moving to the bedroom, but only after we had talked, and in the face of my invincible timidity. I feared that one day, instead of making the gesture or saying the word that would invite me to join him in bed or to pull up my skirt, he would suddenly – or after a pause – bring the conversation and our meeting to a close as if we were two friends who had run out of things to say or had various errands to do and would send me out into the street with a kiss, I could never be certain that my visit would end up with our bodies entangling. I both liked and didn’t like that strange uncertainty: on the one hand, it made me think that he enjoyed my company whatever the circumstances and didn’t see me merely as an instrument for his sexual hygiene or relief; on the other hand, it infuriated me that he could hold off for so long, that he didn’t feel an urgent need to pounce on me without further ado, as soon as he opened the door, in order to satisfy his desire; that he found it so easy to postpone that moment, or perhaps his desire was merely accumulating while I looked at him and listened. But that quibble can be put down to the dissatisfaction that predominates in us all and without which we cannot live, especially since, in the end, the thing I always feared wouldn’t happen did happen, and I had no reason to complain.
‘Go on, what happened next, in what way does that book prove you right?’ I said. He definitely had the gift of the gab and I loved to listen to him, regardless of what he talked about and even if he was recounting an old Balzac story that I could easily read for myself, a story not invented by him, but doubtless interpreted in his own free and possibly distorted fashion. I found anything he said interesting or, worse, amusing (worse, because I was aware that one day I would have to stand aside). Now that I never go to his apartment, I recall those visits as forays into a secret territory, as a small adventure, perhaps more because of the first act of each encounter than the second, although, at the time, the very uncertainty of that second act made it seem even more desirable.
‘The Colonel wants to recover his name, career, rank, dignity, fortune or part of it (he has spent years living in dire poverty) as well as the most complicated thing of all: his wife, who will be shown to be a bigamist if Chabert can prove that he really is Chabert and not an impostor or a lunatic. Perhaps Madame Ferraud really loved him and mourned his death when she was told of it, and felt that the world had fallen in on her; but his reappearance is surplus to requirements, his resurrection a real nuisance, a great problem, threatening catastrophe and ruin, and, paradoxically, it brings with it again the sense that the world is falling in on her: how can the return of the person whose disappearance first evoked those feelings evoke precisely the same feelings? We see quite clearly that, with the passing of time, what has been should continue to have been, to exist only in the past, as is always or almost always the case, that is how life is intended to be, so that there is no undoing what is done and no unhappening what has happened; the dead must stay where they are and nothing can be corrected. We can allow ourselves to miss them because we know they are safely gone: we lost someone and, knowing that he is never going to come back or reclaim the place he vacated, a place that, besides, has since been swiftly filled, we are free to long for his return with all our might. We can miss him safe in the knowledge that our proclaimed desires will never be granted and that there is no possible return, that he can no longer intervene in our existence or in mundane matters, that he can no longer intimidate or inhibit or even overshadow us, that he will never again be better than us. We sincerely regretted his departure, and when it happened, we truly wished he could have gone on living; a vast gap or even abyss opened up and we were tempted to hurl