I played in despair. The human soul is slower than we are: that makes me admit that it may also be more durable. It is always a little behind our current life. I was only beginning to comprehend the meaning of my inner music, the music of joy and savage desire that I had stifled within me. I had reduced my soul to one single melody, plaintive and monotonous; I had filled my life with a silence out of which only psalms were permitted to rise. I do not have sufficient faith, my dear, to limit myself to psalms, and if I repent, it is of my repentance. Sounds, Monique, spread out into time like forms in space, and until a piece of music has ceased, it remains in part plunged in the future. There is something very moving for the improviser in the choice of which note will follow. I began to comprehend that liberty both art and life have when they obey only the laws of their own development. The rhythm followed the rise of my inner anguish; the auscultation is terrible when the heart beats too rapidly. What was now born out of the instrument in which my real self had been locked up for two years was no longer a chant of sacrifice, or even of desire, or of joy so near. It was hate: hate for everything that had falsified me and crushed me for so long. With a sort of cruel pleasure, I realized that you could hear me playing from your room: I told myself that that was sufficient as a confession and an explanation.

And it was at that moment that I noticed my hands. My hands rested on the keys, two naked hands without rings on them—it was as if I saw my soul before my eyes, twice alive. My hands—and I can speak of them because they are my only friends— seemed to me all at once extraordinarily sensitive; even motionless, they seemed to stroke the silence as if to arouse it to manifest itself in chords. They were at rest, still trembling somewhat from the rhythm, and in them were contained all future deeds, just as all possible sounds sleep within the piano. They had encircled bodies in the brief joy of embraces; they had touched, on resonant keyboards, the form of invisible notes; they had, in the dark, traced with a caress the contours of sleeping bodies. Often I had held them uplifted in an attitude of prayer; often I had joined them with yours; but of all that they no longer had any memory. They were anonymous hands, the hands of a musician. They were, by means of music, my intermediary with that infinite being we are tempted to call God, and, by their caresses, my means of contact with the life of other people. They were etiolated, as pale as the ivory on which they rested, for I had deprived them of sunshine, or of work, and of joy. And yet they remained faithful servants; they had provided me with nourishment when music was my only livelihood; and I began to understand that there is a certain beauty in living from one’s art, since it frees us from everything that is not itself. My hands, Monique, were to liberate me from you. They would once again reach out without constraint; they would open for me, these liberating hands, the doors of departure. Doubtless, my dear, it is absurd to tell you everything, but that evening, awkwardly, the way one seals a pact with oneself, I kissed my two hands.