So close, yet so far... l'histoire de Pierrot

Mes amis, the saga of Pierrot and the only woman for him continues. It is incredible, n'est pas, that Pierrot should emerge from the darkest jungles of the human heart, gaunt with the heat, malnutrition and diptheria, and there she would stand, unchanged from his memory. Other men may have come and gone, he did not want to know about them, nor did he have the right. She was she and he was he. Somehow, she was back in the life of Pierrot. He was sullen with the knowledge, and came to the slaughter with reluctance, knowing that he had to go he just had to. It did not help that her handmaiden was standing by, with nothing but a smug smirk, to watch Pierrot descend. Pierrot's effected coldness melted instantly with her smile, her embrace. Why did they still have such moments of lucidity, when Pierrot knew he was falling for her, falling hard, that he would be crushed, and that she was too, such short moments, wine-clouded though they may have been, tantalized Pierrot with the Paradise they promised, broader than the abysmal Congo and deeper than the unknowable jungles of the interior. He felt so close to a breakthrough and did not know how to get there. 'And then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you.' The only greater prophet than Sinatra was Bogart, says Pierrot. And then the silence. Was she afraid? Didn't she feel it too? Pierrot thought of the woods of Siberia, placer gold in unclaimed streams, the purifying winter night. He could not leave. Come what may, even the destruction of Pierrot. He was afraid not, and never thought of death as entailing his heart stopping, but that's what it would be, the silence of the brain. He cherished those seconds when he felt her love and didn't want to think that they would be his last. He couldn't.