On seeing my dream-Yvane develop, I understood a little better that she had been unable to live in a real, complex world, demanding too much calculation. A certain physical awkwardness (what would have happened, the day of the tricycle, if I had not turned up?) a certain forgetfulness of her body, a disgust for its activity, the versatility of her moods—in brief, everything that made her a delightful and charming individual—was out of step with the world. Too delicate to live. Who knows? Perhaps, even when she was alive, I had already loved her as one loves a dead woman, ideally. But what good was this world, then, if the only precious individuals that one meets here are also the only ones who cannot live in it?
I knew full well that the first distraction of my thought, the first relaxation of my effort of will, would bring me back into contact with the reality: “She’s dead”—and the aerial phantom into which I was trying to breathe life would collapse. The frailty of my dreams by comparison with the implacable density of the real was thus a constant reminder of the harshness of the world. And the doctor’s arid philosophy, the implacable aspect of destiny, gradually imposed itself upon me. He was right; everything was written; nothing could be done about it. Had not Yvane been conscious of it herself? Did not her passivity in confrontation with things, and her refusal to take decisions, demonstrate submission in advance to an invincible fatality?
Gentle summer rains accompanied these reveries. The château’s residents respected my solitude and my follies. For my part, I had developed a complete indifference with respect to the doctor and his research. So far as I was concerned, it had exhausted its possibilities at a single stroke. The future was of no more interest to me than the present.
One day, I spotted my host at a distance in the grounds. I noticed that he had become more severe—more careworn, it seemed—but I made a detour so as not to meet him. From various symptoms, I deduced that there was a great deal of activity in the laboratories; the windows remained illuminated for much of the night and sometimes, the howls of martyrized animals reached me. It was of little importance; I was a stranger to the universe, as far astray in my own fashion as Dirk might be in the future, thanks to the effects of the doctor’s magic. In my case, there had been no need of any scientific apparatus; the mere memory of Yvane had sufficed to bear away my mind, to carry into the past, leaving nothing in the present but an empty body.
Sometimes, I happened to run into poor Dirk. Although I did not know why, the kind of captivity in which he had been held for a long time seemed to have been relaxed. As he was always mute, he did not disturb me. He fell into step with me, stopping when I stopped, going away when I showed signs that his presence was becoming tedious.
One day, in the pine-wood, we were sitting together on a fallen trunk. In the distance, a crew of woodcutters was working in an area that had recently caught fire, and axe-blows punctuated the silence at regular intervals.
“What a horrible war…” he murmured.
I thought at first that he was talking about a battle between ants that was unfolding at our feet, toward which I directed a vague gaze; then I remembered that his words could not be referring to the present. I had an opportunity to report them to the doctor, who surprised me one morning in the garage. His face seemed fatigued, with a slightly haggard nuance in his eyes that was new in him. A certain abruptness of word and gesture punctured his desire always to seem affable.
“The confidence is interesting,” he said. “Dirk is nearly a year in advance at present. He must be referring to a European war. For several days, I haven’t succeeded in getting anything out of him, and now I know why: the era in which he’s living is disturbed by events, and the possibilities of forming connections with the calm atmosphere in which we live are rarer.”
“Oh, a war…” I said.
I said it mechanically, fundamentally indifferent. The doctor misunderstood the meaning of my reflection.
“The fact that he spoke to you should reassure you as to yourself, and establishes that, whatever happens, you’ll still be alive a year from now.”
I made a gesture of detachment. The logic of the deduction irritated me—and I thought all these more-or-less obscure pronouncements about the future rather childish. They reminded me of the predictions of fortune-tellers, and such tea-leaves didn’t interest me any more by virtue of their scientific pretensions.
“Don’t be surprised if you hear a certain amount of noise,” the doctor said to me then. “I’ll probably be obliged, during the coming sessions, to fire a few rifle-shots in order to create an atmosphere.”
