So, I did not love you. You gave up asking me for the great love that, I have no doubt, will never be inspired in me by any woman, since I could not feel it for you. But you were unaware of that. You were too reasonable not to resign yourself to such a trapped life, but you were also too healthy not to suffer from it. But one is the last to perceive the suffering one causes. Moreover, you hid it; at the beginning, I thought you were almost happy. You endeavored to dress in a manner that would please me; you wore heavy clothes which hid your beauty, because you already understood that the slightest effort to adorn yourself frightened me, as if it were an offer of love. Without loving you, I was overcome with a sort of anguished affection for you; your absence, even for a moment, saddened me for an entire day, and one could not have said whether I suffered from being away from you or whether, quite simply, I was afraid of being alone. Even I did not know. And then, also, I was afraid to be together with you, to be together and alone with you. I smothered you with an atmosphere of nervous tenderness; I would ask you, twenty times in a row, if you cared for me; I knew only too well that that was impossible.

We forced ourselves to practice a sort of heightened religious devotion, which really did not correspond at all to our true beliefs: those who lack everything else turn to God, and at that moment God, too, abandons them. Often we lingered on in those dark, welcoming old churches one visits in foreign countries; we even acquired the habit of going there to pray. We would return in the evening, pressed against one another, united at least by a mutual fervor; we would invent pretexts for remaining in the street to watch the life of other people: the life of others always seems easier to us, because we do not have to live it. We were too well aware that, somewhere, our room was awaiting us, a transient room, bleak, naked, vainly open to the warm Italian nights, a room without solitude and, at the same time, without intimacy. For we shared the same room, and it was I who wished it so. Every evening, we hesitated to light the lamp; its light bothered us, and yet we were not able to extinguish it, either. You found me pale; you were no less so; I was afraid you had caught cold; you gently reproached me for having tired myself with excessively long prayers: we had for each other a desperate sort of benevolence. You suffered at that time from intolerable insomnia; I, too, had trouble getting to sleep; we both pretended to sleep in order not to be obliged to complain to each other. Or else you wept. You wept as noiselessly as possible so that I would not be aware of it, and I pretended not to hear you. It is perhaps better not to notice tears when there is nothing one can do to console them.