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| Pierre-Auguste Cot, L'orage, 1880 |
This is Bora Mici's original French to English translation of the ending of the novel Romanesque by the contemporary French author Tonino Benacquista. It tells the story of a couple whose love is so strong nothing can beat it. The novel focuses on all of the adventures and adversities that the couple must overcome from the Middle Ages to the current day, as it travels through space and time trying to find a niche but always being confronted by societal expectations and customs that seek to define it and which it always flees from and defies. The ending does not spoil the reading of the story. It only hints at it.
Romanesque by Tonino Benacquista, Ending, translated from French into English by Bora Mici
Whomever has been touched by the affair of the lovers hurries to share it with a person of their choosing, oh quite a person of their choosing, a modest way of sending them a romantic message in order to suggest the idea that they themselves could have been these two, having dreamed forever in dissatisfaction of living a tale at once moral and immoral, a reminder of what love was a long time ago, before the inextricable misunderstandings it evokes today, before we had extinguished it with rhetoric, before the fear of engagement had paralyzed it, before we had reduced it to statistics, before we had calculated its probabilities, before we had optimized its chances, before we had attacked its ideals, before we had commented on its limits. Before pragmatism, realism, empiricism, rationalism joined forces against it, before the fear of suffering made us suffer, before we chose the guarantee of solitude against all its risks. The power of that kind of love does not need speeches, sociology, conceptual analyses: it is rebellious, it has taken to the underground, it’s bitten into an entire system, scratched at an established power, walked all over an authority. And while they are on the run, we wish the fugitives a fate that is uncommon, wild and never revealed.
….
This time no one wanted them on Earth or in the Sky. There was no empire in the universe that was crazy enough to provide a refuge for the intransigent lovers. In order to make them disappear forever, they were sent to a world that was hardly known, immaterial and out of time, which terrorized both the partisans of good and the artisans of evil.
It was a world that no one had created by design, that no one could have even imagined, not the fruit of a will, but the opposite.
It was a renunciation, which wanting to establish its State, had found this faraway territory, inaccessible to all forms of desire. Indifferent to radiation as much as to chaos, the renunciation knew that it was much more powerful than gods and devils united, too involved in their exaggerated plans, while it possessed a supreme ability to be indifferent and sought the inertia in all things. Before such a redoutable enemy, we could finally measure how many things good and evil had in common, how they were impassioned, capable of fighting hand in hand faced with this cold infinity, which was strong enough to absorb them both. Gods and devils came to asking themselves the question they feared the most: did they really exist, or had they been created by mankind in order to fight against the terror of seeing everything end once and for all?
One ended up in this world at the very end, after all afters, when all sequels were exasperated, where man had finally decided to disappear forever, without any hope of return, without a single butterfly or toad to grant him its carnal envelope because nothing more would exist after him, even his ashes would disappear, and he would also disappear from the memory of his descendants, who would never doubt whether he had existed at all.
If men feared so much this realm of absence, it was because it already resided in them while they were alive. Capable of loving or hating, their greatest inclination was to forget, to show their endless detachment, their absolute lack of curiosity: there resided the prefiguration of their fate after death, not in the blessings or the punishments that we let them anticipate,
The lovers were reunited in this mouth of nothingness, neither tortured nor soothed but empty of soul, not even moved by the need to seek one another. For the first time, they no longer vibrated with the force of attraction, which had allowed them to overcome all adversities; they were discovering a state of unimaginable desolation, that of no longer desiring, no longer cherishing, no longer hoping, no longer fearing the loss of anyone, no longer fearing that he or she suffers since even suffering was abolished there.
Ah, if they had known of the existence of such a place, they would have loved even more, cherished even more, they would have pleaded with their kin to forsake all economy, all touchiness, all suspicion. They learned it there—and it was too late—that if Paradise rewarded the giving and the kind, if Hell punished the corrupted and the cynics, there was another territory which caught hold of those who had feared life and risk-taking, preferring avoidance to confrontation, prudence to temptation, giving in to engagement.
It was unimaginable for the lovers, who had been consumed by passion, who had refused to get over one another, and who, despite their insistance on wanting to be isolated from the world, had taught so many humans not to strangle their desire under the weight of customs. Those two did not deserve to find themselves in this realm of abandonment, similar to the purgatory of the unborn.
A thousand deaths would have been preferable to this end, without a morality, lacking meaning, as if the whole path they had traveled had been in vain, and nothing would ever come again to put an end to this ending, because time could well try to defend itself from eternity, eternity suddenly seemed as limited as human imagination.
Already their heartbeats had begun to become spaced out so that one could distinctly count them one by one.
The time had come to say goodbye, to let go, to dissolve and to accept that nothing left behind would recall their existence, that their escapades no longer would inspire legends, that this human adventure was but a dream.
But before the last heartbeat was gone, they would grant themselves a last memory.
A single one.
Also, they had to hurry because their memories were crumbling in large swathes.
It was a world that no one had created by design, that no one could have even imagined, not the fruit of a will, but the opposite.
It was a renunciation, which wanting to establish its State, had found this faraway territory, inaccessible to all forms of desire. Indifferent to radiation as much as to chaos, the renunciation knew that it was much more powerful than gods and devils united, too involved in their exaggerated plans, while it possessed a supreme ability to be indifferent and sought the inertia in all things. Before such a redoutable enemy, we could finally measure how many things good and evil had in common, how they were impassioned, capable of fighting hand in hand faced with this cold infinity, which was strong enough to absorb them both. Gods and devils came to asking themselves the question they feared the most: did they really exist, or had they been created by mankind in order to fight against the terror of seeing everything end once and for all?