It was after we had parted that my thoughts returned to the assurance he had give me: “You’ll still be alive a year from now.” Thus, in a year, I would still be the same person, having eaten and slept regularly, having continued the monotonous game of life, perhaps having forgotten. One comes to love one’s pain, to the point of dreading uneasily that it might one day go away. The prospect of eventually forgetting wounded me deeply. Thus, that brief conversation with the doctor had awoken my rancor at a stroke. The same rebellion that had taken hold of me at the announcement of Yvane’s death gripped me again. “Oh! I’ll still be alive a year from now!” What right did he have to dispose of me thus? And my free will, what became of that? The impression of fatality under which he had made me live had become intolerable. I felt that I was at the limits of a kind of madness, but that it was no longer in my power to command myself.
A chaotic mass of thoughts and feelings was seething within me: my pain, the memory of Yvane, a rebellion against fate, against life. Suddenly, I thought I glimpsed a possibility of vengeance against the universe, against the doctor, against his pronouncements. “You’ll still be alive a year from now.” It had been a bold move to advance that prophecy. If it was impossible to prevent death from doing its work at an appointed hour, with life one must still be able to act in its stead. Me, alive a year from now—that remained to be seen…
Sliding down that slope, in the atmosphere of semi-madness that was then mine—and the only one in which I could live—I eventually came to think that, if I succeeded in inflicting a falsification upon the doctor, I would ruin his entire theory, and, in consequence, the death of Yvane would be negated. That unsustainable idea nevertheless appeared to me to be more luminous with every passing day. Oh, he would fire rifle-shots! Well, I too had a revolver…
I had been ripened by all the bad habits of solitude…now it seemed that Yvane was appealing to me. If, in creating her legend, I was not obeying a pure fantasy, but yielding to her invitation, was it not the case now that she was inviting me to join her, in the indescribable places where her memory was perpetuated? Yes, it was really her that was calling me…
From that moment on, threatened on the one hand by an implacably progressing universe, and solicited on the other by the most gracious phantom ever borne aloft by the light air of those summer nights, could I hesitate much longer?
When a warm and placid evening arrived, so similar to the evening on which we had left together for our last excursion that I thought I could hear the sound of the car that had taken us outside my door, I could resist no longer; I slipped my revolver into my pocket, and I set off for the mountain.
Carefully, I followed in her footsteps once again. I had forgotten nothing—nothing at all. Every pebble, every blade of grass, was etched into my memory. As I passed by, I caressed the same leaves that she had stroked. At the first halt, beside the wall of rock, the same Sun plunged into its bath of molten gold, and in the empty space my hand passed back and forth for a long time over the arm that was no longer held out to me. A final hesitation still gripped me, but when the same sparrowhawk, recalled by the evening to its nest on the plain, plunged into the valley in front of me, I no longer doubted what awaited me on high. The meaning of the strange scene, in the course of which she had escaped from my arms to bound into the night, now seemed clear to me. With a marvelous prescience, while alive, she had arranged a rendezvous with me in these mysterious
places where life overlapped death. Her phantom was still dancing; I only had to go to meet it.
I could have continued on my way with my eyes closed. I went up the scree-slope again and reached the summit. The rocks were there, standing to attention, faithful to their strange forms. I sat down at the place where I had taken her in my arms and awaited the miracle. The Moon was slowly following its path through the stars; my eyes grew weary interrogating the reflections and the shadows; my heart was crying out within my bosom, but there was no reply in the silence.
I understood the meaning of that heartbeat then: one last step remained to be taken. I breathed in deeply, inflating my chest to the maximum for the last time. I closed my eyes, greeting with a welcoming smile the other night that was already descending within me, which a radiant apparition was about to illuminate. I put the barrel of the gun to the very skin of my breast, and pressed the trigger.
There was a click; the weapon had jammed.
