by Unknown
their incomprehensible muteness. We even believed that the ones who had been domestics for the longest time were entirely deprived of senses, that they had no ears and could not see or smell, and some spoke of repul sive creatures whose heads had dried up or came to resemble that of a serpent. This was all quite mad; we finally realized it when, at the height of our delirium, no longer able to flee from the monstrous being coming our way, we rushed toward him, threw ourselves at his feet, kissed him in convulsions, and finally regaining a little calm in exhaustion, we perceived that most of the changes were imaginary and that the once cherished face was only contorted by fatigue, hunger, and servility. Naturally such mo ments of recognition did not succeed in bringing us to our senses. What did it prove? That some of those to whom we ascribed the role of domes tics were only tenants like us and were as frightened and confused as we were? We knew that; we knew it all too well. For our utter inability to dis tinguish, by signs that were truly convincing, between the servants and the people they were supposed to serve led us gradually to another be lief that created even more disorder. We believed that the domestics did not exist, that they had never existed, and that our imaginations alone had given birth to the story of this accursed caste whom we made responsible for our ills. This was a sort of revelation that, while liberating us, almost led to the ruin of the house itself, this house that had remained unshakable amidst our follies, that seemed to disdain them and to cast them back into nothingness. When the thought that we had been fooled in this way took hold of our minds - there is always some great collective movement being stirred up here -we were blinded by a terrible anger and threw ourselves into frightful excesses. If we had maintained a little reason, our indigna tion would only have turned us against ourselves and against those who had given themselves over to this lamentable comedy. But it was not so. Rather, there were some among the sick whom we hated -we hate them all but those in particular with their calm and satisfied air, with the hap piness they seemed to have found, these drove us mad - certain of these were beaten and tortured; we wanted to tear from them their secret; we de sired that they too be shown the truth and that, stripped of the consoling thoughts that were lacking to us, they would cease to be a gateway of con tagion and moral uncleanliness. We tormented them in vain and could not make them understand what this gang of furious men was trying to reveal to them with blows and shouts, and soon we passed on to even more for81
midable projects. The thought in all our minds - but why? what drove us to this tragic extravagance? it's a mystery -was that we must transform the house from top to bottom. Some said that we had been victims of the de fective arrangement of the building, that we had allowed ourselves to be af fected by these dark rooms, by these hallways that lead nowhere, that there should no longer be any separate floors, that we would make new windows and knock down walls, and countless other crazy ideas. It was insane, for the house did not belong to us, and up until then we had found it admi rably laid out; we were at a loss for words to appreciate its harmony; we sang its praises from morning till night. But all these judgments were for gotten. In an instant we were seized with a fury of destruction that drove us to annihilate what we loved the most. And yet when we saw certain mani acs hurling themselves against the doors to break them down, grabbing hold of chairs to demolish the walls, or even attacking them by kicking and scratching, we had the courage to stop them. Standing before this dis tressing spectacle, how could we not have realized our error? And yet, on the contrary, it only led us to conceive a more grandiose project, one that was apparently more reasonable but that, by pretending to apply logical rules to an incoherent undertaking, contained more madness even than the vain and absurd revolt of our companions. In order to avoid the dis orders caused by individual initiatives, we wanted to draw up a plan of the entire house, a plan that would reveal the errors we needed to correct and that would allow us to take on our task to the fullest extent. Was this really the thought that guided us? It's possible, so lost were we to all moderation and good sense. But as soon as we began to discuss our project, we also saw the desire that dwelt in our hearts, and our faces turned red with shame. "What's this!" one of us said. "Do we not have the right to know the house? Why would we be forbidden to visit any part of it? Are we not tenants of the entire building?" Thus seeing that each one of us had been stopped by the same remorse, we hardly had the strength to say yes to our compan ion. In truth, how could we admit that he was right? Did we not know that in one of its most important clauses our tenant's contract authorized us only to occupy a single room, to use the common spaces in an appropriate manner, and, in cases of necessity, to stay over in the rooms of tenants who live on the same floor? It had never occurred to us to dispute this clause, for habit had rendered it unassailable, and we took it as our duty never to visit any floor other than our own. We were allowed to come and go only 82
