After that I stayed for a very long time, lying on the stones. I didn’t notice the cold any more, or the smells. Nothing remained of me but a vacant space, resting lightly on the ground like a dead leaf. Then nothing more at all. And now I come back every evening and lean over the railings to look down on the dry river-bed at the place, among the pebbles, the grass and the refuse, from which I disappeared.
4. Backwards
TODAY, April 15, in the year XXV after my birth. Before that, walk. The train is running on through the darkness just for me, and the windows shake and rattle. The speed must have pervaded every wheel, every dirty steel plate, and the whole thing is vibrating frantically. I’m moving and vibrating too, somewhere in the depths of my body, and the vibration winds up the structure of my organs, electrically, sets them tingling and pulsating, exactly like an invasion of microbes. I am nothing but that, vibration, and the short, sharp waves travel through my segments, my bones, my bundles of nerves. Solid speed. Something is emerging from me, enormous, pure, cold, like a long knife-blade. And I’m waiting. Before that, keep on walking. My face is softer, perhaps, already softer. I can feel my femurs and tibias have shrivelled up, the skin of my belly is folded back. Nothing yet … I go further: my heart, now; my heart, beating appreciably faster, appreciably less strongly. My lungs have shrivelled suddenly. And speed, unremitting speed, emerging from me. Complicated, futile pictures keep building up. Long-drawn-out noises, roarings, perhaps something like the sound of the rush of air in a fire. That’s it: I’m confronted by a gigantic conflagration, raging through half a city. The fire sweeps over, sweeps back again, and I don’t move. 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15 … Something is dwindling, dwindling fast, I can’t hold it back. It’s as though I were being sucked up, drawn in by a greedy digestive apparatus, I’m not defending myself, or hardly at all, there’s nothing possible. The train is me. I understand now, what can I do about it? Can one fight a train? The powerful respiration, the lines, terribly long and straight, which have driven into me with a violence that splinters everything, the wheels, the squeaking axles, the buffers, the gaping windows opening on to black squares of darkness and air, on to ice, the motionless sky, the engine pulling straight ahead, straight ahead, hauling its burden effortlessly through the naked countryside—all this is myself, me hurtling, me furious, me ferocious, me like a mad buffalo. I rush through towns, a succession of towns where the lights shine out and change their position. Wires run past before my eyes, rising, sinking, rising, sinking. Etc. The cold has penetrated into my body together with this movement, and I’ve become horizontal, flattened out on the ground, stretched out on it like a sheet of water. And I run in all directions. There’s nothing left to hold me back. I flow into holes, I stumble over hillocks and cover them, I spread out, I float, I have waves.
Always the same figures escaping from me, counted backwards. They’re seconds, no doubt, ineffable, futile seconds that cut everything up, draw strokes and then erase them, divide up landscapes, sentences, words, letters. And there’s never anything more. A voice I can hear, but don’t know, is spelling out my name in this way and distorting it, diminishing it, shrinking it. And while this voice talks only about my name, I feel I’m going somewhere; I don’t yet know where, but to some definite point, lying outside, which is attracting me irresistibly with its exhausting magnetic pull. It sucks in, it swallows up.
Henri Pierre Toussaint
Henri Pierre Toussaint
Henri Pierre Toussaint
ri ouss
rier Toussaint
er Touss
Touss
Touss
ouss
ss
.....
That’s what I’ve become. I’m being shaken, too, exactly like a heap of jelly. And a lot of things are escaping from me, throwing themselves out of me, emptying me; I feel as though I were the hull of a great liner, and people and rats were fleeing from me, scattering into the distance, terror-stricken, while I am sinking heavily down into the sea. I shall become a desert, the shaft of an air-passage, starting from nowhere and leading to a chasm.
