"Absurdity is king, but love saves us from it."

Your phone call! Ah, mon amour, you don’t know how good it was that you called me! You can’t know! You can’t imagine! Suddenly I feel like I’m reconnected to the earth, to the sea, to the sky, by a mysterious current that your voice and your spirit filled me with, and the clouds have suddenly become friendly. I love you! Oh, how I love you! How I treasure you! And tomorrow I’ll have your arms around me. How could I have doubts about anything when I’m given happiness itself so often! Bad! I’m bad! Demons take hold of me, making me deaf, blind, and sterile, and I’m left distraught, lonely, frozen in the midst of all my turmoil. Why, why, tell me, why am I so bad sometimes? Now…this way, the way I am at this moment, with your warm voice inside me and the promise of your cool mouth and your bright, kind eyes! If I stay this way…my pride returns, my great pride. I love you I thank you and am waiting for you. Tomorrow! Come to me with your heart open; surrender to me. I love you.

I had a bad morning. Perhaps it was the gray sky, or simply waking up, each morning’s the same, a dull day ahead of me, starting over again. There’s a ray of sunshine in my room now, I can see the wind outside. But it’s like the wind in the theater; I can’t feel it. What are you doing? I can picture you in that studio. I hate that studio. Soon you’ll be rehearsing. And even the joy of hearing you is denied to me. Yet it’s one of the most primordial, constant, and pure joys that you’ve given me. Your letter of yesterday made me happy, though. Your voice, last night, on the telephone…I love you. I hate being apart, darkness, suffering, the rain. I want a glorious day, with you, by the sea and sand, under a wildly joyful sky, in a place that I love, but with you, with you…I want your body, the heat, rocks, smooth water, everything you can touch. I hate dreaming, waiting… And yet I’m waiting for you, helpless, empty-handed, and it’s necessary to speak, speak as a substitute for our bodies, to prepare for their return. It’s quite true that I talk to you all day long. I think about you, I worry, I suffer for you, I love your heart. I’d like to make your pain easier, make life simpler and sweeter. But I don’t really know what I want. At other times, my only desire is to feel you’re looking forward to the future with me, with no distractions, until the end. I’ll see you on Thursday, my darling, my beauty. Yes, you are beautiful, and great. Forgive me my follies. Tell yourself that I love you, with courage as well, and with the determination to ease this unhappiness. Perhaps the glorious day, the beautiful countryside, is not far off. But I already have your love, you exist; no, the world is not a desert! I love you, see you on Thursday. Fall asleep with me. I think of you constantly.

..all true passion has a spice of cruelty.

I want to stay like I was yesterday until Thursday—I want to make you happy for the three days you’ll spend at my side, and to do that I must manage to be myself in a certain way. I don’t want to stir anything up; I just want to tell you that you’re not the only one making me unhappy, and that, on the other hand, you’re the only person in the world who brings me and will always bring me joy, true joy.

I didn’t write you yesterday; I forced myself to have a bit of a break, to not think about anything, to forget you, and to forget myself as well, at least the way I am right now, to pull myself together and be ready to bring you a bit of the happiness on Thursday that I so love to give you. I banished my phone, forbade myself from any reading that might sting or hurt me by an unexpected twist in the plot; I turned off the radio, got undressed, lay down in the sun, on my balcony. I closed my eyes and waited, as stretched and taut as the string of a violin. I used to do this when I was little, when the weight of the world already seemed too much to bear. I armed myself with all the rage of my happiness, I secluded myself, I desperately tensed up all my muscles, and awaited the mysterious sound that the hand of some unknown god would wrench from me; and while I was waiting, I would begin to cry out with enthusiasm and triumph and gratitude. Yesterday I tried to do it again, to rid myself of everything, to find myself naked and pure like back then, and to do battle once more with the heart of the universe, peacefully. I stayed like that for hours, six hours, waiting, wiping everything away, blending everything together in the dazzling sky I could see through my eyelids, trying to turn the burning of the sun into a crucible for the frozen regions of the soul. Alas! I didn’t feel the need to shout. When I feel joy now, I want only one thing: to close myself off, to clench my teeth, my fists, to hold on to the joy, and for as long as possible. The time for generosity hasn’t yet returned. But during these endless moments, I managed once more to tremble in the air, with the air, with the light, and for the time of a brief glance at a flower quivering in the cool wind, I again relished the taste of eternity, where I finally completely found you. This is the flower that brought you back to me so totally for a second. Then I let go. I was tired, and all my muscles were aching from the prolonged tension—I let go once again, but I found a bit of gentleness within myself.

