The Naked

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This series of fictional vignettes by Marguerite Yourcenar (translated from the French by Jean Stewart) originally appeared in the August 1956 edition of The London Magazine, alongside work by George Bernard Shaw, Christopher Isherwood and Louis Macneice.

GHERARDO PERINI

The Master said to me:

‘Here is the boundary-stone at the crossroads, a mile or two from the Porta del Popolo. We are already so far from the town that those who travel forth, burdened with remembrance, have, when they reach this place, almost forgotten Rome. For men’s memories are like those weary travellers who, at each halt, discard some useless piece of luggage; so that they will arrive empty-handed and denuded at the place where they are to sleep, and will be, on the day of their great awakening, like children who know nothing of yesterday. Gherardo, here is the boundary-stone. The dust of the roads whitens the sparse trees that stand in the Campagna like the milestones of God; there is, not far from here, a cypress whose roots are uncovered and which finds it hard to live. There is an inn, too, where people go to drink. I imagine that rich women, who always have watchful eyes upon them at home, come here on weekdays to give themselves to their lovers, and that on Sundays the families of poor working men enjoy a holiday meal here. I imagine, this Gherardo, because such things happen everywhere.

I shall go no further, Gherardo. I shall accompany you no further. Work presses and the Pope keeps after me. I am an old man. I am an old man, Gherardo. Sometimes, when you want to show more affection than usual, you call me father. But I have no children. I have never met a woman as beautiful as my stone figures, a woman who could stay motionless and speechless for hours, like a necessary thing that is able to exist without activity and that, by its constant presence, makes you forget the passing of time. A woman who lets herself be looked at without smiling or blushing because she has understood the serious nature of beauty. Stone women are more chaste than others and, above all, more faithful; only they are sterile. There is in them no fissure through which pleasure or death or the seed of a child can enter in, and that is why they are less fragile. Sometimes they are shattered and then their beauty dwells entire in each fragment of the marble, just as God dwells in every object, but nothing foreign enters into them to make their hearts break. Imperfect beings struggle and mate in order to achieve completion; but things that are purely beautiful are solitary, like human suffering. Gherardo, I have no children. And I know that few men really have a son of their own; they have Tito or Caio or Pietro, but that is not the same joy. If I had a son he would bear no resemblance to the image I should have formed of him before he came into being. Thus the statues that I make are different from those I had at first dreamed of. But God has reserved for himself the gift of conscious creation.

If you were my son, Gherardo, I should not love you better, only I should not have to ask myself why I love you. All my life I have sought the answers to questions that perhaps have no answers, and I probed the marble as though truth lay at the very heart of a stone; and I spread out my colours to paint walls as if my task were to strike chords amidst an overwhelming silence. For everything is silent, even our own souls – or else, perhaps, it is we who fail to hear.

And so you are going. I am no longer young enough to attach importance to a parting, even if it is forever. I know too well that the creatures we love, and who love us best, drift away from us imperceptibly with every passing moment. And in the same fashion they drift away from themselves. You are sitting on this boundary-stone, and you think you are still there, but your being, turned towards the future, has already ceased to cling to what was your life and your absence has already begun. I am well aware, of course, that all this is only an illusion, like everything else, and that the future does not exist. Men, who invented Time, invented Eternity next by way of contrast, but the negation of Time is as unreal as Time itself. There is no past and no future, only a series of successive presents, a path continually destroyed and re-made on which we all move forward. You are sitting there, Gherardo, but your feet press on the ground before you with a sort of anxiety, as though they were trying out a road. You are clad in those garments of our century which will appear hideous or merely peculiar when our century has passed, for garments are always only the caricature of a body. I see you naked. I have the gift of seeing, through the garment, the radiance of the body, and it is in this fashion, I imagine, that saints behold souls. This is a torture, when they are ugly; when they are beautiful it is another sort of torture. You are beautiful, with that fragile beauty to which life and time lay siege on all sides and over which they will at last prevail, but at this moment it is your own, and it shall remain your own on the vault of the church where I have painted your image. Even if one day your mirror should show you only a distorted likeness where you dared not recognise yourself, there will always be somewhere an unchanging reflection that will be like your present self. And in the same way I shall immobilise your soul.

