第131页

第二部：万红一哭

从Dasha的网站抄来一部分，不是这个译本的。

PART TWO

Even the tapestries of the Dame à la Licorne are now no longer in the old château of Brissac. The time has come for houses to part with everything; they can keep nothing any more. Danger has become more certain than security. No scion of the Delle Vistes walks beside you with these things in his blood. They have all passed away. No one speaks your name, Pierre d’Aubusson, grandest Grand Master of an ancient house, at whose behest, perhaps, these pictures were woven that exalt everything and prostitute nothing. (Ah! Why have poets ever written otherwise about women, more literally, as they imagined? Certain it is, we might know no more than is presented here.) Now one comes upon them by chance, among chance comers, and is almost frightened to be here uninvited. But there are others passing by, though they are never many. The young people scarcely even halt before them, unless somehow their studies oblige them to have seen these things once, because of some particular characteristic they possess.
     Young girls one does occasionally find before them. For in museums there are many young girls who have left the houses that can no longer keep anything. They find themselves before these tapestries and forget themselves a little. They have always felt that such a life must have existed — a quiet life of leisurely gestures, never quite defined; and they remember dimly that for a time they even believed this life would be their own. But then they quickly bring out a sketch-book and begin to draw, whatever it may be — one of the flowers or a little happy animal. What exactly it is, they have been told, does not matter. And it really does not matter. The essential thing is that they shall draw; for with this intent they one day left their home, rather impetuously. They are of good family. But when they lift their arms as they sketch, it is evident that their dress has not been fastened at the back or, at any rate, not entirely. There are some buttons they cannot reach. For when the dress was made, no one imagined that they would suddenly go away alone. In a family there is always someone to help with such buttons. But here, good heavens! who is going to bother about it in so large a city? Unless, perhaps, one has a girl friend; but friends are in the same quandary, and so in the end it would come to their buttoning each other’s dresses. That is ridiculous; it would remind one of the family, of which one does not want to be reminded.
     But inevitably they wonder sometimes as they draw, whether it would not have been possible to remain at home. If only one could have been religious, sincerely religious, in step with the others! But it seemed so absurd to try being religious in common. The path has somehow become narrower: families can no longer approach God. So there remained only certain other things that might at need be shared. But then, if the division was fairly made, so shamefully little came to each person; and if deception were practised in it, disputes arose. No, it is really better to sketch, no matter what. In time some resemblance will appear; and Art, especially when one acquires it thus gradually, is after all a truly enviable possession.
     And in their intense absorption with the task they have undertaken, these young women, they never lift their eyes. They do not perceive that with all their strenuous copying they do nothing save to suppress within themselves the unalterable life opened before them, radiant and endlessly ineffable, in these woven pictures. They do not want to believe it. Now that so many things are different, they, too, want to change. They are on the verge of abandoning themselves, and of thinking about themselves as men might speak of them when they are not present. To them that seems progress. They are already nearly convinced that life, if one would not stupidly lose it, consists in the search for one enjoyment and then another, and again, another, that is yet more keen. They have already begun to look about, to search — they, whose strength has always lain in their being found.
     That comes, I believe, of their weariness. For centuries now, women have undertaken the entire task of love; they have always played the whole dialogue, both parts. For man has only echoed them, and badly. And has made the learning difficult with his inattention, with his neglect, with his jealousy, which is also a form of neglect. And they have nevertheless persevered day and night, and have grown in love and misery. And from among them, under the stress of endless need, have gone forth those valiant lovers, who, while they called him, rose above their man; who grew beyond him when he did not return, like Gaspara Stampa or like the Portuguese nun, who never desisted until their torture was transmuted into an austere, icy splendour which nothing could confine. We know about one and another because of letters, which as by a miracle have been preserved, or books of poems written in accusation or lament, or portraits in some gallery that look at us through a longing to weep which the painter caught because he knew not what it was. But there have been innumerably many more: Those who burned their letters, and others who had no strength left to write them. Aged women, grown hard, but with a kernel of delight which they kept hidden. Uncouth, powerful women, who, made strong through exhaustion, let themselves grow gradually like their husbands, and who were yet entirely different in their inmost being, there where their love had laboured in the dark. Child-bearing women who never wanted to conceive, and who, when they finally died after their eighth child, had the gestures and the lightness of young girls looking forward to love. And those women who remained with their bullies and drunkards because they had found the means, in themselves, to withdraw far from them as they could nowhere else; and this they could not conceal, when they came among people, but were radiant as though they moved always with the blessed. Who can say how many they were, or who they were? It is as if they had destroyed beforehand the words in which they might be described.

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