But her name ... of course, of course I remembered, finally: it was Janair. And, looking at this hieratic drawing, I suddenly realized that Janair had hated me. I looked at the figures of the man and the woman, with the palms of their vibrant hands up and open, and they seemed to have been left there by Janair as a crude message for when I would open the door.
My discomfort was somehow amusing; had it never occurred to me that in Janair's silence there might have been a criticism of my life-style, which her silence must have labeled "a man's life"? how had she thought of me?
I looked at the drawing on the wall in which I was probably being portrayed ... I, the Man. And the dog . . . was that the name she was calling me? For years I had been judged only by my peers and by my own circle, which were, in the final analysis, made by myself for myself. Janair was the first outside person whose gaze I really took notice of.
Suddenly, with, now, real discomfort, I finally allowed there to come over me a sensation that, through negligence and lack of interest, I had for a good six months not allowed myself to have: the sensation of that woman's silent hatred. What surprised me was that it was a kind of free hate, the worst kind of hate: indifferent hate. Not a hate that individualized me but just the absence of all compassion. No, not even hate.
That was when I unexpectedly succeeded in remembering her face, but, of course, how could I have forgotten it? I pictured again her quiet, black face, pictured her completely opaque skin that seemed more like one of her ways of being silent, extremely well defined eyebrows, I pictured again the fine, delicate features that were barely discernible on the faded blackness of her skin.
The features —I discovered with no pleasure—were a queen's features. And her posture as well: her body, erect, slim, hard, smooth, almost fleshless, with no breasts, or ass. And her clothes? It wasn't surprising that I had used her as though she had no presence: under her small apron she always wore dark brown or black, which made her all dark and invisible—I shivered to discover that till now I hadn't noticed that that woman was an invisible woman. Janair had what was almost only an external form, the features within that form were so refined that they barely existed: she was flattened out like a bas-relief frozen on a piece of wood.
And was it inevitable that just as she herself was, so she saw me? abstracting everything unessential from the body that was me drawn on the wall and also seeing only my outlines. Curiously, however, the figure on the wall still reminded me of someone: myself. Besieged by the presence of herself that Janair had left in a room in my home, I noticed that the three angular zombie figures had in fact kept me from going in, as though the room were still being occupied.
I hesitated at the door.
Also because the room's unexpected simplicity disoriented me: in fact I wouldn't even know where to start cleaning up, or even if it was necessary.
I looked about, dispirited, at the minaret's nakedness:
The bed, from which the bedding had been stripped, had its dusty cloth mattress exposed, with big, faded blotches like from sweat or watery blood, old, pale blotches. Here and there, strands of thick horsehair came through the cloth, which was so dry it was rotten, and they stood straight up in the air.
Along one of the walls, three old suitcases were stacked in so perfect a symmetrical order that I had just now perceived their presence, since they didn't change at all the sense of the room's emptiness. On them, and on the almost effaced mark of a "G. H.," a silent, sedimented accumulation of dust.
And then there was the narrow wardrobe: it had only one door and was as tall as a person of my height. The wood, continually dried out by the sun, had broken open in slits and cracks. Had that Janair never closed the window? She, even more than I, had taken advantage of the view from the "penthouse."
The room was so different from the rest of the apartment that going into it was like leaving my own home and entering another. The room was the opposite of what I had created in my home, the opposite of the gentle beauty that came from my talent for arrangement, from my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, my sweet, disinterested irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a reference to myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.
And nothing there had been done by me. In the rest of the apartment the sun filtered in from the outside in soft beam after soft beam, the result of the interaction of heavy curtains and light curtains. But here the sun didn't seem to come from outside to inside: this seemed to be the place where the sun itself was, fixed and unmoving, with a harsh light, as though the room didn't close its eyes, even at night. Everything here was dissected nerves that had had their ends dried into wire. I had been prepared to clean up a mess, but this struggle with its absence disoriented me.
I noticed at that point that I was irritated. The room bothered me physically, as though the sound of the scratching of dry charcoal on the dried whitewash still hung in the air. The room's inaudible sound was like the sound of a needle going around on a record after the music had finished playing. It was the neutral thing-screeching that made up the matter of its silence. Charcoal and fingernails together, charcoal and fingernails, calm, compact fury on the part of the woman who was the representative of a silence as if she represented a foreign country, the African queen. And she had taken up lodging here in my home, that stranger, that indifferent enemy.
I asked myself if Janair had in fact hated me—or if it had been I who had hated her, without even looking at her. Just as I was now discovering with irritation that the room didn't just irritate me, I detested it, that cubicle with nothing but surfaces: its innards had dried and shriveled up. I looked around me with repulsion and despair.
Until I forced myself to take heart . . . and a certain violence: all this would have to be changed this very day.
