I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life together held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride. Giovanni's face, which I had memorized so many mornings, noons, and nights, hardened before my eyes, began to give in secret places, began to crack. The light in the eyes became a glitter, the wide and beautiful brow began to suggest the skull beneath. The sensual lips turned inward, busy with the sorrow overflowing from his heart. It became a stranger's face—or it made me so guilty to look on him that I wished it were a stranger's face. Not all my memorizing had prepared me for the metamorphosis which my memorizing had helped to bring about.

Our day began before daybreak, when I drifted over to Guillaume's bar in time for a pre-closing drink. Sometimes, when Guillaume had closed the bar to the public, a few friends and Giovanni and myself stayed behind for breakfast and music. Sometimes Jacques was there—from the time of our meeting with Giovanni he seemed to come out more and more. If we had breakfast with Guillaume, we usually left around seven o'clock in the morning. Sometimes, when Jacques was there, he offered to drive us home in the car which he had suddenly and inexplicably bought, but we almost always walked the long way home along the river.

Spring was approaching Paris. Walking up and down this house tonight, I see again the river, the cobblestoned quais, the bridges. Low boats passed beneath the bridges and on those boats one sometimes saw women hanging washing out to dry. Sometimes we saw a young man in a canoe, energetically rowing, looking rather helpless, and, also, rather silly. There were yachts tied up along the banks from time to time, and house-boats, and barges; we passed the firehouse so often on our way home that the firemen got to know us. When winter came again and Giovanni found himself in hiding in one of these barges, it was a fireman, who, seeing him crawl back into hiding with a loaf of bread one night, tipped off the police.

The trees grew green those mornings, the river dropped, and the brown winter smoke dropped downward out of it, and fishermen appeared. Giovanni was right about the fishermen, they certainly never seemed to catch anything, but it gave them something to do. Along the quais the bookstalls seemed to become almost festive, awaiting the weather which would allow the passerby to leaf idly through the dog-eared books, and which would inform the tourist with a passionate desire to carry off to the United States, or Denmark, more colored prints than he could afford, or, when he got home, know what to do with. Also, the girls appeared on their bicycles, along with boys similarly equipped, and we sometimes saw them along the river, as the light began to fade, their bicycles put away until the morrow. This was after Giovanni had lost his job and we walked around in the evenings. Those evenings were bitter. Giovanni knew that I was going to leave him but he did not dare accuse me for fear of being corroborated. I did not dare tell him. Hella was on her way back from Spain and my father had agreed to send me money, which I was not going to use to help Giovanni, who had done so much to help me. I was going to use it to escape his room.

Every morning the sky and the sun seemed to be a little higher and the river stretched before us with a greater haze of promise. Every day the book-stall keepers seemed to have taken off another garment, so that the shape of their bodies appeared to be undergoing a most striking and continual metamorphosis. One began to wonder what the final shape would be. It was observable, through open windows on the quais and sidestreets, that hoteliers had called in painters to paint the rooms; the women in the dairies had taken off their blue sweaters and rolled up the sleeves of their dresses, so that one saw their powerful arms; the bread seemed warmer and fresher in the bakeries. The small school children had taken off their capes and their knees were no longer scarlet with the cold. There seemed to be more chatter—in that curiously measured and vehement language, which sometimes reminds me of stiffening egg white and sometimes of stringed instruments but always of the underside and aftermath of passion.

But we did not often have breakfast in Guillaume's bar because Guillaume did not like me. Usually I simply waited around, as inconspicuously as possible, until Giovanni had finished cleaning up the bar and had changed his clothes. Then we said good-night and left. The habitués had evolved toward us a curious attitude, composed of an unpleasant maternalism, and envy, and disguised dislike. They could not, somehow, speak to us as they spoke to one another and they resented the strain we imposed on them of speaking in any other way. And it made them furious that the dead center of their lives was, in this instance, none of their business. It made them feel their poverty again, through the narcotics of chatter, and dreams of conquest, and mutual contempt.

Wherever we ate breakfast, and wherever we walked, when we got home we were always too tired to sleep right away. We made coffee and sometimes drank cognac with it; we sat on the bed and talked and smoked. We seemed to have a great deal to tell—or Giovanni did. Even at my most candid, even when I tried hardest to give myself to him as he gave himself to me, I was holding something back. I did not, for example, really tell him about Hella until I had been living in the room a month. I told him about her then because her letters had begun to sound as though she would be coming back to Paris very soon.

