Tours of the Black Clock

109

I DON’T INTEND TO try and redeem my infidelity. I haven’t come to redeem anything. Rather I ride history like a wild horse that’s pursued redemption into a century where redemption is replaced by revenge. I knew two women, I’m sorry I was so weak as to need them both. I understand that if I hadn’t betrayed her for my wife, then my wife may not have had to pay betrayal’s price, clutching in her arms against the Vienna night the child of redemption’s and infidelity’s liaison. I would only add one thing now. I say it not for the sake of what one thinks of me, I say it for them, I say it because it’s so. I’d only add that while perhaps, in the eyes of infidelity, what I had with one was supposed to render counterfeit what I had with the other, in fact what I had with each was true unto itself. I don’t expect anyone to despise me less for this. I don’t expect anyone to regard my fingers as less marked by blood. Though the century disgraces the words innocence and honor, I won’t do so by supposing those words could ever apply to me. My daughter, alive today, would be thirty years old, with a hundred undiminished sins of her own.