My Life

Confession

You understand, my sweet confessor, that I could be even more of a sinner than not, and I hope just the same for your absolution. In the meantime, I will tell you that after many, many promises, now, at this moment, I have smoked the last cigarette. By now, when we will read this page, many days will have passed and, if I have kept my promise, you will absolve me freely. But I still have many other black sins on my conscience. Yesterday I asked you, with some nerve, permission to go looking for a girl. I will not tell you more than this: you did well in not permitting me to go. Do you absolve me? You have my word of honor that at the moment of petition, I spoke with the same ingenuousness with which you listened, but now, thinking about it, knowing myself and knowing you, I feel precisely the need to be absolved. And it is not over. Mind you, I still do not take all the words that you say to me literally. “Why did she say this to me?” I think when I am alone, and I go searching for motives that could have caused you to say something or other to me, seeing that I don’t know how to resign myself to believe purely in the word that wounds my ear. I analyze it, compare it to many other words, which you then deny having thought in relation to those words, and for me the end is that your white face darkens, your golden hair becomes a metal less pure, and I despair that I, so debased, have not found that absolute naivety that I sought, that I wanted, that I believed would complete me. I often think that you’ve said a word to reassure me more absolutely, but in spite of presuming your mind to possess the purest aims, it pains me that it is not possible for me to believe in the sound of your voice, in your very words, in your behavior, just as air continues moving. But you absolve me, isn’t it so? It’s bad, bad, the worst evil there is, but it is so, and I would be wrong to conceal it from you.