A Letter (I)

For some indefinite number of months you’ve seen me looking at you, constantly looking at you, always with the same hesitant and solicitous gaze. I know you’ve noticed this. And since you’ve noticed, you must have thought it strange that this gaze, which can’t really be called shy, has never intimated a meaning. Always attentive, vague and unchanging, as if satisfied to be only the sadness of all this… Nothing else… And when you’ve thought about this – regardless of what you feel when you think about me – you must have considered my possible intentions. You must have reasoned, without being too convinced, that I’m either an eccentric version of the shy type or else something on the order of a madman. I can assure you, Madam, with respect to my habit of looking at you, that I am not merely bashful nor positively mad. I am, first and foremost, something else, as I shall explain, without much hope you’ll believe me. How often I’ve whispered to my dream of you: ‘Do your duty as a useless amphora; fulfil your calling as a mere vessel.’

What nostalgia I felt for the idea I wanted to have of you when I learned, one day, that you were married! What a tragic day in my life that was! I wasn’t jealous of your husband. It had never even occurred to me to wonder if you had one. I simply felt nostalgia for my idea of you. Were I to learn the absurd fact that a woman in a painting – yes, a painting – was married, I would feel just as sorry.

Possess you? I don’t know how that might be done. And even if I had the human stain of knowing how, what a disgrace I would be to myself, what a flagrant insult to my own greatness were I even to think of putting myself on a par with your husband!

Possess you? One evening when you happen to be alone on a dark street, an attacker can subdue and possess you. He can even fertilize you, leaving behind a trace of himself in your womb. If possessing you means to possess your body, what good is that?

The attacker doesn’t possess your soul? But how is a soul possessed? And is there a lover clever enough to be able to possess your ‘soul’.....? I leave the job to your husband. Or do you expect me to stoop to his level? How many hours I’ve spent in secret company with my idea of you! How much we’ve loved each other in my dreams! But I swear that even there I’ve never dreamed of possessing you. I’m a courteous and chaste man, even in my dreams. I have respect for the mere idea of a beautiful woman.

♦ I wouldn’t know how to make my soul interested in having my body possess yours. The very idea makes me trip in myself over unseen obstacles, and I get all tangled up in obscure inner webs. Imagine what would happen to me if I really wanted to possess you!

I would, I repeat, be incapable of trying to do it. I can’t even make myself dream of doing it.

These, Madam, are the words I have to write in response to your involuntarily interrogative glance. It is in this book that you’ll first read this letter to you. If you don’t realize it’s for you, it won’t matter. I write to entertain myself more than to tell you anything. Only business letters are addressed to other people. The rest of one’s letters, at least for a superior soul, should be exclusively from and to oneself.

I have nothing else to say to you. Be assured that I esteem you as much as I can. I should be pleased if you sometimes think of me.