“Tu reviens de loin.”‡
“Je ne reviens pas,” she said. “Je pars.”§
That very day, having signed the petition for divorce, she left.
* Pleasures of the honeymoon.
† “My head is a little in the clouds.”
‡ Literally, “You’re coming back from afar”; metaphorically, “You’ve dodged a bullet.”
§ “I’m not coming back… I’m leaving.”
THE BEGGAR
(1962)
HIGH UP, on the Elysian Fields, where in these winter months from four o’clock in the afternoon neon advertisements glow and the windows of the enormous cafés are illumined, icy sleet was falling, while down below, in the long subterranean passageways of the Métro, the air was warm and still. In the middle of one of these underpasses, always in exactly the same spot, stood an old man in rags, hatless and with a dirty-pink bald patch, around which, above his temples and above the nape of his neck, grey hairs protruded in all directions. As with the majority of Paris’s poor, he was dressed in some shapeless garb. Both his overcoat and his trousers looked as though they had ever been thus, as if they had been made to order like that, with those soft creases, with that absence of any lines or contours, like a dress or a great sackcloth robe that people belonging to another world, and not the one surrounding them, would wear. This man was standing not far from a blind youth who would play the accordion for hours at a time and only ever the same melody—Ravel’s Boléro—standing between two advertisements: one depicted a grinning, mustachioed man holding a cup of coffee, the brand and quality of which were indicated below, where a clean line severed the man’s body and below which it was said that there was no finer coffee. On the second advertisement a young blonde with an ecstatically happy expression on her porcelain-and-pink face was hanging on a clothesline deathly white bed sheets, which had been washed in some warm water to which had been added a special powder, imparting to the laundry a never-before-seen whiteness. The colossal posters bearing these advertisements had hung in that same place for years, just as the old beggar had stood there, never moving, just like the mustachioed gentleman with the cup of coffee and the blonde with her hand—petrified on the paper—reaching towards the bed sheets. Yet he did not see these advertisements; rather, they produced no impression in his optics, and if someone were to have asked him what was depicted upon these sheets of paper, he would not have been able to recall.
However, no one ever asked him anything. For many years, since he had become a beggar, one of the peculiarities of his existence had consisted in the fact that he had almost ceased speaking, not only because he lacked the urge to do so, but also because there was no necessity. Words and their meaning had long since lost for him their former value, as had everything that preceded his current life. One day he spotted a discarded newspaper: it was lying on the grey floor of the passageway in the Métro, and on the front page, in enormous lettering, were printed the words: “WAR IN KOREA”. He looked at the newspaper with his dull eyes and marked neither the combination of letters nor their meaning. This war, which was being followed by millions of people the whole world over, did not exist for him, as nothing else existed, except for his own protracted delirium, through which he was slowly but surely moving towards death. Sometimes, when at night he would leave the Métro and walk through the deserted streets of Paris, across the entire city, towards a wasteland on the periphery, where there was an enormous wooden crate in which he would spend the night, he would be stopped by policemen and asked his name, his place of address and whether he had any money. Without looking at those who asked these questions, he would reply that he was called Gustave Verdier and that he lived near the Porte d’Italie. Then he would extract from his pocket and show them several credit notes, always the same ones. The policemen would let him go, and he would continue on his way. Late at night he would reach his crate, open the batten door, fastened by a hook, crouch, enter and immediately lie down on a mattress that served as his bed. He had acquired this crate after an old man, a beggar like him, who had built it himself and obtained the mattress from somewhere or other, died one summer’s night from a heart attack and was found by the police several days later; they discovered his death because it was hot and the body of the old man had begun to decompose. When the crate became free, Gustave Verdier entered it and had remained there ever since. The crate was permeated by the corpse’s stench, to which he became accustomed and which gradually altered later, acquiring ever newer nuances. At first the foetid smell in the crate took his breath away; but then it became easier, as if amid this poisoned air some doubtful equilibrium between the danger of suffocating and the ability to breathe had been established. In the crate there remained, from the old man who had died in it, a little mirror of polished steel—everything it reflected took on a cold metallic tint; there was also a candle, a box of sulphur matches, a little water basin, a small pail, a dented razor, a sliver of soap and a grey rag through which the light shone and which served as his towel. All this, which was embedded in that final conception of the world that the old man took with him to the grave, lay on a little cardboard box for tins of food, except for the pail, which stood in the corner. The old man owned nothing else.