on the level at which our residence had located us. It was forbidden to go upstairs or downstairs. In practice, however, certain exceptions became customary. Since the use of the large meeting rooms was granted to us, and since almost all of these rooms are on the ground floor, everyone had access to this level. Likewise, on the first floor, where most of the inhabit able rooms are located, the bizarre layout of the building -which had no doubt gone through several different periods of construction - the large number of stairways, the absence of any separation between this level and the ground floor had forced the majority of tenants to disregard a prohibi tion they had no way of observing. Was it always possible to know whether one lived on the first floor or on the mezzanine? Did one not have to walk from one place to another over floors that were slightly inclined and that the hallways, the famous hallways, prevented one from seeing clearly? All these reasons had mitigated the contract to the point of making us unaware of the inconveniences it imposed on us. It was enough in any case to be roughly familiar with the plan of the building -there could of course be no question of entering into details - to understand that the more reason able tenants must have had no idea of the curiosities that were forbidden to us. First, there was the basement. The basement had very limited means of access. The only way to reach it was by a stairway half rotted by damp ness, and since the way down fell sharply into the void, we had no desire to risk a fall in order to visit a place that repelled us more than it attracted us. Indeed, the basement had, and still has, a bad reputation. Whether be cause of the kitchens that had been set up there, or because the people who inhabited this somber and isolated part of the building were all quite un pleasant, we came to believe that whoever lived there did not belong to the house: they were too close to the street; it was only possible for them to live and die far away from us. Besides, we were not explicitly barred from the basement floors, and the existence of the kitchens, though they had long been abandoned, granted us the freedom to go there, a right that some of us took advantage of, as I told you, under conditions that did not increase our desire to imitate them. But the higher floors were a different ques tion altogether. The prohibition applied to them especially, and at bottom applied only to them. We were banished from them forever. A strange re striction, no doubt, but at bottom it did not seem strange to us. These two floors, like the attic rooms above them, are so completely separated from the rest of the building, their means of access are so far away from ours -
they are connected to the neighboring house and can be entered only by its stairway - that it no more occurred to us to set up residence there or even to visit them than it occurred to us that we had rights to every build ing on the street since we lived in one of its houses. This thought put our minds at rest, or at least it had done so for the older tenants, who had re spected the contracts all their lives. But for us, it was as if we had already felt how tenuous the reasons for our obedience had become, and we could only add to such a restriction other more formidable prohibitions. We did not dispute the agreement we had signed. On the contrary, we were filled with dread to think that we had been given the opport
unity to break it. For if it was true that there were no ordinary passages between the two parts of the house, it was also true that there was a stairway common to both which might be put back into service at any moment. Nothing, not even a posted sign, warned the tenants that they would be punished if they went beyond the ideal line, which passed constantly through their minds. Sometimes we would stop in front of this stairway simply to look. But was even this much allowed? Did we have the right to raise our eyes? Whatever point vision could reach, imagination had already passed beyond it, and our imagina tions did not cease their efforts to climb higher and higher. For a long time what calmed our desires was the fact that we were unsure whether some of us might actually live in these heights. It was difficult to believe, but not im possible. What did the contract say? That each person must live where his home is, an elementary moral principle, and that door-to-door relations, so to speak, were permitted under duress, which was easily explained by concerns to establish a neighborly rapport and to encourage mutual aid. Access to meeting halls remained unrestricted. In that case it was possible to believe that certain tenants who took part in the common gatherings you see how numerous we are; how could we all know one another? -were among these privileged people, and it was only a matter of finding out who they were and questioning them. Of course, there were a few who tried to pass themselves off as those we called the unknowns. But they were quickly unmasked. At the same time, and even though such measures were repug nant to us, we kept up a discreet surveillance of the stairway to see if any one ever came down. No one ever did. But did that really prove anything? Our surveillance was not complete; we were too scared; as soon as we heard a noise, wherever it might be, we disappeared, though it was precisely at such a moment that surveillance would have been necessary. In short, we
