Cries break out on all sides, blending into a sort of repulsive, rhythmic chant, a hymn of agony. It seems as though the death-rattle were coming from every throat simultaneously, and one can hear nothing but the sound of breathing, crawling, rasping, saturating the vast trench. The world is ending in a vault, no, in a bedroom, in a big room with closed shutters and a rumpled bed, where clothes have been thrown down on chairs, where there is a smell of days of sweat and cigarettes, something like a public ward, a hospital dormitory, where a single electric bulb, hanging naked at the end of a flex, burns ceaselessly, furiously, with a wan, grey light.
In all this disorder, amid this poisoned air, the words in the newspaper have broken up and written, at one stroke, on a big sheet of white paper, as though within a dream, this:
Outside my skull and my eyes
the slow processions of mad men were going up
and their banners were flapping in the wind
with a sound of fist-blows,
written on their tattered linen the word
‘ANGER’
They marched in close ranks, heavy,
powerful as bulls, and the sweat
ran down their foreheads.
They were ugly, but grievous.
The whole town had fled before them,
abruptly leaving houses and workshops,
silently abandoning everything that might have encumbered them.
It was still dark, and they marched
without halting, going round and round
the empty alleys.
The white banners flapped above their
heads, written on them the word
‘ANGER’
and they seemed like thick, ruined vessels
fallen to pieces in terrible
efforts of shipwreck!
They took the whole night to die
and despite the strength of their knotty breasts
they fell one after another,
face down in the gutter,
their hands at last unclenched.
Their foolish eyes continued to stare at
a kind of problematic, rather shamefaced
dawn that shed a soft light into
the black velvet of the sewers.
That,
that is why they died
they died for you.
And further on, later, that other item, fixed in the sheet of newspaper, indelible, and yet so fleeting, that miserable crime, naked, sordid, always present in the world, and in which one participates, little by little, without believing it, as the prisoner of one’s bath. Yes, that’s certain, that event, that crime, that infinitesimal pulsation that rises inside one, reverberates, reechoes, really hurts, before withering away and perishing in the form of words.
AMIENS.—Accused of murder and of theft with aggravating circumstances, Roger Boquillon, 23, a farm labourer at Outrebois, was sentenced by the Somme Assize Court to penal servitude for life.
On January 22 last, at Ham-Hardival, a village near Doullens, Mlle Marthe Morel, 73, who kept a grocery and wine shop, was attacked by a customer to whom she had just served a glass of wine. The accused cut the old woman’s throat with a dagger, and her body was found behind the counter, lying in a pool of blood. The criminal stole the contents of the till, a small sum of between 20 and 30 frs., but made no attempt to search the house, where Mlle Morel’s savings, a bundle of notes amounting to 20,000 frs., were found in a cupboard.
Boquillon was arrested the following day and readily confessed his crime, merely explaining that he had been haunted by the desire to kill the old woman.
So there you are. These old women died like that, with no difficulty; their lives, with one hoarse, broken cry, were smothered in a sudden movement that descended on them like a tidal wave. They left their skins, their old, dried-up skins in which they had once been young and beautiful. And so they went into the furthest depths of themselves, into the black hole we all have in the depths of our entrails; plunged into silence, stripped, denuded, sucked down.
A kind of strange tremor ran up through Roch’s body; sitting on the bed, with the newspaper held out in both hands, he became stock still. With open eyes, staring straight in front of him, towards the wardrobe, he let the wave—it was burning and cold at the same time—follow its course, starting from the soles of his feet, climbing rapidly up his limbs, raising the forests of hairs as it went by, nibbling at flesh and skin; on reaching his chest the wave strengthened and shook him, branched out in all directions, whipped round his whole torso like tentacles, bit, sucked and burnt like red-hot iron. Then, with a jerk, the shivering reached the nape of his neck and his head; it radiated out like a star, constantly repeating its nervous explosion, grinding Roch’s life to powder, pulling the scraps apart, destroying sinews and muscles, splitting his jaws in a yawn like a sort of earthquake; it was no longer blood that was flowing through his veins, it was molten lava, absolute dragon’s serum, which disintegrated everything along its course. Roch shrank together on the bed as he felt the pain spreading; his teeth were chattering.
