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PARTISAN REVIEW
demonstrations that you were already a man. The next day, when
you got up, I was in the patio and, pointing a finger at the sky, I said
as soon as I saw you, "The street of the comet." You didn't look up,
but it seems you smiled. I was very satisfied that day.
That night while I was remembering the comet, I couldn't get
out of my head the face of the lead drummer's wife when she'd told
me I was too old to go on believing in certain things.
If
I told her
about the comet, no doubt she'd have used the same expression of
triumph or certainty like telling me that that was one more proof of
my son's feelings toward me. The truth is she humiliated me a little;
but still there was much more to it and I must get to the bottom of
my shame in order to know, according to what I'd glimpsed, that all
that was nothing, that my face, my form,
father,
and his face, his
form,
son,
still endured and that the life relationship was indestructi-
ble despite all there might be inside the bottle.
Because one is only his own irreplaceable form, with his nose,
which can be a beautiful memory, his ears, the cut of his face, like
those caricatures some people make. Once they made one of me.
"Yes , that's me," I had to admit when I looked at it, because it
couldn't be anybody but me. One is only his form, which limits him
to the rest of the world. Inside are the viscera and all the rest, but
one is finally that, the oval of the head, the total form barely con–
stricted into the neck, eyes, arms which fake sinuosities and then
straight lines toward the ground, terminating in still tips which are
displaced by the earth. One is finally a form which contains a single
life and a single death. One is a kind ofjail in which he is condemned
to live and die. But there is something which saves him when he im–
agines the total existence of another being (his form and what it con–
tains) and feels suddenly that that other being responds, and then
those forms, touched by love, unite and feel they are no longer single
forms, single jails, but share the wondrous world. When one has felt
that , when one has felt touched by that vision of forms which is
called love , then what do death and oblivion matter, what does all
the rest matter if in some way he feels that all the other beings are
responding for one, are affirming the precariousness of their own
limitations. For that reason, discovering now that you love me, I
feel, son, that my life is totally fulfilled. So it is beautiful to be alive,
to feel that all the beings in the world - those who are near, even
those one doesn't know, and those who are in other latitudes - re–
spond to one, accompany him in the world, are with him to assure
him of his own existence. I can tell you that it has been beautiful to