'What is she doing, wandering around through Spain alone?' asked Giovanni.

'She likes to travel,' I said.

'Oh,' said Giovanni, 'nobody likes to travel, especially not women. There must be some other reason.' He raised his eyebrows suggestively. 'Perhaps she has a Spanish lover and is afraid to tell you—? Perhaps she is with a torero.'

Perhaps she is, I thought. 'But she wouldn't be afraid to tell me.'

Giovanni laughed. 'I do not understand Americans at all,' he said.

'I don't see that there's anything very hard to understand. We aren't married, you know.'

'But she is your mistress, no?' asked Giovanni.

'Yes.'

'And she is still your mistress?'

I stared at him. 'Of course,' I said.

'Well then,' said Giovanni, 'I do not understand what she is doing in Spain while you are in Paris.' Another thought struck him. 'How old is she?'

'She's two years younger than I am.' I watched him. 'What's that got to do with it?'

'Is she married? I mean to somebody else, naturally.'

I laughed. He laughed too. 'Of course not.'

'Well, I thought she might be an older woman,' said Giovanni, 'with a husband somewhere and perhaps she had to go away with him from time to time in order to be able to continue her affair with you. That would be a nice arrangement. Those women are sometimes very interesting and they usually have a little money. If that woman was in Spain, she would bring back a wonderful gift for you. But a young girl, bouncing around in a foreign country by herself—I do not like that at all. You should find another mistress.'

It all seemed very funny. I could not stop laughing. 'Do you have a mistress?' I asked him.

'Not now,' he said, 'but perhaps I will again one day.' He half frowned, half smiled. 'I don't seem to be very interested in women right now—I don't know why. I used to be. Perhaps I will be again.' He shrugged. 'Perhaps it is because women are just a little more trouble than I can afford right now. Et puis'—He stopped.

I wanted to say that it seemed to me that he had taken a most peculiar road out of his trouble; but I only said, after a moment, cautiously: 'You don't seem to have a very high opinion of women.'

'Oh, women! There is no need, thank heaven, to have an opinion about women. Women are like water. They are tempting like that, and they can be that treacherous, and they can seem to be that bottomless, you know?—and they can be that shallow. And that dirty.' He stopped. 'I perhaps don't like women very much, that's true. That hasn't stopped me from making love to many and loving one or two. But most of the time—most of the time I made love only with the body.'

'That can make one very lonely,' I said. I had not expected to say it.

He had not expected to hear it. He looked at me and reached out and touched me on the cheek. 'Yes,' he said. Then 'I am not trying to be méchant when I talk about women. I respect women—very much—for their inside life, which is not like the life of a man.'

'Women don't seem to like that idea,' I said.

'Oh, well,' said Giovanni, 'these absurd women running around today, full of ideas and nonsense, and thinking themselves equal to men—quelle rigolade!—they need to be beaten half to death so that they can find out who rules the world.'

I laughed. 'Did the women you knew like to get beaten?'

He smiled. 'I don't know if they liked it. But a beating never made them go away.' We both laughed. 'They were not, any way, like that silly little girl of yours, wandering all over Spain and sending postcards back to Paris. What does she think she is doing? Does she want you or does she not want you?'

'She went to Spain,' I said, 'to find out.'

Giovanni opened his eyes wide. He was indignant. 'To Spain. Why not to China? What is she doing, testing all the Spaniards and comparing them with you?'

I was a little annoyed. 'You don't understand,' I said. 'She is a very intelligent, very complex girl, she wanted to go away and think.'

'What is there to think about? She sounds rather silly, I must say. She just can't make up her mind what bed to sleep in. She wants to eat her cake and she wants to have it all.'

'If she were in Paris now,' I said, abruptly, 'then I would not be in this room with you.'

'You would possibly not be living here,' he conceded, 'but we would certainly be seeing each other, why not?'

'Why not? Suppose she found out?'

'Found out? Found out what?'

'Oh stop it,' I said. 'You know what there is to find out.'

He looked at me very soberly. 'She sounds more and more impossible, this little girl of yours. What does she do, follow you everywhere? Or will she hire detectives to sleep under our bed? And what business is it of hers, anyway?'

