Anio Szado Read Online Free Page A

determination, and which I have much admired when it was not directed at my English conjugations or at my refusal to compromise who and what I am). The fault, if there is fault, lies in one simple fact: the world that I have so loved has changed.
    It was not long ago that freedom meant more than having a predetermined choice of toothpastes and powders on a drugstore shelf. Soon the sidewalks shall deliver us directly into the store aisles, where shelves laden with mind-numbing extravagances will empty themselves into our complacent hands. Gone are the days when one could rally thirty men from the sidewalks of Paris, as I did upon the fall of France, lead them cheerfully into a stolen plane, and fly to unoccupied North Africa, from whence to stage an attempt to regain our homeland. That the territory proved to be already occupied isimmaterial to the point of my story, which is this: all now is rules and technology. Man stripped of choices is stripped, too, of honor.
    How is one to act on the convictions of one’s spirit? “Of course you must,” they tell me, “only first ensure that you meet these criteria”—as they pull out their clipboards. “For your own safety, you understand.”
    My friends and my peers in the military have colluded to protect me from myself, volleying an endless stream of concerns to impede my reengagement in the war. “He is too old, he’ll never survive, do you want to go down in history as the man who sent Saint-Ex to his grave? He is a legend, aristocrat, celebrity, source of commissions, the pet of powerful so-and-so, deluded, irrational, at the height of his creative powers, over the hill …” What nonsense they spew in their well-intentioned conspiracy. In preventing the sudden snuffing of my life they only kill me more slowly and painfully from the inside.
    If I cannot act, I am not alive. Thought and action must be one—have not I often said so, in one way or another, as we spoke of our beliefs and our dreams? The most worthy of lives can be described without adjectives; the soul of a man can be revealed through verbs alone. If I cannot fly, if I cannot work to free my people, I do not exist.
    You did not leave me when you went to Montreal, Mignonne. You left a shell. A man without choices or responsibility is not a man.
    I summon the energy to write you now only because life may be starting anew. I have received a letter from a colleague who assures me he will have me reinstated into active duty. He swears the U.S. will join the war before long. I should not allow myself to feel excitement, but it has been months since I’ve seen even a glimmer of promise. Perhaps I may yet catch up to the world that has rushed so heedlessly and heartlessly ahead of me.
    I write in careless haste driven by an impulse to tell you,after all this time and before I depart, that I have come to see your wisdom. You were right to discard the empty casing I had become, and to not permit falsely optimistic thoughts of me to draw you away from your duty to your mother. And you are right to follow your own path without me now, wherever it leads, for I will at last be on my way, too.
    I do not ask when you will come back to New York, or what you will do upon your return. I do not ask that you write to me (though should you wish to upon my departure, simply request my overseas address from Lamotte). I only say remember me, and in doing so, let there be no disagreement between your thoughts and your acts.
    Antoine
    I remembered him—in Montreal as well as in New York, as I walked the streets of the Garment District wondering what, indeed, I would do now that I had returned.
    On West 50th, I found myself in the middle of a string of chatting, shapely girls.
    “Almost there,” said one, smiling broadly at me.
    “Where?”
    “Oh! The union office. They’re picking the prettiest machine operator. You ain’t in the pageant? You don’t want to be famous? Gosh, that’s lucky for me!”
    I almost followed her