It would be wiser to go home now, while lamps are shattering everywhere, and bury your luminous heart deep in your pillows, behind the livid, trembling windowpanes and the partly drawn curtains of fear.
But the half-naked mind contemplates the wild manes of the wind, the barely subjugated mind always awakens facing the morning it will have to penetrate in the throng of human gargoyles.
A mischievous child whose bloodstream ferries blocks of ice, slag, pincushions, was killing time by fervently placing the famous grain of salt on the tails of frivolous philosophers.
Obstinate, however, those birds of ill omen continually fled his approach and eluded his mettle. Later on, what disappointment, what hatred of the fraudulence of which thought is capable when he discovers the true nature of those mechanical toys that for so long tricked him into thinking they were alive.
By sheer force of running his cheeks catch fire, his chest comes alive, and his lungs, transported from one end to the other of the plateau, sponge the air with agile hands and push it to one side.
But soon the anguish of days without bread draws zigzags on his forehead like the sky bleeding on the horizon despite its bandages, that feverish wound of the sky that all the clouds will never succeed in extinguishing.
And yet it is a passenger without fear and without remorse that is resting his elbows now on the balustrade of night. It is not good to be taller than the stem of the ship that plows the ocean of love when that tall white body of a blond woman, blended with her mind like yeast in dough, stands up. At the arrival in port and even closer to the jetty a vigorous wrist constantly planes the sea.
The shavings come and flutter in wild pirouettes on the beach. The inhabitants of the land’s open sea, toughened by the heat, have abandoned the countryside broiled to a crisp under summer’s grill. They are there to watch the rebellious child gnawing his lessons at the edge of his raft, head cupped in his hands, mind lost in the thickets of the dictionary. He sulks, poking furious fingers into the underbrush of everything he knows. He scorns those ridiculous folk who have assembled to contemplate the sea’s profile. He laughs. He laughs. He sprinkles between him and the inquisitive and mean-spirited crowd the powdered laugh that, mingled with the powder of water climbing the reefs, shields him from the sparks of ennui.
But at the bottom of gorges, under the echoing caverns of day, the sound rushes into the depths of the ear like ocean waves through a hole in a rock.
This silence I have kept for thirty years. This vermilion silence swollen in my chest. This blue or black silence like blood trapped under the skin, exploding like a full-blown sun under the thorns, is the death’s-head perched on its root. For the sheaves of liberty are soon bound and smothered under the coils of words. And a reflection of that liberty, before everything, against everything, lands smoothly on the wing of the right note.
The cruelties of virtue revolt and join forces to block our path. But we have time. Chain for chain, we shall treat the mind roughly. First of all we shall refuse it that closeted heroism which won’t survive the first injection. It’s not for nothing that blood coagulates in all the hollows of the dry slopes of the hills. In the cries of the bushes, where shreds of macerated flesh hide themselves, there are also tatters of those fine days that end so badly. Tragic bathing accidents in the hertzian waves and on the sand of coast guard stations where those waves come to die, shuddering through all their moldings. The blond liqueurs of the last fine days of autumn rekindle the veins spread out on the thistles of the light, under pine trees shriveled by the heat. The air is completely inundated with beads of sweat, with the sound of bells.
As for me, I’m shipping out on the triremes of the sun, to earn my living with the robins.
Splendid architecture of negation, tortuous lairs of doubt, tangled subbasements of terror! Where are you going now with that gash in the fabric of reason that renders its impotence so pathetic!
You count the days like gold coins with the contorted gestures of a miser. And its lightning darts between your legs; it is ground down with anguish and stupor. It’s cold under the vaults, and the arcades, and the atriums of this circular world, in the countryside with its swelling hips, under the oppressive cloister of the fog.
You think of the undiscoverable nest of those islands that have left it to go and fold their wings again on the surface of the sea.
They will never take flight again, anchored offshore by an inexorable fate. And you, look at you, burning in a sea more desiccated and arid than a desert of salt, your feet bloody, your head on fire, your hands empty, your heart tender as a sun-bud in April. And this heart without reason, this pressure without remission, this blood against the forehead, and finally this life without savor and without pardon. For you issued from a tainted spring and the pleasures of time are no longer accessible except to your desires. Beautiful shop windows, magnificent displays of merchandise, muffled temptations, among which you are marching, I’ll explain it to you later, for now it’s useless that you know, you’d get confused. You may as well creak with pain, like an old mast, it’s all one to me.
Poisoned gold and blood trickle everywhere, incense, derelict songs, temperate visions, all those symbolic adornments and, at the end of this dark corridor, all the darker because it comes after the explosion of luxurious living in the open air, in broad daylight, there is the altar; the impassive hieroglyph of the altar.
When, a little farther on, the puffy and gilded hill, smoking and scented, has just emerged from the oven, wouldn’t it be wiser to cast a glance through the first slit in those cracked old walls at inexplicable real life and to forget, in the slight noise of aerial pulsations, the lugubrious antechamber of the tomb?
