by HENRI DAMONTI
I died last Monday about three o’clock in the afternoon, on my way back from my course on Diderot at the University. Very properly, I was run over by a military truck that I hadn’t noticed coming from my left. No doubt I was thinking of Olivia. I thought of her too much during those last days, and anyhow, an unknown woman had warned me in a dream that something unexpected was going to happen to me.
When I say last Monday, you mustn’t think it was last Monday, all I know is that I died on a Monday. I didn’t realize it immediately. I had to see myself dead, and hear the sobs of my wife and sons, before I began to believe it; how can anybody who’s in love with Olivia believe in death?
It’s you I’m talking to, Olivia. Maybe you’ll understand, better than I do, all the things that have happened to me since I died. I’ve been traveling for years. Last evening, at any rate, I was in Amsterdam picking out a lamp in an antique shop. I told the owner I’d made the trip from Paris to Amsterdam especially to buy a gilded bronze lamp—Olivia wants one, you understand, sir. Tomorrow, I’ll be in Syracuse, where you were born; perhaps I’ll see your mother, and I’ll look at her eyes, which you told me are the same color as yours. I shall never see you again, Olivia.
Before I died, I had a wife. Her name was Eve. She is the one I ought to be with now. I had two sons—Robert, who was twenty, and my favorite, Louis, who was only sixteen, but who was more sensitive and (according to me) more intelligent than his brother.
It was Eve who told me you existed. That was on a Monday, too. I was showing my little Louis some reproductions of Raoul Dufy paintings. Eve was smiling. Robert, under the floor lamp, was writing a letter that I would have liked to read; then Eve said, “The second floor is rented again.” Our apartment was on the third. Eve added, “They’re a nice couple. He’s an engineer who works in television. Her name is Olivia.” Trust you to know all about it, old girl.
Olivia, what a beautiful name! Louis, who was listening, said that Olivia was a name to dream about. Since I was in a mood to dream, I was already dreaming of you. Eve had learned all this from the postman, who said he’d never seen as beautiful a woman as Olivia; oh, she’s got dark eyes, and lips ...
One week, we found out your husband’s name was Etienne. He was the one I met first on the stair, with his pipe, his blond curls, his blue pullover—Etienne, a thousand times handsomer than I. I saw you later. After Louis and Robert. After Eve.
“She comes from Chile,” said Robert. “You can tell.”
“You can tell by what?” asked Louis.
“You can tell.”
Louis claimed that at night, Olivia—all of us were already calling you Olivia—played on the piano. Oh, papa, love songs from Chile!
Robert, eager for certainty, had decided that you came from Valparaiso, having committed a perfect crime. What an imagination! A perfect crime!
“Exactly,” said Louis. “You don’t understand at all, mama. Olivia is silent, she climbs the stairs silently, she just nods to us, she’s sad, and at night, about one o’clock, she sees her crime before her eyes again and she plays love songs to forget.”
You didn’t seem beautiful to me right away. The evening when I saw you for the first time, I wanted to know if Eve thought you were beautiful. (You know Eve is never mistaken.) Too slender perhaps, but don’t worry, your Olivia is beautiful.
A few days later came the loveliest holiday, no doubt about it, that I ever spent in my life with Eve. Robert and Louis had gone on a camping trip with some friends on the Côte. I was always anxious for Louis, but the idea of being alone for a whole month made me decide to let him go with his brother.
Eve and I took a room in a little motel on the Ile Saint-Louis where we had stayed in other years. It was a marvelous life of dreaming, reading until dawn, of dancing for long hours pressed close together, without saying a word. And yet I was dancing with Eve for the last time in my life, and saying farewell to her.
I had decided to devote September to a study of Rousseau and modern sensibility. But it was in September that I began to love you.
Eve never knew anything about it. She believed that I still loved her. Louis saw it at once. What’s the matter with you, papa? You look as if you were ill. I was very ill, and I tried to find a way of speaking to you.
Sometimes, when Eve was not there, I went out on the landing hoping you would go out too. What could I be to you? A professor at the University, a good father, a good husband. And Etienne, tell me, did you love him? One day, I let the faucet run in the bathroom. Then I ran down to ask you anxiously if there wasn’t a flood, I am so embarrassed, madame, my wife forgot to turn off the faucet. It was Etienne who opened the door. I babbled. A wretched sort of professor he must have thought me. Obligingly, he insisted on taking a look at the faucet. You understand, sir, one can’t wait forever for the plumber. With a professional gesture, he turned off the innocent faucet, and to keep Eve from knowing anything, all I had to do was mop up.
