‘How much are the bedroom slippers?’
‘The fur-lined ones?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fifteen francs.’
‘Thank you.’
I went six times round the block like this. By the sixth time I knew it almost by heart: the 2 cafés, 1 of which sold tobacco + the druggist’s shop + 1 shoe-shop + 10 greenish lamp-posts + police station cum lost-property office + 1 china shop, Céramiques de l’Etoile + chain-store shoe-shop, Chaus-sures André + 56 parked cars + 11 scooters + 7 bicycles + 1 mo-ped + corner chemist’s + 1 Guild shop + corsets and brassières + newsagent and bookshop + posters + 1 watchmaker’s and jeweller’s (Masséna) + 1 pavement under repair, near the south corner + wines, wholesale and semi-wholesale + hairdresser’s + 1 National Lottery stall + ‘Florence de Paris’ + 1 five-and-ten store + optician + the other hairdresser, men’s and ladies’ + Jean Leclerc dental surgeon + 1 pastrycook’s + garage entrance, dark and dirty + ‘Automatic’ + Singer Sewing-machines + doors + ground-floors + barred windows + graffiti + stains + no parking + doorbells + Lipton’s Tea + 1 beggar sitting on the ground + windows + windows + windows, all those openings and all those excavations at ground level, piercing the walls on all sides; well, at the sixth time round I had to stop; I could quite well have carried on like that for hours, or more; but the policemen on duty outside the Police Station were beginning to give me funny looks, and I thought it would be better not to go past them again.
So I set off in a straight line, along the main street. I felt distinctly less cold; at the far end of the street there was a sort of wintry sun, very low and apparently motionless. As I walked I looked at it for an instant, and all of a sudden I wanted to know what might be happening for people living 3000 miles further on. For them the sun must still be very high in the sky. Or perhaps a screen of clouds was cutting off the heat, mingling the gentle rays with raindrops. But from where I was, in winter, it was very hard to find out. I began walking very composedly, putting down my feet heels first on the coat of cold tar, my eyes fixed on the white ball which was drowning over by the horizon. The strange, confusing thing was that I felt profoundly, obviously, alive, and yet at the same time I seemed to have become transparent in the light. The vibrations of the light were passing through me as though I were a block of air, and making me undulate gently from head to foot. My whole body, my whole living body was irresistibly attracted towards the source of radiance, and I penetrated far into the open sky; I was sucked in by space, in full motion, and nothing could stop my ascent. It was as though I were being constructed brick by brick, into a tall building, into a circular wall that rose up sharply into the depths of the sky. My flesh was welded to the relief-map of the world, and I could feel it moving and expanding, all crackly, stretched, lazy, towards this sun, in the manner of a eucalyptus. It was freedom, or something of the kind. I went past men and women in the street, and I saw them very clearly, silhouetted against the white background of the horizon; or obstacles, animals, lamp-posts, old people marking time along the kerb came towards me as I walked on; but at the last moment they seemed to draw aside and melt like tree-branches, and I was still going on, into the empty sky.
I walked like that for a very long time, without realizing it. Then there was a bend in the road, and no more light. I found myself beside a concrete wall, enclosing a plot of waste land, a palisade round a housebreaker’s yard, or something of the kind. I found myself like that, suddenly, in the shadow, naked, cold again, and I had to stare hard at several things and a few people, so as to get back to being small and nondescript.
A few minutes later the sun went down. I didn’t see it go, but I realized from various things around me that it had happened very simply. The colours had changed by a half-tone, in the street and on the house-fronts. We had passed discreetly from shade to the absence of light. And almost at the same time, the street-lamps had lit up, one after another. For a moment I watched the blue-tinted star swelling up inside the lamps, turning green, then whitish, then blue again, but a crude shade; I found them amusing and homely, these lights advancing softly along the streets of the town like this. I wished I could suddenly be far up in the sky, in a helicopter, or at the top of a hill, so as to follow the crawling progress of the white dots. The town would have outlined itself for me, in relief, and I’d have thought of all those houses and streets where human life was in action; I’d have thought of all the drawings one could make by following those dotted lines with a ball-point. I’d have thought of lots of beds, of warm rooms, of tables, chairs, cars, vegetable-barrows. I’d have played at being here, or there, or somewhere else, taking a light as my landmark each time. Or I’d have played at being the town itself, and I’d have felt the sharp prickles of those lights, like the tracks of an invisible sewing-machine, all over my flat body, with its numbers of bulges and warts.
