"- What dreams are you, Jacques?
- On the impossible. Come. We must go. It's getting late.
We went to the boat and I put the oars. My pretty figurehead stood before me in his part of a very pale blue, gliding among the clouds, his hat on his knees. This hat, really, life was beautiful.
- Why are you always dressed the same way, Jacques, a little Humphrey Bogart, hat and all, like your pictures of thirty years ago?
- I do not know. Loyalty, I suppose. Or the illusion of always look myself. Or, cleverly, this search for I know not what that throws an old-fashioned way. (...)
My gaze wandered beyond her, beyond the horizon. I searched the castles, there's always one waiting for you at a crossroads. I do not know why I felt the need of solemn stone. There was where sandbanks with their air potbellied fish out of water. Sometimes, beyond the hills, the tip of a steeple which spoke of humble graves. I stood up to see farther, but there was nothing. I was rowing and standing, to Laura, who always shrank. The light was pale with her acquaintances transparent complicity of a woman, soft and white, the water gave way to the boat and the wake sympathetic closed behind us like a curtain falling .(...)
- How much further?
- I do not know.
- Are not you tired?
- I am indestructible.
- What are you looking at?
- The Castle.
She turned to the sky line.
- There is no castle.
- There's always one. "
-
Romain Gary, Beyond this limit your ticket is no longer valid , 1975.
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