The Coming of Joachim Stiller by Hubert Lampo

Author:Hubert Lampo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2019-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

THE CONCERT

I shall never be able to convince myself that what happened subsequently between Simone and me can be seen as totally separate from the appearance of Joachim Stiller in our lives. When I was younger, love and eroticism played a fairly important part in what I wrote. Looking back, I realise that it was dreams that played tricks on me. I also know now that my diffidence about reality was not completely unrelated to the fact that in my stories I acted out what was largely denied me by everyday reality. Here and there, though, the odd critic, less blinkered than most, had pointed out that in me as a young man a constant need for purity was alive, not a purity of impotence or dry renunciation, but stemming from the intuitive and hence unprovable conviction that the possibility of an exceptional perfection in love must exist, proof against habit and wear and tear, not subject to the corrosive influence of daily relations. In time my scepticism has increased in that field too. But as we lay that evening listening to the carillon of the nearby cathedral ring out over the city every quarter of an hour, ethereal as openwork of sound on the night air in the rectangle of the open window, the dream from my adolescence and the first years of manhood revived in me, together with the melancholy awareness that with Simone a positively last chance was being granted me to conquer an apparently long since forfeited Ultima Thule, not forfeited out of unworthiness, but because life builds a Great Wall of China between reality and the dream of the child that we once were and which sometimes survives in a few of us. I was still resisting the reality of Stiller’s existence, which had been shoved like a strange demarcation line through my peaceful life. I still refused to accept his intervention in my relationship with the splendid young woman, whose body lay stretched out and relaxed against mine, as self-evident. But nevertheless, I knew that he had a lot to do with all this – which for the time being did not worry me – even if he was only a ghost, born of our imagination. It probably sounds strange, but when I recall that first night and the serenity of Simone’s expression, her head resting in my arm and my face bent over it (all attention and gratitude too for the primeval mystery, in which we had partaken with such astonishing completeness that afterwards, delighted and amazed, we explored each other’s faces, to be sure that a dream was not leading us astray), the thought repeatedly presents itself that my whole life up till now was just an inevitable growth towards the perfection of this hour.

Contrary to my usual habit, I had driven very slowly on the way back. I wanted to make the time we were together last as long as possible, although I could find no words to drive away the feeling of astonishment that had not left us since we had said goodbye to Schoenmakers.

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