Fever

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Then he set off, with no idea where he was going, with a slight nip at his heart when he thought of all he would be seeing, all he would be having to see during this ordinary day, all the girls he would be passing on his way, all the women with the lithe, calm movements of wild animals, all the lame, feeble old men, the whole crowd through which he would no doubt be passing, and which would ill-treat him.

  His mind was made up. He was going to forget everything. Even his own name, his family and his story. Nothing was important, nothing was worth mention. He was going to forget that too, you know, that business with Jeanne. She’d gone away yesterday, in the afternoon, after some sort of quarrel about nothing at all; he was going to forget that as well. And that note she’d scribbled in red pencil on his block-calendar:

  Saturday, May 16, 1964 Saint Honoré

  Sunrise 4.09 a.m.

  Sunset 7.25 p.m.

  Moon rises 8.23 a.m.

  Moon sets 11.49 p.m.

  Morning:

  11.30: meet Jonas.

  Make out bill for Citroën.

  Afternoon:

  Don’t be angry with me. It’ll be better if we separate for a bit.

  It’s no use going on like this. See you one of these days, perhaps.

  Jeanne.

  None of all that really mattered. He had to walk, walk over it, trample it underfoot, leave no trace of it. Here, along the pavement, was J. F. Paoli’s adventure, his real adventure. He was not alone. He had miles and miles on his side, buildings, shops, streets, plane-trees, cars, the other pedestrians. Paoli passed a girl walking in the opposite direction, holding herself very straight, swinging her handbag slightly. Then another girl, with light brown shoulder-length hair, her eyes concealed behind butterfly-shaped sun-glasses. Two more, accompanied by a boy in blue jeans, all talking and laughing very loudly. Very good, all this. Very good. Carry on. Paoli wasn’t alone; he was walking with the others, he was alive, he was meeting lots of girls who were walking along like himself. Further on, perhaps, at a crossing, he would meet a girl going in his direction, at much the same pace, but a little slower, whom he could speak to politely, to whom he could say cheerfully, ‘Excuse me, may I walk a little way with you? You don’t mind if I go along with you for a bit? Where are you going? Do you often come this way? I suppose you live round here? Etc.’ and he would be saved.

  Paoli strolled like this along a succession of streets, some of them shady, others sunny. A mysterious force had entered into him, had distended his muscles and sinews, and was propelling him forward, over the resonant concrete. It was rather as though his body were inhabited by a perfect mechanism, where nothing was left to chance, where each movement followed naturally upon the one before, simply owing to the play of the driving-rods pivoting on their axes, of valves commanded by complex, decisive systems of gears, with smooth wheels and cogwheels, ball-bearings, steel pins and an infinity of screws. In his brain, nothing was clear. No idea could manage to take shape, not the tiniest thought. It was an expanse of fog, prevailing from end to end of his skull, from which nothing emerged except the rock, the tense cry of determination. A sort of tightrope, stretched to breaking-point, extending straight ahead of him, as far as the horizon and even beyond, along which he was walking without understanding. A cry, yes, a perfectly smooth cry on one single note, a cry resembling a road, a long, strident iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii that was drawing him forward, streamlining his whole body, hurling it onwards, stepping on the accelerator, so that it rushed straight ahead, a supersonic aircraft, to attack the vanishing points where the perspective lines meet.

  Unhurriedly, he came to the centre of the town; a thin cloud, shaped like an animal, had slipped in front of the ball of the sun, and the light filtering through seemed whiter, dazzlingly white, like omnipresent snow. There were no vibrations, no warm yellow colour. Everything was a source of light, as though the house-walls, the squares of the pavement, the shop windows and even people’s skins, had been mirrors. It was everywhere, this glaring light, it emanated from everything, it saturated. At the same time a sort of humid, stifling heat had taken possession of the town, and Paoli could feel drops of sweat running down his flanks.

  It was this heat, and this light, perhaps, that began to increase tenfold the power of people’s eyes, around him. They were not becoming brighter, no, but the aggressive lights compelled them to blink continually, and every blink might catch one in a state of inferiority, of humiliation. It was much more in self-defence than for concealment that J. F. Paoli took his dark glasses out of the breast-pocket of his shirt and put them on.