I imagined to myself, all the same, that Etienne told you about it and that you understood my ruse. But why should you understand?
The next day Louis said to me, “Olivia is beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is beautiful.”
“Tell me, papa, is she more beautiful than mama?”
“Olivia is a different lady.”
“What does that mean, a different lady?”
I didn’t know, any more than Louis did. Each time I saw you with Etienne, laughing, pensive, or sad as you often were, I thought I would die.
I made myself think of my jealousy as banal, absolutely identical with the descriptions of Proust or Dostoievsky, there’s nothing new under the sun, Olivia, but I was neither Swann nor Prince Myshkin, and I loved you without understanding anything, hoping for a miraculous letter from you, waiting for you at the street corner, making mad plans of flight to Valparaiso with you, who perhaps loved me too.
One evening when I went to see Louis in his room, he asked me suddenly, “Would you like to take the engineer’s place?”
“What are you thinking of, Louis? You’re mad.”
“I’d like to take the engineer’s place,” said Louis, “and love Olivia all by myself.”
I tried to talk of something else. But Louis added, paying no attention to what I said, “What if all three of us went away together?”
Louis had echoed my thoughts. I wanted to be like Etienne, tall, blond, twenty years younger, and to hold you in my arms every night. Olivia, how beautiful you are, how beautiful you are. Anyhow I really tried to speak to you, a few days before that Monday. I found myself waiting for the bus with you, at the end of the street; tell me, do you remember?
I raised my hat. I think you smiled. “The bus is in no hurry today.”
“I should say not.”
You didn’t say anything more, and anyhow the bus prevented me from making up another excuse; already it was rolling down the street. I sat down far from you, and overcome by fear I got off at the next stop without turning around.
The last Sunday before my death, I wrote you a letter. You never received it, and I have lost it. It was only a few words: “Olivia, I love you and I want to go away with you right away tonight. Tell me if you want that too.”
At three o’clock in the afternoon, a truck ran over me. All my life, I had lived in dread of getting run over by a car, so of course it had to happen.
The last image that arose in my memory was not yours, Olivia, but that of Eve when she was a little girl in a checked pinafore. Didn’t you know? I met Eve when she was six; I was seven. I didn’t even feel any pain, most of all I was aware of the shifting lights around me.
After that, I don’t know. I found myself suddenly on the other side of the street, I felt infinitely rested and at that instant I didn’t even know that I’d just been run over and that I was dead. I looked at my watch, it was eleven o’clock. I didn’t understand. The building entrance was open; I climbed the stair, thinking of you. I wasn’t even surprised that the door of my apartment should be open too. Then I was afraid. The first thing I saw was my little Louis with a jacket that didn’t suit him, crying. Why, what’s the matter, Louis? He pretended not to recognize me.
I opened the bedroom door and saw myself lying on the bed, pale, cheeks sunken, eyes closed. Eve, not even wearing black, was sitting down, worn out, tearing a little handkerchief to pieces. Eve, what’s happening? Eve raised her eyes. Eve, it’s I, look, I’m not dead! Without hearing what I was saying, she offered me her hand and said, “Thank you, sir.”
In the mirror I saw a young, blond-haired man, and I saw that that man was I. I was Etienne, since I had wished to be; Etienne, the one who would be able to hold Olivia in his arms to the end of time. A moment later, I was on the landing again, I ran out of the apartment. Etienne, I was Etienne, I loved you so, Olivia, that I didn’t regret either my death or the tears of my wife; blood was beating violently at my temples, I was Etienne, but I was only his body, I didn’t know anything Etienne knew, and I was going to live with you.
You opened the door without even looking at me. That day you were wearing your gray dress with the brick-red collar. I cried, “Hello, Olivia, I’m back early today.” I tried to draw you to me as Etienne would do, but you freed yourself so quickly that I could not guess the reason. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s you—what’s the matter with you, Etienne?”
“You know the prof up on the third floor is dead.”
“You told me that yesterday.”
“Olivia, I want you to believe me,” but already at that moment I felt I was lost.
“Why do you call me Olivia?”
That evening, I was to learn that your name was not Olivia and that you’d never been to Valparaiso. I also learned that you no longer loved Etienne. What was I to do then with my youth, my burning life, and the most beautiful autumn of all time, the one that was to have been the autumn of Olivia?