My body has lost a great deal, now. I’ve seen it withering in this species of youth, and grow small. The muscles all gone by now, or almost. My hands are short and square, and the veins have sunk into them the way they once stood out, under the white skin. Everything’s moving more quickly, everything is smooth, easy. The decreasing number has stripped me still more and I’m going back, back, back, back, further and further, backwards, backwards, falling horizontally and ceaselessly. Cries I had never heard are all around me. Shapes, too, caught in a frozen, delicate mass. The evaporation is going on gently, without heat, without force, and the water, as I give it off, lays bare only smooth particles, rounded and polished like teeth. Is it still speed, action, that imbues me? I can see no more train now, no more rails, no more direction. On the contrary I seem to be motionless, buried to the waist in the middle of a mudflat. And I’m sinking deep. Waist, wrists. Ribs. Chest, shoulders. Base of the neck, neck, nape of the neck, throat. Then my chin. My mouth, my mouth. My nostrils, they plunge into the sand like two trap-doors closing. Everything is pressing on me. And I go on sinking, I’m falling into this draining-well, this cesspool that’s dissolving me warmly, coldly, bit by bit, into its vibrating, highly-coloured mass of organic dung, this rich, living beast with its long steel guts. My cheeks. My eyes, my eyes, closing on the sandy world.
And I forget. Time goes on, it withdraws its pendulum movements from me. The voice is still counting, backwards: 15, 14, 13, 12, 11 … Everything has become so narrow, so white. I’m sitting in a basket chair in the middle of a stretch of sunlight. Sounds are coming into my mouth and mingling there, rugged and chaotic. Words take shape, buckle up, fold in two, dissolve.
‘Cigarette. PARCHES. TO SHUN. THORNS. MATS. TO HOOT. NALES. RENT. UNT. RAT.
‘AFGHAN. SETTAN. UIR. American. 5 KARRES. 15%. Literature. AURRIS. E RNA.’ Nothing calls them up. And yet they come, they enter, they’re there, arrived from outside, from wide, dark fields. Arrived from the world, from expanses of wet soil, from a kind of wasteland cluttered with scrap. That must be where I come from. That must be what nourished me. If I have any parents, those heaps must be where I ought to look for them.
Retreat, retreat still further. Now there’s a thin, opaque film over my eyes, something that fogs my sight like wearing hypermetropic spectacles.
I listen to the final metamorphoses of my name: ‘Henri! Henri!’ ‘Ri!’ ‘Ri! Ri! Ri!’ That’s my name people are calling out. My mouth opens and crazy laughter jostles its way along my throat, rolling like thunder, subsides, rises again, bursts from my lips and sings through the air, thrusting back the invisible curtains of the air. Then the laughter turns into pain, very great pain, born in the compression-chamber of the lungs, rising from the paralysed diaphragm, a kind of long internal tetanus driving out, thrusting back, driving out, extirpating my soul from my body.
Hello! I’ve shrunk some more. I can’t tell how much, but the surrounding objects suddenly look gigantic. I used to be on the tall side, but now the table comes up to my nose. But I’m not even surprised, no, I allow myself to be handled like this by time. It’s just that I’m moving about among things as though I were in a forest—the tables, chairs, chests of drawers, beds and stools are trees. Their boles are immense, and I’m tiny.
Now comes the tide of very far-back things. For some time already I’ve ceased to be myself. I don’t know how to put it, but the cries and calls are dancing. The hands. Confusion reigns everywhere, and this kind of vacuum has come into my skull, through my gaping eyes, mouth, ears and nose, and flowed through my entire body like water, like water. 10, 9, 8, 7 … I’m connected with the earth by a column, a piece of marble. I belong. Or perhaps I’m lying flat on my face, icy, in a photograph. Yes, there: on a quayside, next to a woman, at the water’s edge, my elbow propped on a bollard. With mountains behind me and a perfect rectangle of cloudless sky overhead. My face is qui
te smooth now, my hair is close-cropped and I have dark circles under my eyes. I’ve practically stopped breathing. That’s it: I’ve withdrawn into my own world, you know—the petrified scene, the cars stock-still, the passers-by with their steps halted, the birds with their flight broken off, the whole thing nice and flat, posed, uniform, set, polished, arrested, untouchable.
And yet there’s still the same thing going away, escaping, the animal running, fleeing, reconstructing itself. I’m no longer retreating, one would say. No, the exodus has ceased. The action that was taking place in reverse a little time ago has now turned about; after a sort of pause during which it gathered for a spring, crouching in the dark, it suddenly leapt forward, started up, began again, and this time it’s really carrying me along. There’s nothing more to check it. I’m free, totally free. I’ve nothing to wait for now, and my flesh is no longer an obstacle. I hurtle down, I rush at breakneck speed along the new, straight, untrodden road, along the white, calm highway. There, this is real speed. Nothing will stop me. I hear the seconds crackling rhythmically past, the dull thuds of my heart-bomb, and the figures run by, they mount, they build up.
