I saw my first naked lady yesterday—in the street, I mean. It was warm, but there was no mistake. She was walking without any inhibition, with a slight grey shadow floating about her thighs. I had already understood: a woman whose dress, destined to be burned, was already reduced to ashes in my eyes; a woman too mature, at any rate, for the vision that she offered me to be a compensation for my woes.
I no longer count the cadavers I encounter. Yesterday evening, it was my concierge who passed into the ranks of the walking dead, the first familiar face to be attained by cadaverous rigidity. That, so close to me, gave me a shock.
Are you unwell, then?” I could not help saying to her.
“On the contrary, I’m very well,” she replied, cantankerously.
“So much the better—but watch out for draughts, all the same.”
On reflection, her lodge is such a dungeon that I’m only astonished that she hasn’t kicked the bucket sooner.
One can have plenty of warning, but secretly refuse to accept that one is subject to a state of affairs oneself. This morning, while cleaning my teeth, perceiving a discolored—almost black—premolar, I raced to the dentist with the utmost conviction, only to hear him tell me: “But, Monsieur, the tooth is perfectly healthy.”
“Perfectly healthy?”
Of course! Only then did I understand. Negligently, I asked: “Is there a means of inhibiting decay in advance?”
“Regular dental hygiene…but you have the teeth of a film star.”
Even so, I could see the still-healthy tooth in a parlous state. Then, I looked at myself for a long time in the mirror, and found myself aged. To be sure, why should I be an exception? I don’t know whether I ought to attribute it to the state of anxiety in which I exist and will exist, but I’m aging badly: a facial appearance more tortured than brilliant…
For the moment, though, others see me still young. I ought to take advantage of that…
There is nothing but the faces of cadavers, clothes turning to rags, dead leaves in midsummer; the entire shiny surface of things, which renders them agreeable and flatters the gaze, has disappeared for me. Not a single varnished carriage, not a single sparkling window-display, not a single piece of shiny nickel-plate, not a single polished banister—everything that ought to reflect light is, to my eyes, already corroded by rust. It seems to me that the very stones are wearing away. In a word, I no longer see anything new. I can no longer see it because, at the very moment it appears as such, I already see as it will be God only knows how many months or years later.
Everything that renews itself, which embodies the youth of the world, is already old for me. I have to get used to that, by dint of looking at things and by dint of reasoning too, of repeating to myself untiringly: “You see things in the locations they occupy, but as they will be subsequently”—and yet, I have never been as deeply affected as by the story of the hyacinth bulb that Armande had put in a jar on the window-ledge of the studio.
The bulb appeared to me to be black and decomposed, and I was no longer paying any attention to it when she arrived the following day and said: “Oh! My beautiful hyacinth!”
“What hyacinth?”
“Eh? Come on, Jean—there, in the window.” Oh, that mania people have for continually saying come on!
I looked at the window. Above the dirty jar fully of murky water, there was nothing—nothing at all. Armande’s hand as caressing the void. Sharpening my gaze, I was able to distinguish a sort of grey mist, a fog perhaps having the shape of a hyacinth cluster, which represented all that would remain of the flower long after its withering, long after its decomposition.
In becoming concrete in the formula: “You will never see flowers again,” the representation of my condition stabbed me in the heart.
I had known for a long time that flowers appeared to me withered, but I had vaguely thought that new buds might, at least for a brief interval, appear to me as flowers. Not at all. I was obliged to take full account the fact that I am not seeing the future, but the present grown old. I am, let us say, three years in advance. In three years, where will the bud be that is about to blossom? Returned to the earth, in the form of humus. I cannot, therefore, see anything but that earth, scattered like a slight shadow, following the contours of a flower. And I can’t see future flowers, since they don’t yet exist…
Thus, between that which is and that which I can see, a great void is opening up as I advance further. Into that abyss everything is disappearing that comprises the beauty of the world and the youth of life: clouds, flowers, fresh colors, brightness, the initial splendor of living beings and objects. Death is raising his grey shroud on the horizon. Twilight is extending over my vision. A great void is being hollowed out, as between a ferry-boat and the departure quay the beginning of the voyage—the voyage into causality, as the other put it.
If anything could soothe the rage that takes hold of me at certain times, at the injustice of the fate that has me in its grip, it would be the sight of this world: this world that has rejected me, wounded me and refused to recognize me, turning before my eyes into squalor and decrepitude; this world, which, with all its facades sparkling with brightness and pride, insulted my obscurity, no longer holds together beneath my gaze. I can see through it, all the way to the bottom. Its deceptive luxury, its peacock pride and its paste-jewelry insolence have been stolen. I only have to raise me eyelids to pulverize it. I witness its death-throes. The death-throes of the world: nothing grandiose and apocalyptic, but a miserable décor falling apart, tawdry frippery hanging in a plaza the day after Mardi-Gras, an old worm-eaten domino crumbling in a dusty loft…
It is not Rome that I am reducing to ashes, it is the entire universe—and it is dying without grandeur. I sometimes grind my teeth in pleasure, prey to a kind of cosmic sadism. Such a vengeance is worth the price that one pays for it: the loss of one’s eyes.