I swore, and threw the revolver to the ground. Thwarted! I had been defeated. The doctor had won. Even the right to kill myself had escaped me. Yvane was dead, really dead. I had advanced to the very threshold in the attempt to rejoin her, in vain: the ultimate door remained closed. I remained alone, sober now, on the rim of the abyss, and I felt the long crisis of dementia, in the course of which I had attempted to bring her back to life, unravel within me.
While recognizing the insane aspect of the adventure, however, while now understanding with perfect lucidity what crazy reasoning had driven me to want to kill myself that she might live, I still would not consent to be dominated by fate. Undoubtedly, nothing could make destiny turn back on its past decisions, but if I had not been able to kill myself for Yvane, I could at least kill myself to prove that I was, in spite of everything, free.
It’s strange to commit suicide twice for entirely different reasons. Groping about, I searched for the revolver in the heather. Very deliberately, I dismantled the loading-chamber, replaced it and cocked the hammer to arm the weapon. I smiled again, but out of hatred for the doctor.
“You’ve won twice—now it’s my turn!” I cried. I put the barrel to my temple this time, and even more deliberately and more determinedly than before, I squeezed the trigger.
Revolvers don’t jam twice.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was white, brighter than white, like a star of silver or polished metal. Blue glints were woven into the rays that emerged from the thing for me, guiding me to the crossroads of light in order to permit me to reach the thing itself, the silver star that also seemed to be a diamond destined to serve as a lodging for my gaze. I had never seen such a marvel, brilliant, suspended, motionless, attractive. Never had any rising star or crystalline drop surprised in the morning dew shone with so pure a gleam. My indolence, wandering in dark space, escaped the darkness in which it was content, and in that dazzling and icy flame that I had suddenly discovered at the limit of my vision, I witnessed that extraordinary miracle, the revival of my curiosity. Light, true light, caused the rebirth within me of the glimmer of intelligence; the one gave birth to the other, and my consciousness, reanimated by that spark, which extracted it from limbo, discovered itself at the moment of its awakening, to lend its unreal magic to the magic of reality. I remained in suspense for a moment, as if at the confluence of two worlds: that of things and that of their comprehension, immobile on their sparkling frontier, hesitant to choose, to renounce the pure and simple marveling of the conscious gaze alone—but an already-awakening intelligence did not leave me any further leisure, pushing me into the infinite network of its mute interrogations to capture the object of my initial surprise, which, amid a thousand memories of anterior experiences, asleep and forgotten, scattered in the debris of my memory, it was finally able to recognize and to identify as being a nickel-plated tap.
The magic ceased abruptly with that realization, but the repose that followed the seething activity thus regenerated was no less delectable for that. In order to savor it, I closed my eyes, returning momentarily to darkness. When I opened them again, there was an angel on the wall. Perhaps I was waiting for him.
The angel did not say anything, paying less attention to me than to a young man who was clutching his arm. He was an extremely handsome angel, in truth, whose harmoniously-formed wings descended to the ground, and I admired the way that he bore them with such ease, like the tails of a coat put on for eternity: an angel with long blond hair, too long for my memories…yes, definitely too long…
At the same moment, thanks to that exaggeratedly-expansive hair, I understood that I wasn’t dead, and that the angel was part of a picture hanging on the wall of my room.
I wasn’t dead, and the colored plate above my bed told the story of a young man miraculously saved by his guardian angel, whose apparition was holding him back from the edge of the precipice. I had already encountered the engraving in the books of my childhood. Here, more pretentious in its gilded frame, it participated in the strange charm of aperitif advertisements on the walls of village cafes. But I wasn’t dead. Why, then, had I to make that observation, which is not usually one of those that imposes itself on awakening?
A woman in a nurse’s uniform came in, bearing a breakfast-tray. She seemed surprised to hear me ask her questions, and came back in company with a man in a white smock, whose face brightened when he heard me. My very ordinary reflections were, however, solely concerned with the fine sunlight that was shining that morning. They withdrew to let me eat. Later, the door opened again.
“Narda!” I exclaimed.
