The Kites

by Romain Gary

he spent every spare minute with his gnamas, as he called them. He had discovered this word in a book about Equatorial Africa, where apparently it refers to everything that has a breath of life in it: men and mosquitoes, lions and ideas and elephants.

Sometimes it seemed to me that it was the kite holding Ambrose Fleury at the end of the line, and not the other way round.

Some say it’s touched in the head, some say it’s touched by a sacred spark. It can be hard to tell the difference. But if you really love somebody or something, give them everything you have — everything you are, even. And don’t worry about the rest.”

“Next time? What next time?” “How am I supposed to know that? But there always is a next one.”

Sun and shadow were dappled beneath the branches, and even today, after so many years, it seems that dark and light have never ceased to play around Lila — that somehow, in this instant of emotion, whose reason and nature I didn’t comprehend, I was forewarned.

I had begun to understand what my uncle called “the pursuit of the blue yonder,” and I was learning not to take myself, or my excess of memory, too seriously.

sunshine rolled over the ground like a voluptuous cat.

There was a pause in her crying, and a human eye with more eyelashes around it than I had ever before encountered in my life was trained upon me.

He had the profile of a young eagle, with a nose that presided over the rest of his visage as if it were master of his face and features.

I felt I was at a turning point in my life — the world had a center of gravity different from the one I’d learned about in school. Half of me wished to stay there, at her feet, till the end of my days, and the other half of me wanted to flee; even now, I don’t know whether I succeeded in life because I didn’t take off running, or whether I came to ruin because I stayed.

I understand dying of love, because sometimes it’s so strong that life can’t withstand it, it snaps.

I was more conscious of her visit after it ended than while it lasted, this perfumed half hour during which, for the first time in my life, I felt the first wafts of femininity drifting over my face, my first sensual proximity.

His nose was bleeding. I didn’t know what to do with my victory, and, as I always did when I felt I had the upper hand, I rather wanted to spare him, even to help him.

Actually, I was beginning to feel guilty of the very cruelest kind of transgression — that is, the one we have no idea of.

“Tomorrow. Same time.” “Oh, go shit in your hat.”

I battled my feelings of inferiority bravely, picking out a guest and imagining him floating in the air at the end of a line I held in my hand, with his stiff-legged trousers, his checked vest, and his yellow tie, propelled this way or that with a flick of my hand. It was the first time I had wielded my imagination as a weapon of defense, and nothing ever turned out to be more beneficial to me in this life.

She nodded her head and stroked my cheek in an almost maternal fashion.

He had one of those very gentle faces that seem made for maturity, which stands ready for its snowfall even in the springtime of youth.

Watch out. First it’s a way of looking at the world, then it becomes a way of life. Seeing everything as twisted gives you crooked vision.” Tad turned to me. “That, young sir, is the voice of a juicy pear whose purpose in life is to be eaten. It’s what they call an idealist.”

She had a horror of mathematics, as she found that numbers had the annoying habit of proclaiming that two and two are four, which to her seemed somehow contrary to the very spirit of Poland.

I have lived long enough to find myself in a world where the term “fighting for honor” has ceased to evoke anything but the absurd panache of a bygone era, barely worthy of jest. But all this means is that the world went one way and I another, and it’s not my place to decide which one of us took the wrong turn.

Lila’s brother had an almost physical gift for nonchalance: it was as if he were constantly trying to attenuate the excessive, passionate side of his personality with an attitude of detachment, a slightly weary boredom.

Obviously, the time has passed when a woman could change the face of the world — really you’d have to be a man, and a pitiful one at that, to want to change the face of the world. I won’t be an actress, because an actress only gets to become someone different for the span of an evening, and I need to change all the time, morning to night, there’s nothing more depressing than only being who you are, some small work that’s the result of circumstance … I have a horror of anything once and for all.”

“I can still fail at everything,” Lila was saying, “I’m young enough. When you get old you have less and less opportunity to mess everything up because you run out of time, so you can live an untroubled life and be happy with what you’ve already made a mess of. That’s what they mean by ‘peace of mind.’ But when you’re only sixteen you can still try everything and fail at it all, that’s what they usually call ‘having your future ahead of you.’” Her voice trembled. “Listen, I don’t mean to scare you, but there are times I think I have no talent for anything …”

As for me, I hoped — to be sure, a little shamefacedly — that Lila was right: if she had no talent for anything, then I still had a ghost of a chance.

Indeed, it was undeniable that pleasing a woman was becoming a taller and taller order: America had already been discovered, as had the sources of the Nile; Lindbergh had already crossed the Atlantic; Mallory had scaled Mount Everest. The five of us were still near to the naïvetés of childhood — which may be the most fertile portion life gives us, and then takes away.

He arrived with due pomp; such a man would not have had the vulgarity to change into ordinary clothes to visit ordinary people.

I had taken to be the embodiment of the very British virtues of phlegm and discretion,

Nevertheless, when the Bronickis returned to Normandy, she would run to me with open arms, covering me with kisses, laughing and sometimes even crying a little — these few instants were enough to make me feel that life kept all its promises and that doubt was not permissible.

in the plants we call weeds when they’re alive because they obey only themselves.

