The Return

The Return
Joe Bousquet

I.
It was as though her eyes sought out their secrets by entering my own. So young was she, our kisses opened directly onto fairytales she made up. But it is not to try to see her again that I have returned to this place.
Whenever I gazed upon her, or she turned her smile up to me, my soul seemed to hover in the space between us. The roses in the garden would float up out of their sleep, reflecting the horizons' unmade heart across my giddiness; and the furthermost silence brought back my dreams to life. The whole universe was placed between me and my heart. Happiness could gaze upon us, and yet our eyes had no way of bringing it any closer.
I was away for but a few months. The selfsame dance whose refrain is now on my lips comes back in every heart on a Sunday, ceaselessly offering up, between the wilting plane-tree, its mirror of pure water to the stars. Once music has recaptured the lost necklaces of every girl in love, once silence has crept back out of the silence, shall I find my way again without having to ask whom it is I have forgotten?
Already everything is so remote that her name alone encompasses my entire youth.
That name quivers in my voice, too trivial to forget, that child's name with its hint of silence, which stares deep into my heart, prompting recollection...
Until such time as the oars bury that song which mocks me with its tale of a final evening on the highway where our folk like to dance, the highway of farewells.
I was aware of an infinite depth about the way she spoke, as she counted off for me the dates of some distant year, without thinking, one arm about my neck; her poor face seemed to abstract itself from my wayward awareness, hiding away in my eyes as if to escape my icy heart. I would ask myself, what kind of shadow is it that seems to weep alongside those words she comes out with, whenever she stares at me? The spectre of my life! I watched in disgust as the spectre grew larger, edging up closer to me in its wildness...
In the villages they tend to stay up late dancing, on the feast day of the crazy. I recall that I used to slip away unnoticed, for I was already well lost before I actually left. That strange hour in which I pondered my rebellion has crept back tonight to make my voice embrace itself. A dense fog comes drifting through the trees. The roses raise up the slumbers of the earth in their spiky veils. On this searing night of truth, I could hear my pain steal my life, which had hitherto lain safe in its enchanted depths.
When I reached the end of a path chosen quite by chance, the first thing I noticed was that the wind had changed direction and was now sweeping what seemed like dead leaves from bygone years, piling them up at my feet. I bent down and touched the grass along the slopes. Taken aback by the whispering of familiar haunts, I suddenly imagined my body might be a cloak for their secret.
I think I must already have been singing. My voice stole back my soul from the gods... Oh, that sweet minute plucked from the past and secreted within the hour of my return! With each step, the paths that lay behind me had been closed off. My life turns into its own song, indistinguishable from the dusk. Death assigns us a name, surprised by our yearning for a pure space which has been betrayed: it is like a woman in love who steals away through the dementia of the rose-bushes.
The winds of time go begging, plundering... The soul of nightfall had merged into the indifference on the face of things. And there was I, staring at myself, all sense of direction lost... A man, a poor countenance in which everything disowns itself. The awkward mistruth of a shadow. I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky.
A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss. Then came the moment when the evening star draws the pastures open. The desert of my gaze casts light across the slopes. Weightless, the night trembled amid the drifting reeds, cradling the vines at my feet and the almond trees across which rode the dark winds.
The branches, the pathway, like a young girl's fetching smile, tore the veil from my heart, unfurling the immensity in my eyes. Each leaf borne off by autumn attracted a look, a cry of pain, from the untamed air. I trod stealthily on, gradually more aware of the marvellous pain I was suffering.

II.
How quickly passers-by move on! There must be a celebration somewhere. No body troubles to look at my face. I feel as if the thoughts of other people were trying to steal up my eyes.
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks. In a song's fading, my name is erased, amid the blossoms of windswept beauties. Is it really the love in my eyes which restores to life the tamarisks, the rooftops, the roses, when everything on which I look escapes from me into my eyes? In vain the beauty of the sunset draws tenderness about itself... Its universe could only describe itself by casting me out of my dream; and I know there is no one waiting for me, anywhere. The whole secret of the path I am following lies in the things I leave behind me forever.
Through the deafness of the night, the village risks sending out the same covert flame. Each voice has lapsed into the all-encompassing silence: its astonishing sweetness persudades me I should return to the petalled shadows of the farmhouses; where branches bearing lovely smiles float back from afar to merge into my dreams; across the slopes whose secret my heart is learning by heart.
Across my dreamy legends, a fragile hoeland reaches out to its exiled lilies. Skylines, shorelines, caresses, the countryside where I was born was fashioned by my heart and my eyes, as they swept across the fields, the daylight and all those hamlets, more mysterious still.
That murmuring in which the light hid from itself, those smells, that trickle of voices came drifting downwards from the sky, which my emotion sawi n rainbow colours, tracing its salts in the cycle of its seasons. An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassing the existance of the slightest human echo. I knew I could identify it in whatever direction I looked, since it would pluck the same fruit for my eyes from the least obvious horizons; and then a smile waylaid that nostalgia wherein my childhood races after me. As if taking its bearing from my own, a woman's life offered the promise of fresh spaces to my infinite desire never to die.
And once the sweet ray of light had split apart amid flashes of bright flesh, my eyes could trace the shadows of desire upon a hidden countenance.
The laughter of young girls was incapable of describing happiness.
Love lay over their beauty like a summer's dawn upon sleeping eyes. The dance, with all its reminiscences of love, had stored its silver heart among the stars.
Nights of fire where flowers would crowd in, bringing silence. Eyes which would invent the time of year, within that blinding purple clash of atmospheres in which life disputed its own rights... When one is too close to daybreak, which erases all things, one has no idea how to wait, one doesn't even realise that one is waiting.
Hands blindly following their caresses! ... They conversed in low tones. Each name died away in my wayfarer's song, and the secret of that loveliest languate of all was lost forever.
It is in my heart that oblivion holds sway over tyhe eyes of those women who are no longer with us. I couldn't even work out how to ask which way to go.

