I lay in the Le Corbusier armchair (an abstract warrior of steel, fur, and leather), holding the telephone (enameled in clinical white) to my ear:

from it I was drinking in the vast space of night: mythical: like a man who has to drink the ocean in order to reach an island where his happiness is exiled:

the space of night that separated me from Dawn.

She was in Paris in the Hôtel Épicure. Why didn’t she answer? Was she ill? Cheating on me? Was she wandering in a daze through the streets of the bright underworld? I believed that my voice had the power to call her back to me—Orpheus (Schwab had found this image; and I reveled in the way he flinched when I then quoted that line from Cocteau’s Orpheus with which the lovers are sent back to their lives:

“Go on! Go back home to your mud!”)

During the day, it was easy to get through on the telephone. I was then told: “Mademoiselle vient de sortir. Non, m’sieur, elle n’a pas laissé de message” (the hated snail-fed indifference in Madame’s voice). “Et vous-même? Vous allez bien? . . . Non, j’en sais rien, m’sieur. D’habitude, elle rentre assez tard” (d’habitude a syntactical formation of perfidious smugness). “Non, m’sieur, elle était à la maison hier . . . Oui, elle a passé toute la journée dans sa chambre” (and wouldn’t take my calls . . . and why this gloating note in Madame’s thick throaty voice? Is she, too, jealous of the handsome Pole? Her hatred of Dawn is obvious). “Certainement, m’sieur: le moment où elle rentrera . . . Oui, oui, j’ai votre numéro. Non, je n’y manquerai pas. À bientôt, m—”

I waited until midnight. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed the phone like an alcoholic grabbing a bottle. (Schwab: how greedily he interrogated me about my futile attempts to resist.

“You seriously mean”—a puff on the cigarette in his trembling fingers, smoked to a dark brown like an old meerschaum pipe—“you seriously mean that these are self-imposed drills? Compulsory soul-testing exercises, as it were—to test our powerlessness? Do we not know it precisely enough already?”)

I was practicing (so to speak anthracite-gray) magic:

By combining letters and numbers in a circle of mysterious correspondences, I summoned into the telephone receiver the voice of a servant of the spirits:

“Hello, this is long-distance operator four.”

Language of pure poetry: a code word for the universe—

I uttered a magic formula of words and numbers, and the locks to astral space burst open:

The rustle of the vast expanse of night

In its echo the world was dissolved. Like charring paper, the shadows crackled across the earth, melting in the smoke of sounds. Mystery flew in flitting signals from continent to continent: sounds flashed like quick silverfish swallowed by the leviathan of darkness. Twittering voices slipped like white mice into the enormous hole of the darkness. . .