All this—the crate with the mattress, the long hours in the subways of the Métro, the slow nocturnal peregrinations across the sleeping city, the fact that the majority of the people he met or who walked past him brazenly avoided him and looked at him with unseeing eyes, as they might have looked at an empty space—all this had appeared to him during the course of the past weeks and months in the most vague and uncertain terms, as though through a shroud of mist. He had long forgotten that it was possible to experience hunger: he had never starved, for there was always money for a piece of bread, cheese and wine; what was more, in the early hours it was easy to find scraps of food in the rubbish bins lining the streets; at the Central Market it was enough merely to traipse through it to fill your bag with vegetables picked up off the ground. Now, however, he needed very little to sate himself. He would go to sleep and awake with that same noise in his head, which had begun recently and which muffled and drowned out all the other sounds that reached him. Sometimes he had the sudden feeling that his chest was being constricted by an iron band: he would begin to suffocate and everything around him would be submerged at once in this feeling of pain and cease to exist. Then he would close his eyes and lean against the wall, nearly losing consciousness. Several minutes later the pain would abate; he would open his eyes again and look ahead of himself hazily, at the grey walls surrounding him, at the people passing him by, at the advertisements he didn’t see. He had long since ceased not only to contemplate anything, but also to think altogether; it was the same as the vanished need to speak. In this mute and unthinking life there remained only the interchange of sensations—the noise in his head, pain, fatigue, the itching from insect bites, the heavy stench of the crate that he would detect upon entering it after a long stint in the open air, cold, heat, thirst. Recently something new had been added to all this; it was also a sensation, but a very peculiar, chilling and insistent one. Then, for the first time in all these years, he made a supreme effort over himself (something he was long unaccustomed to doing), thought about this and at once understood both the meaning of the noise in his head and the feeling of the iron band around his chest. He recalled his age—he was seventy-six—and it became apparent to him that his long life was approaching its end and that nothing could now change this. From that day on, standing in the corridor of the Métro, now closing, now opening his eyes, he began anew to think about those things that had occupied his thoughts many years ago. It had been so infinitely long ago, long before he became as he was now. The question, which had so importunately faced him back then and to which, as he knew both then and now, there was and could be no answer, was that as to the meaning of life, why it was necessary, and to what mysterious end this long sequence of events had been set in motion, having now led
him here, to this warm brick tunnel under the Elysian Fields. Through the noise in his head he again heard the melody that the blind boy would play on his accordion. Until now he had been so far removed from his surroundings that he had conceived of this music as a mechanical irritation of his audition, without realizing what it was. Now he suddenly recognized this melody and recalled that it was Ravel’s Boléro, which even in former times he had been unable to abide; it had always seemed to him that this blunt repetition of the same barbaric sounds, their savage and primitive rhythm, contained something that affected the nerves. The Boléro provoked in him almost physical revulsion. When had he last heard this? He made an effort and recalled that it had been a long time ago, at a concert. He saw distinctly before him the concert hall, the conductor’s tailcoat, his bald head, rows of chairs, a multitude of familiar faces, male and female, which emerged in front of him either in the black and white frames of dinner jackets, collars and ties, or in the anaemic pallor of women’s powdered necks and shoulders, terminating where their dresses ended, above the cut lines of which glittered in various shimmering tones their necklaces. He remembered how the conductor jerked convulsively in time to the music and how with those same jerking movements up and down the violins’ strings the bows rose and fell. He was sitting in the second row, never turning his head in the direction of his wife, lest he see her face and the cold, inane expression in her eyes. It was an evening in December, with the same icy rain as now, but in the concert hall it had been warmer than in the subways of the Métro. After the concert came a late-night restaurant, white wine and oysters, and in the restaurant he felt just as ill-tempered as he had in the concert hall, and he longingly watched his wife’s fat fingers tirelessly work the shells she held, and he looked forward to the time when he would finally return home and be alone with a sense of illusory and short-lived freedom. This return home, to the suburb of Paris where his villa was located, the fact that he would walk into his bedroom and lock the door behind him—this was essentially like his return to that crate where he now lived, with the difference that now he was free.