When everything was quite black, with these white dots of windows and street-lamps, I set off again. I lit another cigarette and smoked it as I walked. I looked at the faces of the people who came towards me in the street, or whom I overtook, or who overtook me. The angle of the light varied, and sometimes one saw a pair of eyes, with great bags under them, sometimes hair lit up like a halo, sometimes hands, moving legs, clothes which looked rough beneath the neon lights, sometimes dark figures crowded in the shadows under the walls. I walked like that for a long time, moving in wide semi-circles across the town. I went through the outskirts, a long way from the sea, a district of gasworks and waste plots. It was deserted, and cold. Then I came to a square, a kind of immense square with a buckled surface, covering the river-bed, where there was nothing, not a tree, not a house, not an ice-cream merchant or a newsagent’s, nothing but motionless cars. I walked through the whole length of this car-park. I saw hundreds of dark window-panes, undulating coachwork, black, blue, grey, red, green, white, tyres, bumpers, headlights, windscreen-wipers. There too all was deserted. Now and then, from this sea of cars, under the dirty rain of the street-lamps, there emerged a solitary man in a gabardine coat, or a couple leaning against the bonnet of a car; all these motionless engines were giving off a kind of vague sound which was no longer noise, but not yet silence. As though the continuous roar from the two parallel rivers of the streets to either side of the car-park were penetrating these masses of congealed iron and making them reverberate dully, drawing from them a music full of engine-grease and remoteness.
In a kind of a way I fed on this sound. It came in through my ears and through my whole skin and settled down inside my body, so that unknown machinery began to rotate. After a time I too had become a sort of car, a second-hand one, no doubt; my skin had hardened and taken on metallic glints, and in the depths of my entrails a dancing mechanism was discharging, right-left, right-left. Pistons were jerking out, driving-rods were gathering speed, and in a recess of firm flesh, rather like a cylinder-head, a hot, powerful gust was flaring up very rapidly, and extinguishing itself by its own explosion, driving back waves of smoke gorged with soot, wide and heavy as sheets of blood. Then, caught up by movement and by automation, I was lost in the middle of this labyrinth of dazzling coachwork. I knocked into the chromium bumpers, I was shot through by the beams of the headlights, laid flat on the ground and crushed by pairs of wheels that ran over me and imprinted the pattern of their tyres on my skin. I was moving all the time, threading my way between the rows of cars. As I went by, names caught at me and remained fixed on my retina, De Soto, Pontiac, Renault, Ondine, Panhard, Citroën, Ford. I didn’t run, but hurried in a zigzag across the tarmac, making my way round the corpulent shapes, the corners of the wings, the bumpers, the boots, the spare tyres. I crawled under lorries, I scraped my back along driving-shafts, in a chiaroscuro full of petrol smells and pools of oil. In the greasy shadows and between the tyres. For me these were tiny, stifling rooms with rubber walls and a very low ceiling, a mass of nozzles and threads. And I sat down in these rooms, right on the ground, and occupied them completely, like a quadruped. That’s it, I w
as a sort of alley-cat frightened by noise and lights, and I was crawling the whole time under the bellies of the cars.
