Holes in les chausseurs

Pierrot was perhaps made for wistfulness, as his is so elegant, it would be a shame to see him walking around at his full height with broad shoulders once one has seen him hiding in the corner of a lowly bar, uninterested in the women, the drink, hiding in the darkness behind sunglasses impenetrable. You would not understand that the loneliness fires the warmth of recognition, when it comes, though rarely, and in such times might mistake him for a saint in the magnanimity of his heart, as though at other times he were a hermit in the city desert, unnourished, swatting away buzzards feebly, and at his one friend, the arrival of Christ, he is revived!

John Grady Cole

You died too young but were immortalized for all our sakes by Cormac McCarthy, that sage of the desert. I read your words in my Paris bathtub, bathed variously in filtered blue, red and green light, I read you driving down the highway, and walking along the beach, a fugitive, my life immersed in your art. When you felt, crossing the border, that your father had died, I was pierced, my eyes watered. Such a feeling could not but be true, though it has no basis in fact. In John Grady I understood myself as a lover. My love is hopeless, fatal, that is it's essence, the source of its sweetness is it's impossibility - and how sweet it the realization of the impossible! The moments of its realization must be immortal, they could fill my short life, as they filled yours, with thousands of lives of unrealized, undaring love. For myself, I imagine her coming to me, many years from now, needing my help with matrimonial problems, how could I refuse those eyes, of course I would take it on, there would be no question of billing, though you insist, rebuke it could be no other way. I will think of what is, what could have been, it will leave me, when she has gone, in unblinking silence. We could have been saved all this, those children could be mine. Alas. Thinking over time, when the dream felt so close to being real, and would have been real too, it was not that it could never be true, but that I could never see a reason why it shouldn't! The years would have haunted us, we would have been aged. But such feelings never die. They cannot starve and cannot be burnt. They live on even when the lovers fall, as John Grady Cole did, into eternity. My soulmate John Grady, the tatters in these paperbacks do not age your memory in my heart. Through you I begin to understand myself, and the death that will come, in her. What am I to do? There is no handbook, no law but the heart and I must rely on myself. She won't come to me but I am doomed to never leave and will be there, as I have before. Now I find myself standing against the darkness of existence, with no recognizable god to hear the prayers I pray earnestly, and only suffering to beat me down till death. Just the one hope makes it all worthwhile, even if I can attach to it no reason. We are together in our loneliness, riding alongside Comanche ghosts by moonlit trails, our laws shaped by the winds, John Grady.

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.