had to limit ourselves to the stories that went around concerning the mys tery of the upper floors and that, we weren't sure why, seemed unbelievable to everyone. It may be that there were too many of these explanations. It would have been impossible to count them all. Each of us had his own way of interpreting things that even he didn't believe in, though he would have defended it as fiercely as if he were defending his life. I will only tell you about a few of them. Some said that these floors had been abandoned after an epidemic that could be attributed to the filthiness of the place. Others said that they were inhabited by terribly sick people and that the conta gion condemned them to isolation. These were very widespread notions. But there were many others. People said that the upper apartments were infinitely more beautiful and more finely furnished than ours and that the prohibition against visiting them was based on the desire not to attract too many tenants and not to inspire jealousy in the ones who could not live in them. People said that these apartments were reserved for scholars and men of knowledge who needed calm and silence for their studies. They also said that the restriction was only a ruse of the staff, who lived there peacefully and comfortably without anyone ever daring to request their services. And they said that the apartments did not exist, that these floors did not exist, that there was only a fa<;:ade masking a void, since the house was never completed and would not be until much later when, after years and years of ignorance, the tenants finally understood the truth. We saw ourselves as the vessels of this truth. An extraordinary and ridiculous arro gance. But it was easy for certain ambitious men to enflame the people by announcing that their hour had come, that the veil had to be torn away by a generation that had already run roughshod over so many secrets. These speeches were delivered timidly at first but were soon taken up by everyone in concert, and they resounded through the halls with such violence that the walls trembled, and the entire house seemed to arise from its muteness into a language we did not understand. The more fearful souls tried in vain to draw our attention to these confused words that seemed to fall from the sky. Sometimes, in the far ends of the corridors, to which the echo slowly carried its sounds, we ourselves were surprised to hear our conversations repeated in indistinct rumblings that expressed their true, their repulsive nothingness. Were these even our words? And if they really were the words we had used as the instruments of our derangement, was it not permitted us to recognize them not as we believed we had spoken them but as the 85
house had heard them in its grave and mournful solitude? Although we were disturbed by a prophecy that rose from our hearts, this disturbance, far from holding us back, inspired us with new rages and new plans for vengeance, as if we had been assaulted by an enemy who had pursued us into the depths of our very selves. In a spirit of method and order that was like the victorious counterpart to our inner confusion, we made use, ac cording to their abilities, of all the tenants -at least the most courageous and daring among those we knew - and soon enough we had teams of masons, carpenters, and workers of every kind who were full of a zeal that burned to be seen. This preliminary work was not finished in a day. We threw ourselves into it with scrupulous attention; we continually started over in order to impose an ever more perfect discipline; there was no end to the exertions we thought necessary to avoid the errors that might have been fatal for us. It is possible that already we were anxious to find pretexts for delaying the completed work itself, for it was a terrifying prospect, but we were not aware of this. We only sought in our miserable way to dimin ish the grandeur and the impossibility of our task through reflection and foresight and through a preparation that was so complete that no difficulty was capable of putting it in danger. All this work in itself was very beauti ful; never before, or so it seemed, had knowledge and ingeniousness been taken so far. When it was torn apart and burned after the collapse of our pride, some of those who had helped make it, despite the shame and ter ror that had come over them, saw the work realized in a revelation whose beauty they could not conjure away and that fell back upon them like the derisory image of their hopes. And yet the large mass of those who did not understand the reasons for this long effort and who saw in the delays perhaps rightly - the expression of a supreme timidity ended up showing their impatience and threatening the discipline that we had taken so many pains to establish and that we still did not quite consider strict enough or altogether perfected. A revolt began to stir. Certain mediocre men, pre cisely those whose insufficient merits destined us to banal tasks and who were, so to speak, not of a piece with our troop, liberated themselves. One day we found them gathered together, and they told us that the wait had gone on long enough and that they were prepared at that very moment to go up to the higher floors to take the first necessary steps. "Madmen!" cried our leaders. "What folly has taken hold of you? Do you wish then to reduce all our efforts to nothing and to destroy yourselves in the pro86
