All that resurfaces from the bottom of me.

How well you read, in the unquenchable curiosity through which you invite me to travel to and fro between the banks of my own river, its flows and adorned bed, its winding and intertwining paths, its wild aspects as well as its fine and polished works, the myriads of its pebbles, the myriads of its sculptures, how well you read about the desires and loves through which impulse and ardour were sparked off, or about my smooth, languid waters and the way I open up or refrain from mentioning them, as the shapes and titles of my sculptures -so evocative of my dreams- silently confess who were those I had set my mind on, those I sculpted them for. Fusion and confusion, most of the time, in that confluence, and, for the river, the hiding of oneself and further oblivion, though at times, as in “The Conversation”, prevails the abiding memory of that love that once was a prompting to me. And how could I mention such devotion without offending you,

without letting you deduce that I concealed a face from you, and a secret faithfulness, a happiness at the bottom of my heart ? I am aware of the woman’s sensitiveness in you, of your delicacy, aware of your expecting an achievement for yourself at present; I sense you will in no way be inquisitive about that other person, that you will, in fact, bless her for that remote love she caused to rise in me then and allows to spring for you now. For you can give a new impetus, destined for you alone, to the current flowing through me, the current flowing through my writing to you, the profusion I love picking up the trail of with you, while bygone days bend –all that resurfaces from the bottom of me. Such is the way of your curiosity, of your looking at things, of your hand … that the pasts of my lifetime, from childhood ingeniousness to sundry actuating forces of my getting on in years, are thus allowed out of my entangled waterways. And I rediscover for you those buried pieces of driving emotionality, quite dazzled by their richness today in the singular happiness of you and me, a happiness with no equal.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)