Ah, mon chéri, mon amour, my handsome love, you, you! You, with the peace you bring me, the life you fill me with, your greatness that rubs off on me, and the kindness and the demons you instill in me! You, and life! Don’t leave me! Keep me always by your side! Don’t let me leave. I don’t want to die! Ah, I’m afraid of this terrible need that you’ve become to me, this vital need that you are for me! I’m afraid. The bond that unites two beings is so fragile. The obstacles on our path are so great! And I need you so much! Come! Come quickly and take me in your arms, speak to me, calm me, cherish me. Tell me, tell me again and always that you need me and you’ll always need me, you’ll need my presence by your side! Give me back my reason for living and my appetite for life! I don’t know anymore if I love you. I think it’s more than that and I’m a bit terrified. Guide me. Help me. Give me your hand to lead me. I can only find myself within you. Help me, I beg you. Force me if you have to, but let me hear you, so I’ll finally know that you know that I belong to you. I know I’m a heavy burden to bear. Are you still willing to keep me beside you?

Don’t we all have a usefulness complex, a need to be needed? But what will I do without you? Find someone else? No! I can’t! I don’t want to! It would be fake, vile, mediocre! It would be a farce, a vulgar comedy! I don’t want to! A solitary life? I feel dizzy when I think of all those barren years to come, those gray and lifeless landscapes. Friendship? Camaraderie? The communion of a chance moment? I know all about that, oh yes, I do. My profession allowed me to get to know and explore this kind of friendship, these deep, total, and somewhat exhilarating bonds, these intimate links that are forged and dissolved with every play we perform in, those weeks we spend in the open air when we shoot a film. How disappointing it is! How superficial! My head spins when I think about it—I can literally taste what it’s like on the day after such drunkenness. Those aren’t friendships, not even temporary ones; they’re “emotional benders” that leave you with a hangover. If not that, then what? A life of kindness? Maybe. But will I be able to stand the people and the abstraction you find in such a life?

I don’t think I’m crazy yet, unless I have been for a long time, because I’ve also always lived with the idea that we’re irreplaceable, each one of us, and up until now, that is what has given me a reason to live with intensity, fervor, rage, joy, self-pride. The very simple self-pride of being a woman, and, as you’d say, of carrying out the work of being a woman strongly and courageously. It’s simply that as far as that’s concerned, there was a fundamental error: I wasn’t yet a woman and only a woman. I was also a child, a little girl too, and my life is too full to allow me to feel what’s missing. Now the missing bits are there, and they’re terrifying, dizzying; they take away almost everything that surrounds me, they even empty my heart and my soul. And I’ve also acquired the right to carry out my profession at the very moment when work is forbidden to me. If you disappear from my life, mon chéri, I’ll be useless, I’ll be lost; all I’ll have left to do is disappear as well.

I’m sitting in my bedroom on the floor, on the carpet, leaning against the bed, opposite the open window, facing the rosebushes, the pansies, the sweet peas, looking at the sky. There’s no one here and everything is lovely and calm. I have a heavy heart. Since I left you yesterday, I’ve been holding a gloomy and strange debate…with…I don’t know what, something new that got into me a while ago and suddenly became tangible the day before yesterday in Cannes. I think it’s fear, the dreadful fear of being apart. I get the sense that you’re closer and closer to giving up, to defeat, and this idea is driving me absolutely mad. I know that if one day you falter and stop fighting to hold on to me, I’ll leave. I know it. I know myself, and in a certain way I’m wise enough to know that the struggle can’t lead us anywhere. So I’ll leave, and for the moment I keep thinking that it wouldn’t take much for that catastrophic moment to arrive. I was still holding on to a vague hope that in an extreme situation, you’d choose me; I learned that I was mistaken, so all it would take is for that situation to come about. If we get to that point, it would be a debacle for me—death itself. I try to shake myself out of it, to hold back, to defend myself, to cling to anything at all to avoid the abyss. Ah, if only you could understand the depths of my stubbornness, my energy, my desire to justify my existence without you, my regret, the nostalgia I have for my taste for life! If only you knew how I’m trying to hold on, how I’m resorting to everything I can! No! Oh, no! I don’t want to die either. But I get no answer to my efforts—nothing satisfies me even a little, not even for a second! I tell myself—ah, if only you knew everything I tell myself. I tell myself that I have a place that no one can fill but me, and that this is the sole reason I exist and act. When the sun strikes me, I look at the shadow that appears beneath me, that only exists for me, that unique shadow that I form on the stone, and I’m moved just standing above it, as though I were looking at a child.