But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

‘But I’m a man,’ I cried, ‘a man! What do you think can happen between us?’ ‘You know very well,’ said Giovanni, slowly, ‘what can happen between us. It is for that reason you are leaving me.’

‘Giovanni,’ I said, ‘you always knew that I would leave one day. You knew my fiancée was coming back to Paris.’ ‘You are not leaving me for her,’ he said. ‘You are leaving me for some other reason. You lie so much, you have come to believe all your own lies. But I, I have senses. You are not leaving me for a woman. If you were really in love with

He pulled me against him, putting himself into my arms as though he were giving me himself to carry, and slowly pulled me down with him to that bed. With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.

I looked at Giovanni’s face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that, while what was happening to me was not so strange as it would have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief. It was not really so strange, so unprecedented, though voices deep within me boomed, For

My executioners are here with me, walking up and down with me, washing things, and packing, and drinking from my bottle. They are everywhere I turn. Walls, windows, mirrors, water, the night outside—they are everywhere. I might call—as Giovanni, at this moment, lying in his cell, might call. But no one will hear. I might try to explain. Giovanni

The beast which Giovanni had awakened in me would never go to sleep again; but one day I would not be with Giovanni any more. And would I then, like all the others, find myself turning and following all kinds of boys down God knows what dark avenues, into what dark places? With this fearful intimation there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which

And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no-one to watch, no penalties attached—it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

‘You want to get away from me.’ He laughed; he watched me; the look in his eyes was so bottomlessly bitter it was almost benevolent. ‘At last you are beginning to be honest. And do you know why you want to get away from me?’ Inside me something locked. ‘I—I cannot have a life with you,’ I said. ‘But you can have a life with Hella. With that