One ended up in this world at the very end, after all afters, when all sequels were exasperated, where man had finally decided to disappear forever, without any hope of return, without a single butterfly or toad to grant him its carnal envelope because nothing more would exist after him, even his ashes would disappear, and he would also disappear from the memory of his descendants, who would never doubt whether he had existed at all.
If men feared so much this realm of absence, it was because it already resided in them while they were alive. Capable of loving or hating, their greatest inclination was to forget, to show their endless detachment, their absolute lack of curiosity: there resided the prefiguration of their fate after death, not in the blessings or the punishments that we let them anticipate,
The lovers were reunited in this mouth of nothingness, neither tortured nor soothed but empty of soul, not even moved by the need to seek one another. For the first time, they no longer vibrated with the force of attraction, which had allowed them to overcome all adversities; they were discovering a state of unimaginable desolation, that of no longer desiring, no longer cherishing, no longer hoping, no longer fearing the loss of anyone, no longer fearing that he or she suffers since even suffering was abolished there.
Ah, if they had known of the existence of such a place, they would have loved even more, cherished even more, they would have pleaded with their kin to forsake all economy, all touchiness, all suspicion. They learned it there—and it was too late—that if Paradise rewarded the giving and the kind, if Hell punished the corrupted and the cynics, there was another territory which caught hold of those who had feared life and risk-taking, preferring avoidance to confrontation, prudence to temptation, giving in to engagement.
It was unimaginable for the lovers, who had been consumed by passion, who had refused to get over one another, and who, despite their insistance on wanting to be isolated from the world, had taught so many humans not to strangle their desire under the weight of customs. Those two did not deserve to find themselves in this realm of abandonment, similar to the purgatory of the unborn.
A thousand deaths would have been preferable to this end, without a morality, lacking meaning, as if the whole path they had traveled had been in vain, and nothing would ever come again to put an end to this ending, because time could well try to defend itself from eternity, eternity suddenly seemed as limited as human imagination.
Already their heartbeats had begun to become spaced out so that one could distinctly count them one by one.
The time had come to say goodbye, to let go, to dissolve and to accept that nothing left behind would recall their existence, that their escapades no longer would inspire legends, that this human adventure was but a dream.
But before the last heartbeat was gone, they would grant themselves a last memory.
A single one.
Also, they had to hurry because their memories were crumbling in large swathes.
The bad ones had been erased first. Only the more harmonious, the more just, remained.
A wild kid with amber skin offers a bowl of water…A working woman shares her blanket on an icy night…An Indian woman hides her distress behind a radiant smile…An executioner, the ax in his hand, whispers into the ears of the condemned: You will feel nothing…A monk is happy to pass on his teachings to these rustic beings…A master gives an unknown woman his two dogs without which she would not survive…An anonymous person offers the bread of reconciliation…A crazy person prefers freedom to wisdom…An old couple has forgotten all but the most important…A dying man wishes a long life to a travelling woman…An artist recreates a face without even having seen it…In the storm a sailor sings to chase away his fear…A tyrant regrets having forgotten his people…A prisoner treats his prison mate as a brother…At the theatre, the spectators show they have as much talent as the playwright…A mother is lost in tears of gratitude for she who has brightened up her son’s smile…
But as soon as remembered these memories start to be dislodged too. Soon only the most radiant will remain.
The first look exchanged that morning at the corner of the woods.
That one held on so well that it led to another heartbeat, unexpected, insolent.
Because how could one think of that moment without hoping for the next, and all the others that would come.
Suddenly, in the middle of nothing, before forgetfulness sucked them up completely, the lovers’ hearts got going again.
The Nothing, surprised by this unexpected but stubborn counterpoint, started fearing that it was losing ground.
And it sent them where they had come from.
A wild kid with amber skin offers a bowl of water…A working woman shares her blanket on an icy night…An Indian woman hides her distress behind a radiant smile…An executioner, the ax in his hand, whispers into the ears of the condemned: You will feel nothing…A monk is happy to pass on his teachings to these rustic beings…A master gives an unknown woman his two dogs without which she would not survive…An anonymous person offers the bread of reconciliation…A crazy person prefers freedom to wisdom…An old couple has forgotten all but the most important…A dying man wishes a long life to a travelling woman…An artist recreates a face without even having seen it…In the storm a sailor sings to chase away his fear…A tyrant regrets having forgotten his people…A prisoner treats his prison mate as a brother…At the theatre, the spectators show they have as much talent as the playwright…A mother is lost in tears of gratitude for she who has brightened up her son’s smile…
But as soon as remembered these memories start to be dislodged too. Soon only the most radiant will remain.
The first look exchanged that morning at the corner of the woods.
That one held on so well that it led to another heartbeat, unexpected, insolent.
Because how could one think of that moment without hoping for the next, and all the others that would come.
Suddenly, in the middle of nothing, before forgetfulness sucked them up completely, the lovers’ hearts got going again.
The Nothing, surprised by this unexpected but stubborn counterpoint, started fearing that it was losing ground.
And it sent them where they had come from.
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