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Loneliness is when the people around you no longer make you laugh
When our issues shift in such a way that they no longer resonate
One no longer feels understood, nor able to explain oneself. The desire to convince runs out, like when there is no more salt at the bottom of the cardboard box in the shape of a tube with a spout. We think that salt is infinite, so many grains, so fine, so numerous; so little is used. Only every day we use it. Then one day, the cardboard box in the shape of a tube comes to an end; you can see the bottom of it, something you thought impossible, unimaginable. This must be how everything comes to a visible end, when you choose to live in consciousness. More than a step away from exclusion; more than two centimetres away from death. In fact, I don't know in what unit the distance to death is measured. Some people would say in seconds, minutes, days, years, but that's a bit crude because there are so many intermediate nuances. I don't keep this diary to tell my life story but to bear witness to a journey. There you have the feeling - because it's always an evaluation; no precise map - that you are so many miles from death. Yes, why not miles? 1609 metres, I am told on the Internet. To tell you the truth, I don't really care. No, Miles to me would be more like the little boy in the Turn of the nut by Henry James; particularly through his interpretation by Martin Stephens in Jack Clayton's 1961 film adaptation of the novella, starring Deborah Kerr. It seems that "they", as they say, replayed it yesterday on TV; I don't know on which channel. I've seen this film, 10, 20, 30 times, I don't know, since I first saw it on a Wednesday afternoon in my childhood. The film is called The InnocentsThis is an excellent choice given the ambivalence of the children in the story. So much so, in fact, that I also chose this title for my fable on the background of a good family's childhood, created in 2003, the last part of the triptych begun by The Puritans, then The Just -Story and which closed the adventure of the company Life is short two years later. This same Martin Stephens, with his aristocratic bearing so unusual for his age, had already caught my attention with his icy and dangerous charm, which worked identically in The village of the damned directed by Wolf Rilla in 1960. This time, little Martin stood up to George Sanders, who was just as admirable as Deborah Kerr two years later, to give him a line and measure himself against the demonic power of this little prince, so perfectly extraordinary on the screen that it would be hard to imagine him being different in life. Who is Martin Stephens and what has become of him today?
Born on 30 June, 19 July or January 1948, depending on the source, he will be or has been 65 this year and is probably retired from a brilliant career as an architect, which was his second and long-lasting profession, since he voluntarily gave up filmmaking after a last film for the Hammer in 1966, entitled The Witches. According to a Wikipedia article, he is now living in Portugal. As was the case for Garbo's fans during her lifetime and up until her last days, after her abrupt voluntary interruption of filming (IVT, so we would say for actresses in this case), something in me would like to know the current face of the mature man he has become; at least, to guess, to catch a glimpse of him. Who does one become having had the look and features of that childhood? I would have so much liked to have been him at his age (his characters at least); to have had that authority over adults, that indecent sexual maturity that gave him the right to kiss the housekeeper Miss Giddens-Deborah Kerr full on the lips, stunned by that "good night" kiss. I would have liked to have had his little alien power, when he sent a bad guy, against his will, into a wall at the wheel of his car. But above all, I would have exchanged my whole being, my dark skin and my brown hair for an ounce of his bewitching charm of a little blond boy indifferent to the tragedies of other people's lives, I who felt empathy for the most malformed of the lame dogs. Yes, I too, like hundreds of others of both sexes, including adults, was dumbfounded by this little boy who was as attractive as a magnetic star, embodying with the perfect reserve of a gentleman, all the provocation of childish desire. So I was a paedophile at the age of 10; big deal! Can one be accused of paedophilia when one is a child and even more so when one is madly in love with a young man who is actually 15 years older than me? I imagine and I hope, plunging back into the mysteries of the fascination of icons and of this staggering face, that Mr Stephens would laugh with me heartily at the infinitely ambivalent content of this unnatural love, through celluloid and decades. We'd be sitting comfortably in an English drawing room having tea today; I, in my current 50s, would be a young man with him this time. Time would have caught up with us and turned the tables. But what does time matter? So no more cinema. I would nevertheless ask him, skilfully slipped into the thread of conversation while trying to camouflage the salacious indiscretion of my question, if he remembered having had pleasure in briefly but densely kissing Miss Deborah Kerr during the filming; if he was moved by it in his little boy's body, perhaps even afterwards. And having thus amused myself and delighted in such an interview, I would wish him a very happy birthday, past or future, and punctuate my sentence with a sympathetic kiss, full of the warmth of my childish admiration on his charming, if somewhat more than sexagenarian, lips...