'You can't possibly be serious,' I said.

'I certainly can be,' he retorted, 'and I am. You are the incomprehensible one.' He groaned and poured more coffee and picked up our cognac from the floor. 'Chez toi everything sounds extremely feverish and complicated, like one of those English murder mysteries. To find out, to find out, you keep saying, as though we were accomplices in a crime. We have not committed any crime.' He poured the cognac.

'It's just that she'll be terribly hurt if she does find out, that's all. People have very dirty words for—for this situation.' I stopped. His face suggested that my reasoning was flimsy. I added, defensively 'Besides, it is a crime—in my country, and, after all, I didn't grow up here, I grew up there.'

'If dirty words frighten you,' said Giovanni, 'I really do not know how you have managed to live so long. People are full of dirty words. The only time they do not use them, most people I mean, is when they are describing something dirty.' He paused and we watched each other. In spite of what he was saying he looked rather frightened himself. 'If your countrymen think that privacy is a crime, so much the worse for your country. And as for this girl of yours—are you always at her side when she is here? I mean, all day, every day? You go out sometimes to have a drink alone, no? Maybe you sometimes take a walk without her—to think, as you say. The Americans seem to do a great deal of thinking. And perhaps while you are thinking and having that drink, you look at another girl who passes, no? Maybe you even look up at the sky and feel your own blood in you? Or does everything stop when Hella comes? No drinks alone, no looks at other girls, no sky? Eh? Answer me.'

'I've told you already that we're not married. But I don't seem to be able to make you understand anything at all this morning.'

'But anyway—when Hella is here you do sometimes see other people—without Hella?'

'Of course.'

'And does she make you tell her everything you have done while you were not with her?'

I sighed. I had lost control of the conversation somewhere along the line and I simply wanted it to end. I drank my cognac too fast and it burned my throat. 'Of course not.'

'Well. You are a very charming and good-looking and civilized boy and, unless you are impotent, I do not see what she has to complain about, or what you have to worry about. To arrange, mon cher, la vie pratique, is very simple—it only has to be done.' He reflected. 'Sometimes things go wrong, I agree, then you have to arrange it another way. But it is certainly not the English melodrama you make it. Why, that way, life would simply be unbearable.' He poured more cognac and grinned at me, as though he had solved all my problems. And there was something so artless in this smile that I had to smile back. Giovanni liked to believe that he was hard-headed and that I was not and that he was teaching me the stony facts of life. It was very important for him to feel this: it was because he knew, unwillingly, at the very bottom of his heart, that I helplessly, at the very bottom of mine, resisted him with all my strength.

Eventually we grew still, we fell silent, and we slept. We awoke around three or four in the afternoon, when the dull sun was prying at odd corners of the cluttered room. We arose and washed and shaved, bumping into each other and making jokes and furious with the unstated desire to escape the room. Then we danced out into the streets, into Paris, and ate quickly somewhere, and I left Giovanni at the door to Guillaume's bar.

Then I, alone, and relieved to be alone, perhaps went to a movie, or walked, or returned home and read, or sat in a park and read, or sat on a cafe terrace, or talked to people, or wrote letters. I wrote to Hella, telling her nothing, or I wrote to my father asking for money. And no matter what I was doing, another me sat in my belly, absolutely cold with terror over the question of my life.

Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men, jostling each other on the wide sidewalk, and aiming the cherry-pips, as though they were spitballs, into each other's faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon. And, watching his face, I realized that it meant much to me that I could make his face so bright. I saw that I might be willing to give a great deal not to lose that power. And I felt myself flow toward him, as a river rushes when the ice breaks up. Yet, at that very moment, there passed between us on the pavement another boy, a stranger, and I invested him at once with Giovanni's beauty and what I felt for Giovanni I also felt for him. Giovanni saw this and saw my face and it made him laugh the more. I blushed and he kept laughing and then the boulevard, the light, the sound of his laughter turned into a scene from a nightmare. I kept looking at the trees, the light falling through the leaves. I felt sorrow and shame and panic and great bitterness. At the same time—it was part of my turmoil and also outside it—I felt the muscles in my neck tighten with the effort I was making not to turn my head and watch that boy diminish down the bright avenue. The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places?

With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love and which was nourished by the same roots.