BETWEEN YES AND NO
1095
another. He endures them, settles down in his destiny. He
is
esteemed.
And then, one night, nothing. He meets a friend whom he has been
very fond of. The latter speaks to him in an off-hand way. When he
gets home, the man kills himself. People then speak of personal
troubles and secret dramas. No. And
if
there absolutely must be a
cause, he killed himself because a friend spoke to him off-handedly.
Thus, every time I have seemed to feel the deeper meaning of the
world, it is its simplicity which has always overwhelmed me. My
mother that evening, and her strange indifference. Another time, I
lived in a cottage in the suburbs with a dog, two cats and their kittens,
all black. The mother couldn't nurse them. One by one the kittens
died. They would fill their room with muck. And every evening when
I returned, I would find one all rigid with its lips curled up. One
evening I found the last kitten half eaten by its mother. It had al–
ready begun to smell. The odor of death mingled with the odor of
urine. I sat down in the midst of all this wretchedness, and, with my
hands in the muck, breathing the odor of putrefaction; I stared for a
long time at the wild flame blazing in the green eyes of the mother
who crouched motionless in a corner. Yes. That's just what it's like this
evening. At a certain point of destitution, nothing leads to anything
any more, there seems to be no basis for either hope or hopelessness,
and my whole life
is
summed up in an image. But why stop there?
Simple, everything is simple; in the lighthouse beacons, a green
light a red one, a white one; in the coolness of the evening and the
odors of the city and the squalor which rise up to me.
If
this evening
it is the image of a certain childhood which comes back to me, how
can I help welcoming the lesson of love and poverty which I draw
from it? Since this hour is like an interval between yes and no, I leave
for other hours the hope and disgust of living. Yes, to epitomize only
the transparence and simplicity of lost paradises-in an image. And
thus it is that not long ago, in a house in an old neighborhood, a son
went to see his mother. They are sitting facing one another, in silence.
But their eyes meet.
"Well, mamma?"
"Well, all right."
"Are you bored? Don't I talk enough?"
"Oh, you never talked much."
And a lovely lipless smile melts over her face . It's true, he never