Having made the observation that the slippage of my gaze into the future is producing nothing but darkness, I forbade myself sleep for several days. To keep my eyes open without interruption, it was sufficient to make use of a Chinese method: one places on one one’s table a plank studded with nails, on which the head falls as soon as the threat of sleep looms…
My forehead is covered in scars, and my mind is like marmalade…
Futile efforts—the advancement is still increasing. It’s the Sun that needs to be prevented from setting!
CHAPTER FIVE
A discovery! Perhaps a rope-bridge thrown across the abyss, to permit a backward glance! God bless human industry! Who would have thought that I would ever utter such an exclamation? But let us start at the beginning.
Armande arrived yesterday afternoon: the holiday had liberated her, and she immediately took me to task. The poor girl complained that I had been looking at her severely for some time. One looks at people as one can, as I know only too well. We had been friends for too long for me to give her any great credit of indulgence. I did not intend to be severe, but merely sincere. At any rate, she brought me, as a gift, a portrait of herself, taken by a photographer: “a real one,” she said, “who has a studio in Passy.” I don’t know exactly where she had met him—I preferred not to ask questions. I stripped the object of cardboard and tissue-paper, the wrappings of every sort in which it was enveloped, finally to discover an Armande in a scintillating evening-dress with a flower on her shoulder, all smiles. Her forehead smooth, her cheeks full and velvety, her hair freshly permed, her eyes keen and full of brightness—in brief, everything that the camera-lens and posterity required.
“The portrait has been retouched,” I murmured.
“Retouched? Never in this life! He has a horror of the retouching that provincial photographers do. You’re behind the times—a professional, a contemporary artist, no longer retouches his photographs. He knows how to take them, that’s all.”
“But…”
I had mechanically transported my gaze from the portrait to the original; she appeared to be at l
east five years older than her photo. And I slapped my forehead: the Armande that I saw was Armande aged, but the photo brought me—probably, in truth, without any retouching other than ordinary make-up—the present Armande, as I might have been able to see her. The photographic paper had borne the five years of aging on her behalf: the print seemed yellowed to the point at which I had thought it an artistic impression on amber paper, when it was actually the most ordinary monochrome. But, in spite of the aging of the supporting medium, the subject—or, rather, her image—was still there, just as the moment had fixed it…
But in that case, in that case…in order for me to see my present—to see it once again—did I only have replace my eyes with a photographic lens?
That same evening, I bought a Kodak. I took photographs of the view from my window, the murky jar, the parking-lot, my own head. I took photographs without pausing, like a machine-gunner. And the prints that I have just gone to collect are on my table. I can see the hyacinth that I ought never to have seen again, the crowns of the plane-trees decorated with all their summer plumage, and, finally, my own face as it appears to the gazes of others…
Flowers, greenery, my youth—it’s all before my eyes. I am weeping affectionately over the photographic film, and my heart is singing a hymn of gratitude to Nicéphore Niepce18 and Daguerre!
Poor amateur photos, all yellow and creased, you bring me the vision of the moment, of the ephemerae that make up everyday joy! I shall go and photograph Paris: the gardens, the avenues, the passers-by, the sky and its clouds. I no longer want to do anything but take photos—let no one ever talk to me about painting again!
I have procured the red lamp and the necessary equipment, and I develop the photos taken during the day myself. Thus, I learn in the evening what I saw in the afternoon; I renew the elegance of the world from which my eyes are distanced; I rejoin the present and its ephemeral grace. A voyager departed for the unknown, I am haunted by nostalgia for the world I have left behind, and, setting aside the new horizons that are revealed to my gaze, it is the views of the countries I have left that I record avidly on the photographic film…
From the depths of the abysm of time, beyond the years, the voyager in causality turns toward his native planet a telescope that is nothing but a Kodak!
I look at myself in the mirror for a long time, comparing myself to my own photo—an ample and fine enlargement of the face, taken with the intention of this confrontation.
In the mirror, my face is as I see it. In the photo, it is as others see it.
I am thinner and more wrinkled in the mirror. My temples are more hollowed out there. The corners of my eyes are more creased; my eyelids are marked with nascent stigmata; dark shadows are eating into the flesh of my cheeks. The mirror is aging me by at least five years—but my face there has something harsh and strong about it, my gaze a depth that reveals an uncommon inner fire. It is, in sum, a face that reveals a personality.
