Inseparable

For Zaza If there are tears in my eyes tonight, is it because you are no longer alive, or because I am? I should dedicate this story to you, but I know that you no longer exist anywhere, and my writing to you like this is pure literary artifice. In any case, this isn’t really your story, only one inspired by us. You were not Andrée; nor was I Sylvie, who speaks in my name.

People say you have to have faith because believing is irrational. So I end up thinking that the more irrational things seem, the more likely they are to be true.

I didn't understand: you don't believe what you believe on purpose. Could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?

We made small talk, like adults do; but I suddenly understood, with astonishment and joy, that the emptiness in my heart, my gloomy feeling of recent days, had only one cause: the absence of Andrée. Living without her was no longer living.

How old do you have to be to think: this is forever?

to fight against time, against forgetting, against death, to do justice to this absolute presence of the instant, to this eternity of the instant, which will have been forever

walked a lot that summer. I walked through the chestnut groves, stinging my fingers; I picked bunches of honeysuckle and spindle, tasted the blackberries, arbutus berries, dogwood leaves, the tart berries of the barberry shrubs; I breathed in the heavy scent of the buckwheat in flower, lay on the ground to catch a whiff of the strange scent of the heather. Then I would sit in the wide meadow, at the foot of the silver poplar trees, and open a novel by James Fenimore Cooper. When the wind blew, the poplars would whisper. The wind enthralled me. I felt that from one end of the earth to the other, the trees spoke to each other and spoke to God; it sounded like both music and a prayer were piercing my heart before rising to the heavens.

She was often late, not because she didn't care, but because she had too many contradictory cares.

Oh! This trick of my heart that wants to diminish you in order to suffer less. Is it suffering? Despite everything, I know that you are so close to me, and that it is towards me, not towards someone else, that you are coming; but how far away is that radiant domain...

Three days passed before Andrée could find time to see me again; we arranged to meet at the tea shop at Au Printemps. All around me, women wearing perfume ate cakes and talked about the cost of living. Since the day she was born, Andrée was destined to be like them: but she wasn’t

I was very well informed about sexual issues, for during my childhood and adolescence, my body had had its desires, but neither my considerable wisdom nor my infinitesimal experience could explain the ties that united the flesh to tenderness, or happiness. To Andrée, there existed a link between the heart and the body that remained a mystery to me.

How old do you have to be before you have the right to think: this is forever?

I would have liked to protest: “There isn’t just studying, there’s you.” But we had changed the conversation. In books, I thought with sadness, people declare their love or hatred for each other, they dare admit to everything they feel in their hearts; why is that impossible in life? I would walk for two days and two nights without eating or drinking to see Andrée for an hour, to spare her any pain: and she had no idea!

Una noche tendida en un prado húmedo, de cara a la luna, me dije: « ¡Son pecados!», y sin embargo, estaba firmemente dispuesta a seguir comiendo, leyendo, hablando y soñando como me viniera en gana. « ¡No creo en Dios!», me dije ¿Cómo creer en Dios y escoger deliberadamente la desobediencia? Por un momento, esa obviedad me dejó atónita: no creía. Ni papá ni los escritores a quienes yo admiraba creían, y, seguramente el mundo no se explica sin Dios, pero Dios no explica gran cosa; de todas formas, no se entendía nada.

What would I have daydreamed about? I loved Andrée above all else, and she was right next to me.