Thursday

Week 1 : Text Fragment : Final page - The suicide note of Jean Sagan.

“…into an empty room. I know she’s been there. The air is heavy. She takes with her her own atmosphere. Venus is veiled. Suffocating. No man can live with her. You hid her from me on purpose, Thierry, to extract a truer performance. You cast me as the unrequited lover. Now I shall never be anything other. Day after day, take after take, a year spent walking through her absence. Never touching. Never seeing. Never even learning her name. You got your haunted look, BASTARD! You got your tragic hero. Orpheus in limbo. Punished for looking back to see if Eurydice followed. Cursed never to see her face.
No flesh and blood woman will ever fill the aperture you have opened in my mind. All the avid little whores lined up outside the theatre doors so eager to open their coats, lift their skirts and show themselves to me. They…[1]each night. But they who leave nothing hidden mean nothing to me now.
Who is she? Why, even now will you not tell me? You bar the doors of the studio from me. Ca me fait chier![2] You lock yourself away to cut and stitch together your masterpiece. ‘Obsessed, he’s obsessed’ your little Jew tells me. ‘Wait until the premiere, Jean. All will be revealed.’ As though I were a child to be sent away whilst father readies the stockings. Technician! For you she was never anything but trompe l’oeils[3], a symbol, a prop! For me she is life and I shall not let you have her, nor any other man.
By the time you read this you shall already know of the fate of your great work. Have pity on Audrey. She was my unwitting accomplice. The rest of the laudanum is in my bedside drawer. Use it to dull the pain of your loss. Nothing shall diminish mine.
Do not bother searching for the spools in which you snared my soul. By the time you read this the only ever screening of your work has already run. And it shall never be seen again. It is gone. Every last second of torture you wrought from me is erased. I have built of it a pyre. The first reel round my legs. The second from my waist up to my neck. The third wrapped about my skull. I have inhaled one last long breath. A pause upon the silence. I hold a lit match aloft - my final pose. But no soliloquy. See me now press the flame to my lips. The opening shot sears my cheek as she enters from left of frame. Her back to the camera, her face immersed in the matter of the screen upon which she is projected, me. See her illuminated in my eyes. See her, a vision of grace, burning into my skin, across my whole body, consuming me in one bright moment of ecstasy. Our ashes fall like waves of applause and rest in a bow.
Jean.”


[1] Indecipherable.
[2] French colloq.: I am frustrated; lit. ‘It makes me shit!’
[3] French: visual illusion; lit. ‘deceives the eye’.

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