The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  “I shall now pass on to the other extreme of philosophical speculation. I’ve already made you a profession of materialist faith. I believe that everything that happens in the universe, and everything that will happen there, depends on material factors, the evolution of which is regulated by immutable laws. Everything has been written since the first day of creation, and nothing can modify in any manner whatsoever the unfolding of the initial program.”

  After the scene in the laboratory, this philosophical conversation was somewhat anodyne—and, all things considered, I preferred it to experiments in which I served as the subject. I made a gesture of polite condescension, as if to reserve my opinion, and contented myself with drinking a mouthful of gin.

  “What I’ve just told you is not essential to the consequences that follow whatever hypothesis one adopts, but it explains the orientation I have given to my research. I have been able to localize in the cerebral cortex the zones that preside over the organization of memory, and I have been able to detect, as in the experiments we have just made, the electrical currents associated with the activity of these zones.

  “Just now, if you had not abruptly interrupted me, I would have shown you a curious but well-known experiment on the rabbit with the open skull, which consists of artificially imparting a rhythm to the electrical oscillations of the cortical currents. It is sufficient to submit the animal to periodic excitations, such as a lamp that goes on and off before its eyes, for the pulsations of the cerebral currents to reproduce the artificial rhythm of the lamp. Now, pay close attention to me…”

  He got to his feet, extended a professorial finger to emphasize an important part of the speech, and continued: “Here is a subject. I localize the cerebral currents corresponding to the zones of memory. I impart an accelerated oscillatory rhythm, which has the effect of giving the nerve-cells of memory a more intense and more rapid activity than normal. I thus age the cells artificially, pushing them temporally, in terms of duration, to a point in their evolution that is ahead of the other cells. But these memory cells do not have two ways of aging. If, as I have told you, the film of the world’s evolution is recorded at all times in the archives of the future, if what is going to happen is already contained within what had already happened, the cells age as they would normally age, but more rapidly—and, as a result, the hard-driven activity of my subject’s memory precedes him in time, thus revealing to me the future that is already recorded, which nothing can modify. I finally obtain a subject who has a memory of the future…

  “That subject, as you have deduced, is Dirk.”

  I sat there somewhat petrified, my head tilted back in the armchair so as not to quit the doctor’s eyes, for I now mistrusted his every gesture. But the memory of Dirk’s strange attitude during our last meeting came back to mind.

  “Dirk,” he continued, “who remains entirely normal with regard to his comportment, is presently living mentally one minute and 12 seconds ahead of the present. His life is unfolding in two parts: his body keeps company with ours, and he makes all the gestures he needs to make at the right moment, but his thoughts preceded it by 72 seconds, and from time to time, he says what he ought to have said 72 seconds later!” He accompanied these final words with a triumphant snigger.

  “Did Dirk consent to this experiment?” I stammered.

  “The question is irrelevant,” the doctor said, dryly. “Now, you will easily comprehend the consequences. One only has to know how to take advantage of a 72-second advancement in the knowledge of the future. The average interval that separates two spins of a roulette-wheel is 70 seconds. Above the gaming table, after each spin, a figure lights up indicating the number that has just come up. I place myself, with Dick, so that I can see the signal. Twelve comes up and lights up. I ask him: ‘Which number is lit up?’ He replies: ‘28.’ I know that 28 will come up on the following spin, and I bet the maximum. If he doesn’t reply, it can only be because the interval between one spin and the next will differ from seventy seconds. This morning, I obtained four responses, which is four coincidences. Result: 400,000 and some francs. In a week, the principality has poured 12 million into my pocket.

  My bewilderment was tempered by a prudent smile.

  “That’s your fortune made…” I said.

  “Not yet,” said the doctor. “My little ruse couldn’t last forever, and this very morning I sensed that there were four inspectors of the gaming police spying on me. They can’t prove anything against me, but they can ban me from the gaming rooms, under one pretext or another. I’ve collected 12 million in passing, but in reality, my ambitions are much greater.”

  I frowned, gripped once again by anxiety.

  “Let’s leave it there, if you will,” said the doctor. “As for the rest, I don’t want to go any further before being certain—selling the bear’s skin before it’s shot, as they say in France. I hope that you won’t ask any more of me, and that we’re still friends…”

  My thoughts were utterly confused within my head. I got up, shook the hand that he extended to me mechanically, and went out.

  I only came back to myself somewhat when I found myself in the open air again. I had taken too strong a dose of the doctor, unless it was the gin…

  In any case, my first clear impression was an irresistible desire to go as far away as possible as quickly as possible. Everything that happened here seemed troubling, vaguely dangerous. I had committee a folly in wanting to install myself in the dependencies of the château. To set sail as soon as possible was the wisest course.

  Little by little, however, the cool air under the trees in the grounds calmed my agitation. At the corner of a path, I happened upon Narda, in company with two Great Danes.

  “Do you know that my uncle has given me permission to stay here?” she said. “I’m very glad not to be returning to Switzerland. If you hadn’t been there at lunch the other day, I wouldn’t have dared say anything.”

