Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.
I watched him as he moved. And then I watched their faces, watching him. And then I was afraid. I knew that they were watching, had been watching both of us. They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end. It had taken some time but the tables had been turned; now I was in the zoo, and they were watching.
We had, in effect, been playing a deadly game and he was the winner. He was the winner in spite of the fact that I had cheated to win.
Why, for example – especially knowing the family as I do – I should want to marry your sister is a great mystery to me. But your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to, and no one has the right to stop us. If she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine.
Then, we were still. We did not move, because we could not. We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.
I am sure that if any of the girls we whistled at that day had shown any signs of responding the ocean would not have been deep enough to drown our shame and terror.
But, these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that’s why so many people are lost.
I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home; not that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where the concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill; but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood; to those things, those places, those people which I would always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else.
The question is banal but one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal.
He grinned. I could not tell whether he grinned because he thought I was lying or because he knew I was telling the truth.
You are evil, you know, and sometimes when you smiled at me I hated you. I wanted to strike you. I wanted to make you bleed. You smiled at me the way you smiled at everyone, you told me what you told everyone – and you tell nothing but lies.
I’ve known him all my life and I hope I always know him.
It became in his imagination his impossible, lifelong task, his hard trial, like that of a man he had read about somewhere, whose curse it was to push a boulder up a steep hill, only to have the giant who guarded the hill roll the boulder down again – and so on, forever, throughout eternity; he was still out there, that hapless man, somewhere at the other end of the earth, pushing his boulder up the hill.
To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it.
His courtesy is as real as her trouble.
That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood. Precisely, I wanted to know that mystery and feel that power and have that promise fulfilled through me.
You are – how old? Twenty-six or seven? I am nearly twice that and, let me tell you, you are lucky. You are lucky that what is happening to you now is happening now and not when you are forty, or something like that, when there would be no hope for you and you would simply be destroyed.
He smiled – smiled like someone who, faced with the total inadequacy of the opposition, is prepared to drop the argument.
They knew that they had witnessed a beginning and now they would not cease to watch until they saw the end.
Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.