Today, once more, Costals gave thanks. But he also besought the unknown Presence to give him the strength and the audacity to think of his happiness unceasingly. He made a resolution to remind himself continually that his happiness must come first, that he must not allow himself to be put off by anything or anyone. Solemnly he made this resolution. Then, on the way out, he halted for a moment on one of the steps.
Paris ... white, grey, black, dirty, polluted, like sheets after a night's coupling. Nothing beautiful in what lay before him, except perhaps, under the milky sky, those buds of such a tender green one would have wished to protect it. They heralded the spring, season of purity and impurity, that great vessel which could be seen looming on the horizon, after the long wait, bringing the perfumes of unknown lands. And nothing strong, save this unscrupulous crowd and its infinite possibilities. Once, as an adolescent, walking with his parents on the Grands Boulevards, he had heard his father say: 'On the Boulevards, everybody's for sale.' As a result, he had conceived for the boulevards a respect arrowed with hope: already the river of his concupiscence was overflowing its banks. Later a doubt came to him: 'But I too was on the boulevards that day. And my parents. And we're not for sale. So there are exceptions, alas ... ' Nevertheless, he had never forgotten his father's words.
Beneath him, on the viscous pavement, flowed the race of men, of sub-men and of women, a vast stream of liquid manure which split in two at the foot of the temple and into which it was his destiny to discharge his male liquid, the purest of the substances secreted by the human organs - the only pure substance - innocent and pure as a grain of wheat. The baseness of this Parisian crowd, how he had hated it in the past! There was a time when he used to lower his eyes when he passed these women of Paris, for fear that some passer-by might think he desired them: he would have been ashamed. ['They [Parisian women] are at most passable-looking, and generally plain rather than handsome.' - J.-J. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloise (Author's note).] Now he loved this baseness: 'It's my raw material.' The Latin gorilla, the Parisian marmoset, the fish-complexioned pétroleuse, [A reference to the female incendiaries who, during the Paris Commune of 1871, emptied paraffin into the basements of houses and set it alight (Translator's note).] the sansculotte with his foul mouth and girlish voice, all those grey people intent on evil-doing - stealing, cheating, f—ing, wangling, skulking - all this (external) Judeo-Latin licentiousness which horrifies and fascinates the decent Nordic, because it testifies to the licentiousness within and promises that here all things are possible - it was this sun-beaten dung (dung of body and soul) that he spread over his soil and that made it sprout so thickly. He knew, too, that there were plenty of pearls in this dunghill - and 'does one disregard a diamond because one has found it in the mud?' (Fénelon) - and purity in this filth, like the white teeth in the jaws of a dead dog.
As it happened, today he felt disposed towards the hunt, for he had not shaved that morning. And when he went hunting women he liked to be unshaven and rather scruffily dressed so as to make the sport more difficult and in particular to make it clear that he despised his quarry and, so to speak, dominated his subject: put myself out for them! let them take me as I am! there are plenty more like her! His beard increased his self-confidence - 'To hunt with a beard I must be really good at it!' - and at the same time provided him with an excuse in case of failure: 'Not surprising, when I'm as hairy as an ape!' For the first time since his return, he was also without either overcoat or hat: relieved of these symbols of respectability, a man is reborn, like a woman who has had her hair cut short: a light-infantryman without impedimenta, he can pursue the adversary more easily, as brisk and lively as the people one said good-bye to on the boat at noon, crumpled, haggard and dishevelled, and meets again at three o'clock parading along the harbour front all spick and span. Then he lit a cigarette. Then, with the same instinctive gesture as the caveman 'girding his loins' before venturing forth, or the soldier tightening his belt before zero hour, or the matador pulling his cape tight to his waist as he enters the ring, he buttoned the middle button of his jacket and plunged into the jungle. Just as wild beasts emerge from their lairs each day in search of food, so he resumed his regular way of life, which was to set forth each day in search of fresh prey. Less from a need of prey than from a need of the hunt: as Lessing said, if God offered him the truth he would refuse it, loving the search for it so much; and a shell that has burst is no longer interesting, it's the one on the way that excites you. Today, Costals had no great hunger, but he was taking the plunge because he thought: 'So those swine would like to stop me doing what I want to do, would they!' When other motives were weak in him, this one would decide him without fail.
Worshippers of love should draw the following conclusion from all this: that every man who falls ill becomes good and forgives all, while the first impulse of the man who has recovered is to run amuck. The nurse, almost before she looks at the thermometer, knows that the patient's temperature has dropped: he looks a regular shark again. Evil becomes identified with life (whence the fact that a man in good health always wants war, his life force demands it, even though his reason shows him how much good might be done in peacetime with the virtues expended in war). Thus all the forces of society are pitted against life, which is apt to cause far too much trouble; unable to attack life directly through men's bodies, which they need for the strength of the nation, they attack it through men's souls, inoculating them with morality and religion. Costals, strolling along the boulevards, amused himself by jostling people (especially old trouts of both sexes), or charging straight at them to see if they would step aside. And they always did, with never a protest: they were Frenchmen of the 1928 vintage (just try and play rugby in the streets of Algeria or Spain or Italy! ). True, he had no illusions about these billowing women with their generous backsides and their faces smeared with cream like tumours smeared with ointment, and he recognized that they hardly deserved to be coveted. His desire was simply to set his seal, his P.C., on each of them, and never to hear of them again - this for the pleasure a farmer feels as he surveys a flock of sheep all marked with his brand.
