Chapter 33 Section thirty-two

That day, when they were walking in the street without saying a word, watching the strange pedestrians around, why did she blush?Really incomprehensible: Think back to when he couldn't control his reaction and exclaimed, "You're blushing! How could that be?" She didn't answer.He realized with discomfiture that something must have happened to her that he did not know about. As if that little episode had added to the splendor of the golden chapter of their love, he had written her the letter about the cardinal's mantle.In his role as Kairano, he achieved a great achievement: he finally got her.He was proud of his letter, of his seduction, but he felt a stronger jealousy than he had ever known.He creates a fantasy man and unwittingly lures Chantal into a quiz to test her susceptibility to seduction by men other than him.

His jealousy is not the same as the jealousy of his adolescence at the onset of painful sexual fantasies: less painful this time, but more devastating: gradually, she transforms the woman she loves into a phantom loved woman.To him, she was no longer a trustworthy person, and she no longer had his foothold in today's chaotic world.He felt a strange, melancholy indifference occupy him in the face of this incarnate Chantal (or she could no longer be proved to be Chantal's).Not only the indifference to her, but also the indifference to everything. If Chantal is just a phantom, then all of Jean-Marc's life will be a phantom.

But in the end, his love triumphed over his jealousy and suspicion.He opened the closet and stared at the underwear.Suddenly, he was a little excited, and he didn't know where the excitement came from.He felt that his unique, incomparable Chantal also hid the letter under their underwear as women of her age had done since ancient times.He never wanted to know the part of her private life without him, but why is he a little interested and even a little offended now? He asked himself, what is personal privacy?Is it that we hide the most ambiguous, most unusual, most primal things about a person?Was her privacy the cause of his love for Chantal, his esteem of her like no other?No.What people keep secret are the most extraordinary, the most basic, the most mundane things that happen to everyone: the human body and its desires, its morbidity, its mania—say, Constipation or menstruation.We shyly hide those personal matters not because they are so individual, but on the contrary, they are too general.How could he be dissatisfied with Chantal's gender, with her resemblance to other women, with her wearing a bra with a mentality of underwear?As if he himself did not belong to some eternal masculine folly!Both of them got their start in that pottery studio.There, their eyes were messed up by the incoherent movements of the eyes.It was as if a steam factory had been placed in their belly.The souls of both of them almost have no place in their bodies.Shouldn't they forgive each other?Shouldn't they go beyond that weak spot tucked away in the bottom of the cupboard?He was possessed by a great compassion.He draws a closing line under the whole story and decides to write her one last letter.