Paoli walked past a café terrace where a lot of people were sitting. He saw the round tables, on his right, the glasses of beer and cups of coffee, the white hands resting on the tablecloths, the plump wrists, the shining gold watch-bracelets. There was a lot of noise, too, there, a confused hum that didn’t rise in the air but remained, spread out in front of the café area. No words, either, never any words; only cries and exclamations. ‘Ahs!’ ‘ohs!’ ‘oohs!’ ‘ah-ahs?’ and ‘hey-hos!’ But the crowd was becoming thicker again, and Paoli had to look where he was going; he looked at people’s faces too, and their arms, he slipped between groups, he passed people, slowed down and went on again. From time to time he stopped and marked time, or stepped off the pavement to avoid a stream of passers-by, drew back into a corner and waited for a few seconds. The sea was already visible at the end of the street, a kind of dirty blue patch that formed the horizon.
There was another bar, this time with no terrace, and Paoli saw the cave-like interior, the crimson imitation leather seats, the soft lights, and the dark figures standing at the bar. Music was coming from a juke-box half-concealed at the far end, a thing just like a watchful octopus, a mass of iridescent flesh, a jelly-fish, an anemone, a machine bleeding like a slashed belly. Paoli received the music in passing, the slow, heavy melody that came from still further down, the crawling, melancholy animal that came up to him and wouldn’t be following him.
Paoli walked down the street with a sort of intense happiness. He was about to be released, no doubt, he was about to be blessed through all his being by the asymmetry of the scene, on one side the land, the beach, the promenade with its row of palm-trees, on the other side the mass of sea. It took him about five minutes to reach the front. He suddenly came upon the wide expanse, he emerged from the chaos of crowd and cars as though he were going up in a lift. He felt taller now, his spine was straight and his head almost level with the tree-tops. He crossed the road and the promenade and came to the other side, by the railings, with his eyes fixed on the water. Then he turned to the right and began walking parallel to the beach, without really knowing how it would all end.
There was a stronger breeze along the promenade; Paoli’s shirt was blown against his back at once, and stuck there, because of the sweat. The sun was right opposite, and in the distance one could see the purple line of the hills, the flat point of the airfield, and the small, irregular jumble of houses. Paoli began walking towards the airport, going faster and swinging his arms. For a little time he had the illusion that everything had become pure and easy again. The pavement was wide, one could choose one’s own course, one could see the groups of figures coming from a great distance and choose those one would pass close to and those to be avoided. At a pinch one could even forget the whole thing. And just let oneself drift lazily, restfully, amid the infinity of possible movements and gestures, let oneself glide along one’s rails without holding back or thinking of one’s wheels. One was a wave, or rather a rhythm, a sort of double curve whose quiet, elongated rocking was a boundless pleasure, a pleasure that swamped one, in which one became merely life, regular lungs, a smooth thrusting to and fro, gentle, resilient, consistent. That was how Paoli went ahead for another few seconds, two steps forward, one step back, lulled, tricked, caught up in the immense dance of everything around him, swaying majestically with the houses, the people, the cars, the wind, the trees, and most of all the sea.
But little by little, without his knowing why, no doubt because it was becoming a habit, the waves narrowed their field of action, the pendulum movement that was driving everything speeded up, and it all became confused. An instant later, Paoli was buried under a jungle of lines and fractures; the groups of people were coming to meet him aggressively, with signs of irritation, with turbulent gestures. The lines of the pavement were criss-crossing in front of his steps, mingling round his feet, making him stumble, trying to trip him up. Light was flashing back from the bodies of the motor-cars and dazzling him. Cries, savage, inhuman yells, were rushing through the air like birds and hitting at him as they went by. In the distance, on the side away from the sea, there was an unbroken row of white houses, twelve storeys high, swaying, stretching and folding up until one felt sick.