You have ceased to love me. If you consent to listen to me for an hour, it is because one is indulgent towards those whom one is deserting. You bound me, and you are unbinding me. I do not blame you, Gherardo. The love of a human being is so unexpected and so undeserved a gift that we should always marvel at its not being taken away sooner. I feel no anxiety concerning those whom you do not yet know, but towards whom you are going and who, maybe, are awaiting you; they will know a different person from the one I thought I knew, and that I imagine I love. Nobody can possess another human being (even sinners fail to do so) and art being the only true way of possession, one should seek less to lay hold of a person than to re-create him. Gherardo, do not misinterpret my tears; it is better that those we love should leave us while we can still weep for them. If you stayed, perhaps your presence would intrude between me and the likeness I want to preserve of it, and weaken that likeness. Just as your garments are only the sheath of your body, so you are now for me only the sheath of that other, whom I have brought forth from within you and who will outlive you. Gherardo, you are now more beautiful than yourself.

We can only possess for ever those friends from whom we have parted.

TOMMAI DEI CAVALIERI

I am Tommai dei Cavalieri, a young lord, a passionate lover of art. Beautiful though I am, my soul is more beautiful still; so that my body, painted on the vault of a church, is no more than a geometrical symbol for uprightness and fidelity. I sit here, one hand on my knee, in the posture of one who is ready to rise up. The Master, who loves me, has painted, drawn or sculptured me in all the attitudes that life imposes on us, but I was my own sculptor before him. What shall I do? To what god, to what hero, to what woman shall I dedicate this masterpiece, myself?

What shall I do? Perfection is a path that leads only to loneliness; I look on all men now as rungs in a ladder that I have left behind. The Master, who surpasses me by reason of his genius, is in my presence merely a poor distraught creature; Michael Angelo would gladly exchange his ardour for my serenity. What am I to do? Have I whetted my soul only to make a sword of it, which I shall never brandish? The mad emperor wished that the universe had a single head, that he might sever it. If only there were a single body, that I might embrace it, a single fruit that I might pluck it, a single enigma that I might solve it at last! Shall I conquer an empire? Shall I build a temple? Shall I write a poem that will endure longer? The fragmentary nature of action saps my inclination to act, and every victory is merely a broken mirror in which I cannot see the whole of myself. The desire for power requires too many illusions, the desire for glory too much vanity. Since I possess myself, how can the universe enrich me further – even bliss is inferior to me.

Men, contemplating my likeness, will not wonder what I was, what I did; they will praise me for having existed. I am seated on the capital of a column, as if on the summit of a world, and I am myself a crown to it. I say to the dizzy imminence of life: he to whom everything is possible need attempt nothing further.

CECCHINO DEI BRACCHI

I, Michael Angelo, hewer of stone, have drawn on this vault the likeness of a young man of Florence who was dear to me and who is no more. He is seated in a forbidding attitude, and his folded arms seem to hide his heart: But dead men, perhaps, have a secret that they do not want to disclose.

At first I loved my dreams, for I knew nothing else. Next I loved my family (and this, when I come to think about it, was like loving myself) and the friends who came to me laden with such beauty that I was both humbled and happy. Last of all I loved a woman. My relatives are dead; my friends, my loved ones, have gone from me; some to seek life, others maybe betrayed into the tomb. Of those that are left I am unsure; even if my suspicions are not justified my suffering is as great as if they were, for it is within one’s own mind that everything really takes place. The woman that I loved has also gone from this world, like a stranger who discovers that she has opened the wrong door and that her home is elsewhere. Then I reverted to loving nothing but my dreams, because nothing more was left to me. But dreams, too, can betray one, and now I am alone.

