So Vast the Prison Read Online Free

at the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter that I found him alone—the sun intense, freezing cold, the air translucent and dry before dusk? I have forgotten; the truth is that I had become so distracted during that period—in so many ways. Those thirteen months, I don’t think I noticed the seasons, except perhaps, stepping out the door, I would suddenly wrap up or maybe go back mechanicallyto get a shawl or a raincoat or umbrella. I never even tried to use the reactions of my body, which is sensitive to cold, to locate myself in the yearly cycle—as if, since the story began in the summer, and despite all the external evidence to the contrary, I remained in that season.
    My memory, benumbed, registered vaguely a few sighs from other voices in me:
I’m cold! I’m hot! I don’t have on enough clothes! Why is it so damp?
    I remember a visit just before winter; I probably imagined it was still the end of September, or at the latest October. As I stepped out of the taxi to see the summer village with its bungalows all closed up and its little streets seeming frozen and abandoned, I was reminded that summer was long gone. “December already,” I murmured, paying the driver; suddenly I was at a loss to find some pretext:
How am I going to explain dropping by? I don’t even have the excuse of saying that I’ve come for a swim and thought I’d say hello!
    Of course, in September, I had not used any such pretenses. Even when the adjoining beach was swarming with families who were there to swim, I had not even thought of saying, “I’ve come for a swim,” or, “After my swim, I’ll come by to say hello, relax a bit, and then be off again.” On the contrary, more than once I even said in an offhand manner, “I thought of you, so I took a taxi, and now here I am with all your friends!”
    This time I told myself that I had thought up the most cunning ruse possible. I would tell the truth; without mincing words I would explain my real motivation, the urge that drove me to come in a taxi as fast as possible. Then, precisely because the unadorned truth was revealed, it would be played down, and I would know that my passion was concealed as deeply as possible. The other could not take what I said at face value, because then it would have been a confession! As if I had proclaimed in a faint voice (frail tones, quiveringchin, and all the other signs of my soul’s secret vibration):
I wanted to see you! I took a taxi. Fifteen kilometers and here I am!
    How easily that passed for a fantastic notion, for the whim of a spoiled woman, flaunting an admittedly capricious desire. In fact at the same time that I was telling everything, or rather the external form of this everything, I was trying to figure it out; it seemed as if I couldn’t get over it myself.
How can this be possible? I forget everything just to see your face, to convince myself that you are alive, that I’m not obsessed with a dream, I take a taxi and I come here! What is this weakness in me—and just to check on your existence! The moment I stand in your presence, I see that everything is back in order; I master my underlying fever; I am quite simply no longer suffering, everything is liquid, everything
 …
    Thus I unveiled myself. Thus I was in search of myself. Thus I attempted to disguise myself from myself.
    There were then those two or three occasions when I found this man alone when I got out of the car.
    I remember the last visit in detail: The gate was closed. I had to go down toward the beach and walk clumsily through the sand. Since all the shutters were closed now, it was hard to tell the villas apart and decide which was his path and not the neighbors’. (“An ambassador!” he had told me earlier, signs of irony aquiver in the corners of his eyes. “You see, we live right in the bosom of the
nomenklatura!
”) From there I could go straight through to the terrace. The shades to the French doors were half down. I tapped on the wood,