I would console her. Nothing gave me more pleasure than these moments of despair, which allowed me to take her in my arms, to brush over her breasts with my hand and her lips with mine. And then a day came when, losing my head, I abandoned my lips to their mad inspiration and, not encountering any resistance, heard a voice of Lila’s that I did not know, a voice that no virtuoso singer can surpass. Even as the voice went to my head and bore me away beyond everything I had ever known in life of happiness and of myself up until then, I remained on my knees. The cry rose so high that I, who had until that moment never been a man of faith, felt as if I had finally rendered unto God what was His due. Afterward, she remained motionless on her bed of flowers, both of her hands forgotten on my head.

“You feel guilty because you’re sleeping with my sister. You must have about two thousand years of guilt, there. Are you happy? Yes or no?” Saying “yes” seemed so inadequate that I kept silent. “Well, there’s no other justification to life or death. You can spend your whole life in libraries, you’d never find another answer.”

I was horrified. The cruelty of losing Lila seemed to me to be incompatible with everything I knew of being human.

And even if you must love this girl your whole life long, she’s better off going away forever, it will only make her more beautiful.”

Only a few days remained to us, and our goodbyes were made of looking at the woods, ponds, and old paths we would never again see together. The end of the summer came in soft tints, as if it felt a certain tenderness toward us. The sun itself seemed reluctant to leave us.

I pulled her to me; my lips pressed to hers, my last conscious thought being that if what Lila was giving me was not, as she had cried out to me, “true, great love,” well, then life was even more abounding in beauty, joy, and happiness than I had imagined, even as she departed for Paris that very evening — here, without premeditation but not without a smile, I have created a syntactic confusion between “she” and “life” — where her parents were waiting for her.

We hugged goodbye and they saw me out to the terrace. I see the two of them again now, waving at me. I was certain that Tad was wrong, and I felt a bit sorry for him. He passionately loved all of humanity, but really, he had nobody. He believed in misfortune because he was lonely. You need two to hope. All laws of large numbers begin with that certainty.

and we left each other like that, in a burst of laughter.

It did not occur to me to think of history in the present tense.

Lila was sitting by my side, and her profile, so pure against the background of her pale hair, her gaze like the end of every question and all doubt, awoke within me a certainty of victory that was no illusion, for it could not and would not ever know defeat.

I really don’t know where I had come up with the idea that love could constitute the whole of life’s work and meaning. Probably I had inherited this total lack of ambition from my uncle. Perhaps, too, I had loved too early, too young, with all my being, and there was no room left over in me for anything else.

She became upset when I murmured to her, “You are my whole life,” and I didn’t know if it was the banality of the expression that made her indignant or the puny size of the unit of measurement. “Come on, Ludo. Other men have loved before you.” “I know, I’ve had precursors.” Today, I believe she harbored a bewildered desire that she was incapable of articulating: not to be reduced to her femininity alone. How, at my age, knowing so little of the world in which I lived, could I understand that the word “femininity” could be a prison for women?

The marks of our bodies in the sand still remained from the preceding days. Lila caught her breath; I shut my eyes on her shoulder.

But for some time, everything had been silent. I went up to the music room: the piano had disappeared. What occurred to me then seemed mad, but was in fact how I thought of heartbreak: Bruno had thrown his piano into the sea.

I stopped behind a tree, not to hide, but because everything was so very perfect in this northern symphony of paleness and sea that I feared I would interrupt one of those moments that could last a lifetime, if there were memory enough for it. A seagull escaped from the fog, traced its brief signal above the water, and flew off like a note. The swishing of the surf, although it was only that, the Baltic, nothing more than a stretch of sea, a plain mixture of water and salt, ended in the sand before the piano like a dog lying down at its master’s feet.

I was beginning to understand that you must learn to let all things leave you every so often — even your reason to live. That you must grant them their right to be a little inconstant, even: to take up with solitude, with the horizon, or with those tall plants whose name I didn’t know, the ones that lose their white heads at the tiniest gust of wind.

Is it necessary to have loved several women to learn to love a single one? Perhaps. Nothing can prepare us for a first love. And when Tad would say to me, as he did occasionally, “Come now, you’ll love other women in this life,” it seemed like an awfully harsh thing to say about this life.

“Long live immortal France!” said my host. “Long live eternal Poland!” I replied. There was something all too mortal in these declarations of immortality.

“There’s always time to be enemies, old man.” “Bruno, someday you’ll die of kindness, tolerance, and gentleness.” “Well, given the options, it isn’t a bad way to go.” I would never forget that moment. I would never forget his long fingers on the keyboard, that tender face under its thatch of hair. When fate finally laid its cards on the table, nothing would have prepared me for the change it signaled: Bruno’s card really must have been drawn from another deck. But then again, fate sometimes does play with its eyes shut.

One last embrace, until Lila’s voice died on her lips, unmoving and half-open; her widened eyes would lose their quick; her heart would slowly calm against my chest. In those moments, I was still stupid enough to feel like a master builder, proud of his force.