The Complete Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

know the meaning of “honor,” for example.
    And, above all, for the very first time I, in a deep slumber until then, caught a glimpse of ideas.
    The uneasiness those first conversations with Daniel produced in me arose as from a certainty of danger. One day I managed to explain to him that the thought of this danger was linked to expressions read in books with the scant attention I generally granted to everything and that now flared in my memory: “fruit of evil” . . . When Daniel told me that I was speaking of the Bible, I was seized with terror of God, combined nevertheless with a strong and shameful curiosity like the kind from an addiction.
    Because of all this, my story is difficult to explain, when divided into its elements. How far did my feeling for Daniel go (I use this general term because I don’t know exactly what it contained) and where did my awakening to the world begin? Everything was interwoven, mixed up inside me and I couldn’t specify whether my unease was desire for Daniel or yearning to seek the newly discovered world. Because I awoke simultaneously as a woman and a human.
    Perhaps Daniel had acted merely as an instrument, perhaps my destiny really was the one I pursued, the destiny of those set loose upon the earth, of those who don’t measure their actions according to Good and Evil, perhaps I, even without him, would have discovered myself some day, perhaps, even without him, I would have fled Jaime and his land. How can I know?
    I listened to them, for nearly two hours. My staring eyes hurt and my legs, frozen in place, had fallen asleep. When Daniel looked at me. He later told me that the burst of laughter that so wounded me, to the point of making me cry, was caused by the days-long delirium he found himself in and above all by my pathetic appearance. My mouth gaping stupidly, “my foolish eyes, attesting to my animal ingenuity” . . . That’s how Daniel spoke to me. Clawing at me with easy and colorless remarks that he tossed off but that dug into me, swift and piercing, forever.
    And that’s how I met Daniel. I don’t recall the details that brought us closer. I only know that I was the one who sought him out. And I know that Daniel took me over gradually. He regarded me with indifference and, I imagined, would never have been drawn to my person if he hadn’t found me odd and amusing. My humble approach to him was my gratitude for his favor . . . How I admired him. The more I suffered his scorn, the more superior I considered him, the more I separated him from the “others.”
    Today I understand him. I forgive him for everything, I forgive everything in people who can’t get a hold of themselves, people who ask themselves questions. People who look for reasons to live, as if life alone didn’t justify itself.
    Later I got to know the real Daniel, the invalid, the one who only existed, though in perpetual radiance, inside himself. Whenever he turned toward the world, now groping and spent, he realized he was helpless and, bitter, bewildered, he discovered that all he knew was how to think. One of those people who possess the earth in a second, with their eyes closed. That power he had to deplete things before getting them, that stark premonition he had of “afterward” . . . Before taking the first step toward action, he had already tasted the saturation and sorrow that follow victories . . .
    And, as if to compensate for this impossibility of achieving anything, he, whose soul so yearned to expand, had invented yet another path suited to his inactivity, where he could expand and justify himself. To make the most of oneself, he’d repeat, is the highest and noblest human objective. To make the most of oneself would mean abandoning the possession and achievement of things in order to possess oneself, to develop one’s own elements, to grow within one’s own form. To make one’s own music and hear it oneself . . .
    As if he needed a scheme like that . . .