The Man in a Hurry

by Paul Morand

  “The next one would finish me off?”

  “Oh, no…” said Regencrantz hesitantly.

  The conscientious doctor prevailed over his friend.

  “It’s very likely,” he said drily.

  Pierre raised his arms as though he were sinking.

  Pierre goes home.

  He is a prisoner here between his four walls.

  Up until now, the reassuring, breathing parts of a room for him are not the walls, but the doors and windows, because doors open onto what is new, doors allow you to leave; windows are friends; you can cast your eyes through windows, you can throw money out of them, you can communicate with the living. Pierre no longer expects anything at his door; he no longer pays any attention to that window that overlooks a labyrinth with no exit.

  He repeats the conversation with Regencrantz to himself: “Do you mean to say, Regencrantz, that the next time…?”—“It’s likely.”

  Not a trace of mobility or agility in Pierre any longer. He appears to be stuck in cement. He enjoys thinking, but he has lost his sensitivity, he no longer moves around. His footsteps seem as useless to him now as cries from the bottom of a dungeon.

  Everything is blocked. There are guards at all the exits. No means of escape.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  A DAGGER THRUST to the heart: the victim takes a few more steps before falling down dead. A great misfortune can strike and numb simultaneously in this way, paralysing our emotions and anaesthetizing the imagination, while our intelligence goes on ticking over.

  The physical assimilation of the disaster begins much later.

  We carry the impact within us like a deferred ending whose practical applications we lie in wait for as we glimpse the infernal machine.

  Pierre did not fall asleep until the morning. He had spent the night trying to comprehend, forcing himself to translate, no longer into words but into mental images, the great adventure he had embarked upon. He was not in pain, he was not shaking. It seemed to him that all this was happening to someone else. When sleep came, Pierre welcomed it like someone taking opium before enduring torture.

  At nine o’clock he woke with a start, thrown from his bed by that sinister music that had not left him when he was asleep and that kept repeating Regencrantz’s words: “It’s likely… it’s likely… it’s likely.”

  “What’s to become of me?” he said to himself out loud.

  Hearing his own voice piercing the silence, he was seized with a nameless terror. The threat of losing his mind suddenly loomed over him. For the first time, he considered how destructible he was, how easy to upset, how fated he was to be destroyed.

  “I am doomed.”

  He repeated these words, imagining his defeat, his decline and the advance of the invisible enemy towards him.

  He remembered stories about people sentenced to death: some show off and curse their executioners, some set themselves up as heroes, while others create fear around them. Pierre envied them: their death had a human aspect at least, a human cause, a date set by human will-power. They are part of what is known and is even commonplace. It is men who have convicted them, men who will come to their aid or who will execute them. Up until their final moment, they will be dealing with men, men for them to plead with or stand up to.

  He was entirely on his own and was waiting for something that was absolutely impossible for him to imagine.

  “A masked death,” he wondered.

  He leant against the wall, his eyes staring. Before him, on the tablecloth, set out lovingly the previous day, lay his most recent acquisitions: a gilt chalice, a sacramental ambry, a length of Sicilian silk.

  “What am I going to do with all these?” he said to himself with a perplexed air.

  Mechanically, he unfolded the silk, the colour of dried blood.

  “It’s like the colour of Hedwige’s dress.”

  The thought of Hedwige struck him with such force that he staggered. He felt pain for the first time. It was so unbearable that he feared he might die then and there. The frightened reaction of someone who was very ill spurred him towards his bed where he lay down, breathing carefully.

  The mid-morning sun warmed his feet, but he no more felt it than he heard the sparrows singing or the pair of doves cooing. With open eyes, he carefully preserved the calm expected from darkness and closed eyelids. A sense of peace came over him suddenly, the doldrums of the tropics, when the sails of yachts are limp and their reflection in the still water looks like a vampire with its head hanging down from the ceiling.

  Fear had left him; fear projects itself into the future and for the time being it was impossible for him to think of the future. A fleeting joy came over him at the thought that his death was a purely individual adventure and one that would only happen to him. (Morally and materially, Hedwige was taken care of.) Was it because death was to cut the thread of his days so prematurely that fate had caused him to live alone so much?

  “I’m going to have to organize my life,” he said.

  The absurdity of this remark made him smile.

  “Organize what is already no longer… And yet if I were a believer, what wonderful days would lie ahead!”

  A phrase of Turenne’s came back to him: “I should like to place some time between my life and my death.” Pierre had moved into this no man’s land. It was up to him to make God’s kingdom out of it.

  But he had always lived without God. Uniquely focused on day-to-day realities, the materials for his future constructions, lacking any metaphysical anxieties and indifferent to death, which he never graced with a single thought, he neither denied nor accepted the afterlife; he was simply not bothered with it, having other things to do, frenziedly having to pursue a destiny that had now left him alone beside the grave.

  “I can’t go on automatically, like a doddering old fool, doing things that I won’t see completed. How shall I fill my time?” he asked himself in a loud voice.