101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117
Where I am there’s no more day, no more night, no more anything. Just photographs filing past, undated, silent photographs that display nothing, depict nobody. Where one sees no faces, no objects, no landscape. Big sheets of grey cardboard, into which I enter very quickly, and which I leave more quickly still. A veritable corridor with a thousand doors, where I go forward regally.
Further down, now. Yes, much further down. On all fours. The whirlwinds are everywhere, and I’m one of them. Heat, cold. Pain. Prickling, tickling. My tongue curls up in my mouth, my breath can hardly get through. The words, where are they? They’ve disappeared. There’s nothing left but kinds of haloes, yes, that’s it, kinds of haloes surrounding things. Impulses that lift up the whole body and send it sliding towards targets, throw it into the midst of the materials and knead the whole thing together.
I’m a dwarf. I have no strength left, I’m trembling in every limb. It’s fear: let them leave me here, forgotten in my hole, I’m no longer worthy to be remembered, to be approached, to be looked at. Forget me. Everything is so big and angular; the lights hurt my eyes; they’re going past, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, trailing their perpetual white, pearly robes across my retina. Lightnings, electric suns. To left, to right, the crunching and grating sound of scraped wood. I’m caught on an expanse of blotting-paper and the dust is shifting amid sour whiffs of ink. And everything rises up in me.
Vague acids leap up from my stomach, thrust through the partitions of the mucous membranes and rise, rise, rise. I’m belching out the world all over. I’m flooded; then called, torn away, shaken. Cradled, rocked. Then other sheets of vapour appear, gauzy, hypnotic veils that settle, lightly fluttering, on my head and cover it, one after another, like lava.
What’s the figure??? 2? 1? or even less? …
The marsh is really very wide. Vapours rise from it here and there, in all directions, and sugary or spicy odours hover and swirl above it. Very sluggish beasts rise out of the mud, their blackish shells gleaming in the light, drops of water beading on their pustules. These beasts thrust up their necks out of the marsh, stretching their lanky spines, then they look sideways and their open eyes pierce through the coating of mud. In a vaporous sky heavy signs are inscribed—thick, sooty bars that gradually dissolve in the wind. In some places the cold is so intense that one can see ice-crystals forming right in the layer of atmosphere, as though on a window-pane. Other places, on the contrary, are hot, a humid, oppressive summer, and spirals are forming in puddles of melted earth. The bubbles collide, struggle, and burst, making dirty splashes all round. Everything is boiling and thudding. Dull waves are travelling down to a depth of kilometres, their routes marked by imperceptible shudders of the earth’s crust. Hunger. Thirst. Curled up, bathed in sweat. Fever, what fever? The gullet wide open, the gullet expanded, to suck in air and life, the nutritious liquids, the coolness, to calm this devouring fire that burns in the entrails, to soothe these red places, these chapped places, to flood these folds of dry skin, to breathe, to irrigate, to enter the atmosphere all alive and swim, fly, crawl, float, spread out, enlarge, live, live! And the hoarse, strident cry, echoed by another cry, by a stone-breaker’s grunt, these two cries rise up together and continue to soar towards the ceiling.
And then, right ahead towards the species of death. Zero Year.
5. The Walking Man
ONE can waste the better part of a lifetime in walking without actually being a walking man. That’s obvious. And on the other hand one may have walked very little, really, one may never have cared for walking, never been good at walking, and yet be unquestionably a walking man. Such is the law of all deep-seated life, according to which beings and objects exist only in terms of a pattern peculiar to themselves, an achievement for which they are granted no handicap, no limit and no appeal. Witness what happened to J. F. Paoli.
