Was Your Love Like That?? (Story of the Month)

Story of the Month

I loved her madly.

Why does a man love? Why does a man love? How strange it is that one comes to see but a single creature in the world, that his mind holds but a single thought, his heart but a single desire, and his lips but a single name — a name that rises constantly, welling up like spring water from the depths of the soul to the lips, a name one repeats over and over, murmuring it without ceasing, everywhere, like a prayer and a supplication.

I want to tell you our story, for love has only one story, ever the same.

I met her, and I lived on her gentleness, on her caresses; I lived in her arms and in her dresses; I lived on every word she uttered. I was so wrapped up, so bound, so absorbed in everything that touched her that I no longer cared whether it was day or night, whether I was alive or dead, upon this old earth of ours.

Then death came suddenly upon her. How did she die? I do not know. I came to know nothing at all. But I know that she came home wet one evening, for the rain was heavy; the next day she began to cough, and she went on coughing a whole week and took to her bed. What happened? I do not remember. But doctors would come, write something, and go away. Medicines were brought, and some women made her drink them. How hot her hands were, how burning her forehead, how bright and sad her eyes! Whenever I spoke to her she answered me, but I do not remember what we said. I have forgotten everything — everything, everything... She died, and I remember quite clearly her faint, feeble sigh. The nurse said: "Ah!" — and I understood,

Yes, I understood!

But beyond that I knew nothing, nothing. I saw a priest who said to me: "Your mistress?" — and it seemed to me that he was insulting her. Since she was dead, no one had the right to say that of her any longer, and I drove him away. Another priest came who was kind and gentle, and I shed tears when he began to speak to me of her.

They consulted me about the funeral, but I remember nothing of what they said, though I remember her coffin, and the sound of the hammer when they nailed the coffin shut upon her. Oh! my God, my God!

And she was buried — buried. And she was in that pit! Some people came to see me — lady friends. I resolved on escape; I fled. I fled, rushing through the streets; I returned home, and the next day I set out on a journey.

Then yesterday I returned to Paris; and when I saw our room again for the second time — when I saw our room, our bed, our furniture, everything that remains of the life of a human being after death — a new and violent grief fell upon me, so that I was on the point of opening the window and throwing myself from it into the street. I could not stay among these things, between these walls that had enclosed and sheltered her, that kept in their hidden crevices a thousand atoms of the departed beloved, of her skin and her breath. I picked up my hat to escape. But I had not reached the door before I passed the great mirror in the hall, which she had set up in that spot so that she might look at herself from the crown of her head to the sole of her foot every day as she went out, and see whether her toilette, from her little boots to her hat, was faultless and pretty.

And I stopped short before that glass which had reflected her image time after time — and I reckon the mirror must have kept her image. I stood there trembling, my eyes fixed upon the mirror, upon that flat, deep, empty glass which had contained her wholly and possessed her wholly, as I and my yearning glances had contained and possessed her. I felt as if I were in love with that glass. I touched it — it was cold. Oh, memory! And oh, the dense, burning, terrifying mirror that torments people with such torment! Happy is the man whose heart forgets everything it has held, everything that has passed through it, everything that has looked at itself in that heart and read its image in its tenderness and its love. Oh! how I suffer!

And I rushed outside without knowing it, without any wish to go out, and made my way to the cemetery. I found her simple tomb; I saw a white marble cross, and I read these words:

"She loved, was loved, and died."

She is here, beneath the earth, decaying. How dreadful the picture! I sobbed, my forehead pressed against the ground, and I stayed where I was a long, long time. Then I saw the darkness gathering and thickening. And a strange, mad desire took possession of me, the desire of a wretched lover: I wished to spend the night, one last night, weeping upon her grave. But I should be seen in that place and driven out. What was to be done? The stratagem did not fail me: I rose and began to wander through that city, the city of the dead.

I walked and walked. How small that city was, measured against the other city in which we live! And yet how far the dead outnumber the living! We need houses and spacious streets and ample room, so that there may be space for the four generations that look upon the light of day at the same time, and drink water from the spring and wine from the vines, and eat bread from the wheat of the plains. But there is scarcely anything — scarcely anything — for all these generations of the dead, for all these steps of humanity descending down to us. The earth takes them back, and oblivion gathers them in. Farewell!

