk, to expect, before one can try."

  
   Two days later Sylvain came back to Paris with me. We remained silent; he held my hand against the wheel, and my hand was lifeless, and I was absent, a long way away from him, in a vague and indifferent dream from which he was excluded. Perhaps I should have interrupeted my dream, told him that he would forget me, that he would suffer one day through someone else, that I was sorry. But I knew it was useless, that during these moments nothing exists except the past, a nostalgic and painful past which takes the place of the present - an unbearable present limited to an obsession which excludes all notion of future, any attempt at forgetting - and that even the certainity of forgetting someday, and easily, what one has loved, can be more heart-rendering even than suffering, and that in any case it wouldnt prevent him from suffering at this moment, from being alone and from loving me.

   As it happened, I hardly had time to feel lonely. Being tied down to a regular job didnt destroy the emptiness that was too deep within me for anything at all to fill it, but prevented me sometimes from thinking about it and from being obsessed by it. 

   there would be other Sylvains and other strangers, but at he moment all thses strangers, all these futures, seemed reassuring to me, pebbles thrown into still water. With the mirror always there, this possibility of seeing my life in a reflection and of seeing only the reflection of everything. Shadows hung down heavily and became distorted in the polished glasses. In reality this mirror was my strenght, my retreat from people; It was my indifference Through the pale amber contained in my wineglass everything became slightly unreal, and yellow, and calm. I had slept in the sun, I was opening my eyes again, and the world was blurred and faint; contrasts became slighter, the shadows glowed with light, and the patches of gold faded away into leaden-hued expanses. Not even the noise destroyed the impression of calm that I felt, for only waves of sound reached me in a heavy, inaudible whisper, almost stupefying. A fluffy cloud, like fog over inland water. The mirrors offered me several Sylvains, the stranger who smiled at me multiplied himself, they were all my pasts, all my futures, and I smiled at all these smiles, at all these ephemeral shadows, so slender phantoms of my absence. 

   I came to myself again seated on a bench in the Champs de Mars. The night was dismal, oozing damp shadows, peopled with skeleton like trees, with sharp, crackling whispers. I felt myself old with all I had forgotten, with all I remembered; heavy with this incapacity for feeling which I had accepted, sought out like a wonderful gift, and which appeared to me today like a lack, almost an infirmity. And I had also the painful, despairing intution of what I should forget and remember in the future, of my sadness to come, fleeting moments, too breif a break with this calm; my indifference, neutral and lucid companion of my life, opaque veil between others and myself. So unruffled face of my boredom. Gift, sad and useless gift.