The spasm didn’t last long; perhaps three seconds altogether; perhaps less. Roch found himself lying on his side, gasping. Sweat had broken out on his back and his face. The newspaper had fallen on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Roch looked round the room in astonishment; but nothing had altered. The walls were still covered with the same dirty yellow paper, the shutters were still closed, the table in its place in front of the window, and the electric bulb at the end of its flex, under the tin shade. Washing-up noises could still be heard from the kitchen, a few yards away. And outside, the sun was still crawling down over the peeling paint of the shutters, like a great phosphorescent slug.
Roch put his feet on the floor and tried to stand up. A strange weakness suddenly came over him and he had to sit down again. He bent forward and picked up the newspaper. But he soon dropped it on the bed and felt on the night table for his wife’s packet of cigarettes and the matches. Before taking a cigarette he looked at the cardboard packet; they were menthol-flavoured cigarettes, Consulates or something of that kind. He smoked for a few seconds, moving as little as possible, then he called his wife. She appeared at the door, holding a dish-cloth in one hand and pushing back a strand of hair with the other. She looked at Roch and said:
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Give me an aspirin,’ said Roch, ‘I’ve got a headache.’
She went away, and returned a moment later with an aspirin and a glass of water. Roch took a gulp and handed back the glass.
‘You’ve got a headache?’ said Elisabeth.
‘Yes. I’ve been shivering,’ he said. ‘I must have caught a chill.’
‘In this heat?’
‘There was a bit of a breeze, on the beach. What’s the time?’
‘Nearly half past,’ said Elisabeth.
Roch got up and walked a few steps. He felt all right now. He stretched himself and said:
‘Right, I’ll be getting along to the office.’
The girl took off her apron.
‘I’m going out to do a bit of shopping presently,’ she said. ‘Shall I call for you at the agency at seven o’clock?’
‘No, no, come straight home and wait for me here.’
‘Sure you don’t want me to meet you in town?’
‘No, it’ll be best for us both to come back here. I’m not sure what time I shall have finished at the office,’ said Roch.
‘As you like,’ said Elisabeth.
Roch combed his hair in front of the wardrobe mirror and went to the door.
‘See you later,’ he said.
‘See you later,’ said Elisabeth.
And he went out. Down in the street he looked at his bicycle and hesitated for a moment; then he decided to walk.
After five hundred yards the shivering began again. Delicately at first, brushing over his skin like a breath of air; then rougher and rougher, deeper and deeper, making his skin quiver w
ith a succession of savage bites, shaking his nerves, spreading out in an electrical chaos, with rage, burnings, sweat, lightning-swift advances of wasp-stings, surges of heat in his blood, and of poison; Roch strode along the pavement, holding himself stiffly, in the full glare of the sun. The sweat was beginning to soak through his shirt down the back and under the arms. There was nothing to be done. He had to go on just the same, his mind on the alert, ready to resist at the first hint that his legs or spinal column might give way.
The road stretched ahead of him, dead white in the sunlight. The cars parked along the kerb gave off strange smells of boiling paint and melted tyres. People came towards him, heavily, toiling along close to the wall. At a crossroads there was a policeman, waiting in the middle of the street with his shadow huddled at his feet. Pigeons were waddling round at the edge of the gutter, their heads moving in all directions, looking for the crumbs that had fallen from a tablecloth, up on the third floor. The pavement had been repaired here and there with patches of tar that stuck to the soles of one’s shoes. And above the cubes of the houses, above the white-hot tile or corrugated-iron roofs, the sky was empty, blue.
