Henri to Yvette.

15 July

You know as well as I do, beloved that my pining for you is as strong as I am old.   Since I have told you that again and again and recounted that life which led me towards you and only there with a dark magnetic force that inhabits my being. My life. I love you and it is the result, the cost and the eternal perspective of all that I am. It seems to me quite useless to try ceaselessly to explain to you by letter what I feel.

You see, when I write, “I love you” I perceive a false note because the truth is much more profound: I am you.

I don’t feel myself a particular entity, a being lifted by the sum of my cells. I feel that I exist through you. My lungs are your. My heart is yours. My belly, your belly.

My God, how can I tell you exactly what I feel? I saw I love you. But one loves something else besides one’s own living body, one loves a stranger. But you, Yvette, you are not another body, you are mine. You are not another being, a stranger apart from my living cells. You are the cell and the sum of my cells. Is that clear, darling?

Well, there you are: you are loved as no one has ever been loved.

I pine for you all my life. But right now this pining is as continuous as my love for you. I love you, I love you, and I love you.

Even while asleep I pine for you and in the morning when I awake I feel all its majestic strength which crushes my heart.

There have been storms, my little one, who has not had them? You have suffered and I sense your suffering in all my body. I will bring you good; believe me because I feel it fro the depth of my soul.

I will know how to make you forget all the harm I have done you by loving, and continuing to love you as I only know how to love. And. the only tears that might flow are those of peaceful happiness that I can offer you and that I know how to offer you.

I am yours, Yvette. So much yours, Yvette.

I wrote in one of my last letters about the Beethoven Concerto and the words- infantile and naive for the wordsmiths that I added in a Cairo hotel. Now the same day, you wrote exactly the same thing. The Concerto and the words: Yvette, ma petite Yvette, je t’aime” Coincidence? No. It is much more. It is two hearts that beat as one. Not one half in me and one in you. But one only. The same. Beating to the same rhythm, living the same life.

One heart; one thought.  We are one, darling.

I want you and I crush the pillow under my head. I want you, walking, reading working. I don’t work any more; I love you.

There is a storm within me now. The same as in Bologna. For in Bologna too, I was sure that you loved me, that you wanted me and that you wanted me to love you, for otherwise how could you live, how could I live since we had only a single heart. I was sure that you would find yourself again, that you would no longer be “vanquished”.

“You must be the victor”, do you remember darling? How good it is that you are. For you are Yvette.  And you will be always. Oh! I feel it so well. Now I want to caress you. At first, your golden hair- do you still know how I play with it? Do you like me playing with it? Then, to glide my fingers over your face, darling. And there, you know that beauty spot my child. And that lip, the one I discovered, invented. To kiss it. To kiss your nostrils. To kiss your tongue and drink deeply. Yvette, I love you so much. I want to live, then you know, you must be with me as I am with you.

You ask me not to tear up my letters. And I tear up so many.

What you read is a tiny fraction of what I write and I write a tinier fraction of what I feel. I can do nothing else.

My love doesn’t tell you that. Can I go on crying aloud “I am alive, alive, alive?”  Darling. Eternity is you… who? Henri? No. It is us. United by the most beautiful love. You will come. I await your response to my proposal. The Polish visa- I am in a position to acquire it the most easily in the world.  I am thinking about Ouri. I have seen his photo and I said “ Here is a free kid, solid as the rock he is standing on.” I am conscious of the whole problem. We will resolve it; heart to heart, hand in hand and above all eyes drinking in eyes.

Tendernesses

Henri