  Ever since the previous day he had constantly been talking out loud, as if to disturb the silence before it became eternal, and also so as to remain on good terms with this outmoded self who would soon have no voice at all. When words are very solemn, one is inclined to say them aloud; and for Pierre, nothing could be light-hearted any more.

  “I was a man of action,” he said. “What shall I do now?”

  He forced himself to review the occupations that were still possible. For obvious reasons, almost everything was precluded: how could he do sport, go on journeys, take trips, do any gardening, do business, make plans? Even reading, for other people a relaxation, an education, a time for reflection and daydreaming, was an acute form of action for him, because he read so that he could take part wholeheartedly in the most spirited exploits of great sea captains, explorers, adventurers, his heroes.

  “Action presupposes the future before all else. Regencrantz has wiped out my future. The future was my life. How shall I live without life?”

  He felt himself lost in a foreign land, a land without clocks, a land whose language he knew nothing of because no one speaks there in hours, minutes and seconds, a land in which present-day money no longer has any currency, where the words “precede”, “follow”, “early”, “late” no longer have any meaning. He seemed to have lost all depth. Something vital, something essential had deserted him.

  “It’s funny,” he said dreamily, “I have the feeling that I’ve been operated on by myself.”

  Not for a moment did he think of looking after himself in the way the doctor had prescribed. Whether he died immediately, in a month, in three months, what did it matter? Even yesterday, the future was for him an infinite space in which his fearless momentum was driving him beyond all weariness. Placing a limit on infinity was to deny it and to instantly destroy the patient.

  “I am in a void in which I recognize nothing. I’ve been marooned in mid-ocean, without any possible rescue, on a rubber mattress…”

  Pierre was amazed that he did not feel the distress of someone who i
s shipwrecked. An entirely new feeling of apathy came over him and caused his eyelids to droop. He dozed off.

  He had a dream: he was dead and he was keeping watch over himself, astonished to see a Pierre Niox who no longer moved. It was appalling, this body solidified by the disappearance of life, this man in a hurry suddenly pinned, weighed down for all eternity. With a knife, he opened the veins of this corpse and saw that no blood flowed. In one of those symbolic puns that are the wordplay of dreams, Pierre murmured:

  “The man who was squeezed for time really has been squeezed to the last drop!”

  Rooted to the spot, he contemplated his funeral mask, his wordless mouth, his soft, pasty flesh and that inner smile, half mocking, half blissful, that the dead have. That expectation, so full of hope, which had been his life’s true companion, had deserted him. His speed of motion had forsaken him… And nobody would ever know how quick he had been!

  “How are you feeling?” Pierre asked his double, and the latter responded without opening his plump white, swollen eyelids, which looked like poached eggs.

  “Well. Still much calmer.”

  Pierre awoke with a start and remembered his dream. It was true that nobody would ever know how quickly he had been able to move. No one would ever be grateful to him for the efforts he had made always to be more dextrous and more nimble. He would watch enviously as flowers were laid on the tombs of the great men who were his neighbours. “I, too, was a hero in a way, a sunny and invigorating man,” he would cry out, “and one who has cracked the whip a good deal to bring nature out of her rut! I, too, had some merit!” But they would pass by without hearing him.

  He had lived too quickly to be noticed.

  The telephone rang for a very long while, so long that Chantepie himself heard it and rushed in:

  “Monsieur is not replying to the phone?”

  “No. Switch it off. Tell the concierge that I’m away to any callers. I don’t want to see anyone. You yourself, Chantepie, make yourself as invisible as possible.”

  Pierre remained alone in the empty apartment, alone with a lucid intelligence sustained by a sick heart in which the blood that normally gushed from left to right only came in dribs and drabs. All the time, he could see on the wall, as he had on Regencrantz’s screen, a large, dense aorta, petrified and almost rock-like. All he could feel in his body was his ever-watchful heart, balanced precariously on its tip, like a spinning top. For how long would the little oscillating movement continue to function?

  Every evening, after going to bed, lying in the silent house as he did when he used to wait in vain for Hedwige, Pierre vaguely wondered why he felt shattered. What treasure had he been robbed of? Yes, it was true that due to swift action, due to the hasty procedure, carried out with more devastating speed than any of his own efforts, something had ended the moment Regencrantz’s head had nodded, something that was no doubt his raison d’être. Pierre was just beginning to sense that that indefinable thing was Time, his beloved Time, which was deserting him.

  He owed everything to time: his originality, his verticality, his expansiveness. In losing that quantifiable ether that he strode through in buoyant, joyful leaps, he had lost everything.

  “Now,” he told himself, “begins the harsh ordeal of surviving, of persevering, of waiting. Me, waiting!”

  Over the following evenings, Pierre did not go to bed, preferring to spend the night in an armchair. He did not dare lie down for fear of hearing his heart thumping; as soon as he laid his ear on the pillow, he could nevertheless detect, in the silence of the night, that rumble of thunder, scarcely audible though it was, that terrified him. He remembered the last moments of old Boisrosé, with his mouth open like a fish at the bottom of a boat and that halting breathing of a dying man; the Mas Vieux clearly did not bring happiness.