Paoli was being attacked, and he was frightened. As he went along the promenade, with the burning sun in his eyes, the crowd of men and women gradually became thicker again. The fat, dark figures, with the light behind them, came tottering towards him, quite black, their eyes concealed behind dark glasses, their hands empty, their shoulders squared. To left and right of the promenade, three rows of armchairs and deck-chairs were occupied by these human masses, with their broad faces, their features half lit by the white sunshine, their chests breathing, their thick, heavy, probably varicose legs stretched across the pavement. In the middle of these sweating, screeching, many-coloured hunks of meat there were eyes, living an almost independent life, little glaucous, greedy animals. J. F. Paoli was going down the middle of this sort of lane, as though on parade, and the earlier inferno began again. But this time there was no help for it. He was hedged in by these living walls, kept to the very middle of the pavement, attacked from all sides, the prey of every kind of people, those who were walking, those who were seated, those who were laughing, those who were talking, those who were behind, those who were watching, those who were asleep.
J. F. Paoli fled before them. He passed between their ranks like a lanky, absurd puppet, his nylon shirt sticking to his thin shoulder-blades, his legs moving fast in their khaki linen trousers, his face bathed in sweat, his eyes very mobile behind their sun-glasses, his arms in disjointed motion, one hand empty, the other clenched on a blood-stained handkerchief; deep in his pockets a lighter, keys and small change jingled metallically at every step he took.
He was walking. He was still walking, no doubt of that; but the hallucinations, the dizziness, were there, blurring his eyes and making his ear-drums whistle. It was owing to that precious rhythm, the rhythm he’d begun with, those drops of water falling on the upturned basin in the kitchen of his flat, which he had allowed to slip away from him without noticing it. His respiration, having nothing to sustain it now, had also gone wrong. Impossible to breathe naturally: sometimes the air rushed abruptly into his lungs and stayed there ten seconds before it managed to get out again; at other times, as the result of an incomprehensible puckering-up of his diaphragm, everything was blocked—his throat, uvula, nostrils and mouth remained closed, stuck fast, and the carbon dioxide accumulated in his thorax, making his heart throb wildly, causing nascent terror, causing the bursting of the myriads of tiny orange-coloured bubbles that floated and fizzed across his eye-balls. He needed to stop for a moment, to sit down in one of those armchairs facing the sea, among all these people, and take his turn to look, throwing his head back and opening his mouth to gulp down gallons of cool, quiet air. But he couldn’t stop. The rows of spectators were there, stretching as far as he could see, and they wouldn’t let their prey escape, that was certain, they held him, pitilessly, unforgetting.
Further on, the lane between the rows of chairs became even narrower; this was the central point of the promenade, the meeting-place of those who came to stare, and their seats took up almost all the space. All that was left was a narrow passage in the middle of the pavement, a sort of winding path where one had to go forward alone, walking painfully to the sacrifice. Paoli saw from a distance where he would have to go through; confronted with this difficulty he hesitated for an instant and even thought of turning back. But there were witnesses around him and he could not offer them the disgraceful spectacle of a man turning tail. So his legs carried him forward, towards the wretched corridor, towards the swarming mass of seated bodies, towards those who had been so long awaiting him, who would bruise him, sully him, mutilate him for ever, no doubt. He went in.
The faces filed past him, pressed one against another; the bulging eyes, the mouths with their smiles, the outstretched hands, the foreheads, the glossy hair.
They were everywhere; it was impossible to lose sight of them, even for a second: they were there, they filled the whole space. Above, below, to right, to left, behind, in front, the faces were raised, the eyes were watching, the lids were blinking. Paoli tried to run, to flee. Forms rose up as he went along, and barred the way. Torsos appeared from all sides and blocked the outlets, gently, without seeming to, without ever touching him. Sometimes positive barriers of human bodies lying in deck-chairs compelled him to stride over them, or to go out of his way. The sun was shining straight at Paoli, and he felt naked, as though stripped of his clothes, irretrievably exposed, like a living statue, in the glare of thousands of projectors. He could hardly breathe. So he walked for a few seconds with his eyes closed, haphazard, his head seething, perhaps in the vain hope of finding himself, when he opened his eyes again, all alone in an expanse of silent desert. Then he bumped into somebody in passing, and it all began again. However, the central lane had widened out again now. But he had really been through hell, and that’s a thing one can’t forget.