When I emerged from the car-park, by creeping under a Berliet, I saw some public gardens, and beyond them a big square with arcades all round it; and I walked about in that for twenty minutes. People were beginning to look at me in a funny way, because in dragging myself under the motor-cars I’d got oil on my clothes and torn the right knee of my trousers. So I went into the thick of the crowd and let myself be carried along in the movement, without a word. When I got tired I chose a seat at the edge of the pavement and sat down. I smoked a cigarette and watched the cars going by. After a bit, as I didn’t really know what to do, and I’ve never liked looking straight at things for too long, I began scratching a row of letters along the back of the seat with a sharp stone. It turned out something like:
AXEIANAXAGORASEIRA
I saw a little girl trying to roller-skate with only one skate. She’d take a run and then fling herself forward, throwing up both arms, and glide along on one foot. But she’d lose her balance at once, and nearly fell each time. In fact she did fall two or three times. But that didn’t seem to put her off, she always began again, tirelessly; at one time she came close to the seat and grabbed at it to stop herself. I looked at her and said
‘Aren’t you afraid of falling?’
But she didn’t answer. A moment later, as she was going past the seat again, I asked her the same question. She said:
‘I ought to have both skates, then I shouldn’t fall.’
I asked her why she hadn’t got both skates. She thought for a second, and then replied:
‘It’s Ivan. My little brother. He has the other skate. You see they’re his skates, so he only lends me one at a time.’
She went to and fro again once or twice, like that, on one foot, dodging the passers-by, and then she came back to the seat.
‘And if he’d lend me the right skate, it would be easy. Bnt he’ll only lend me the left one, so …’
I told her I didn’t know there was a left and a right in roller-skates. I’d always thought they were interchangeable.
‘Usually they are. But these are special skates. Look,’ she said, showing me her foot, ‘you see, there’s a kind of shoe on it. Usually there are only straps. But with these skates there’s a kind of shoe to put your foot in; they’re special; it’s so as not to hurt yourself.’
I said it was silly not to be able to put the left skate on the right foot, and that it must be very hard to stand up like that on the left foot, except for left-footed people, of course. She looked at me rather pityingly and explained:
‘There are left-handed people, but there’s no such thing as a left-footed person, everybody knows that.’
I tried to convince her that there were left-footed people as well as left-handed ones, but she wouldn’t believe me. She said it was silly, complete nonsense. So I merely said again that it must be very difficult, all the same, to roller-skate on the left foot.
‘It’s a question of habit,’ she called, and ran off again. This time she went a long way, disappearing behind a group of strollers. I waited a little for her to come back, because I wanted to ask her to lend me her skate so I could take a turn; but she didn’t reappear, and I was beginning to feel cold again. I went away too.
Near the railway station I met a girl I’d known when we were kids together; her name’s Germaine, Germaine Salvadori. I hadn’t seen her for ages, because of that trip I made to Bulgaria. We talked vaguely about trivialities, standing there on the pavement. She told me she was married now and that she had a little girl called Elodie. I said that was a strange name, etc., but in point of fact it wasn’t true, I just thought the name was pretentious and affected. She suggested a drink, probably in memory of the time when I used to go round with her. I was thirsty, so I agreed. I listened to everything she had to tell me, about her visit to Spain, her marriage, her husband’s name, her kid, education, work, all passionately, as though it had been true. There was something I didn’t understand, behind all these words, as though a kind of tragedy were being concealed from me. I wanted intensely to find out what it was, to push through quantities of ramparts, to explore every path in the maze, systematically, taking them one by one, making a hole with my head through the barrier of forgetfulness. It was exhausting. After an hour I had a pain inside my brain, behind the eyes, and the lights and sounds of the café were moving round me like human figures. I felt as though I were armour-plated, hermetically sealed against I don’t know what, impenetrable to the fireworks of other men, and of this woman. She said to me:
‘I heard of your success with your play, you know. I read about it in the papers, and it reminded me of our first year at university. What’s it called, by the way, your play? I can’t remember …’
‘Foreword.’
‘Yes, that’s it, Foreword. I remembered it was a double word, but I could only think of Floor-board, or Ex-voto, or Afterthought, or something like that. Anyhow, it did well, you must be pleased?’
‘Yes, when it comes to it, I’m pleased,’ I said.
