I don’t think we are talking about the same thing. I’m not talking of those huge events which change a whole life, no, just of the things which give pleasure while one is doing them. Traveling is a great distraction. Everyone has always traveled, the Greeks, the Phoenicians: it has always been so, all through history.”
“It’s true that we’re talking of different things. Travel or cities by the sea are not the things I want. First of all I want to belong to myself, to own something, not necessarily something very wonderful, but something which is mine, a place of my own, maybe only one room, but mine. Why sometimes I even find myself dreaming of a gas stove.”
“You know it would be just the same as traveling. You wouldn’t be able to stop. Once you had the gas stove you would want a refrigerator and after that something else. It would be just like traveling, going from city to city. It would never end.”
“Excuse me, but do you see anything wrong in my wanting something further perhaps after I have the refrigerator?”
“Of course not. No, certainly not. I was only speaking for myself, and as far as I am concerned I find your idea even more exhausting than traveling and then going on traveling, moving as I do from place to place.”
“I was born and grew up like everyone else and I know how to look around me: I look at things very carefully and I can see no reason why I should remain as I am. I must start somehow, anyhow, to become of consequence. And if at this stage I began losing heart at the thought of a refrigerator I might never even possess the gas stove. And anyway, how am I to know if it would weary me or not? If you say it would, it might be because you have given the matter a great deal of thought or perhaps even because at some time you very much disliked one particular refrigerator.”
“No, it is not that. Not only have I never possessed a refrigerator, but I have never had the slightest chance of doing so. No, it’s only an idea, and if I talked of refrigerators like that it was probably only because to someone who travels they seem especially heavy and immobile. I don’t suppose I would have made the same remarks about another object. And yet I do understand, I assure you, that it would be impossible for you to travel before you had the gas stove, or even perhaps, the refrigerator. And I expect I am quite wrong to be so easily discouraged at the mere thought of a refrigerator.”
“It does seem very strange.”
“There was one day in my life, just one, when I no longer wanted to live. I was hungry, and as I had no money it was absolutely essential for me to work if I was to eat. It was as if I had forgotten that this was as true of everyone as of me. That day I felt quite unused to life and there seemed no point in going on living because I couldn’t see why things should go on for me as they did for other people. It took me a whole day to get over this feeling. Then, of course, I took my suitcase to the market and afterwards I had a meal and things went on as they had before. But with this difference, that ever since that day I find that any thought of the future—and after all thinking of a refrigerator is thinking of the future—is much more frightening than before.”
“I would have guessed that.”
“Since then, when I think about myself, it is simply in terms of one person more or one person less, and so you see that a refrigerator more or less can hardly seem as important to me as it does to you.”
“Tell me, did this happen before or after you went to that country you liked so much?”
“After. But when I think about that country I feel pleased and I think it would have been a pity for one more person not to have seen it. I don’t mean that I imagine I was especially made to appreciate it. No, it just seems to me that since we are here, it is better to see one country more rather than one less.”
“I can’t feel as you do and yet I do understand what you are saying and I think you are right to say it. What you really mean is that since we are alive anyhow it is better to see things than not to see them. It was that you meant, wasn’t it? And that seeing them makes the time pass quickly and more pleasantly?”
“Yes, it is a little like that. Perhaps the only difference between us is that we feel differently about how to spend our time?”
“Not only that, because as yet I have not had the time to become tired of anything, except of waiting of course. I don’t mean that you are necessarily happier than I am, but simply that if you were unhappy you could imagine something which would help, like moving to another city, selling something different, or even . . . even bigger things. But I can’t start thinking of anything yet, not even the smallest thing. My life has not begun except, of course, for the fact that I am alive. There are times, in summer for example when the weather is fine, when I feel that something might have begun for me even without there being any proof of it, and then I am frightened. I become frightened of giving in to the fine weather and forgetting what I want even for a second, of losing myself in something unimportant. I am sure that if at this stage I started thinking of anything except the one big thing, I would be lost.”
“But it seemed to me for instance that you were fond of that little boy?”
“It makes no difference. If I am I don’t want to know it. If I started finding consolation in my life, if I was able, to however small a degree, to put up with it then I know I would be lost. I have a great deal of work to do, and I do it. Indeed I am so good at my work that each day they give me a little more to do, and I accept it. Naturally it has ended by them giving me the hardest things to do, dreadful things, and yet I do them and I never complain. Because if I refused it would mean that I imagined that my situation, as it stands, could be improved, that it could be made somehow bearable, and then, of course, it would end up one day by becoming bearable.”
“And yet it seems strange to be able to make one’s life easier and refuse to do so.”
“I suppose so, but I must do whatever they ask. I have never refused anything although it would have been easy at the beginning and now it would be easier still since I am asked to do more and more. But for as long as I can remember it has always been like this: I accepted everything quite quietly so that one day I would be quite unable to accept anything any more. You may say that this is a rather childish way of looking at things, but I could never find another way of being sure that I would get what I wanted. You see, I know that people can get used to anything and all around me I see people who are still where I am, but ten years later. There is nothing people cannot get accustomed to, even to a life like mine, and so I must be careful, very careful indeed, not to become accustomed to it myself. Sometimes I am frightened, because although I am aware of this danger, it is still so great that I am afraid that even I, aware as I am, might give in to it. But please go on telling me about the changes you see when you travel, apart from the snow, the cherries and the new buildings?”
“Well, sometimes the hotel has changed hands and the new owner is friendly and talkative where the old one was tired of trying to please and never spoke to his clients.”
“Tell me, it is true isn’t it that I must not take things for granted: that each day I must still be amazed to be where I am or else I shall never succeed?”
“I think that everyone is amazed, each day, to be still where they are. I think people are amazed quite naturally. I doubt if one can decide to be amazed at one thing more than at another.”
“Each morning I am a little more surprised to find myself still where I am. I don’t do it on purpose: I just wake up and, immediately, I am surprised. Then I start remembering things . . . I was a child like any other: there was nothing to show I was different. At cherry time we used to go and steal fruit in the orchards. We were stealing it right up to the last day, because it was in that season that I was sent into service. But tell me more about the things you see when you travel?”
“I used to steal cherries like you, and there was nothing which seemed to make me different from other children, except perhaps that even then I loved them very much. Well, apart from a change of proprietor in a hotel, sometimes a radio has been installed. That’s a big change, when a café without music suddenly becomes a café with music: then of course they have many more customers and everyone stays much later. And that makes