  Besides, the town was full of prying glances, of sorts of spies who, on the pretext of selling newspapers, shut themselves up in shelters along the kerb, concealed their piercing eyes behind black holes, and kept watch, kept watch the whole time; others, hidden behind lowered sun-blinds high up on the house-fronts, stared at you as you went by, filming all your movements in the dark, scorching box of their skulls. Dogs trotted past, glancing stealthily at you, or else it was cats, caged birds, babies sitting bolt upright in their prams, insolent flies, pigeons that circled above your head in their noisy, ponderous flight. Hidden behind their windows, the shopkeepers were recognizing you, seeing you, scrutinizing you, whereas you yourself saw nothing, you went by, you walked on, the windows were opaque. Further on there were children again, policemen, a few old women, their eyes heavy-lidded but quite capable of seeing. Under the walls, in the old, musty corners, there were tramps asleep, seeming to be asleep, but that was a lie, they were watching, they were stealing from under their swollen eyelids a thin ray that pierced you, injected you. Beggars scattered along your route, and when you got there it was you who were the beggar, you who saw yourself sauntering along, stiff and awkward, making your way through an area of insults, pushing back a positive curtain of filth. And ceaselessly, tirelessly, the passers-by, all of them, men, women, children, dogs, shadows coming and going, swirling round, combining into dizziness, fear, anger. The town was like that, clear-cut and hard, with hundreds and thousands of holes pierced in all directions, and excited eyes shining like marbles in their depths. Breathless, caught in the middle of these staring eyes, caught by this swarm of bees, Paoli felt a strange indolence creeping over him. His leg-muscles were still firm, his nerves were still transmitting the almost electrical vibration of his will; and yet, somewhere in his body, there was now a soft, harmless point, a bruised, damp heart that made him cowardly.

  For the last few minutes he had not been walking so quickly. His rhythm had grown more tense, if you like, but at the same time its quality had declined. He had lost the original music, yes, that was it, he had lost possession of the click-click of the water-drops on the upturned basin, the vocal architecture that he had swallowed up once and for all before leaving his flat, and which was to have served him as something in the nature of a talisman, his own action, his marching orders.

  The spies had fooled him. They’d fooled him, those misshapen beings, the fat, facetious men, the suspicious skinny ones, the children, the atrabilious dogs, the matrons whose bins were full of vegetables. He’d been caught. They were holding him, on this surface of streets, boulevards, gateways, garages, bars and tobacconists. He belonged to these people. He was their slave, their walking slave. He was the servant of the stumbling crowds, of the men lined up motionless along the kerb. He was the menial of all of them, a mere cipher, the dog of dogs, a phantom that slipped through their fingers, rebounded from their barbed glances, erased itself at every word, disappeared, fled, was carried along, fainting, swallowed up, trodden underfoot, trampled on like a square patch of earth and dust.

  Already he was holding himself none too straight. As though the weight of the whole town—the monstrous town battening on the heat, the heavy cistern of stagnant water with gnats and mosquitoes skimming across it—had been placed on his shoulders, J. F. Paoli was advancing a yard at a time, with labouring heart, lungs contracted, head bent. With shoulders hunched forward, and arms
dangling by his sides, finding no support, he made his way through the thickening crowd. He wanted to stop, to pull up, to stand like the others along the gutter, and pretend something different, such as not being who he was, and smoke a cigarette in the sunshine, be an idler. But he couldn’t do that. He had a terribly heavy load behind him, a sort of handcart full of scrap-iron which was pushing him forward, making him hurry, making the street slope down, rushing him. Just here a group of five old people, ambushed in the mouth of an alley, flung him over to the left; five gentle old people, a man and four women, armed with walking-sticks, who were talking in loud whispers. Paoli was right on top of them, about to go through them; the aged, sing-song voices barred his way; and it was like a thunder-cloud with lightning and big drops of rain zigzagging in it. The words crawled ahead of him, spreading right across the pavement.