  It did me good to hear her frank girlish voice. It occurred to me to appeal to the judgment of her innocence regarding the matter that preoccupied me.

  “Narda, what do you think of your uncle?”

  “Him? He makes me laugh,” she replied, laughing herself.

  A happy age! I thought. But who knows—perhaps she’s right and one ought to laugh? Her company brought me back to a saner view of things. I listened to her chatter. She told me, incidentally, with the precision that a child’s words have, that Yvane was at the hairdressers in Cannes. Extraordinarily, I had not given any further thought to Yvane—but my mind was immediately invaded by her. Could I flee and abandon her?

  From the summer-house, where I pursued my meditations, I could catch glimpses between the branches of the olive-trees of the left wing of the château—the one with the laboratories—a few hundred meters away. It was a sordid patch in the landscape, like a muted threat. Truly, I felt that prudence commanded me to tear myself away from this place. On the other hand, though, thinking of Yvane, I found that there was no immediate peril, that I could still wait to see how things went. In spite of everything, I remained undecided.

  I cast an eye over the interior of my dwelling. The divan, comfortable beneath its bright cretonnes, seemed welcoming. In the entrance-hall, the flowers that Yvane had brought were slowly dying in the vases. The promise I had made the previous day returned to my memory. On due reflection, my malaise stemmed mainly from a vague dread of discovering secrets that I ought not to know, of finding myself an accomplice of deeds of which I would rather remain ignorant. And poor Dirk—what role was he playing in all this?

  All things considered, I could not bear the idea of going to sleep so close to the doctor. He might have been able to influence my dreams, to devote himself while I slept to God knows what experiment upon me. Before nightfall, I leapt into my car and went to sleep in a hotel in Nice.

  When one has a house, it’s much funnier not to live in it, I said to myself, by way of an excuse.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When
I woke up in my hotel room, the events of the previous day had settled down somewhat in my mind. My fears seemed exaggerated. I had a house waiting for me in the foothills; what was I still doing in a hotel, in that scorching town, when I hadn’t seen Yvane for two days? Going through the market of the old town, I filled my car with flowers and, strengthened by that justification for my sojourn in Nice, I took the road to La Colle.

  All was silence in the summer-house and its surroundings. The loggia was charming in the fresh morning sunlight. I began to unpack my belongings. Someone rapped on the window; it was Yvane, wanting to know how I had slept. I confessed to not having gone to bed there. She seemed distressed.

  “What disappoints me more than anything else,” she said, “is that yesterday evening I imagined you here, in your house, and I thought that I could see you here…and now I find out that it was false! I’m not used to my thoughts being mistaken. There was nothing in the house where I thought I could see you. How extraordinary that is!”

  Although those sighs might seem rather puerile, it was impossible for me not to be moved by the inflections of her voice, in which the very essence of her being seemed to be distilled: a disarmed and disarming sincerity in confrontation with life.

  To console her, as one consoles a child, I told her that I had found a little five-meter boat for sale in the old harbor at Nice, and that we might perhaps be able to buy it between us. My idea did a marvelous job of chasing away her disappointment. The “we” that she repeated had something clandestine and chaste in her mouth, which delighted me. She wanted to go and see the boat immediately. I yielded to her desire.

  Confronted by the boat, it was necessary to try it out. I had to pardon myself for my inability to speak; I consented to everything. We refused the assistance of the sailor who offered to accompany us; the sea was calm, we could easily steer it by ourselves.

  Yvane was charmingly unskillful, in spite of her docility in following my advice. The departure was rather laborious, but we got out to sea as best we could. Once the first period of activity was over, we finally found ourselves side by side, hands on the tiller. Then the thought occurred to us both that, for the first time, we were truly alone—for we exchanged a smile at the same time, which had that meaning.

  She let herself loll backwards on to the false bridge, the nape of her neck in the gap, her eyes challenging the brightness of the sky, and her hair floating over our wake.

  “It’s as if I’d fished up a siren,” I said.

  Her little hand as resting on the tiller, brown and nervous; it no longer seemed to form part of her stretched-out body: a forgotten hand, sagely following the movements that I imposed on the rudder; a hand so alone, with a bone-structure so delicate, that it was heart-melting. I leaned over and I kissed it for a long time, in the valley hollowed out by the roots of two fingers.

  “You’re kissing me in September,” said her voice, singing over the sea. As I didn’t understand, she added: “You know how one counts the months on a closed fist: 31, 30 days…you’re kissing me in September.”

  “Come closer,” I said to her. “What are you doing so far away?”

  She sat up again. “I was forgetting. That’s what I was doing—forgetting.”

  “Forgetting what?”

  “Everything. That’s my dominant impression, for the moment: forgetfulness. And it’s infinitely refreshing. As if I had left everything behind, to be elsewhere.”

  “Having left me behind with everything else?”

  “No, not you—but me, I’ve left myself behind.”

  “Give it to me, then, and I’ll look after it while you’re not here.”