And suddenly, at the edge of the cemetery, I realized that I was in its oldest part, where those whose deaths lie far in the past have become mingled with the soil, where the crosses themselves have grown old, and where the cemetery's new arrivals will likely be laid tomorrow. The place was full of roses that had known no share of care, and of strong, magnificent cypress trees. What a mournful, beautiful garden, fed upon human flesh! I drew into myself beneath a green tree and hid myself completely among the thick, desolate branches, and waited, clinging to the trunk of the tree as a drowning man whose ship has broken up clings to a plank.

When the darkness had grown deep I left my hiding place and began to walk gently, deliberately, with mute steps, over that earth filled with the dead. I wandered long, but I could not find her tomb a second time. I went on searching, my arms outstretched, my hands and feet and knees and chest — even my head — knocking against the tombs. And still I could not find her. I kept on searching like a blind man groping his way. I felt the stones, the crosses, the iron railings, the metal wreaths, and the wreaths of withered flowers, and I read the names with my fingers — read the names by passing my fingertips over the letters. What a night, what a night! I could not find the beloved a second time.

And there was no moon on the horizon. What a night! I was terrified — terribly terrified — in those narrow passages between two rows of graves. Graves! Graves! Graves! Nothing but graves! To my right, to my left, before me, around me, everywhere — graves! I sat down on one of them, for I was unable to keep up the search. My knees were in the grip of exhaustion. I could hear the beating of my heart. And I heard something else as well. What did I hear? A confused noise that has no name to be called by. Was that noise inside my head, or in the depths of that thick-veiled night, or was

the noise beneath the mysterious earth sown with human corpses? I looked around me, but I cannot recall how long I stayed where I was. Terror had paralyzed me; I was cold with fear, ready to burst out screaming — ready to die!

And suddenly it seemed to me that the marble slab I was sitting on was moving. Certainly it was moving, as if something were lifting it. With a single bound I moved to the neighboring tomb, and I saw — yes, I saw distinctly! — the slab I had just left rise upright; and the dead man came forth, came forth a bare skeleton, pushing the slab back to its former place with his bent back. I swear that I saw it with perfect clearness, though the night was pitch dark.

And on the cross I read:

"Here lies Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. He loved his family, and was kind and honorable. He gave up his soul in the grace of God."

The dead man likewise read what was carved upon the slab of the tomb. Then he picked up from the path a small, jagged stone and began, with effort and care, to scrape away the letters, and after a time he brought his work to completion. Then he gazed with his two hollow eye-sockets at the place where the letters had been carved; then, pointing with the bone that had been his forefinger, he began to trace with it gleaming letters, like those lines that children draw upon walls with the tips of matchsticks. And he wrote:

"Here rests Jacques Olivant, who died at the age of fifty-one. This man hastened his father's death by his harshness and his coldness, because he coveted possession of his fortune. He embittered his wife's life, made his children miserable, deceived his neighbors, robbed whomever he was able to rob, and died a wretch." When the dead man had finished this work, he stood dumbfounded, contemplating what he had done. And casting my gaze about me, I saw that all the graves were open, and that all the corpses had come out of them and had effaced what their kinsmen and relations had written upon the slabs of the tombs, and had set down the truth in its place. And I learned that all of them had been the tormentors of their neighbors — that they had been malicious, wanting in honesty, hypocrites, liars, arrogant, blasphemers, envious. I learned that those men whom no blemish stains and those women whom no stain sullies — I learned that these upright fathers and faithful wives and loyal sons and chaste daughters had all of them, before, stolen and cheated and committed every shameful, hateful deed. I saw them all, at the same moment, on the threshold of the eternal dwelling, writing the truth — the tremendous, sacred truth of which everyone was ignorant, or feigned ignorance, during life.

And I thought that the beloved, too, must have written something on the slab of her tomb.

And at that instant, running now without fear among the half-open graves, among the corpses and the skeletons, I made my way toward her, certain that I should find her at once. And I knew her straightway, without seeing her face, which was hidden in a winding-cloth.

And on the marble cross where I had first read:

"She loved, was loved, and died" —

"She went out one day in the rain to betray her lover; she caught cold, and died."