Lovers (9781609459192) by Howard (TRN) Daniel; Curtis Arsand Read Free Book Online

blind to the others, to the whole world.
    The only things that existed for me were the stake and your cry.
    The same cry, repeated over and over behind a curtain of flames. I heard you but could no longer see you.
    And all was silence, the roar of the flames and the yells of the crowd.
    And the cobblestones, and the houses surrounding the square, and the executioner, and the priest, silence, my love, nothing but silence.
    And I realized all at once that I will not be able to paint all that.
    I will paint only insignificant things.
    It was as if I was formless, weightless, powerless. And I will be that way forever.
    That cry he gave!
    I heard it. What else could I hear? And for the first time in my life, I hated something of his.
    That cry that some call inhuman.
    Perhaps because it is the last cry a man can give. It emerges from the last frontier between what is and will no longer be. It is absolutely human, my love.
    It is the only cry that you, like all of us, can utter, the only true cry. And it is that cry that I heard.
    I will not paint again, my love.
    Don’t abandon me.

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    Y ou did not have to say: Don’t go, come back.
You did not abandon each other.
Apart from this love, its twists and turns, its clarity, everything is negligible. Unknown men no longer arouse your curiosity.
    That is what provokes your suffering: although Balthazar is more than your shadow, although he is another you, you can no longer touch him, it is seeing him that you miss. This love, however great, will no longer evolve.
    You have lost your future.
    You no longer wonder how tomorrow will be. And that is why your contemporaries think you mad. Just like Anne de Créon. You have learned that her riches, her lands, everything has been confiscated. By order of the King, she has been confined to a convent for life. You do not care. She is more dead to you than Balthazar will ever be.
    Tonight you tried to draw Balthazar’s cry. You could not do it.
    I will not paint again, you told yourself. And you wept.
    You will be able to paint nothing now but what is formless.
    So you make a bundle of your brushes and pigments and a notebook on every page of which your beloved is radiant, as he was before the flames, and, without taking your leave of Saint-Polgues, good old Saint-Polgues, you flee Paris.

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    T he capital is now far behind you.
There is this road, and that one. It makes no difference now, whether you choose to go right or left.
    One month, two, three.
    Six months.
    A year.
    He is still alive in you, but as the days pass you hear a new presence throbbing inside you, and this presence is your own, although you no longer recognize yourself, you have been stripped of everything, even your grief.
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80
    W hy did he stop here rather than there? His exhaustion, of which he had ceased to be conscious days earlier, months earlier, suddenly overcame him, urgent, perhaps final.
    Sébastien Faure was found looking through the gilded bars of a gate at an avenue, trees, a chateau. He muttered to the people who surrounded him, bent over him, that he was sick with exhaustion. That he couldn’t go on, that he was hungry and thirsty, that he was cold, that he was hot, that he could no longer feel his legs, that everything was confused in his head, he spoke in an uninterrupted flood of words.
    Suddenly his knees sagged, and he collapsed to the ground, sobbing.
    Exhaustion, but not imminent death.
    What keeps him alive is a hidden energy, where it comes from, what sustains it, who can say, surely not him, surely not anyone. It sustains him, but for how long? For what purpose? Until what dawn? Until what night? Until the love and the presence that possess him have lost all their splendor, suddenly, and all their stillness, and they disintegrate and collapse, until they are nothing but a memory, the most beautiful and intense of memories, but a memory nonetheless, coming and going in his mind, appearing, disappearing,