It was just the kind of exchange she had always detested, the kind of talk she could never make herself. In my wildest imaginings, I had never expected it to be like this—that I should say cold things, that she should cry. I thought I would bawl when she said she was going. I thought I would throw myself at her very feet.
We looked at each other for a long moment, her eyes tinged with red, her mouth almost quivering.
And then I lost my control.
I rose and I went to her, and I gathered her small, delicate limbs in my arms. I determined not to let her go, no matter how she struggled. But she didn’t struggle, and we both cried almost silently as if we couldn’t make ourselves stop. But she didn’t yield to me. She didn’t melt in my embrace.
And then she drew back. She stroked my hair with both her hands, and leant forward and kissed me on the lips, and then moved away lightly and soundlessly.
“All right, then, my darling,” she said.
I shook my head. Words and words and words unspoken. She had no use for them, and never had.
In her slow, languid way, hips moving gracefully, she went to the door to the garden and looked up at the night sky before she looked back at me.
“You must promise me something,” she said finally.
Bold young Frenchman who moved with the grace of an Arab through places in a hundred cities where only an alleycat could safely pass.
“Of course,” I answered. But I was so broken in spirit now I didn’t want to talk anymore. The colors dimmed. The night was neither hot nor cold. I wished she would just go, yet I was terrified of the moment when that would happen, when I couldn’t get her back.
“Promise me you will never seek to end it,” she said, “without first being with me, without our coming together again.”
For a moment I was too surprised to answer. Then I said:
“I will never seek to end it.” I was almost scornful. “So you have my promise. It’s simple enough to give. But what about you giving a promise to me? That you’ll let me know where you go from here, where I can reach you—that you won’t vanish as if you were something I imagined—”
I stopped. There had been a note of urgency in my voice, of rising hysteria. I couldn’t imagine her writing a letter or posting it or doing any of the things that mortals habitually did. It was as if no common nature united us, or ever had.
“I hope you’re right in your estimation of yourself,” she said.
“I don’t believe in anything, Mother,” I said. “You told Armand long ago that you believe you’ll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don’t believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think.”
“Then why am I so afraid for you?” she asked. Her voice was little more than a gasp. I think I had to see her lips move in order to hear her.
“You sense my loneliness,” I answered, “my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don’t stop me, Mother. I’m too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that’s all.”
“I love you, my son,” she said.
I wanted to say something about her promising, about the agents in Rome, that she would write. I wanted to say . . .
“Keep your promise,” she said.
And quite suddenly I knew this was our last moment. I knew it and I could do nothing to change it.
“Gabrielle!” I whispered.
But she was already gone.
The room, the garden outside, the night itself, were silent and still.
SOME time before dawn I opened my eyes. I was lying on the floor of the house, and I had been weeping and then I had slept.
I knew I should start for Alexandria, that I should go as far as I could and then down into the sand when the sun rose. It would feel so good to sleep in the sandy earth. I also knew that the garden gate stood open. That all the doors were unlocked.