  The thirsty runner, who swallowed up the hours like an ogre and drank up the miles as the earth drinks water, had already come to a stop. He had been blamed enough for being mechanical! With the machinery now broken, the car in the ditch, the motor reduced to silence, Pierre could have walked through a countryside full of gentle creatures and left behind these petty squabbles with human beings that his weaknesses had landed him in. But his fading strength no longer provided him with the means.

  Rather than regret a happiness he had never experienced, Pierre might have felt remorse for having sought his sensual pleasures in speed and for having mowed down everything in his way had not merciful fate made him the gift of a child. In the hands of this creature still to be born, he would leave his debit balance and the task of paying his debts to a world that from now on would continue without him.

  Once upon a time Pierre used to go to bed without going to sleep; now he went to sleep without going to bed. Sitting up all night, his eyes open, he watched the calm intensifying.

  Each morning he repeated the same activities; he washed very slowly, contemplating with disinterest his dumb-bells, which were the same shape as the globe is on the opening pages of atlases, in just the same way as he considered the world itself, without any desire to lift them up any more. Then he would go out and walk along the banks of the Seine at a strolling pace, at times when there are no pensioners around, times when you meet no one apart from fishermen with rods and old men wearing capes, their white silk scarves knotted beneath their white beards, and who look after small children in garden squares. At the age of thirty-five, he was experiencing the De Senectute and he was walking about like an old man raising his gaze to look at the houses.

  Having become extremely frail himself, it was the outside world that now seemed to him antiquated and destructible.

  “It’s unbelievable how everything has changed!”

  And day by day, he grew increasingly weary of it.

  He could feel the soothing sensation invade his being, which no longer struggled, even though his entire life, on the contrary, had been nothing but struggle and his powerful, essential warmth had come from the friction of his personality with the wind, with men, with everything that stood in his way. Today, even the memory of this heroic revolt against enemy forces had been obliterated. Vanquished, he let drop his weapons. It was a kind of joyous defeat that he fully supported. He possessed true despair, which is to say that total absence of hope that resignation and peace bring, not that violent regret, wrongly termed despair, in which a shadow of hope is concealed, just enough to prolong our resistance and our dreadful convulsions.

  Ever since the day when, having passed a local ambulance with its flag, its bell and its frosted-glass windows, he had imagined himself falling down in the road, being picked up and dying on the spot, Pierre no longer went out.

  “I must live a further fortnight,” he thought to himself.

  The time required to see, to observe his child, to hand him the “baton” in that relay race in which father and son run against time.

  Frightened of stairs, wary of steps, terrified even of pavements, he stayed at home without stirring so that he, too, could be sure of surviving. From his bed, he watched the purple showers, the iris-coloured clouds, the shafts of harsh light over Paris, and, in a direct line with the dome of the Invalides, the Eiffel Tower adorning the Montsouris park with a grid of iron mesh.

  All his expectations were dead and buried and his frenzy had abated. His nights were spent reading. He rediscovered Bossuet: at the lycée, he had come to adore the great panoramas replete with the smell of incense and gunpowder, those broad glimpses of the lives of children of the nobility that “show all the extremes of human affairs”. Today, he preferred to pause over the less dazzling passages, on the muted pages in which Bossuet’s voice subsides after his outbursts: “The shepherd finds and captures his lost sheep…”

  Leading an empty and limited life, only one view remained to him—the sky, the sky in which he discovered, reflected in vapours, all the earthly attractions of the world he was about to leave, flags, cathedrals, swollen snowscapes, islands in the ocean, continents that formed before one’s e
yes and unravelled a moment later; all those shapes that one recognizes in passing here on earth and that quickly fade away, flooded him with their unreality.

  What detachment! He remained lying on his back, like the sleeper in summer, never wearying of searching for excellence behind the fleeting clouds. One day he found it.

  Then, prepared to be patient, he stood ready to wait for She who is always on time for her appointments.

  A phone call from Amyot: Hedwige, transported to rue Mozart, had had a daughter.

  Looking very pale, Pierre walked slowly, very slowly, down his staircase.

  “It would be too bad,” he thought, “if I were to collapse down there, if the guard going off duty were not able to give the password to the guard coming on… I am going to see my daughter and it’s important that between here and Auteuil nothing should happen to me.”

  He took his car, raised his foot from the clutch very gently, without letting his tyres, worn down from so much prior acceleration, skid. It was a time for saving money and looking after things. He was holding his steering wheel with an unsteady forefinger; anyone would have thought he was frightened of crashing on the way.

  He arrived at last at the clinic. It struck him as remarkable that a man who was about to die should come and haunt the district of Paris in which most children are born.

  He stopped at the porter’s office and had him make a phone call. He was asked to come up.

  He crossed a garden area where nurses were taking the air and where convalescents were manoeuvring themselves about in their own wheelchairs (this method of crawling along made him shudder).

  He walked along corridors where trays of stewed apple and biscuits, and bunches of roses removed from rooms overnight, were laid out on tables, among different-sized vases and burettes.