Silence has been requested of you in this bedroom open to the sky where the deceased is sleeping, glory is half-asleep on a divan, fortune’s head is propped against a tub, disease draws her bony hands across the ravines of her bosom. You might at least have walked on tiptoe when approaching this giant billionaire banker who is crushing his twenty-fourth leather club chair to death under him. That is how one wins major battles. No one would dare to express in our presence the slightest doubt concerning the generosity of generals, when it’s a question of deeding over the living chattels of the Earth. One’s capital. A capital grant without security.
Yet he’s there, our man, overflowing, napping in the shadow of an opulent cigar. The reporter has approached him respectfully. Hat in hand, he moves forward, circling that fortress of finance. Not without valor or ruse, without strength or cunning, without talent or an appointment made in advance does one approach a man protected by several layers of walls and salons, guarded by swarms of maids and valets who buzz around his plate—but that doesn’t annoy him, he doesn’t bother to shoo them away with his napkin—who sleeps sheltered from the bitter cold of the street, at the end of the mysterious galleries of the apartment building, in a secret honeycomb cell, like a worm.
The courageous reporter has approached nonetheless, and is now within earshot; he can hope that his voice, correctly aimed, will manage to pierce the cavity of that august ear. And now, adroitly unfurling his spring-loaded courage, he asks in a firm voice what the man has been waiting for beneath his cigar, forever.
And the latter, lifting without too much effort the less weighty of the two lids of his glowering eyes, answers him placidly.
“I, in this puny land of the chosen few bodies, I await the resurrection of the flesh.”
Really, it’s hardly worth being awakened first thing in the morning by acids, yielding like stars to that horrible seesawing of love in the turbines of the night, or spending one’s time under globes of fire, between the vacillating haloes of pallid faces, running after hot vehicles that drain the fog.
It’s hardly worth it, really.
So you, there, you think it’s nothing?
You’re walking along the highway at night. You have only a vague idea of where you’re headed, having received no certain information concerning your itinerary. Where will you sleep tonight, where will you die someday? You don’t know exactly what degree of longitude and latitude you are occupying on this gnarled praline that barely tolerates you and that you tolerate even less. But you’re beginning to be really tired; the rain that has fallen all day hasn’t rendered the going easier; you stumble at each step. No light in the distance, the immense plain surrounds you, solitude, somber thoughts. Abruptly you sense a presence behind you. Little by little the feeling that you are being followed takes shape, you don’t dare to turn around. With a dull rumbling sound a very heavy step spatters the puddles, squashes the ruts’ smudges. A powerful breath stirs the leaves and begins to make your ears tremble. The poplars groan gently in their mother tongue, the oaks puff out their powerful chests and flex their biceps, the willows, shamefaced old men or squalid philosophers, bow their dented foreheads under their disheveled hair.
You hear voices, voices that whisper to you of good, that preach evil to you, voices of women hoarse with debauchery. They are perhaps not so much voices as pangs that rend your stomach, your heart, your abdomen, they are black veils, heavy silences, inextricable knots of conscience.
Suddenly you realize you are being escorted by a building nine stories tall. You think that’s nothing, do you? A metallic fear seizes you like a bale of oats in the terrible hurricane of the threshing machine, madness turns in a heavy spiral around your head and down to the base of your spine.
Finally you arrive at a crossroads; at one corner is a wayside shrine, a cross. The building stops, takes the place of the cross. A door opens. You go in.
There, all the doors are hermetically sealed, hidden behind tapestries. There are no windows and the walls don’t form right angles, but an arena whose tiers are lined with seats. It is there that all the spectators of this assembly take their places, all silent actors in this scene. Now a moment of calm allows one to observe certain differences of rank shared by these shadows whom one had at first thought equal in the eyes of the law. But this difference is more the result of traces of manners and customs of the other world that have been conserved and introduced here under the simple trappings of appearance. For on this side of the medal all is but appearance, deliciously unreal. Nonetheless, freed of all earthly obligations and influences, every hierarchical constraint had disappeared, all subordination was extinct. One witnesses in all its simplicity this marvelous spectacle of men whose image retains the air of grandeur or baseness that nature had imposed on them, while the liberated soul no longer conforms to that image. However, on closer inspection one perceives that this soul hasn’t totally forgotten its sojourn on Earth either, that it has retained certain minor flaws. Sometimes the shadows quarrel, sometimes a black wave of hatred invades their ideal forms, which then become more opaque, though not so much so that one can’t perceive what is going on in their hearts.
