THE HAND THAT FED ME
33
this,
all
my gratitude. Because, at a moment when you did not yet
exist for me, I already existed for you. Isn't this reason enough?
No, it needs further explaining. I feel that the more I love you,
the less you understand me. You must know that a man like myself,
so deeply displeased, dissatisfied with himself as I am, can only be
saved by an act of graciousness. A blessing, external and gratuitous
must come to him. For he will destroy whatever is internal, whatever
comes out of himself. The lower he falls, the more he will demand
and the louder he will clamor for salvation. An absolute beggar
demands the entire world.
This is why I love you. But
if
I love you because you flirted with
me, I am, at the same time, inclined to disapprove your flirtatiousness.
I could understand flirtatiousness in a nun. But in a woman like your–
self, Ellen! A nun, let us assume,
is
repressed. But you! Not repres–
sion but bonheur, bliss at every pore. Now that I no longer need
withhold anything, now that I am free, I may tell you what I felt
when I first saw you. Believe me, and here enters another irony, my
first sight of you was intuitive proof that I would have you ! That
is
what
is
called spontaneous love. Love pre-exists in the heart, and when
it finds its object it leaps out and enters it and does its business, estab–
lishing a conviction, while the timid soul still tells itself it has no more
than an "interest." But I do not delude myself. I saw and at once
believed, and I knew what I saw and what I believed, and so strong
was my conviction that even thei three years that passed and the frus–
strations of the last week have not deprived me of
it.
Yes, I was sure.
Furthermore, I still am. For it will not go away. I still see you as I
saw you then, excited, plump, in a tight black dress, your arms bare,
your hair loose, your feet in sandal-shoes. I have torn that dress from
you a thousand times, but I have done it reverently, in my mind ob–
serving that same delicacy, that attention to detail I would observe
in fact. Thus I have seen you naked, and I do not revile myself with
the thought that what
is
only imaginary for me must be actual for
one or many a man. It
is
my possession. The nakedness with which I
have endowed you
is
solid and unique, both in the actuality it has
for me, and in its expression, which
is
entirely its own and not com–
pounded of other women. Nor is the look of your body a wish fulfil–
ment, for I do not assemble you out of separate female perfections–
that art of day dreaming! No, for your breasts, as I imagine them,
are even too large for my preference and your thighs could do with