We love because we are incapable of enduring loneliness. And for the same reason we are afraid of death. When I have chanced to speak out loud of my love for someone, I have seen knowing winks and nods all round me, as though my listeners thought themselves in league with me or else presumed to judge me. Those who do not accuse you try to excuse you, and that is even sadder. For instance, I loved one woman; when I say I loved one woman only, I do not count the others, the transient loves who were not women but merely woman and the flesh. I loved one woman only, whom I did not desire, and I do not know, when I come to think about it, whether it was because she was not beautiful enough or because her beauty was too great. But men do not understand that beauty can be an obstacle to love, by satisfying desire beforehand. Even those whom we love do not, or will not, understand it. They wonder, they suffer, they resign themselves. Then they die. And we begin to fear lest our renunciation may have wronged ourselves, and our desire, now thwarted, grown unreal and obsessive like a ghost, assumes the monstrous aspect of all that has never been. Of all forms of remorse known to man the cruellest, maybe, is remorse for the unaccomplished.

When you love someone, you are not merely anxious that he should live, you are astonished that he should cease to live, as though death were not a natural thing. And yet existence is a miracle more amazing than non-existence; it is before the living, surely, that one should bare one’s head and kneel as before an altar. Nature, I imagine, wearies of resisting annihilation, as man wearies of resisting the attraction of chaos. In my own lifetime, as advancing years have led me deeper amid the gathering shades, I have constantly seen those forms in which life attains perfection tend to yield to other, simpler forms, closer to primitive humility, as mud is more ancient than granite; and the man who carves statues, after all, merely hastens the process by which mountains crumble. The bronze of my father’s tomb grows green with mould in some village churchyard; the portrait of the Florentine youth will gradually flake away on the vaults I have painted, and my poems for the woman I loved will, in a few years’ time, cease to be understood, which is a manner of death for a poem. To try to immobilise life is the sculptor’s hopeless doom. In that respect, it may be that my whole life’s work is against nature. The marble in which we think we have fixed one form of perishable life tends constantly to resume its place in the natural order by means of erosion, patina, and the play of light and shade on planes which seemed abstract but which, however, are merely the surface of a stone. Thus the eternal mobility of the universe no doubt amazes its Creator.

Before they laid her in her coffin, the only woman who had given life a meaning for me, I kissed her hand, but I did not kiss her lips, and now this grieves me, as though I might have learned some wisdom from those lips. Nor did I kiss the Florentine youth, neither his hands nor his pale face. But for this I have no regrets. He was too beautiful. He was perfect, like those who are utterly beyond our reach; for nothing can move the dead. I have seen many dead. My father, when he joined his forebears, became an anonymous Buonarotti; he had laid down the burden of being himself; in the humility of death, he effaced himself till he was merely a name in a long series of men, a line leading not to himself but to me, his successor, since the dead are only terms in a problem set by each of their living heirs in turn. The woman I loved, after a death-agony that had racked her as if to tear her soul from her, retained a hard smile of triumph on her lips as if, having conquered life, she silently despised her vanquished adversary, and I saw her grow proud of having crossed the threshold of death. Cecchino dei Bracchi, my friend, was purely beautiful. His beauty which thought and action, in life, had divided into movements and expressions, became once more intact, absolute and eternal; it was as though he had made a composition of his body before leaving it. I have seen smiles curve bloodless lips, filter through closed eyelids, and give a quality of light to a dead face. The dead rest, satisfied, in a certainty that is indestructible because such a certainty cancels itself in the very act of accomplishment. And because the dead have passed beyond knowledge, I have imagined they are wise.

But perhaps the dead do not even know they have wisdom.

FEBO DEL POGGIO

I awake. What have other people said? Dawn, that re-creates the world each morning; youth, dawn of man’s existence. What do I care what others have said or thought or believed. … I am Febo del Poggio, a rogue. Those who speak of me say I have a low soul; perhaps I have no soul at all. I exist as a fruit does, or a cup of wine, or a fine tree. When winter comes, men leave the tree that offers no more shade; when the fruit is eaten they throw away the stone; when the cup is empty, they seize another. I accept all this. Summer, lustral water of the morning on agile limbs; o joy, dew of the heart. …

I awake. Behind me and before me lies endless night. I have slept for millions of ages; I shall sleep for millions more. I have but an hour. Why should you spoil it with theories and maxims? Pillowed on pleasure, I stretch my arms in the sun on a morning that will never return.

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Marguerite Yourcenar was a Belgian-born French novelist, winner of the Prix Femina and the Erasmus Prize.

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