Soon one perceives also that the apartments of this strange house are lit by stars, incalculable numbers of which line the ceilings. And this light is so gentle and at the same time so intense that one can tolerate it night and day without being disturbed by it, and one can distinguish perfectly the least details of the anxieties, the hands and the faces of the last spectators seated at the top of the amphitheater, despite its enormous dimensions. However, it is true that here all estimates of distance are altered.
There is no longer any common measure between the one who sees and the one who is seen; between the one who speaks and the one who hears. Confusion and doubt continually guide our steps. Pleasure is king in the vacuum. Soon a marvelous, limpid, and dazzling chime is heard in the distance, marking the hour.
But within this music whose harmonies are so new, it is never possible to take into consideration the concept of number. Time is no longer divisible. Remarks flow along the surface of the ether, and the cruelest witticisms float motionless on their wings for a long time. Without the law of gravity all this gratuitous gossip would vanish into sparks. But here everything becomes luminous; like a brutal shepherd the magic lamp chases away the shadows. The walls are rays, gestures are more luminous in this world where only images live. On the slopes, groups of people mingle among the cliffs and springs of this magnificent landscape.
Memories younger than life blossom in the trees. Others flow along the flowering streams. But beneath the black whirlwind of happiness the magisterial voice resumes, dominating the tumult. I, I too have banged my stricken forehead against the black rafters of hell.
But the safety of nature, which loves us with all its heart, has emerged from behind the wall and again taken up its trowel.
And if it chooses to listen to a purer song, and if it chooses to surpass the swallows?
Far from wishing to weaken that gift of internal crises which lay the groundwork for the future, that heaviness of mysterious disturbances of ideas and feelings, those disconcerting anticipations absolutely disproportionate to the struggles of real life, our plan is to cultivate to its furthest limit a certain power of penetrating the future, of forgetting the past, of calculating the weight of the secret motives that cause men to act. Whatever may befall at the end of all our deeds, in that nebulous atmosphere that reigns between our hands, between our wrinkles, from the breast to the heart, from the heart to the stomach, and from the stomach to the soul, among our most distant friends, among our tenderest enemies, we shall never abandon the helm that has allowed us to travel as far as the moist and trembling lips of the harbor of love while avoiding death. Still, we shall not lose sight of that extremely fine line that so cruelly slices through transparency.
Isn’t it true that between these andirons, against the ashes, one senses a delightful warmth? And this pot of geraniums
at the casement window that gave the signal to the sailor who was passing along the road? He came in, the childish voyager whose eyes, on opening, let fall all the images and all the tales of his long sojourns in distant countries. How he sleeps, now, against the ashes! A charming warmth reigns, the curtains are drawn over the casement giving on the harbor. No one else will come, now. The lamp is extinguished. Everyone is asleep.
But outside, calamity will be unleashed. For there is a time that wants uncontrollably to go back, even though the most responsible inhabitants and tenants are unwilling to agree that it’s too late. Decidedly, nothing dies, nothing wants to die at one and the same time.
For a trifle one would let one’s head, one’s heart, one’s arm go off in all directions, even though there are still some who want to keep the rest and make do with that.
The old emperors, the old kings, the honorific rosettes, the unexpected windfalls, the noble profiles of those who lack rigor, the brief disgrace, the kepis which would still look so well on certain heads. All that is degraded and dead.
Yet still they battle, they come around walls, they point to airplanes scattered in the olive trees among the cicadas, they drag decapitated bodies into the gutters, they rise up against judges and curb the law like the arch of a bridge for a parade of uniforms of half-mourning, at half price.
Finally time is threadbare, a cast-off coat at the rag merchant’s.
Besides, all those old sleeves have their stripes. And henceforth no one will be seen without stripes—whole pagoda sleeves of stripes.