  ‘Already there, over there again,’ he heard them say. ‘Yes yes, it’s very hot, very hot, Madame,’ they said. ‘I’m going back to the country—They say that—Yes, yes, I think it’s—It seems M. Thomas is dead, yes, yes.’ The phrases trickled out, trailed along, fell down flat. And Paoli saw he was alone, quite naked, almost entirely naked, lost on this concrete ground where the groups of old people were turning in circles. Further on, other groups were forming, circles were closing up and figures were tottering, dragging their thick-soled shoes over the asphalt, hitting the walls with walking-sticks, coughing in long bouts with their faces hidden in their hands. A blind man came slowly towards him, his face crimson with the traces of a long-ago burn, his eyes dull behind their thick, opaque glasses. The man advanced, calm and threatening, a white walking-stick in his right hand and a book of National Lottery tickets in his left. Paoli saw him coming to meet him, groping, mechanical and powerful as a ship; then he felt him going by, brushing past him only a few centimetres away, and other words reached his ears, droned out in a kind of sad, listless chant:

  ‘Last tickets … The draw takes place this evening … Last winning tickets … This evening’s the draw …’

  Paoli went on along the main street, like that, pushed forward by his burden. He was in the grip of fever now, and trembling in all his limbs. Sometimes, inside his dark glasses, in the benumbed area where his eyes were open, free, luminous haloes drifted down, strange whitish spots, even paler than the street and the sky, and then vanished under his cheeks.

  His bare hands, left to themselves, were opening and closing independently of his control. At last, with a terrible effort, he managed to thrust one of them into his trousers pocket. There still remained the other: he put that into a pocket too, but because of the to-and-fro movement of his shoulders it came out again at once. Luckily Paoli had had time to make it seize his lighter on its way, and now it was clenched on the metal object, could clutch it, had acquired weight!

  There were similar troubles in Paoli’s throat: the hot atmosphere, the walking, the draught, his cramped breathing, had dried it up. Down by the uvula there was a little knotted cord that was scratching and jamming. Paoli tried to swallow, but in vain. His salivary glands must have given out: the knot slid down into the back of his throat and then came up again to block his windpipe. His breath came wheezing out, and he listened to it as he walked. He even tried to stop it for a moment because he found the bellows-noise so unpleasant, so embarrassing to other people. He managed to hold his breath for about forty seconds, and he was already beginning to exult, telling himself that after all nobody had ever tried, that one could get along very well without that compulsive task, that with a little determination one could easily shake off that absurd habit, when suddenly the air he had rejected for the moment parted the close-pressed sides of his nostrils and the pads of his lips and thrust into his lungs as hard as a spear. For a second he reeled drunkenly, the pain bringing tears to his eyes. Then everything began again as before, as usual, and he had to resign himself to breathing in, out, in, out, until the end of time, to putting one foot down in front of the other, to the accompaniment of the familiar sound, the sort of hateful rrrrrh chchchch of a locomotive.

  His path was laid down for him, and it led nowhere. Everywhere was dryness, the arid slope of pavements and walls, the bare, granulous concrete, the squares of dust that crunched beneath his feet, the smell of petrol. The sun struck down vertically on his skull and on the ground. One seemed to hear the sound of its shafts, and they drove into the soil and stuck there, upright, making patches of tall, stiff grass. Paoli advanced through them, without parting them, without feeling them; but he heard them fall, the great rays of light, he heard them bursting round his feet with tiny, violent explosions, heavy drops possessed of fantastic speed, machine-gun bullets that had travelled about 150,000,000 kilometres.

  Now he was walking past a row of houses with iron railings in front of them. In the doorways old women were sitting or standing, looking out and talking. Dogs, probably biters, were curled up asleep on the front lawns. There were parrots in cages, and singing canaries; their trilling pierced through the other noises, rose, fell, overlapped, tirelessly. As he walked Paoli could see the cages hooked on to the open shutters, and inside the cages the little balls of grey and yellow feathers, the little shrill-voiced monsters. A few yards further on the loudspeaker of a wireless set was warbling out music and human voices. Inside the rooms, half-seen behind the gaping holes of their windows, emerging from the darkness and concealment, the frames of the sets glinted and the valves shone, reddish, boiling-hot points. One had to reckon with them. They were there. With them, one had to withdraw into a room full of hallowed darkness, lie down on a bed, and there play, play at all costs at the game of being: with a box of matches, for example:

  (a) inside the box

  (b) on top of the box

  (c) underneath the box

  (d) to left and right of the box

  (e) containing the box

  (f) being the box

  (g) inside the box and containing it

  (h) inside the box, containing it, and to left and right of it

  (i) being the box contained, containing, and on top of it, and underneath it, and to left and right, and by means of the box

  (j) without the box.