The rows of idlers ran about two yards apart, on either side. J. F. Paoli took a line right down the middle, and with bent shoulders, hardly breathing, his whole body damp with sweat, he continued his walk, his great walk, his eternal walk.
Seized now by a sort of coldness, he looked at the faces as he walked along. Faces of middle-aged women, tanned skins, bright eyes, dry, tinted hair. Faces of elderly men, with bulging cheeks, heavy-jowled, wrinkled, their noses like caricatures, their heads bald. The face of a young man with wide nostrils, black moustache, square jaw. Tattooed arm. Face of a woman with an inquisitive, mocking expression, a supple, animal posture, and a smile. Faces of old women, grey, with mumbling jaws. Faces of mature men, with heads thrown back, bushy eyebrows, inaudible laughter. And the heads, arms and trunks filed past without interruption. Paoli, his eyes riveted to each of them, went forward with the gait of an automaton, his mind a blank; he knew he wasn’t the master, oh yes, he knew he belonged to them, body and soul, to each of them in turn. Every glance he met as he walked between the rows, every crease in a face, every cheek, every ear, threw out a cable, or rather flung towards him a furtive pseudopod that bound him hand and foot, draining the substance, the life, out of him. And so he went on, from one tentacle to the next, palpated, nibbled, digested, like a sort of prey in a corridor of death; like a piece of food, exactly like a pellet of meat going gently down the oesophagus, over the living carpet of ciliated cells.
This was life, this continuous descent into nothingness, this stream flowing through a black pipe, this pellet hurrying down into the unknown, which was merely his own flight, his disappearance. Everything was falling, the whole universe was one immense, ecstatic engulfment. All things were self-destroying, and everything was withdrawing from everything, slowly, inexorably, progressively. It was as though at one time, so long ago that nobody nowadays knew anything about it, there had been a very high point, a peak, somewhere, a sort of skyscraper platform from which things had taken off, thrown out by a mysterious explosion, and begun their vertiginous avalanche, their eternal obliteration. And ever since then the universe had been on its way, in process of falling, in a species of indefatigable porosity. One didn’t suspect it. One knew nothing about it. And yet it was pouring out, dribbling ceaselessly, dispersing itself, disintegrating, and apart from this gradual fading out there was nothing, objects and beings existed only inasmuch as they were passing, pursuing their long downward course. That was it: putrefaction was triumphing, internal decomposition, the tiny vermin gnawing away the organs of the body, the sort of disease that was sapping it, extinguishing it. Something like a corpse, a stinking carcass thrust deep underground and rotting away there.
While walking, for example, like J.F. Paoli. If one wanted, one could grow very tall, a giant as high as a mountain; in that case one would walk over whole continents, splashing knee-deep through the oceans. The Mediterranean Sea would be a small grey puddle, a little patch of water that one could scoop up and empty out somewhere else. The population of Sibenik, or of Antipaxos, to mention no others, would go through a time of real terror. A dark form, so tall that it disappeared among the clouds, would stand swaying on their horizon, and disasters would begin to occur, such as waterspouts, walls of water rising up towards the sky and cutting off the sunlight. A cataclysmic darkness would fall over their plots of land, with occasional flashes of dazzling white light as the darkness parted, then closed down, then parted again. A mixture of earth and water would begin to pour down on their heads, the trees would tear themselves up by the roots, terrible fissures would begin to appear on all sides, approaching with extraordinary rapidity. A thick, heavy, blood-red cloud would abruptly take the place of the sky, and things would topple over. Things as tall as volcanoes, as wide as entire countries. Then the wind would start blowing, the hurricane, the fury of cubic kilometres of air hurtling against one another like rutting beasts. Sometimes a gigantic vacuum would suddenly be hollowed out in the heavens, and everything on earth would be sucked into this chasm, amid the tremendous din of millions of acres being smashed to fragments. Indescribable explosions would fill the whole of space, explosions so violent that their sound-waves would travel right round the globe, making the earth’s crust ripple like an expanse of liquid, faster and faster, further and further, deeper and deeper, until, broken up by interference, at the centre, at the heart, the globe would fall to pieces, shattering in a tremendous symphony of sheets of fire, red lightnings, corollas of dazzling magma, scarlet, rocketing into eternity. But one might go on growing, taller and taller, leave this planet like a scrap of dust, and hurry on, fill up the entire cosmos. Round the cape of the galaxy, push on further, ceaselessly dilating oneself. Be wild flight, be vaster and vaster time, attain dimensions verging upon perfection, in speed, in creation. And pass beyond the limits of flight itself, overreach the universe’s zone of expansion, the remotest galaxies, the novae, the quasi-stellae. Then, divested of all speed, all action, one would enter the sphere of total vacuum, the cold, naked atmosphere where nothing exists, not even infinity. And in thus advancing one would create one’s own space and time, one would really be the master, and matter would come to birth around one, softly, imperceptibly, while one fled on and on in one’s cloud, one’s halo of existence … Infinity, isn’t that so, infinity exists only for the finite. And beyond? And further on? There is no further on; further on does not exist in a place where you are not. There isn’t even nothing, it is not, one mustn’t think of it.