He who cries out with joy tonight, on the jagged ice of the pavement, has a hole in his forehead, but he won’t die; farther down he has a red wound under the sun of people’s glances—the other one too—but no one looks at him.
Will we be forced to hide someday when, having grown timid and totally ruined, we won’t have even the celestial right to utter a word? Prisoners in the glowing circles, we’ll have only splinters of that overripe glory, that preference for things that set us apart from the others and fashion us a Venetian frame out of sword blades. The voices are piling up into a storm and roaring at the gate of the courtyard.
Everyone would like to get in so as to find a prey that’s easy to strike down without risk, under the heroic rainbow of so many cowards.
At present all those friendly hands, those living profiles, that laughter, those impulsive gestures are entangled in shadows. A fasces of faces laughing and bright as swords clanks in the darkness. Where did I lose you, loving glances? Who stitched your lips together over your teeth, laughing mouths?
Ebony streams are flowing in the ruts, and on either side shapeless birds fly up out of the hedgerows. Their cries mingle with the clamor of the wind and of sheets flapping in the wind, on the wall and against one’s face. The air becomes heavy, the sky descends. It’s a terrible stretch to travel alone, repelling all the assaults that arise simultaneously from everywhere, from all the countries, all the colors, the facial features that resemble you so strongly. One must pass, certain of receiving no recompense, nowhere and never.
Certainly it’s not for lack of a sufficient motive that we have always, in our flight from sorrow, left behind the largest and most valuable pieces of our luggage. Of course nothing is hidden from us, nor, on the other hand, is anything totally revealed to us of what we so urgently needed to know. Yet for better or worse we have, without excessive wincing, lived through the heaviest period of our role.
If a mysterious messenger came to tell you, as you were emerging from sleep, at the moment you were slowly traversing that isthmus of torpor that links the syncope of thought to the lucid vibrations of the evening before, “Don’t you want to stay?” wouldn’t you experience the long-premeditated impulse to abruptly turn back? Like an expert diver who gently slips into the depths that hide buried treasures, pulling the liquid sheets up to his chin, wouldn’t you go back to retrieve the featureless happiness at the bottom of the empty and unlit tabernacle? But if a nightmare grinds down the verdant moss of the reefs behind your eyelids, if broken lances stain with blood the grooves of your forehead, when the corners of the salty lips of Earth tremble at their juncture with the continents, what slackening breaks the ice that imprisons your hands, the tender hearts of nocturnal lettuce beneath the skidding of steady animals, as dawn the laundress straightens the mortal folds of your frozen curtains?
Outside, due to the market-garden hour, subversive songs are muffled under felt soles, guided through deserted streets between manifestations of bifurcated patriotism that causes the public washhouses to be hung with bunting. Numbers roll under windows overflowing with work when the sun jams its rays into the lock.
It’s the awakening of eyelashes, of bayonets twisted in brawls, of knives stabbed into the panels of doors, and the ripping up of the asphalt linings between shop windows still heavy with sleep. But be patient; your hour will come, your eyes will open on the misunderstood hypnosis of faith, the shadows of mouthless winter will dissipate under the warmth of the joyful firebrands of summer’s straw torches.
Someday, the mind carefully concealed under erasures will have ceased to believe that its place, like that of nests, is in the bushes. Then along towpaths, the halos, goods on display, horse-drawn carts, we’ll discover a thousand reasons to go back to those antiquated and uncomfortable coaches that today we no longer see circulating from stage to stage in Paris at night, and which are no longer used to transport the salad that grows between the paving stones of the city—that’s why today they are called baskets.2
And at the vital turning points of paganism, on the multicolored highways of peace, we’ll hear again the lively cracking of whips, the postilions’ insults, we’ll see again the sudden ambushes in denuded gorges, in the mountain passes of fear. And inspiration, that free wheel of the spirit, will go off to rejoin the secret calculations of chance, glued to the endless study of lists of the chosen and the condemned, pushing back the edges of forests.
