Chapter 54

A friend

I opened the drawer. I slipped the last letter into it. How many letters in that drawer. How much it is.

For years one, often two letters a day: "It's half past three in the morning and I can't sleep because I miss you too much, so I'm writing to you..." "This is a morning letter to tell you that I love you just as much in the morning as in the afternoon..."

How many thoughts, confidences, how much love in those letters. Despite everything, they almost always managed to be funny, often cheerful. Who knows then why there was so much sadness in me, closing the drawer...

(Perhaps an omen? I would have met a man who, looking at me with dark magnetic eyes, would have explained to me how I was now a lost woman, on a slope with no way back. Perhaps only he could have saved me and perhaps he was willing to try, even marry me, if I had given him proof of my desire for redemption by burning with my own hands, without showing uncertainty or regret, all the letters of Hemingway who had covered me in mud.

In the white tiled stove in my room, I would put a first packet of letters. I would have struck a match. I would have drawn the match to the letters. I would have watched the papers burn. Crumple. Becoming ashes.