III.
Why did life never identify its own reflection in my eyes? Everything on which I gazed had already abandoned me for good; thus it was that happiness passed me over, in songs, in farewells... It was the wind over the tombstones which nullified our words as we paused at the edge of everything, distanced even from ourselves, with the world opening its eyes anew in my dream.
Saddest of loves in which we were being dreamt by someone remote whom I could not trace and in whose shadow the memory of that evening comes back to me. Happiness has only ever been betrayed by its own shadow. . . Rocky hollow, thatched cottage or rat's nest, this is where you'll find bitterness, this is the summit at which the wanderer realises that what he has been seeking has meanwhile taken on the aspect of everything he has been trying to disown, and wonders if he might be on the verge of dying. Never again shall my sandals leave prints along the ruts. Never again shall children point me out in my black jacket or my corduroy trousers at the crossroads where I used to ask my way.
I cannot distinguish the road back from my own shadow. Oh, beauty of this evening which my heart makes even purer than the sky, where the stars pick out their partners, stealing me back from those who have given up waiting for me; its darkest song has reached its climax in my suffering.
. . . Wrapped within her smile, she brought me such bliss, and her child's gaiety was nourished by my life.
When her graceful eyes had reunited us in that great flight of evening, the stammerings of love sought the shadows of our lips, as each avowal, exposing the nakedness of the soul, brought our thoughts closer to silence, expiring once it had voiced its secret.
Her smile was a naked dream. It was her purity that made my soul visible; while I could just make out a slight heartbeat, offering little resistance to me at the black core of the abyss and repeating, each time more softly, the name she had given me in the act of love.
Such at least are the thoughts in which a former life is laid bare, the gold gleaming at the bottom of the goblet too heavy to lift up. For in that time of youth, the dream of love would float on a sombre stream, which recollection has now drunk dry. How strange it all is! The trees of a separate highway trembled in the background of our impatience. Did her forehead bow down to obey the forehead of that evening which once more I see in my dreams? It was as though she had sought through me to be free of her own reality.
And her smile, telling me that space has been found anew.
.........
Her smile has chosen its giddy path within my eyes. And truly she is there. Her look draws out my secrets from within the mystery of the stars.
In that far place she had a name, Anne or Marion, I can no longer be sure. Was she pretty? Her features memorised my childhood, and made my whole life transparent.
That face wherein I felt invoked, I confess to myself in a low voice that it had circled about my entire existence.
Ah! Then my every thought was synonymous with her life. She was always daydreaming, and I recall how her slightest smile would cut short her gaze. An unreal sadness loomed over her beauty.
In a single smile, she would confide the secret of her tears to my loving gaze.
The whole miraculous structure of her life was founded upon my own.
I would stare at her as though through a glimmering dawn: it was the purity of my own life which I was drinking from her eyes.
Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow; and all my flesh was aware of black pathways and hovels and the silence one observes when the dead are near.
In the half-dark where her memory pursued me, voices fell silent beneath the clouds at my heels; the same fire shines through everyone else's eyes, and they all seem to wait to hear love spoken.
It is beneath such candles that the song is taken up again: there was once a girl who danced so much she lost her heart. Her mouth was fed on smiles alone. . .
The loveliest of the stars has raised up the night so as to blind me with its infinite presence; my gaze is submerged, like a silver ring tossed into the flood of my heart.