The first thing that I'd do would be to haul down the hallway the few things that were left in the room. Then I would throw bucket after bucket of water into the empty room and let the harsh air drink it up, and finally I would wet down the dust until some moisture came into that desert, destroying the minaret that so haughtily topped a horizon of roofs. Then I would throw water onto the wardrobe, swamp it in a flood up to mouth-level—and then, then watch the wood start to rot. An unexplainable anger, but one that had come over me completely naturally, had taken hold: I wanted to kill something here.
And then, then I would cover that dry-straw mattress with a soft, cold, clean sheet, one of my own sheets with my initials embroidered on it, to replace the one that Janair must have thrown into the wash.
But before all else I would scrape that granulated carbon dessication off the wall, scratching the dog off with a knife blade, erasing the man's hands with the turned-out palms, destroying the undersized head of that hideous naked woman. And I would throw water and more water until it ran in streams down the clean-scraped wall.
As though I were looking at a photograph of the room after I had changed it back into mine and into me, I gave a sigh of relief.
Then I went in.
How can I explain it except that something was happening that I don't understand. What did that woman who was me really want? what was happening to a G. H. in luggage leather?
Nothing, nothing, it was just that my nerves were now on edge—my nerves that had been calm, or just organized? had my silence really been a silence, or a loud voice that is mute?
How can I explain it to you? Suddenly that whole world that was me was contracting from exhaustion, I couldn't stand carrying it on my shoulders any longer . . . it, what? and I gave in to a tension that had always been there but I didn't know it. At that time there were beginning to take place in me—and still I didn't know it—the first signs of the collapse of subterranean limestone caves that were falling in under the weight of stratified archaeological layers—and the force of the first collapse lowered the corners of my mouth, made my arms fall. What was happening to me? I shall never be able to understand it, but there must be someone
who can. And I shall have to create that someone who can inside myself.
In spite of having come into the room, I seemed to have come into a nothingness. Even inside it I somehow kept staying outside. As though it was not deep enough to hold me and left parts of me still in the hallway, in the greatest rejection I had ever experienced: I didn't fit.
At the same time, in looking at the low sky of the whitewashed ceiling, I felt I was suffocating with restriction and confinement. I needed my own home back. I forced myself to remember that I owned that room too, it was in my apartment: for I had walked to this room without leaving the apartment, without going up or down stairs. Unless there were some way of falling into a chasm horizontally, as if the building had twisted slightly and I had been tossed from door to door until I reached this highest one.
Stuck inside here by a web of spaces, I was forgetting the order that I had made up for getting things organized, and I didn't know for sure where to start. The room had no point that you could call its starting-place and none that you could call its end. It was of a sameness that made it undelimited.
I passed my gaze over the wardrobe, raised it to a crack in the ceiling, trying to get a better hold on that enormous, empty space. More boldly, but with no intimacy, I ran my fingers over the prickly mattress.
Then an idea came to me that gave me heart: the wardrobe, after it was well nourished with water, its fibers completely swollen out, I would wax it to give it some shine, and I'd even put a coat of wax on the inside, since it must be even more parched in there.
I opened the narrow wardrobe door a crack, and the dark inside came out like a breath of air. I tried to open it a little more, but the door was blocked because it hit against the foot of the bed. All of my head that would fit in I stuck through the crack that the door made. And, as though the darkness inside were spying on me, we remained for an instant spying on each other without seeing each other. I didn't see anything, I only noticed the hot, dry smell, like the smell of a live chicken. But I pushed the bed a little closer to the window and got the door open a few centimeters more.
Then, before I could even understand it, my heart turned white like hair turns white.
Then, before I could even understand it, my heart turned white like hair turns white.
Up against the face that I had thrust through the opening, right next to my eyes, in the semidarkness, the heavy cockroach moved. My scream was so muffled that it was only by the contrast with the silence that I realized I hadn't screamed. The scream had stayed pounding inside my chest.
Nothing, it was nothing—I immediately tried to calm myself in the face of my fear. It was just that I hadn't expected, in a house that had been meticulously disinfected against my dread of cockroaches, I hadn't expected this room to have been left out. No, it wasn't nothing. It was a cockroach slowly moving toward the crack.
By its enormity and slowness, it must have been a very old cockroach. In my primeval horror of cockroaches, I had learned to guess their ages and dangers, even at a distance; even though I had never really come face to face with a cockroach, I knew their life processes.
It was just that the sudden discovery of life within the nakedness of this room had frightened me as though I had discovered that the dead room was in fact fecund.
Everything else here had dried up—but one cockroach had remained. A cockroach so old it was immemorial. What had always disgusted me about cockroaches was that they were obsolete and at the same time still living. Knowing that they had been on Earth in the same form as they have today even before the first dinosaurs had appeared, knowing that the first man to come forth had found them crawling across the ground in hoards, knowing that they had seen the formation of the great deposits of coal and oil in the world, were there during the great glacial advances and retreats—peaceful resistance. I knew that cockroaches could go more than a month without food or water. And they could even survive on wood for food. And even after you step on them they come apart slowly and keep on walking all the while. Even when they freeze, after they thaw out they keep on going. For three hundred and fifty million years, they have reproduced with no change. When the world was practically naked, they walked slowly across it.