On he went, sizing up each passer-by at a glance, the women to see what there was to be had from them, the men to see what to guard against. He interrogated each face, turning away from one, following another, half tracker, half tracked, half savage, half coward - exactly like a beast of prey. He took a terrifying pleasure in this jungle, as much from being himself on the alert as from putting others on the alert. Fear swept over him in waves, like a thin film of spray over a rock; this rock was his belief that he bore a charmed life: Gott mit uns. With his youth, his health, his effrontery, his writings, his charming son, his string of young mistresses, and all the advantages of power without any of its disadvantages, he felt himself invulnerable: stronger, more supple, more resistant, more malevolent than they. With his head jutting forward like a snake's, sniffing danger and prey from afar, and a slight thickness in the neck like the ox which Rosenbaum had seen in him, he was both ox and snake; and the life force, the urge to take, to hurt, to corrupt, to deceive, stood out on his face not in a sweat, but in a sort of glowing veneer - glittering like Moses descending from Mount Tabor. And all this time he was creating, in the course of this feral prowl. And he would create better still, once he had offered up a sacrifice. The more he sacrificed, the more he wanted to sacrifice: his finest captures were always made when he had just finished sacrificing, was almost on his last legs, but nevertheless all set; and he was the better fitted for it then, for the rails over which many trains pass are clean and shining, whereas little-used tracks rust. Doctors tell us that the sexual capacity of living organisms is far more considerable than people suspect. Costals had never perceived the slightest difference in intellectual or physical vigour, in lucidity and self-control - everything, in short, that makes a man's worth - between those periods when he indulged in apparently excessive delights and those during which (in the war, at sea, or in the mountains) he was
forced into total abstinence. On the contrary, the more he sacrificed, the better his form, both in mind and body. When he was on his last legs - quick, a sacrifice! And he came out of it renewed, as delighted with himself as a doggie that has just done its business and immediately rushes round like a madman. Literally, a copious amorous excretion was necessary to his health.
Resuscitated from that other world - the world of disease and death, the world of despair and absurd projects to avoid being engulfed by it all - he was coming back to life, to his life, like a convalescent on his first outing, or a colonial officer who finds himself in a town for the first time after the dangers and hardships of two years in the desert. Whence the element of frenzy he injected into such a trivial act as walking along these drab boulevards. Whence, after ten minutes' walk, his almost unbearable nervous excitement, his abnormal anxiety - anxiety about the impending catch, anxiety about possible failure, anxiety about a possible cogida. [Cogida: goring of the torero by the bull (Author's note).] There was the dragon of Disease, which he had eluded, the Hippogriff which he had slain, the monster of Work, which he laid low each day; now there was also this Gorgon to be flung on her back without too much compunction. Already his eyelids ached, already his cheeks were hollow with fatigue, for his constant chagrin had come back to him - the chagrin of being unable to 'tumble' the whole youth of this city without a single exception. Just before he arrived at the corner of the rue de Richelieu (where there is a house with a double exit: pirates please note), he withdrew into a courtyard for a moment and closed his eyes to calm the palpitations that rose inside him - and also to allow his face to relax; a face so tense, so avid, so cunning, so give-away, that it seemed to him it must mark him out to all as someone to be distrusted, when there was nothing he wished more than to pass unnoticed and to lull suspicion.
Faint voices, ridiculously feeble, voices from another world, from a world of shadows and ghosts, broke out above the crowd with the sour tinkle of a broken clavicord, or perhaps, rather, the cantilena of a foetus: 'Bibles for sale!' The monstrous ugliness of these Nazarenes explained everything. Costals turned his head away. He suffered from his outbursts of anger and loathing, as far as possible avoided anything that might occasion them.
At the corner of the faubourg Montmartre, he debated whether or not he desired a passing woman; there was an indefinable shabbiness about her footwear that was full of promise; in fact it was a very near thing. He took out a coin and tossed for his desire, heads or tails, in the palm of his hand. He let the woman go.
Opposite the rue Rougemont, having given an old man a light, he felt he had performed an act of altruism. One does what one can.
A little further on, he shuddered. The sun, traversing the five figures stencilled in the turned-down roof of a bus, above the platform, traced a number on the back of one of the passengers. With this number in large, garish figures on his dark jacket, the man suggested a convict. 'Hm!' grunted Costals. After a pause he added: 'But is there anything that is not worth experiencing?'
At the faubourg Poissonnière he slipped into a urinal. He had seen an ex-mistress of his approaching, and trembled at the thought that the end of such a promising day might be ruined by charity. He had no desire for her, but out of kindness would feel himself obliged, if they ran into one another, to spend the evening with her in some place of entertainment instead of getting on with the chase. 'No, God will not abandon me,' he repeated to himself in the urinal. Which was not blasphemy, since he did not believe in God. God did not abandon him: the ex-mistress vanished.