IV.
These new silences run so deep that I know my being must have changed its secrets.
I have thrown away the tiny lamp which cast a shadow as long as my entire journey. What might I not rediscover if I am now to be lost?
A ringing sound rises up from the links of chains slipped by the night. Now other words, words of the tenderest kind, slip reluctantly down from hair that is loosed. A path is quickly beaten across the rubble of the prison.
The rose of risk blossoms within my flesh, unfettered from my shadow: a single life has enfolded each gaze and all the silence within its wings.
The world soars up anew, illumined in a silken giddiness, and only the sky remains to bear witness to its artifice. Harbouring deep colours, a hand, raised over the very air I am breathing, dies as it persuades me to stay alive.
This is surely no time to try to track myself down to the place where I am standing. So that I may be free of this body which the earth insists on taking back, the sky, the sky in all its lightness, has absorbed me within the sweetness of belief.
The bulrush of love might point towards a shadow, were it to move. Mistakenly, some absence or other reverberates in the hidden depths of my vague tenderness. . .
My gaze is reborn from its shadows and steals across the plane-trees, the balcony and the year's array of flowers, whose profound truth has found me out at last. The same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. This is the land where everything depends on my life, where the one thing to inhibit love would be an excess of love.
A new world, capable of surprising me, a world in which every being can know itself and find its apotheosis in my desires. . . Caught up in their own brightness, the silvery plane-trees become marvelous visions in the night. . . In all those places which on enourished my thoughts, I see tears welling up in colourless eyes as they dream about my life. . .

. . .She has no idea at all how to make herself known. The delicacy of her approach is enough to dispel all hint of a storm. The translucency of those glances which her presence sets alight for me is like a candle wherein life caresses its eyes and selects its zephyr, reviving all those beauties in which my naked soul revealed itself to chance. . .

. . .Kisses, pink and various, and then faces.
Here is the age old dream of a gaze in which the spirit can drink itself in, absolving the daylight from its allegiance to my shadows, carry off the arc of my madness towards an iris no one can foresee.
Something like trepidation tells me there mustexist more light within the silence of things, within the fear of seeing my life's stagnancy disfigure those awakenings as they multiply about me; and I allow myself to be borne away on the winds towards those overflows where love tries to construct some sort of protection for itself. For in between my glances the winds traverse a landscape erased by the dazzling impulse of the flesh, across heather where I read the message of defenceless eyes.

Once there was a face in which the depths of my life were blown away, a face whose smile penetrated me deeper than my own dream.
Whereupon our eyes, true to their sky-blue hue, cast shadows across time.
Myosotis of the look, probing for sunlight in the crevices of time. Yes, I remember my youth. Inside my life, there was always a secondary life hidden away. A brother would peer into my happiness, with a benevolent eye.
His hands drew closer to my heart those unreal fields where love uncovers its chalice. He gazes on life, on the grass in the graveyards, on love as it fades. An hour's brightness floats between us, swollen like a tear about to fall.
The floodwater uncovers the heart of the last of the mermaids. In vain the wind invokes its departed spirits, predicting the death of all things that breathe and shine. My entire happiness is tied up inside my child's apron, and as I walk I shall turn to look back over my shadow's dream.
My cries are like the residue of blood that lingers in a deep wound. The sounds breathe, then die away. An enormous bowl of silence has been filled to the brim.
The world is like some alternative dream in which a heart falls apart; a dream in which the sky closes down its lid upon the secret of all things we love. I can make out the tracks, the darkening mountainside, even the shape of bodies, as lovely as oblivion, that rivulet in which the blue sky looks for solace. And still that same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. Upon the eroded cliffs where I come to my senses, my steps gather up the shadow as it pours down from the sky.
Tonight, the thoughts of the dead are turning back to the earth. I manage to open my eyes again without forfeiting my heart. The trees and the grass at dusk intoxicate my thoughts, inciting them to slip back into the shadow in its natural state.

My soul pares itself at the centre of this nocturnal landscape. Wretched spirit, in thrall to all those lightning flashes, the utter blackness of the sky has paid off your ransom tonight.
Listen, through the composure of the olive trees, a tiny river can be seen: everything it says is addressed to the stars. Through the lattices, the very roses intensify the darkness. If you, the living, were to weep, your ears would strip me of everything.
The necklaces of your eyes describe the distant outline of those windswept villages. Here, complaints may only be voiced in a low murmur. A sad brother would read out what happiness meant. His heart has taken on all my suffering. I would weep softly were he to speak to me about myself.
But it is she whom he best remembers. Ann, or Marion - I forget which name linked her to life on this earth, where her laughter drew together the crowns of all the gods I have ever worshipped. And now her face is heavy with my secret.
I gaze upon her and sense that my life now can go no further. A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything

*****

First published in Chantiers between January and March 1928.
Reprinted in Joe Bousquet: Oevre romanesque complete, Vol. 1.
French original copyright Albim Michel, 1979
Translated by Roger Cardinal.