But one might also go in the opposite direction—become a sort of dwarf, as big as a child to begin with, and life is complicated when one is that size. Or as big as a doll, and then, already, the world is a monstrous place. The softest, silkiest materials are as rough as files, and the skin of the most beautiful woman is a rhinoceros hide, dirty and hairy. But one could shrink still more, become the size of a match, or even smaller, the size of a very young gnat. Then what a miracle the earth would be! One would walk, walk very fast over rough ground, grains of dust as big as houses would fall on your head, and the tiniest hole, the tiniest crack, would be swarming with strange creatures, amazingly ugly, covered with antennae, mandibles and legs. Sometimes on these vast plateaux, these lunar surfaces, always echoing with dull, furious rumbling sounds, one sees curious globes, shining, solid, as smooth as metal or glass. There they are, tethered by the base, slightly flattened at the top, and now and then they shake, vibrate as though about to roll away. They are drops of water. But the inexperienced gnat should beware of touching one of these glistening beauties: he will be lucky if he can tear himself away again, so strong are these monsters and so great is their appetite for tiny things. The world is boundless, immense. One can see nothing of it any more: to left and right, above and below, are nothing but gigantic surfaces, bottomless abysses or terrifying heights. One mustn’t look even, for fear of being disheartened by so much flatness and ruggedness, of being suddenly terror-struck. It would be so easy,
then, to despair: one would give up the whole thing, one would drop down on the rough ground and wait for the end, for the swarms of insects to arrive from all sides and devour you, or for a blackish mass as big as a town to descend from the sky and crush you brutally. No, one would have to struggle, survive, set all one’s legs in motion, preen one’s wings, be always ready to fly away, with frantic speed, through the atmosphere misty with particles.
Smaller still, one would be altogether lost. One would see a big cavern, go in, and find oneself inside a pore of somebody’s skin. Or one would see nothing at all, one would float along strange rivers of various colours, among amoeba and microbes. And time would become so short amid this confusion that one would scarcely be able to note its passage any more. The unit of measurement would be in the neighbourhood of 1/1,000,000,000th of a second, or something like that. Total silence. Infinite space. Time in little bounds, in little jerks. Liquids, cells, leucocytes, pools where everything was defined, divided up as though by frontiers, but where nothing stood out from the rest. One would travel on the flat, and things would all be different and yet all alike, like drawings on a sheet of paper. And if one looked lower down, past this order of things, one would become aware of an indefinable swarming, a kind of disturbing feverishness, a species of humming, emanating from oneself and everything else, and spreading like an electric current. For lower down, in that forbidden, frozen region, the cosmos began again, the balls of energy, the proto-matter whirling, flying, losing itself, manufacturing infinity. And if one ventured into that universe one would be caught up, as it were, in the aridity of abstraction, one would vanish in one’s turn, become nothing but an assembly of diverse energies, a wave, a phase, a ripple, a furtive, ghostly halo, and one would break up, obliterate oneself, be lost outside time and space, on the way to the non-existent point that should never be mentioned, and which is assumed to be divine, since everything is brought to a halt there.
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