Just like here, in this naked, dessicated room, a virulent speck: on a clean test tube, a material speck.
I looked around the room, suspiciously. There was, then, this cockroach. Or cockroaches. Where? maybe behind the suitcases. One? two? how many? Behind the immovable silence of the suitcases, maybe a whole black pile of cockroaches. One motionless atop the one beneath. Layers of cockroaches—which suddenly reminded me of what I once discovered as a child when I lifted up the mattress I was sleeping on: the blackness of hundreds upon hundreds of bedbugs huddled one on top of another.
The recollection of my childhood poverty, with bedbugs, leaky roofs, cockroaches, and rats was like a prehistoric past of me, I had lived with the first creatures on earth.
One cockroach? more? but how many? I asked myself in a fury. I let my gaze move slowly over the naked room. No sound, no sign: but how many? No sound and still I clearly sensed an emphatic vibration that was the vibration of silence rubbing against silence. Hostility had taken me over. More than just not liking cockroaches: I really hate them. Besides, they are miniature versions of a huge animal. The hostility increased.
It wasn't I who rejected the room, as I had felt for an instant at the door. The room, with its secret cockroach, had repelled me. I had been repelled by the sight of a nakedness as strong as a mirage's nakedness; for it had not been the mirage of an oasis that I had seen but the mirage of a desert. Afterward, I had been immobilized by the harsh message on the wall: the figures with the hands spread out had been one of the series of sentinels at the door to the sarcophagus. I now understood that the cockroach and Janair were the room's true inhabitants.
No, I wouldn't do any cleaning—not if there were going to be cockroaches. The new maid could dedicate her first workday to this dusty, empty casket.
Even in the fierce heat of the sun, a wave of shivers ran through me: I hurried to leave that burning chamber.
It was my first physical act of fear, finally expressed, that revealed to me with surprise that I was afraid. And that plunged me into a greater fear—in trying to leave, between the wardrobe and the foot of the bed, I tripped and fell. The very possibility of a fall in this room of silence made my body recoil in profound dread—stumbling had turned my attempted flight into an act ill-fated in itself—could this be the way that "they," the inhabitants of the sarcophagus, had of keeping me from getting away? They were keeping me from getting out by using this one simple means: they left me completely free since they knew that I could no longer get out without stumbling and falling.
I wasn't really penned in, I was just cornered. As cornered as if they had fastened me here with the single, simple act of pointing a finger at me, at me and then at the spot.
I had experienced sensitivity to place before. When I was a child, I had suddenly had the sense that I was lying on a bed that was in a city that was on the Land that was in the World. Just as when I was a child, I now had the clear sense that I was completely alone in a house and that the house was high and free-floating in the air, and that this house had invisible cockroaches in it.
Before when I put myself in a place, I grew. This time I put myself in a place by shrinking—shrinking so much that the only space I took up in the room was between the foot of the bed and the wardrobe door.
But this time the sensitivity to place was, fortunately, not happening to me at night, as it had when I was a child, since it now had to be somewhere after ten in the morning.
And, unexpectedly, the coming hour of eleven took on a horror for me—just as with place, so too time became palpable, I wanted to flee like from inside of a clock, and I rushed awkwardly.
But to get out of the corner I had put myself in by opening the wardrobe door, I would have to close that door, which was pinning me against the bed leg: here
I was, with no way clear, cornered by the sun, which was now burning the hair on the nape of my neck in an oven-blast called ten o'clock in the morning.
My quick hand moved to close the wardrobe door and open me a path—but it immediately drew back again.
For, inside the wardrobe, the cockroach moved.
I stayed quiet. My breathing was light, superficial. I now had the sense that my situation was hopeless. And I knew that, absurd though it might be, my only chance of getting out lay in facing up to the absurd fact that there was something irresolvable here. I knew that I had to recognize the danger I was in, even though I knew that it was crazy to believe in an entirely nonexistent danger. But I had to believe in myself—like everyone else, I had been in danger all my life—to get free this time, I had the mind-boggling responsibility of having to face that fact.
Closed in as I was between the wardrobe door and the foot of the bed, I hadn't yet given a second try at moving my feet to get out, but I had moved back, as though despite its extreme slowness the cockroach could swoop out in an instant—I had seen roaches that suddenly took off in flight: winged fauna.
I stayed there, still, plans racing madly through my mind. I was alert, I was completely alert. A great sense of hope arose inside me, and a surprised resignation: in this alert hope I recognized all my prior hope, I recognized too the attentiveness that I had experienced before, the attentiveness that never leaves me and that, in the final analysis, may be the thing that is most a part of my life—that perhaps is my very life itself. And then, the cockroach: what is the only sense a cockroach has? attentiveness to living, inseparable from its body. For me, anything that I had added to what was inseparable from me would probably never hold back that attentiveness which, more than an attentiveness to life, was my very life process itself.
The Passion According to GH Page 4