  With the gesture of an obedient little girl, she came to rest her hair on my shoulder. The sail carried us on silently, effortlessly. “A pretty self,” I murmured, “brown and gold, perfumed with sea-salt, a self as light as a morning sky.”

  A sharp movement of her head, rolling on my shoulder, indicated a mute negation.

  “A self that wearies me and makes me despair,” she said. “I never know where it’s going, what it will do—a self that drags me into dreams in which I lose myself… It looks me in the face: ‘Is that me? Is it possible that there are so many differences between the self that you see from outside and the one that I see from inside?’”

  “Then it’s the one inside that it’s necessary for me to look after.”

  “No, that’s a wild, intractable animal,” she replied. “I’d better give you the other.”

  “I want both of them,” I said.

  She shook her head pensively, but came back to huddle against me.

  I too forgot everything. At that moment I was very far away from La Colle, the doctor, his frightful logic and his somber experiments. My usual indecision had given way to a certainty: the thought that, out of the entire life that I had been leading for thirty years, also without understanding very much, there was nothing to retain and carry forward but that very simple and marvelous thing, the living being pressed against me.

  I steered into an inlet where the water was so calm and so transparent in the rays of sunlight that at twenty meters’ depth one could make out the patches of sand and algae on the sea-bed. Leaning over the edge, Yvane said something that I would remember for a long time: “What strange and marvelous landscapes! Why are the drowned the only ones who have the right to stroll there?”

  “What about divers?”

  She protested against that prosaic notion. “There are landscapes in which it is necessary to go naked, caressed by the algae, one’s hair at the mercy of the waves, one’s eyes exposed to the sea. Ys, the city of Ys… those are my initials, you know. Y. S. I would love to walk the streets of my drowned city, the city of Ys…”

  “I thought that I had fished up a siren!” Alluding to our first meeting, I continued: “From the first day, I should have known that…”

  It was the first time that I found myself evoking a memory that we had in common. I asked her what she had thought of me that day.

  She caressed the contour of my cheek with her hand. “Nothing. I couldn’t know that you would be so indulgent to all my caprices, so welcoming to all my girlish ways. I’ve often been told that I’m no more than 12 years of age. I’d love that to be true—but I’d rather have an ageless mind. There’s no one but you with whom I can say what I think.”

  The wind had changed and a slight swell was getting up. The boat’s movements sometimes threw us into contact with one another, as if for a lesson in salutary rudeness, to remind us of our bodies made of muscle and bone. I hadn’t the heart, however, nor the force of mind, for exacting gestures.

  I was no longer a child, nor even a young man. Many times, it had been granted to me to enjoy the company of women who were said to be agreeable. In those past circumstances, the obligation to play a role, to be attentive to the impression I might be producing or to expected tasks, had always marred the pleasure of those encounters. In this instance, there was nothing like that. For the first time, I let myself go without thinking about it, without worrying about a game-plan—not because I let myself be led, but because everything proceeded of its own accord. “With you, I can say what I think,” she had said. “And I too,” I could have replied, “have only ever felt with you this impression of effortless wellbeing.”

  We did not return until the evening. And that evening, for the first time, I slept in the summer-house. The attraction of a virgin heart had borne away all the troubles and dangers that seemed to be roaming the pathways of the grounds. The event took on a symbolic value, and marked a step toward the acceptance of a situation that, sooner or later, would demand an official approach. It was, however, to take me nearly a week to decide to speak to the doctor.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I asked to see the doctor one morning. The painful impressions felt during my first visits assailed me once again as soon as I went into his study. Every object was occupying its immutable place, and if the stained glass panels in the windows were not p
rojected their colors on to the carpet, it was because that morning’s leaden sky was becoming stormy.

  “It’s some time since we’ve had the pleasure of meeting up,” the doctor said, cheerfully. “One only needs to be neighbors not to see one another.” I wanted to get to the point of my visit as rapidly as possible, but the doctor did not give me the opportunity. “Is your dwelling suitable for work? As for me, I haven’t been wasting my time.” He paused deliberately before announcing to me, with greater emphasis: “Dirk is 48 hours in advance…”

  Everything that I had intended to say suddenly stuck in my throat, unable to compare with this extraordinary declaration. Having wanted to forget that entire frightful experience, I found myself brutally plunged back into it, and was gripped, my breath cut off as if by a jet of cold water.

  “We weren’t going to stop short after obtaining the first encouraging results,” the doctor continued, apparently desirous of taking advantage of my surprise to proffer his confidences. “The treatment by artificial excitation seems to be acting more and more rapidly as we progress further. The difficulties encountered, would you believe, are of a much more trivial order—they relate to the measures that have to be taken to remain in contact with the subject. I anticipated the measures in question, but I did not imagine that they would have to be applied so delicately. In fact, not only can Dirk only talk if his surroundings are identical to those in which he will find himself 48 hours later, but it’s also necessary that he situation of his interlocutors be that which will be reproduced the day after tomorrow. Only in these conditions is the connection made between the two components of his person, between his body and his mind, and, in consequence, the possibility of expression. Otherwise, he’s out of phase, if I might put it thus, and says nothing.