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.