  Or else one had to walk the way one does in one’s own flat, along corridor-streets, through dining-room-avenues, across bedroom-squares, into blind-alley-baths, along kitchen-wharves, round table-houses, bed-houses, armchair-blocks, carpet-gardens, w.c.-fountains and trunk-news-stands. Because that was the only way of going around a town that was really one’s own.

  At the end of this row of dwellings there was a street to be crossed, a street like many others. Paoli crossed this street. He stepped down into it, between two cars, he climbed up the slightly convex asphalt and then down it again, avoided a pothole, reached the opposite gutter, raised his left foot, heaved his body on to the pavement, and resumed his course. Going past another row of houses he trailed his hand along the rails so as to touch them, to produce sounds. His fingers bounced from bar to bar a dozen times, then there was a wall and it tore his skin. Paoli said nothing, he didn’t even pull a face, but it hurt him. He looked at his hand and saw that across the joints of the index and middle fingers there was a large, dirty grazed patch, which was bleeding. Without halting he took his handkerchief and twisted part of it round the wound, holding the rest of the stuff crushed up in his hand.

  A dark-haired girl was waiting for something or other, leaning back against the railings. Paoli saw her from a distance, and went a few centimetres out of his way to avoid the obstacle. When he was close to the girl she turned her head and looked at him. She had a pale, tired face and her black eyes rested on him, idle and indifferent. As Paoli advanced he stared first at her legs, then at her hips, her belly, her breast, her neck, her chin, her mouth, her nose, her eyes, her eyebrows, her forehead, her hair. She saw him coming, she watched him calmly with her tired, lack-lustre eyes, and after he went by she turned her head and continued to watch him, from behind. Then she dropped him and watche
d an approaching lorry.

  Paoli walked past a housebreaker’s yard. He made his way awkwardly over a succession of beams and planks that lay about on the pavement. A group of workmen stood in the middle of the pavement, arguing vigorously. Paoli went by them, shamefaced, not looking at them. He heard their voices, but couldn’t understand a single word.

  Ahead of him, a young woman was pushing a pram. Her red hands were clenched on the handle-bar, and she pushed with a slight, regular movement of the loins, and at every push her head jerked forward and then back, like a hen’s. Inside the little black pram a small baby lay curled up, asleep. Paoli looked at the infant, and its strange, puffy, wrinkled face went into his head like a memory. He gradually passed the pram, and speaking aloud, for his own benefit or other people’s, he said these words:

  ‘The world is so old. The world is an old man.’

  Then he crossed another street. The sea was close by, now. The intermittent gusts of air were cooler, and—how can one put it?—one could feel the near presence of the sheet of water, one could divine its smooth, motionless expanse, the breathing rhythm of its ebb and flow, the end of the land, the liquid, the hollow, receding, subtle, round, as it were perfect element.

  No conscious choice had drawn J. F. Paoli to the sea-front. For a long time now he had ceased to enjoy that particular pleasure, if he ever had enjoyed it. For a long time now he had been absorbed by the town and its people, finding satisfaction only in them, and unable to do anything but obey their will, their absolute will. No more independence, no more struggle. He had to be carried along, borne on their shoulders, bowled along, poured like drain-water. If anything other than chance had brought him here, to this sort of frontier, it could only have been the slope of the ground, the angle of the streets, the gradual descent of the pavements towards zero level. And now he knew the sea was there, very close, still hidden by one or two blocks of houses, but so present, he couldn’t escape it. He was going towards it, breaking off his walk, going down the great invisible steps, going to bathe.