Roch turned into a street lined with chestnut-trees. He walked on for a while, like that, on the shady side; then he felt that it would be difficult for him to go any further. He was bathed in sweat from head to foot, the blood was scorching in his veins, and his jaws were chattering the whole time.
He looked around for a fountain, saw one on the far side of the pavement, in the sun, and went across to it. He was shaking in every limb; he had to lean with one hand on the fountain while he bent down and drank the water as it came out of the spout. He drank a lot, probably as much as a pint. Then he straightened up, feeling heavy, and glanced round him.
The town still looked burning hot; but now it was as though electric sparks were flashing out on all sides. Great purplish sparks that gleamed at the corners of walls, along the edge of the pavement, beside the street lamps and on the trunks of the trees. Perhaps he’d been caught at the centre of a magnetic storm, in an invincible tempest where the lightning-flashes were drawn back on themselves, balls of fire enclosed each in its matrix, ready to explode at any second. From high up in the sky the sun had bombarded all this surface of the earth with its rays, piercing it with burning arrows; it wasn’t so easy to escape the fury of the elements; the stars must have declared war on the earth; the heat had been accumulating in solid matter, like that, for days. And now everything had turned to red-hot coals and ashes, one was walking over a great carpet of lurking fire. From one second to the next a slight breeze, a mere nothing, might start the blaze, fanning up flames as high as houses, pouring torrents of napalm into the streets, sparking off the gunpowder, or better still, giving the signal for an infinite cataclysm, an implosion where everything would sink into itself, vanish, disappear into an abyss of interconnected acts of violence.
Tottering beside the fountain, Roch looked anxiously at the sun. Up there, alone in space, the round ball was terribly white; it was floating on the sky, it was running, and queer concentric circles were swimming round it, indefinitely, spreading out towards the periphery like waves. The defenceless earth lay open to its blows, and the avalanche of light was pouring down with a sort of unreal frenzy. Everything flat on the earth—all the roofs and terraces, the streets, the manhole-covers, the sea— was being pitilessly bruised. And one would have said that things were melting under that dazzling stare, that they were gradually liquefying; in a few years, a few days, a few hours perhaps, the soil would turn into a sheet of gas, a vague silvery vapour which would steam slowly, stretch out over the marshes, rise up and then vanish in space. That was it, the earth was gradually turning into a nebula. Roch shut his eyes, but the cruel star was still marked on his retina, it went on digging a black hole, like a drill, went on boring into the veil of blood, far back in his head.
That was it, the daily sickness; the everyday sunstroke. Men and women found what shelter they could in their huts, but behind their shutters there was always the idea of this attack hurtling down on the town. A terrible peace was thrusting into the interstices of their rubble walls, blowing up the recesses of stone and clay. The earth was cracking in all directions, and the trees were being lifted off the ground, slowly, by its monstrous breathing. There was no shelter anywhere. Even at the bottom of the sea, in their hiding-places full of seaweed, the lampreys and skates were waking up and crawling over the mud, at the approach of an invisible foe. Their cold and hot planet was safe no longer. It was rotating round the sun, in the void, and the light-rays were dislocating it.
That light, which had brought life, was now bringing death on its waves, and soon, in only a few centuries, all would be over. That was what was making every clump of grass and every scrap of animal so disturbing, so fluid. Of them nothing would remain, not a bone, not a ruin, to tell their brief, minute story. Roch had set out again along the pavement, and his eyes were searching out everything they could, the tiniest details. Scraps of wood, the grain of stone, the glossy skin of painted surfaces. The cars were beautiful, burning away in the glaring sunshine, fiercely reflecting the prisms of light. On the other side of the road the trees rose up out of the basalt spaces, with their wrinkled trunks and their masses of foliage. A cat was walking from door to door with supple, tigerish movements, sometimes stopping short for a quarter of a second, then going on again, rippling into every angle of the wall. Swallows sped across the gaps between roofs. Somewhere round there a fat, bald man was making for his office, a leather brief-case dangling in his right hand. A little old woman crossed the road, looking neither to right nor left, as though she were deaf, and clambered with difficulty on to the opposite pavement.