‘I’ve not read it, you know, but the papers were full of it when it first came out. It’s about the problem of passion, I believe?’
‘Yes, that’s right. It’s about the problem of passion.’
‘And what are you going to do now?’
‘You mean from the point of view of the theatre?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m waiting.’
‘You’ve been getting some interesting proposals, I expect?’
‘Yes, but I’d rather wait a bit.’
‘Oh, of course, you’re waiting for the inspiration.’
‘Yes, that’s it, I think it’s better to wait a bit.’
‘It reminds me of the essay you wrote in your first year at college, do you remember? That essay on Le Bateau Ivre? In those days you had some ideas that were rather too original, it seems to me. It was all far above the heads of the class, don’t you think? And Berthier had slapped you down hard in the exam that summer. Everyone thought you were a phoney, but I knew you’d got something. No, honestly, I really did know you’d get somewhere.’
I smiled humbly, finished my beer and said I had better go now, because I had an important appointment. If I’d told her point-blank that I was fed up with sitting there, at that table, in that café, among all those people, with her opposite me, she wouldn’t have understood; but I felt sure that if I made the excuse of an important appointment she wouldn’t protest. She called the waiter, paid for our drinks, and got up. We went out together and said goodbye at the door. I watched her turn away to the left and then disappear into the crowd, between a newspaper kiosk and a jeweller’s window glaring with neon lights.
It was getting late by this time, nine or ten o’clock. Over the whole outstretched town one could already perceive the signs of silence that would soon fall. Slumber was gliding into everything and coiling up softly. A tranquil, frozen substance that came from nowhere, perhaps from the depths of the sky or from the spot on the horizon, the black, deep patch opposite the point where the sun had disappeared. Like animals possessed by a strange uneasiness, just like a flight of pigeons or a swarm of flies, men and women were prowling along pavements which were sometimes in shadow, sometimes lit by the pallid shine from a shop-window. And the street-lamps were beginning to burn all alone in the compact darkness.
Personally, when I’d had a look at these things spread out everywhere before my eyes, I felt a sort of clear, well-defined melancholy take possession of my mind. I realized that everything was evident, pure and frozen, consuming itself eternally without heat or sparkle, like stars in empty space. I realized that time was going by, that I was on earth, and that I was wearing myself out a little more every day, without hope, but without despair. I realized that when autumn comes round again in the cycle, I cease to be anything at all.
So then I turned back and took the bouleva
rd leading to the river. When I got there I went down a little staircase and out on to the dry bed of the stream. I walked over the stones, between brambles and stagnant puddles; over to the left the trickle of dirty water was flowing quietly. Sometimes, between the little heaps of stones, one saw what looked like muddy gutters with twigs floating in them. The air was black, and in patches it smelt of smoke. Scattered among the heaps of refuse there were braziers and broken packing cases that bore witness to the presence of secret human life. Further down, as it approached the middle of the town, the river had been covered in to make a square, and tramps lived under there, all together. When winter came and the cold gradually increased, they withdrew further and further into their shelter; sometimes the river suddenly swelled, covering its banks, and they were all drowned, or almost all.
I wandered about the rubbish-dump like this for quite a time; I was very thirsty, and I drank from one of the muddy puddles. If I get typhoid, all to the good, one death is much the same as another. Then I sat down on a heap of pebbles and smoked a cigarette. I looked across at the town again, and felt kind of amused. I took handfuls of pebbles and threw them at an empty tin that was lying on a little heap of stones. When I’d finished I lay down on my back on the cold stones and stared at the black sky. I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered a poem my brother Eddie wrote before he went away, six or seven years ago. I recited it aloud, for myself and the tramps. It was:
bitter or what
I withdraw my desires
I let my fame slip away
I open the door a crack to refusal
I don’t give a damn that birds fly.
I don’t like red any longer
Destiny is a stepping-stone
for incapacity.
I’m taking the train tomorrow
for the blisters’ capital.
Fever Page 10