One cannot, beneath the ashes of boredom and the slabs of stupidity, abolish that flaming vision of love. For behold, in the liquidation of the past, the stimulus of envy, the uneven parquet of dismal fields sown with grain, the dark swollen sea of the passions, salt, the salt of evaporated air, moldy bread, snow hardened in the grooves of winter, time carefully folded and stored in crates, on the docks, next to the new lights, songs permitted and forbidden, the joy of living, unpunished crimes, hearts laden with boredom, distress subdued, peace and prosperity forever compromised, knot-free boards of silence, gaping abysses of fear, delicate zigzags of madness, staccato tenterhooks of murder, icy feet of terror, cold hands of justice, exhausted limbs, head empty of confessions, lassitude that oxidizes reason, alcohol that perforates the flesh and the Earth which is only the rattling bead in an immense silver sleigh bell, across which, still counting the scales of the roof and the gleaming slates of the fish, the convict has slipped back to his penal colony through the crafty slit of the guillotine between the severity and the honesty of the judges where not even a hair could pass through. It’s not a question of entering the other world, it’s a question of getting out of it. If one may, at the end, succeed in saying what one has to say. Since, as we know well, reading letters backward isn’t enough and one must, for the merest trifles, live backward, traveling from death throes back to birth. The flight is accomplished only under the most horrendous circumstances, past the treacherous shoals of liberty, the countless nuisances at street intersections, virgin forests, and the aristocratic outback of the suburbs, close surveillance by the police, prisons of ice, myriad lights of the boulevard, and the steep slope of the emotions that file down his heart from minute to minute.
Here begins the nacreous part of this narrative. At the head of the street that pours headlong into the square like a river into the sea, at the street corner, stands the sinister tavern where the crime occurred. No one could ever find a motive for that atrocious scene of carnage other than madness. Motive? Madness to subjugate, I mean. The cabaret singers could no longer make ends meet. They were considered too happy, too reasonable, and it became necessary to revamp the place and call it At the Sign of the Dangerous Idiot.1 What excellent cider you could drink there! There was dancing at all hours of the day and night. Then a few w
ho found that time weighed too heavily on them fell asleep. They were found next morning hanging, like sailors in their hammocks, in the cobwebs of marriage. The others were dead, they were heaved outside, the current dashed them against the pilings of the terrace. And the prospect of wealth finally swept away the last few who had had the patience to wait. For, naturally, the chief ferment in all this rage had its source in the need for glory and gold as it always has.
During this time, on deserted highways licked avidly by an icy wind, we ventured out, Despair and I, to get clear of misfortune by wandering in the marshlands. If, at the exit from an ordinary local road that has already brought us here from quite far away, there is a lugubrious and isolated house that we more than anyone are surprised to find in such a profoundly sinister spot, it must be owned that it was not placed there to reassure us. Indeed, this house, whose literally inconceivable existence was inexplicable in such a cruelly ravaged spot, had an appearance of life more chilling than an appearance of death would have been in different circumstances. As the crow flies, the vertical meanders of the road couldn’t be made out, but from our vantage point one could easily see the rows of trees of different species which lined it. There were dwarf trees and giant trees, trees with smooth bark and others with gnarled trunks, svelte ones and scraggly ones. The house was at the center of a vast garden, itself surrounded by an incredibly high wall. It occurred to us to wonder why a wall so high had been built in so deserted a place. From where we stood, still teetering unsteadily on a steep slope, we couldn’t see much beyond the green borders of the road, the rather tall hedgerows and the branches of the trees, all of which contributed, along with the wall and the vagrants it was no doubt meant to discourage, to the grisaille of the sky.
For everything there contributed to the grisaille of landscape and sky, especially the branches of the trees lining the road, the hedgerows scoring the landscape, the thickets, the woods, the vagrants, and finally the season and even the hair that is beginning not to flourish on our heads, yet which nevertheless prevents us from seeing the sky as blue as it perhaps is for some.
In a word the wind was gray and, though calm until now and only stirring the tips of the dead leaves, it began to blow violently. It seemed to follow the road naturally, as if it were a corridor. It was traveling at a crazy speed. We were perhaps afraid. A fear penetrated us perhaps at that moment, for our legs gave way, and we turned our backs to the gale, clutching our headgear with our hands. Our clothes, glued to our bodies on one side, were flapping on the other. We felt like stems of grass in a torrent.
I no longer know what feeling seized us at that moment, nor if we were precisely afraid or if we were ready for anything. But suddenly I saw Despair turn toward me with an effort and plunge his deep gaze into my sea-green pupils; then, with a common accord, having said nothing (for the wind would have carried the sound away), we abruptly turned our backs to the storm.
That is, we abandoned all hope of successfully struggling further against the incredible violence of the wind, which thereupon carried us along as easily as it would have pounced on frail and fugitive words.
“We never met one another, kindness and I,” said my terrible companion, “in the embrasure of the same oriel window.”
You can well imagine the vigor with which I would have settled his hash. From the degree of torpor you found me in when you arrived, you may surmise that I never allowed myself to suffer the slightest humiliation of his breath.
That was what let me control the free movement of my mind.