Then once more he plunged into the jungle.
And already he thought of the coming night reposing on his peaceful face, a night without demons and without dreams.
And already he thought of the first streak of approaching day, when the lights of the city tremble pitifully, as though they knew they had only a few minutes more to live, while the highest star, which knows that it too must soon be extinguished, stiffens and does not tremble. Early morning, an unappreciated hour compared to those literary sunsets, like a fastidious person who does not seek the limelight. And the solemnity of dawn: what will this day bring? Uncertainty in face of the day, as in face of a young life. And already he would be at his desk, lucid and pure and tenacious, his eyes soothed with sweet sleep.
And the first noise would be the jingling of the milk-cans brought by the milkman's boy. And he would go to his window, his chest all honey-coloured with the first rays of the morning, and he would feel the sunlight vibrating against his person. He would go to his window, so that the first face he saw should be a youthful one, a greeting and a sign of hope for the day to come.
And there would be the joy of water, the ancient joy of Triton and of Rome, ludus matutinalis (he had made one huge bathroom of his life). And the perpetual astonishment that a glass of cold water did not cost six francs in a restaurant, so much better is it than all their alcohols; the perpetual astonishment that our minglings with our aquatic partner are not a 'sin', so good they are, that one is not liable to four years' imprisonment without remission for getting into a bath; the perpetual astonishment, too, that one does not risk getting GPI by letting water flow over one's skull. Oh, the certitudes of sensation! And unpunished, too! And whose only limit is satiety!
And he would go out and walk into the Bois, where the birds would still be singing for themselves alone, his manuscript and fountain-pen in his hand, working as he walked. There would be the insulae of the ignoble rich, and soon the humble race of early morning people, drudging in their midst without hating them: the paper-pickers, all of whom he knew, and to whom he would say 'Good morning'; the rustic, dawdling roadmenders; the keepers, who are incapable of showing you the way to Bagatelle; the butchers' boys on their carrier-tricycles who, on seeing him, would show off by speeding along on two wheels, as a dog, the moment it sees you, lifts its leg in order to impress you; the night-watchman going home after having protected the rich, who will never be killed because they pay men of the people to be killed in their place, just as they will go to heaven because their relations will have paid for plenty of Masses for them.
Then, one by one, the sporting cranks, in sweaters, running, stopping, making rhythmic movements. And then the rich, who dig in their heels to avoid paying their divorced wives alimony, and shove their only sons into boarding schools, but walk the spaniel in the Bois every morning, not because it wants to walk but because it cost two thousand francs. And the little bourgeois boys, floating along in the air, lightly, like soap-bubbles. And the wan-faced satyrs, with their swift and restless eyes (underlined with pouches), affecting a supreme off-handedness.
And, in the background, the blueish Seine, blueish hills, a blueish mist, a pointed steeple evoking all the spirituality of France, etc.... (if I can't think up a flowery phrase for the steeple, I'm not a man), little boats which lower their funnels when they are covered by a bridge, with a gesture that somehow smacks of a woman succumbing. And the show-offs, male and female, in the riding alleys, and the little, shining, well-polished horses, waggling their bottoms in the most improper way, but above all proud of the veins standing out on their foreheads. And the little crosspatch urchins (you can tell from their faces that they're fuming inside) on bikes the colour of dragon-flies and poison, colours never seen except in oases - astonishingly serious urchins, pedalling in a dream (that they're doing the Tour de France), bunched together and jostling the uncomprehending butterflies out of the way. And the religious silence of the bunch as it goes by.
And everywhere he would recognize places where he had bored or debased himself with women, and at each of them he would shy internally, like a horse that passes a crossroads where it once saw a viper. And he would reject these places, but the pleasure of rejecting them would be such that it was as if he were going through the experience again. And passing in front of the thicket where he had kissed Solange for the first time, he would think to himself: 'Dead men tell no tales.'
And he remembered th
at in a week's time his son would be with him here, in this very place, on his bike with its emerald wings, insisting on doing a balancing act in a forbidden alley, and putting his hand on his shoulder every time the bike gave up the ghost....
And off they would go, amid the laughing birds, in the grace of the morning.
23
I drive thee on pitilessly, knowing thy suffering. Song of the Bedouin of Southern Tunisia (the rider is talking to his mare.)
A life that stirs further than you wish, like those enormous chains which you set very gently in motion and which soon drag at your hands, and would drag you with them too if you did not let go....
A has an old school friend, B. Since B has been living in Chartres, and comes to Paris for forty-eight hours every fortnight, he has taken it into his head that one of his two evenings in Paris must be spent with A. A finds this a bit much, and considers that an evening together every two months should be enough to satisfy the demands of his old friendship with B. He would like to be able to say to him, as Mohammed said to Abu Hosairah: 'O Abu Hosairah, visit me more rarely, and my friendship for you will increase.' (Saadi). He does not say this, but twice running he makes an excuse, and that is enough. B understands. He makes his invitations fewer and farther between.
The Lepers Page 16