Roch was now going through the middle of the town. An unhealthy fatigue had taken hold of his legs and shoulders, and all his joints ached. His face was running with sweat, but no one paid attention to that, not even he himself, because everything around him was sweating in the same way. The houses, the shop-windows, the street, were nothing but sweat. The air, too, was damp, it clung to the gullet and the inside of the lungs like a wet sheet. Only the sun, perfectly dry, went on with its work of disintegration. The earth upon which it looked down was a real mountain of skin, on which people were walking like vermin; and the skin was throwing up its moisture.
In this way Roch arrived at a big crossroads with a square in the middle. With incredible effort, Roch crossed the street and sat down on a bench in the middle of the square. Close by was a kind of children’s playground, from which shrill cries could be heard. Roch remained prostrated for a few minutes, long enough to recover his breath. But he could not get back his normal, regular respiration. And as the last straw, his heart, hitherto unknown to him, suddenly woke up and began pounding inside his chest like a brute.
Waves of mist began to follow one another in front of his eyes; over there, on the opposite pavement, the houses rippled slowly, as though stirred up by a raging wind. And the passers-by were walking through a liquid screen, they were twisted, undulating, columns of little black figures made of wire. Roch shrank into himself, folding his arms across his stomach, to stave off the storm that was going on inside him. Burning liquids were trying to climb up his throat, and he had to keep swallowing continually. The shivers were now launching an attack on his whole body; they were coming from all sides at once, from his feet, his loins, the nape of his neck, his hair. Their waves met and passed on his skin, ran down, climbed again, surged from side to side, disturbing everything as they went.
Roch didn’t interfere. He defended himself as best he could, pulling in his diaphragm, clenching his teeth, trying to hold back as much as possible. He mustn’t let go, or everything would become vague and shivery, on his skin; his face would turn to water, his nose, eyes, ears, hair and everything would collapse, rot away and drip off him like lather. And his arms, and his legs: they would certainly fall off if Roch stopped holding them back for half a second.
The peo
ple going past over there had no suspicion. Their bodies were sturdy, their limbs supple and muscular. They held together completely. So they could afford to take their eyes off themselves, to ogle the women, to look at the shop-windows; there was nothing to prevent them from lounging along the kerb with their minds empty, deliciously alive. And yet, when one came to think of it, they too would one day experience this ignominious condition; their ligaments would go soft, their bones would break like glass, and their flesh, their succulent flesh, would rot away in family vaults, beneath imitation marble tombstones, with plastic orchids and chiselled inscriptions running something like this:
Etienne Albert Guigonis
born January 12, 1893
called to his Maker on June 25, 1961
People were walking calmly along these streets, in the sun; they were parading in their ancient skins, carrying their death’s heads high, indolently swaying their tibias and ulnas. They were strolling past posters, going into shops, fingering cloth, pinching chickens’ breasts. They were standing at the bus-stop, smoking, their eyes concealed by dark glasses. Their shirts and dresses had damp half-circles under the arms. Their feet struck hard on the cement pavement, with a regular rhythm—a confused noise from the men’s shoe-soles and a rapid clicking from the women’s heels. A priest in his cassock was striding energetically across the street, jay-walking from one side to the other. Later, a fire-engine appeared at the entrance to the square and went hurtling round at a terrific pace, keeping close to the pavement, zigzagging among the cars, with its siren blaring all the time. Somewhere in the direction of the hills, a patch of garden was burning, because a careless little boy had wanted to burn a handful of weeds. There had been a puff or two of wind, and soon, below the terrace, the fire was spreading, widening its circle very quickly, with a queer roaring sound. The palm-tree was beginning to blaze, like a torch, sending clouds of black smoke into the air, when the fire-engine reached the end of the street.
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