A friend.... When I see him, it is like a revision of all I am, a kind of unusual sincerity that urges me on, amplifies me, and carries me toward him.
When he is away, I have the impression of having discovered a treasure within myself from which I draw in deep draughts....
And also of hymns striking up beneath my tread.
"Why? Yes, tell me why you squeezed my hand so hard?"
I lean towards him, my head touches his chest. He is enraptured, overwhelmed, and as smiling as the night when it is about to pass.
A silky wind blows down from a sheltering eminence and carves his face and makes me cling to him. Are we on the borders of the true silence, the ultimate silence in which human beings find themselves face to face? "You! You!"
A terraced garden. If this were another evening, I should be discovering in detail how beautiful the garden is. Each walk opens up a paradise, cool and secret as a spring, and the pebbles shine like glowworms. Borders of irises with violet fragrance dissolving among their stems, a profusion of spreading boughs, and near our bench a thicket from which at intervals darts the straight streak of a gray-bird's flight. Below us in the distant semi-circle across the fading daylight the sparkling apparition of a group of houses lighting up.
The sight of all this beauty fills me with such a glow--almost hurts me--because I feel _he_ is looking at me.... He says: "Your shining curly hair, your broad, clear forehead, your mouth, your eyes." Mentioned in his quivering passionate voice my hair, my forehead, my mouth, my eyes are so new that I close my eyes so as to see them ... And I did not know....
The garden has changed. Pale ochre reflections. Little shivers damp and creeping. Heavy black pockets on the parasol tops of the trees. The mournful andante of a swaying cypress. As though it were the first time, my beloved, that we were alone and had only found each other this evening under the narrow sky.
The shadows spread haphazard piling up in ridges, drawing after them dim white trails. Unknown thoughts escape from everywhere. They are too swift for me. The breeze carries them away. His face at my right, blurred except for the prominent features, is silvered over and turned into a medallion....