cess? Anyone who leaves this room will be punished, and this punishment will exclude him henceforth from all communal work." But these threats and exhortations -while they made them afraid of losing the hope that spurred them on so ferociously- only managed to increase their anger, and they set out to execute their hateful plan. Then, already beaten, we began to implore them, trying to convince them of their error and their foolishness; we too were beside ourselves and were reduced to invoking the prohibition in the contract; we described to them the terrible dangers that tradition associated with these unknown places. Ridiculous memories. We had done all we could to destroy these legends and to render these super stitions innocuous. They answered us with mockery, and our behavior, so full of weakness and incoherence, shook our partisans and unsettled even ourselves. Soon the threshold was crossed. For a moment we wanted to follow them and to hold them back from any excesses, but whether it was fear that mounted within us, or whether our concern for our work out stripped every other thought, we decided to abandon them, and the door closed behind them. Alas, what we had foreseen was far surpassed in hor ror and malediction by what actually happened. First, the tum ult of their departure was followed by an extraordinary silence. We had not left the room, and we forced ourselves to continue working as usual- as though our work still had any s
ense. But already our minds condemned what our hands were doing. At the first noise we heard, we all stopped, silent and pale, casting glances toward the place from which the noise seemed to call to us. It's a strange fact, but the noise seemed to come from below, from the basement or from a place even more hidden away. One would have thought that somewhere in the foundations of the house there rose a voice that, without anger but with a terrible and righteous gravity, proclaimed our misfortune to all. But we hardly had the time to look around to see what each of us was thinking. From above there came cracking sounds, noises that were sometimes muffled, sometimes sharp, a grinding together of beams and planks. Well, what was this? Were they going to bring it down on our heads? And yet above us there were only the rooms of the first floor, a place that seemed untouched by any mystery. What was this unexpected danger? With what tragic and unpredictable effects would we all pay for our blindness and for the madness of a few? A new silence fell over our un certain thoughts. We did not have the courage to speak to one another; we remained motionless, as if a gesture, a shout would have been enough to
bring down upon us the fate that our obedience was still holding in place. At times, overcome with fear, we imagined hearing the crashing noise of a collapse, and our eyes saw the walls shaking and the drapery trembling. Absurd terrors that were only the first signs of a reality that was infinitely more terrible. We were abruptly shaken from our imaginary fright by a shock that rumbled through the entire house. Then we heard inhuman cries that could only be coming from a horrifying anguish. The light went out. Even more grave and powerful tremors reverberated in the upper spaces. We began to hear calls, but in truth they were so separated from us, and so distant, that they seemed not to be calling for us but saying farewell. And yet these cries awakened us, and we rushed to the door. Hardly had we opened it when a veritable quake shook the edifice, and in the middle of a deafening tumult, part of the ceiling of the large hall collapsed, bury ing our friends, our leaders, and the best part of our work. Today such moments seem incredible. Those of us who were not wounded were even more to be pitied than the dying. While those in their death throes, struck down at the high point of their dreams, believed they saw shining through the shadows the work for whose sake they had succumbed, the rest of us saw only the punishment, a punishment that was all the more unbearable in that we did not know how it had fallen upon us and could only attribute it to obscure powers, to invisible masters, to the law that had punished us because we had trespassed it. And yet what we believed to be the height of our misfortune was only the beginning. Soon we saw some of our unhappy companions returning. They were ragged and bloody. They collapsed at our feet; but others came in turn, trembling more than if they had wit nessed their own death, and childish tears coursed down their cheeks at the sight of us. These, however, were peaceful men, inhabitants of the first floor who had always refused to take part in our enterprise and who lived very retired lives. Why had they too been drawn into this madness at the last minute? For a long time we were unable to learn anything about it. We were all dead and alive, lying inanimately in the night. From time to time a few of the poor wretches returned, but if reason, in taking leave of them, had left the least trace on their countenance, we were unable to see it. It was only gradually that we returned to life, if one can call life the curse with which we were stricken. A man lying next to me was invaded by a wave of words. What he said to me was almost incomprehensible, but did I myself still possess the strength to understand? Have I ever re88