For the moment, in basements and attics, numerous prisoners are moaning in pain. They are on fire. With bloody limbs they implore the end of tortures worthy of times hardly more barbaric than these. They demand the glass of water to which they are entitled. They cry out. But no one answers them. No distinct voice leaves their eternal throats and no merciful ear hears them. The conflagration that erupts in that enigmatic house with its sculpted passages, its secret galleries, is a fire of consuming mystery, an internal heat which incubates under the ashes of life, under the beams of the thorax, in the incandescent organs of breath whose rare flashes illuminate all the miseries of egotism; what are you asking of the ground, majestic thought; what do you anticipate from that adding machine, truant intelligence? Whether the sky is less big than the eye. Whether the sun is darker than the lair, how to cut the thread that is now fastened to the walls of the labyrinth, now that it leads to the wonderful current that makes it swell as blood swells the vein and it goes from lamp to lamp, wrapping around the lightning. How to escape from an elemental rivalry that’s so cunning, see daylight again, run across bridges, reconnect the floating thongs of the banks?
When he comes down from the clouds, from the needles of the hill where the sun plays in the mirrors of the lighthouse—he will find the house empty. Wind and the water’s iron filings will have swept everything away! If he wants to follow in our footsteps, the rain will have effaced them. The last lightning flash to chip the horizon will tell him that we are already too far away—and he will climb the mountain that the tortures of thunderbolts have spared. Who then is that illustrious physician, with a brain of cork shriveled by a too-long sojourn in northern colonies devastated by gunpowder and bullets, back when it was always hunting season, who claimed that a bird can maintain itself in air while resting as inert as a stone? We were then in the good old days of sail flying (which, by the way, nobody mentions anymore). The helixes of pallid pretentiousness congested the pia-matral meninx of that barely unhooped brain. Under the bull’s brow of that gigantic mo
und of soft sand one could watch, unaided by any magnifying apparatus, the germination, though very slow and excessively sparse, of generous ideas, still however only insofar as they related strictly to the needs of its own existence.
Reader, as you read me, don’t you experience a fecund joy as you tell yourself that you are one of the rare beings who can still give yourself, with a modicum of pleasure, to that perilous exercise? Be you stretched out on a sordid pallet, in a sunless hovel, swathed in cold and avid only of self-instruction, or languorously reclining on a downy divan in a nook of some elegant and discreetly perfumed salon, if you are alone, and whether it be intrepid electricity which supplies you with light or the vacillating flame of a miserable candle, and with the sole aim of diverting yourself, savor at its true cost the unctuous sip of pride with which this attention may be capable of flattering your finicky palate.
Ruled by the dimensions of the frame of that page and of his complete works, whose limits nothing in the world could persuade him to exceed, the novelist begins to describe a room in that disquieting building wherein a certain number of the peculiar events of our era have taken place. But as he is about to enter he hesitates and takes a step backward, for in that bedroom where the eye of the most penetrating observer would distinguish at first glance nothing more than a shaving brush, an iron pedestal table, a lead mirror, and a chair whose rush seat has caved in, groans a soul eternally condemned to remove from its cheeks with a nicked razor the down of long sentimental considerations that continually comes to tarnish them.
Nothing is simpler for a free man wishing to charm his summer leisure than to transport himself on the stout, canvas-covered wings of his imagination to the center of the Beauce region (those who don’t know the Beauce are advised to go there—they won’t regret the trip).3 It’s there, under a chilly, starless sky, darker in the night than my mood, amid geometric hectares, that stands the formidable building which has already been referred to somewhere. Vigilant electricity vibrates at all the windows. And the house stands like a bar of flame in the night. Behind the house is a lake—on the shore of the lake a man is asleep. After waiting a long time he fell asleep and when the noise of the orchestra ceased, wakened by the silence, he slowly raised his eyelids. He no longer has any memory of his sojourn at the edge of the pond unless it’s, in his eyes, the incessant movement of the waves wriggling in the sun and the burning bruises contracted at the touch of that fascinating sheet of liquid metal. He doesn’t understand how one can live outside the limits of that unknown land where the echoless well of unchaste truth is sleeping. But how to get out of the enchanted ring of this fortress and reach the outside world again, and beyond the encircling wall of the mystery that is barely stirred by the innocent flight of doves?
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 27