I also learned the next day that Etienne was not a television engineer, but a waiter in a high-class restaurant. Instead of preparing my course on Rousseau, I began serving soups, entrees, and complicated dishes to old Englishwomen who told me every day that I ought to sleep with them. Etienne did it, I think, but it was your money that kept you going. You’d met Etienne on a trip to Italy organized by an agency, and for the blue pullover, the blue eyes, the pretty curls on the forehead, you’d left Syracuse and your mother.
I love you anyway, Olivia, and I’m not Etienne. I couldn’t tell you the truth; would you have understood me? A day later you disappeared. This is an old story now, and since then I’ve made love to other women and have thought I loved some of them, but it’s you I’m looking for, because it was for you I died. I don’t know if all deaths are alike, each one may be unique in its surprises: death to me was becoming an Etienne not loved by you.
While you were gone, I watched what happened at the home of my wife and children. Louis alone wept for several days. Eve did not wear mourning; nevertheless I know that my death broke her up. Robert was the same as usual, decisive and cold. One evening I heard them talking about my green notebook. I had a green notebook in which I jotted down pell-mell the thoughts of my children, various calculations, addresses, and even outlines of courses. Louis wanted this notebook, but no one had turned it up. All the same, it was in a drawer in the library. Louis was crying. Nobody had found anything. The next day, I saw Louis on the stair and offered him my condolences.
“My father,” said Louis, “often spoke to me about you.”
“And yet I never spoke to him but once.”
“He thought your wife was very attractive.”
I snubbed him, almost with malice: “Oh, my wife, you know .. .”
“My father thought she was very attractive, I assure you.”
So Louis wanted Olivia to know, even after my death, that I loved her.
A sudden whim made me write on a scrap of paper that I slipped into Eve’s letter box: “The green notebook is in the drawer in the little room. The notebook is for Louis.”
Would they guess that my spirit was not dead? But really, I made this gesture more as a game than for any true interest in Louis; I thought only of you. Soon I knew that you had not gone off alone. There was a gray-eyed pianist.
I remember perfectly, that evening in the Grand-Théâre. You were sitting in the first row, Olivia, and you were wearing a necklace of fine stones that I didn’t know you had the day you left. Your hair was done up, you were smiling, and when I went to you, shaky with fever, trembling, you pretended not to recognize me.
“Olivia, you see, here I am.”
“Leave me alone, sir.”
You said that almost at the top of your voice. I had to go back to my seat. Your pianist played only for you. During the Beethoven concerto I decided to kill him, and quickly. After the concert, I forced my way into his loge.
He was alone.
“Are you in love with Olivia, sir?”
“Who?”
“Olivia.”
“What are you doing here, sir?”
I took out my revolver then, but before I could make a move, the pianist already had a little automatic in his hand; he pressed the trigger twice, and two bullets went through my lungs and head. I fell strangling in my blood. Olivia, I cried out, Olivia, I’ll never love anyone but you, and once more it was the image of Eve as a little girl that was the last, Eve smiling. Olivia, why aren’t you here?
This new death made me enter instantly into the fleshly envelope of my murderer. I became the pianist. Before the Court of Assizes, you made a cold deposition, you seemed absent-minded. Acquitted, I was offered a concert tour in Belgium or Greece. I couldn’t even read a note. I said so to my impresario on the eve of my first concert. You’re nuts, my friend; play and don’t bother me. I got away half an hour before the concert, and found myself next day on a street in Florence without a sou in my pocket, famished, longing for you—you who had not waited for me at the prison gate, because you were in a hurry to go and make love to an Egyptian banker who believed himself to be the son of Rameses II.
Eve was married again, to a vice-consul. I don’t know where she dug him up, he was the most distinguished vice-consul you can imagine. Louis wasn’t at the wedding, but I was there. That day another vice-consul, a friend of the aforesaid vice-consul, was paying court to you. It was hardly any trouble to take his place and his life. I succeeded in approaching Eve.
“I believe I knew your first husband slightly, dear madam.”
“Oh, really?” said Eve.
“Yes, by George, he was an expert on your eighteenth century, the great century, was he not?”
Eve was not listening to me.
Suddenly, taking her aside, I murmured, “Eve, listen, in the green notebook there’s a note that concerns you, you and our Ile Saint-Louis.”
She stared at me, her eyes wide and frightened. I went away.
One day I even thought seriously of going back to Eve, to all the happiness of my lost real life, but how could I? The mere thought of it calls up the vision of you, Olivia, forever glowing and young. They lie who say that love stories end with death. All last night I walked along the docks of Amsterdam, the better to think of you and of what I plan to do, since I saw you day before yesterday with Louis on the rue de Rivoli. He held your arm. I know that you love him.
But what about me—tell me, why won’t you love me, Olivia?