"pauline_reage_-_return_to_the_chateau" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reage Pauline)

all. Otherwise she would have waited for an hour and then come back the
following day at the same time, the same place, in accordance with the
classic rules of clandestine lovers. He said "get away" because they both
used a vocabulary of prisoners whose prison does not revolt them, and
perhaps they realized that if they found it hard to endure they would have
found it just as hard to be freed from it, since they would then have felt
guilty. The idea that they would have to return home gave a special meaning
to that stolen time, which came to exist outside the pale of real time, in
a sort of strange and eternal present. They should have felt hemmed in and
hunted down as the years went winging by without bringing them any greater
degree of freedom. But they did not. The daily, the weekly
obstacles-frightful Sundays with- out any letters, or any phone calls,
without any possible word or glance, frightful vacations a hundred thousand
miles from anywhere, and always someone there to ask: "A penny for your
thoughts"-were more than enough to make them fret and worry and constantly
wonder whether the other still felt the same way as before. They did not
demand to be happy, but having once known each other, they simply asked
with fear and trembling that it last, in the name of all that's holy that
it last . . . that one not suddenly seem estranged from the other, that
this unhoped-for fraternity, rarer than desire, more precious than love-or
which perhaps at long last was love-should endure. So that everything was a
risk: an encounter, a new dress, a trip, an unknown poem. But nothing could
stand in the way of taking these risks. The most serious to date,
nonetheless, was the notebook. And what if the phantasms that it revealed
were to outrage her love or, worse, bore him or, worse yet, strike him as
being ridiculous? Not for what they were, of course, but because they
emanated from her, and because one rarely forgives in those one loves the
vagaries or excesses one readily forgives in others. She was wrong to be
afraid: "Ah, keep at it," he said. What happens after that? Do you know?
She knew. She discovered it by slow degrees. During the rest of the waning
summer, throughout the fall, from the torrid beaches of some dismal
watering spot until her return to a russet and burnt-out Paris, she wrote
what she knew. Ten pages at a time, or five, full chapters or fragments of
chapters, she slipped her pages, the same size as the original notebook,
written sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink, whether ballpoint or the
fine point of a real fountain pen, into envelopes and addressed them to the
same General Delivery address. No carbon copy, no first draft: she kept
nothing. But the postal service came through. The story was still not
completely written when, having resumed their assignations back in Paris in
the fall, the man asked her to read sections out loud to him, as she wrote
them. And in the dark car, in the middle of an afternoon on some bleak but
busy street, near the Buttes-aux-Cailles, where you have the feeling you're
transported back to the last years of the previous century, or on the banks
of the St. Martin Canal, the girl who was reading had to stop, break off,
once or more than once, because it is possible silently to imagine the
worst, the most burning detail, but not read out loud what was dreamt in
the course of interminable nights.

And yet one day the story did stop. Before O, there was nothing further
that that death toward which she was vaguely racing with all her might