The blind youth paused for a while, and the Boléro faded away. The old man went on thinking, still trying to apprehend something that seemed (to him) so uncommonly important, the chance to explain everything that was slipping away from him. He was free now—because nobody needed him; he had no belongings, no money, no ability to influence anything anywhere, no ability to help or harm anyone in any way, in a word, nothing—nothing that could have tied him to other people and established any obligation between him and them. He even had no name, for there were thousands upon thousands of people who shared his surname, so many that it had become almost anonymous and no one could have supposed that this beggar, with the dirty-pink bald patch enclosed by a trim of grey hair, standing in the corridor of the Métro under the Elysian Fields, and that Verdier who had attended the concert where a performance of Ravel’s Boléro had been given, and about whose disappearance every newspaper had written all those years ago, could have anything at all in common. As to the reasons for this disappearance, no one had guessed, and not one of the hypotheses set out in those newspaper articles bore the slightest relation to reality—suicide, an irrepressible passion for some unknown woman, a double life that preceded this, financial embarrassment. His finances turned out to be in perfect order, there had been no double life, just as there had been no passion, no unknown woman. People who belonged to the same milieu as Verdier were unable to comprehend how such a man as he could renounce the life he had led and become a vagrant and beggar—unless some imperative reasons had brought him to this—bankruptcy, ruin, insanity, alcoholism.
But there had been nothing of the sort—and so for this reason, in the realm of those ideas that governed all possible actions in this milieu, there was not and could not be any explanation for what had happened. In this milieu there were, however, people of so-called enlightened views, several of whom were writing historical or sociological dissertations on the causes of some revolution or rebellion of immiserated people against their fate and those whom they deemed to blame for it, against the landowning class. Yet none of the authors of these dissertations could admit the possibility of a voluntary rejection of that very same wealth in the name of whose problematic acquisition—according to them—revolutions took place. Just as it was natural to imagine a poor man who strived for prosperity and wealth, so too was it unnatural to conjure up the reverse—that is, a rich man who strove for poverty. Verdier understood this perfectly. From these words—wealth, poverty and rebellion—it was possible to devise different combinations; however, the principal word nevertheless remained “rebellion”. Verdier had no aversion to wealth and no lust for poverty or destitution. Yet all his life—until he attained freedom, having renounced what others considered the greatest blessing—he silently and constantly rebelled against that system of oppression that surrounded him on all sides and forced him to live not as he desired, but as he ought to live. Nobody ever asked him whether he wanted this or not. It was immaterial: this question did not exist. What existed was the firm Verdier et fils, which manufactured precise measuring instruments for metallurgical factories. In this firm there were employees and workers, beginning with the director and ending with the janitors. And this firm belonged to Verdier, first to père, then to fils.
The firm’s owner had once had a great many obligations relating to the most varied of people who were connected to him in one way or another. He had a house, a wife, children, a servant, a chauffeur; he made charitable donations and bank transactions; he hosted parties, went to the theatre, concerts, negotiated with deputies in parliament, made connections, attended briefings on the status of his business, on the reorganization of some division or other, had to be at certain places at certain hours, had to respond to some speech, to speak on the evolution of the economy, had to travel hither and thither by train, automobile, ship, aeroplane, stopping in some hotel, had to read some newspaper, had to have an opinion on some composers or artists—thus appeared the system of his perpetual oppression, from which he had long been unable to see any escape. He could, of course, divorce his wife, although in his situation and at his age, and in regard to his children—a mature son, a young engineer who had already begun to grow bald, and a daughter, a plump-cheeked girl with her mother’s cold eyes and a piercing voice—this was seemingly not the appropriate course of action. He could divorce, though this would engender a whole host of new complications. Moreover, divorce would not save him from the other obligations, which would remain just as they were. While he received his education, first at the lycée and then at university, before, as his father would say, he “truly entered upon life”, he hardly suffered from this system of oppression, though even then he would pose himself that same question, to which he was never able to find an answer and which tormented him his entire life: what mysterious and unfathomable combination of millions upon millions of different causes or accidents had determined first his appearance in the world, and later his life; what was the meaning of this and how did it differ from the meaning of other people’s existence? And if there were no meaning—which seemed the most likely answer—then what replaced it? A void? On the other hand, if the concept of meaning did not exist, then, it followed, nor did morality. But if morality did not exist either, then there would be what someone had once foretold, that without the threat of retribution, policing and state authority, people would act according to their nature, leaving on earth only ruins, corpses and pregnant women. Yet that suggested that morality was the state and the police—that is, the embodiment of collective policing, the instinct for the self-preservation of society, and so-called individual morality was but fear, heredity and fastidiousness, and in no way the shimmering and perfect reflection of man’s meaning and significance on earth. When in his youth he would think about this, it was essentially an abstract problem. And when he finally did “enter upon life”, from the very outset this took on a tragic character, in compa
rison with which everything that had preceded this period seemed idyllic and happy. How could all this have happened? Verdier recalled returning from England, where his father, in his day, had sent him, deeming it necessary that he complete his education namely there, at Oxford.