Since the really terrifying catastrophe during which we had joined our contrary destinies forever, he had never addressed a word to me. But not a single gesture, not a single twitching of his exceedingly sensitive epidermis had, during that protracted period of anguish, left me indifferent.
At that moment we were both shut up in a room devoid of any kind of furniture, with no unnecessary space between the ideally bare walls, that is to say without any obscenity either, and dark because the light from outside was blocked by a dense curtain of moss. I was ensconced in an armchair as deep as my thoughts, in pursuit of which I was squandering all my time. He was lying on his side, couchant on a bed as hard as the life of man and narrower than the ideas of those of their ignoble race who are chained to the pursuit of some ideal or other, or even asleep, between the stone piers—as fatal to the free play of intelligence as they are tall and rigid—of duty.
Soon the visitors entered, not without having first knocked timidly at the door. Then, with infinite precautions, and after having first sought with a gesture my permission to do so, he began to address the group in a forced, artificial manner.
“Be so kind, friend, as to open the window, having first pushed aside that horrid curtain of moss, still wet with tears of the dew. I can barely see you in the dusk, yet I am determined to learn whether you too bear on your wretched face the blemishes common to members of your unworthy species.”
The curtain having been pushed aside and the window opened, a magnificent sun stretched an enormous ray into the room.
“What beastly weather,” he said. “Never will we be peaceful or happy on this foul planet.”
And, addressing the visitors: “From your reserved and courteous manner, from the studied refinement of your dress, from the silence you are not afraid to keep in order to preserve your thoughts like a priceless jewel behind a thick pane of glass, from the timidity and infrequency of your gestures, tallied and tallied again, I understand what has brought you here to satisfy the distressing demands of your shameful profession: It’s the accident that happened last night, in which I alone perished.”
Despite their open and brazenly flaunted cynicism, the visitors were speechless. There was a fluttering in the leaves, in the hair neatly brushed back, in the branches already laden with buds, of the eyelids. There was a stirring deep within the pupils. The white walls blushed red with the sun and the reflections from their burnished faces. An extravagant light filled the room.
So far my insignificance had protected me; the visitors hadn’t seen me.
And suddenly I became so insignificant that I disappeared entirely; I became totally invisible.
“I understand very well why you are here. And you could have done worse than end up in the enchanted disorder of my luxurious hovel. It pleases me to imagine beforehand all the lies, the fantasies, the revenges of self-esteem you’ll be able to enjoy once you are far from the firing range of my kindness and my laughter, with pen in hand before the blank paper that lends itself to every collusion.
“But never mind. I savored in one gulp, as others do in tiny sips, the baseness of those strongboxes known as men. This is exactly what happened. We were traveling at top speed on the blade of illusions lost and always found again, night was at first open and pierced by the perforating knives of the headlights—we were joyful as cramps—when suddenly a dark vehicle, its dimensions totally beyond those prescribed by law, barely contained between the two curbs, blocked our way and passed over us. The friends who with me occupied the seats of our car were more or less seriously injured, the car was smashed to smithereens, the driver had given his week’s notice, and I was killed on the spot. That is all I have to say to you.”
“But,” the visitor who seemed to have taken on himself alone the burden of the defense said tremblingly, “we were coming, we were also coming especially, to ask you a question. And please don’t think it insidious. Sir, dear sir. What do you think, what do you know. In sum, sir, what are your ideas about God?”
I almost became visible again to the eyes of everyone. He, with an amazingly harmonious motion, had rolled onto his back. In all my life I have not seen, in all my long, interminable, and joyous life it has never been given to me to contemplate a visage as great, a face as completely ignoble as his.
“God?” he said. “What? But he is my father. Then you don’t know that in our family we are God from one generation to the next? Come, come; I see you still have much to learn on t
he subject of God.”
Inside, all was calm.
Outside life flowed smoothly, without hope or remorse, like the current of a piddling river. The sun spat everywhere, even on heaps of garbage. The street hoardings flamed around vacant lots for sale on easy terms. Speculation was nearing fever pitch. The level of the franc was falling. Extra precautions were being taken along the flowery banks of the Seine. As for me, I was asleep in my deep armchair. My ideas swarmed over my body like bedbugs voraciously seeking their fodder—everywhere except on my head. I was dreaming with extraordinary vigor, I was in a paroxysm of rage and at the peak of good fortune, but I was dreaming.
Suddenly he seized a Browning that never left his bedside and aimed this ruthless weapon at his inoffensive visitors.
“The villains, coming here to disturb the sleeper swathed in sheets of scorn! Young troublemakers on the trail of all the literary curiosities, all spiritual manna, they should have respected this corpse.”
In cemeteries, in the starry attics of the firmament, in cages full of wild beasts who never cease dreaming of the shadowless freedom of the desert, in the amply provided wine cellars of grand hotels, in the salons of high society and the cells of lowbrow society, everywhere a religious silence is kept.
If, in the pastures of the great mountains of Europe and the plowed lands of the plains of every country in the world, rumors fly like a hare hunted relentlessly along the furrows, this is still not a cause for shame.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 26