At eleven o’clock in the morning, Paoli awoke from a very long sleep, a stifling, torrid, oppressive sleep, which he had brought on nine hours previously with the help of an overdose of sleeping-tablets. He got up, opened the shutters, and began going about the one-roomed flat in his pyjamas. The sun, already high in the sky, was warming the wall on the east front of the house. When he had finished washing and dressing, Paoli boiled a little water in a saucepan and made himself a cup of Nescafé. Then he drank it, sitting on the kitchen stool, and remained there for a little while, idle, half-dazed, waiting for God knows what. The face-cloth he had hung on a nail over the sink was dripping down mechanically on to an upturned enamel basin. The drops fell regularly, one after another, or sometimes two at the same time, following a rhythm he set himself to understand. Looking round at it, he saw that water was flowing from two points of the cloth, on the right and in the middle. There was more water in the middle, and it was dripping faster. So much so that, for about five drops from the right side, eleven or twelve drops were falling from the middle. Nor were the drops falling in the same place: those from the middle were hitting the edge of the basin, near the spot where it was soldered, making a sharp, high-pitched sound; those from the right were striking the middle of the receptacle, and the sound of their impact was more gong-like, it had a dull, deep quality, a full-toned, subterraneous note which vibrated for approximately as long as two high-pitched notes. However, owing to certain mysterious accelerations in the trickling process, vibrations in the atmosphere, knockings in the pipes, the sudden union of two minute streams at the top of the cloth, the rhythm of both trickles was variable. One might easily have the sudden surprise of three ‘bongs’ in a row, with no intervening ‘tick’. Or, on the contrary, there might be a machine-gun rattle of ten or eleven ‘ticks’ without the faintest ‘bong’. But despite these fluctuations the rhythm was still definite, violently regulated, and if required to note it down one might have arrived at the following theme:
tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick
bong bong bong bong bong bong
As Paoli sat huddled on his stool, the chinking of the water-drops struck him more and more insistently. It had simply come in through his wide-open ears, and now there it was, settled in his head, an absolute tap leaking, filling him up slyly, drop by drop. He was possessed by it; it was like a rammer, like a sort of stamp, noising its way forward by a millimetre each click and thrusting him back towards darkness. Or like a tiny animal, a mouse or some such, bouncing up and down, running away from him and dragging him along, with little jerks of its spine, with atrophied reflexes, pulling him towards its cache, towards its hole in the angle of a wall, where he would be abandoned, cast aside, in silence, imprisoned in his outsize body.
J. F. Paoli was afraid of being deserted by the little clockwork animal; with an effort of will he managed to forget the presence of the noxious creature.
But he had scarcely succeeded in blotting out the slender grey shape when something else came along. This time it was music. Not just any music: the theme had come of its own accord, quite simply, from the rhythmic alternation of bass and treble notes. But the theme, ordinary enough after all, had no sooner formed than it had multiplied, subdivided, taken on endless constructions, reverberated, re-echoed, repeated itself in every direction and at every possible speed. By this time each drop that fell from the face-cloth was shattering into a thousand, two thousand, a hundred thousand more drops, all identical, which showered down again, pell-mell, hammering at Paoli’s ears with the indistinct, harsh rattle of clicks of the clicks of the plashes of the clinkings, ad infinitum. Everything was mingled, and eternal, for each new break-up of a drop falling on the upturned basin came to life in its turn and carried on the rhythm of alternating bass and treble sounds, and, in so doing, broke up again into other droplets, which became other particles, then another drizzle, then rain, shower-baths, fogs, vapours, sprays, blurs of sound, all perceptible, all precise, strict, inevitable, attuned to their own harmonies, weaving a queer symphony of ecstasy against Paoli’s ear-drums, an absolute, unbridgeable chasm, which carried you away, seated you in its palanquin, under a canopy, and bore you slowly, regally, towards the domains of madness.
It was this music, not the other, that brought J. F. Paoli to his feet and made him walk, through the force of hammerings and fugues, which made him, if you like, break the silence of his muscles and penetrate further, more deeply, into the new space, with his two moving legs, his back braced, his arms swinging, his breathing regular.
He moved forward. He left the flat, the parallelipiped with white-painted walls where inertia reigned, where the power of action was seated and smothering all by itself. He went downstairs; at first a step at a time, then faster, two by two, still faster, four by four, five by five, holding fast to the banisters, six by six, and when he came to the last landing above the ground floor he jumped the whole lot, the fourteen little steps, at one go, he leapt at one bound, with one impact, to the street that lay open to the sky.
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