I watched her coming toward me, as brunette as the angel was blond. She took one of my hands in hers. “Pierre! How glad I am! You recognize me! You recognize me!”
The sound of her voice completed my return to myself, and permitted me to reconnect with memories of the past. In a flash, I reviewed the château, the summer-house, my departure, the night on the mountain.
“But where am I?” I asked.
“In a hospital in Switzerland, near Lausanne. We brought you with us.”
“But why? What’s happened, then? How long have I been like this?”
“Tomorrow, it will be six months since the day when you were found on…” She stopped, fearful of bringing back painful memories.
“Six months!” I exclaimed, unable to believe my ears. “What? I’ve been in this state for six months!”
“The wound healed quickly, but the rest took longer to put back in order,” she explained, with a discretion of expression that was touching. “When they telephoned this morning to tell me that you were talking, I didn’t want to lose a minute, I came right away. I never lost hope, but the doctors didn’t want to give any guarantees…”
The novelty had not yet passed, and in my confusion, it was a very trivial thought that came to my lips: “For once I get a year’s leave, and I spend six months unconscious—just my luck…” But I was still in need of explanations. “Who takes care of me?”
“We do,” said Narda. “My uncle, the doctors…”
“Has your uncle been looking after me?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“No, don’t worry,” she said, laughing. “But we didn’t know who to inform. I’ve written to addresses found in your papers; we’ve had a reply for Cairo, from your sister. She offered to accommodate you out there, but the climate…”
“Why, in fact, am I in Switzerland?”
“One of my uncle’s ideas. The sojourn in Provence had ceased to please him. You’ll never guess why—he’s afraid of a war. We’ve moved to Switzerland, lock, stock and barrel—and you came with us.”
“I see, I see,” I murmured, having become pensive since mention of the doctor had entered into the conversation. “I owe you an infinite debt, my dear Narda. It’s truly admirable that a solitary individual always finds, in his hour of need, devotion at his service…”
An interval of forgetfulness that lasts six months, even when one has not been conscious of it, creates a situation in which on
e looks back the man one has been with new eyes. I recovered possession of myself as if of an abandoned apartment; I recognized the general disposition of places and objects, but the affective links that bound me to them had changed. I was a stranger in my own dwelling. On passing my hand over my forehead, I encountered a scar near my temple, the first new thing that I had found within me. It was also the last of the man that I had been. There, in fact, was the junction between my successive selves. In the old me, that scar had had a profound spiritual significance, but I no longer acceded to its gravity. Now, for the new me, it was no more than a little sinuous line, losing itself in the roots of my hair, and I limited myself to following it with my finger, with an almost amused curiosity.
In a few days, I recovered full rational possession of myself. I was able to leave the clinic, to go out for walks in the town, and, after the brief intoxication of convalescence, to retrieve the petty annoyances of life. Politeness, for want of any other sentiment of gratitude, obliged me to pay a visit to Dr. Mops. I could not make up my mind to do it—not so much, I thought, because of memories of a past that was well and truly dead, but because it displeased me to present myself to him in the somewhat ridiculous role of a failed suicide. Day after day, I put off my visit, letting myself drift, in the mild Swiss ambience, from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner, without making any decision.
In the course of the visits Narda made, I expended treasures of diplomacy in declining the invitations she addressed to me on her uncle’s behalf.
“We’re living not far away,” she told me, thinking to soothe me. “Nothing has changed—you’ll see.”
“Yes, yes,” I said, distractedly, knowing very well for what reasons nothing had changed. Giving in to the succession of memories, I added: “By the way, what’s become of Dirk?”
“Still the same, still just as mad. He doesn’t talk anymore, so to speak. He hasn’t forgotten, but he gets everything mixed up. A little while ago, he greeted me with a ‘Bonjour, Madame Delambre’—which surprised me greatly. I hardly expected to hear your name emerging from his mouth.”
The Eye of Purgatory Page 9
