Travesty Read Online Free Page B

desperate
     expressions through the wet glass. Perhaps you should have agreed to the radio after
     all.
    Confession? Confession? But do you really believe that the three of
     us are sitting here in what I may call our exquisite tension (despite all my own
     pleasure in this event, I am not insensitive to the fact that we are in a way frozen
     together inside this warm automobile) merely so that I may indulge in guilty
     revelationsand extract from you a few similar low-voiced scraps
     of broken narrative? No,
cher ami
, for the term “confession”
     let us substitute such a term as, say, “animated revery.” Or even this
     phrase: “emotional expression stiffened with the bones of
     thought.”
    I do not believe in secrets—withheld or shared. Nor do I
     believe in guilt. At least let us agree that secrets and so-called guilty deeds are
     fictions created to enhance the sense of privacy, to feed enjoyment into our
     isolation, to enlarge the rhythm of what most people need, which is a belief in
     life. But surely “belief in life” is not for you, not for a poet. Even
     I have discovered the factitious quality of that idea.
    No man is guilty of anything, whatever he does. There you have it.
     Secrets are for children and egotists and sensualists. Guilt is merely a pain that
     disappears as soon as we recognize the worst in us all. Absolution is an unnecessary
     and, further, incomprehensible concept. I am not attempting to justify myself or
     punish you. You are not guilty. Never for a moment did I think you were. As for me,
     my “worst” would not fill a crooked spoon.
    And yet there are those of us, and I am doing my best to include you
     among our select few, for whom the most ordinary kind of daily existence partakes of
     the contradictory sensation we know as shame. For such people everything,
     everything, is eroticized. Such a man walks through the stalls of a butcher in a
     kind of inner heat, which accounts for his smile. But if weallow
     shame to the sensualist and deny guilt to the institutions, it is simply that such
     words and states serve poetic but not moral functions. In the hands of the true poet
     they are butterflies congregating high in the heavens, but in the hands of the
     moralists or the metaphysicians they are gunpowder.
    But you are becoming angry,
cher ami
. Be patient.
    Another cigarette. I approve. Though you must know that every minute
     you are growing more and more like my good but crippled doctor, despite the fact
     that you are in full possession of your four limbs. But it occurs to me that had I
     not given them up on the very day you entered our household, I would now ask you to
     reach slowly across the space between us and position your freshly lighted cigarette
     between my own dry lips. And you would do that for me. I know you would. And your
     shaking hand would hover there an instant just below my line of vision, sparing my
     own two hands for their necessary grip on the wheel, until I fished for the end of
     the cigarette with my parted lips and then found it, held it, inhaled. One of your
     cold fingers might even have brushed the tip of my nose as I waited and then
     exhaled, blowing one lungful of smoke against the inner side of the windshield like
     a silent wave curling along a glassy shore.
    Cigarettes always make me think of bars. Theyremind me of the war, of talkers around a dark table, of wine, of a
     woman’s hand in my lap.
    But no, not even that single puff. Not even now. It cannot be. And yet
     while you are drenched in the aroma of your cigarette, and while Chantal may be
     acquiring some slight awareness of the relative newness of this automobile which she
     cannot help but smell, I myself am breathing in fresh air, dead leaves, ripe grapes.
     And the windows are closed. Quite closed.
    Chantal? Do you hear Papa’s voice as through the ether?
     Whatever you are thinking,
ma cherie
, whatever monsters you may be
     struggling with, you must believe me that