Thomas The Obscure Read Online Free PDF Page B

reasons, and that after all there was in fact a possibility of contact between them. Now that she was sure that, pitilessly unrelenting as he was, if he spoke he would say everything there was to say without hiding anything from her, telling her everything so that when he stopped speaking his silence, the silence of a being that has nothing more to give and yet has given nothing, would be even more terrifying, now she was sure that he would speak. And this certainty was so great that he appeared to her as if he had already spoken. He surrounded her, like an abyss. He revolved about her. He entranced her. He was going to devour her by changing the most unexpected words into words she would no longer be able to expect.
    "What I am. . ."
    "Be quiet."
    It was late, and knowing that hours and days no longer concerned anyone but her, she cried louder in the shadows. She came near and lay down before the window. Her face melted, and again closed itself. When the darkness was complete, leaning in her tattered way toward the one she now called, in her new language drawn from the depths, her friend, without worrying about her own state she wanted (like a drunkard with no legs explaining to himself by his drunkenness the fact that he can no longer walk), she wanted to see why her relations with this dead man no longer seemed to be advancing. As low as she had fallen, and probably because from that level she perceived that there was a difference between them and a huge difference, but not such that their relationship must always be doomed, she was suddenly suspicious of all the politenesses they had exchanged. In the folds where she hid herself, she told herself with a profoundly sophisticated air that she would not allow herself to be deceived by the appearance of this perfectly lovable young man, and it was with deep pain that she recalled his welcoming manner and the ease with which she approached him. If she did not go so far as to suspect him of hypocrisy (she might complain, she might cry miserably because he kept her twenty fathoms below the truth in brilliant and empty words; but it never came into her head, in spite of her sullen efforts to speak of herself and of him in the same words, that there might be, in what she called the character of Thomas, any duplicity), it was because, just by turning her head, in the silence in which he necessarily existed, she perceived him to be so impenetrable that she saw clearly how ridiculous it would have been to call him insincere. He did not deceive her, and yet she was deceived by him. Treachery revolved about them, so much the more terrible because it was she who was betraying him , and she was deceiving herself at the same time with no hope of putting an end to this aberration since, not knowing who he was, she always found someone else beside her. Even the night increased her error, even time which made her try again and again without reprieve the same things, which she undertook with a fierce and humiliated air. It was a story emptied of events, emptied to the point that every memory and all perspective were eliminated, and nevertheless drawing from this absence its inflexible direction which seemed to carry everything away in the irresistible movement toward an imminent catastrophe. What was going to happen? She did not know, but devoting her entire life to waiting, her impatience melted into the hope of participating in a general cataclysm in which, at the same time as the beings themselves, the distances which separate beings would be destroyed.
     
     
     
    VIII
     
    I T WAS IN THIS NEW STATE that, feeling herself becoming an enormous, immeasurable reality on which she fed her hopes, like a monster revealed to no one, not even to herself, she became still bolder and, keeping company with Thomas, came to attribute to more and more penetrable motives the difficulties of her relationship with him, thinking, for example, that what was abnormal was that nothing could be discovered about