He was twenty-four years old, and many things interested him—music, painting, literature, philosophy. Least of all did he think of business, for there was no need. He intended to become a writer: he believed that therein lay his vocation, and he forever sought a subject for his first novel—and only then, much later, did he understand that under no circumstances would he ever become a writer—precisely because he was seeking a subject. Unable to find one, he began to ponder the need for something like a treatise on the peculiarities of English prose, but this got no further than a few lines. In the July of the following year, two days after he arrived in the Midi, where he was planning to spend the summer, he received a telegram informing him that his father was gravely ill. When he returned home, he saw only the corpse of his father, who had died the previous evening from an apoplectic seizure. Later came the funeral, eulogies, the reading of the will, and then began that inescapable enslavement, all these eternal obligations and everything that attended them. Several months later he realized that, for as long as it continued, he would never have time for what was called a private life. His mother, whose health was becoming worse and worse, would tell him in a feeble voice that the Verdier family must have an heir, that he must realize that life would not wait for him, that the years would pass by, and so on—in short, that he must marry. So with that same inevitability with which Verdier had attended the funeral of a father, whom by rights he knew only slightly, for when he was a child he would rarely see him, since his father was always busy, and later would see him with even less frequency, since he studied and lived abroad—with this same inevitability he later attended his own wedding; his acquaintance with his future wife was altogether brief, and soon enough he asked himself how all this had happened. Only afterwards did he discover the answer to this, an answer that was for him tragic and unflattering in equal measure. Within her, back then, despite the cold void of her eyes—that same void in which later he would perceive distinctly something else, which without hesitation he defined as stupidity—within her—in her movements, in the contours of her body—there had been some warm, animal allure. That was one answer. A second was that from the very start of their acquaintance she had borne herself with an unshakeable conviction that everything must come about just as it does, and no otherwise, as if everything was clear and set in stone, and since it was inevitable, regardless, Verdier also unwittingly adopted that same tone, and when he suddenly bethought himself that he was planning to do something important, something that he did not at all want to do, it was already too late. Perhaps it had not quite been like that, but thus did it now seem to him, and it struck him that the memory of a seventy-six-year-old man was powerless to reproduce the feelings that he had experienced back then, when he was twenty-five and, essentially, another man. Perhaps it had not been like that, perhaps there really had been some emotion that was now forgotten utterly and irrevocably, and that had been significantly weaker than, for instance, the memory of the taste of oysters after a concert where there had been a performance of Ravel’s Boléro. Later he had lovers who would submissively undress when he visited them in the evenings. Even then he knew that not one of them truly loved him, and this was understandable: he himself had never experienced an irresistible attraction to a woman, or that feeling of love about which he had so often read in books. Instead of this, there was something akin to physical thirst, tormenting, exhausting, irritating; and when the thirst had been quenched, all that remained was the unpleasant dregs, and nothing else. Later he realized that he was too spiritually impoverished to experience true emotion, and for a certain while this idea was very disagreeable to him. Although he later stopped thinking about it.
The Beggar and Other Stories Page 11