On the photo, I am fuller in the face and my cheeks are more rounded. I am more ordinary: it is a face not much different from others, even a trifle reminiscent of a prosperous and self-satisfied shopkeeper. The people who see me thus, reckoning by my apparent mediocrity, obviously cannot understand me. Am I not something else, such as I see myself—in progress toward my genius?
Which is the true me? Is it the me of the passing moment, that of the photo, or the me that will be, that of the mirror? Why have confidence in the darkroom rather than my eyes? Is not my gaze more piercing, as it cuts through the layers of appearance to seek out the underlying depths—that which can survive, and, in consequence, is truer? I lose myself among these question marks.
Considering things more attentively, my image in the mirror is not so much a more aged face as a face from which health will be absent. Will what I call my genius be no more than an illness? In five years, will I, for example, be eaten away by a cancer?
By devoting myself to this anguishing problem, I arrive at another interpretation. The body’s cells renew themselves. I can see those in my face that are five years older, but I cannot see the new ones, those which are going to substitute for the old, since they are not yet there—which explains that appearance of wear in the texture of the tissues, the lack of matter that causes the shadows in my cheeks, and also the slightly disquieting aspect of my genius!
All these chains of reasoning give me a terrible migraine. They are, however, necessary to permit me to live like everyone else. In effect, it is as if I am being torn apart between that which is and that which I see. If I followed my gaze, I would be irresistibly drawn out to sea, as Dagerlöff put it. I can only resist it by using and abusing the thought-processes that are my only anchorage in the world of flowers and the moment. A frail mooring, submitted to a rude proof. At every moment, it must restore the wholeness of the staff that my gaze sees broken.
Beneath the feeble light emitted by the red lamp in the studio transformed into a darkroom, I was reveling in the midst of the developing basins when the doorbell rang. I was not expecting anyone, especially at that hour. Anyway, given that I had adopted the habit of not opening the door, my friends had gradually forgotten the path to my studio…
The doorbell rang again, more insistently. Determined to give the unwelcome visitor a piece of my mind, I went to the door and opened it abruptly. Standing out against the dark background of the staircase, a skeleton was standing on the landing.
After a start of surprise, I vaguely supposed that the medical students of the floor below were playing a joke, but then the skeleton took a step forward, came in, and walked toward me as I recoiled mechanically toward the halo of the red lamp. Was it a hallucination? A fantastic vision? White hairs were suspended around the skull. Was it Time that had materialized? Was it Death, come already to pluck me from my domicile? I looked for the scythe, the hourglass
Fear made my teeth chatter, and I felt myself bite my tongue.
“Don’t you recognize me?” said the skeleton.
Amazed to hear sounds emerging from that empty and darkly-hollowed skull, I didn’t recognize the voice. The skeleton posed its coccyx on an armchair and stretched out its tibias. The jaws moved again. “I promised that I would come to see you.” At that moment, I identified the timbre of Dagerlöff’s voice.
“What has happened to you, then?” I stammered.
“I ought to be asking you that question.”
I noticed then that the rib-cage was rising slightly in a regular manner, and that one of the femurs crossed over the other was agitated by a slight periodic swing that extended to be tibia. The movement of these bones was not accompanied by any grating sound. I understood that he was breathing, that his heart was beating—in brief, that he was alive, although I saw him dead and reduced to a skeletal state.
He was caressing his knee with a cautious fingertip. His skull adopted a slight complacent inclination above the cervical vertebrae—rather surprising in a skeleton, in which one expected less expression. That macabre mime had a vaguely comical aspect. With some adventure with X-rays vaguely in mind, I asked him: “What experiment have you carried out, then?”
“Yours is sufficient for my glory. I’m eager to know. Talk. Where are you?”
Only then did I recall that he was the origin of my atrocious adventure—that I was face to face with the monster who had spoiled my vision, the unscrupulous torturer who had used me as a guinea-pig. I clenched my fists, but his skeleton still frightened me.
“Where am I?” I repeated, in a hesitated voice heavy with implication.
“Yes. Speak. At what stage is the most fantastic experiment ever attempted by human science? Has the veil of causality been torn away? Bold voyager in the beyond, are you approaching the secret of the thing-in-itself? What does the other side of the world look like? Tell me everything. I await your report more impatiently than an emperor awaits his crown.”
By virtue of a stroke of genius, I found my vengeance instantly.
“But I have nothing to tell�
��”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing in my life has changed. What experiment are you talking about? What do you think has happened to me? I used to paint, now I take photographs—that’s all…”
His lower jaw remained suspended, and the empty orbits of his skull seemed to be staring at me fixedly.
“You’ve surely received my letter?” he said. “You recall our conversations?”
“One receives so many letters…and one also has many conversations…”
“Even…when you look round, how do you see things?”
“As I see you.”
I had never seen a skeleton manifest amazement before, and then pass from amazement to irritation. He was now stirring in his armchair like a hanged man in a strong breeze. He spread out his humeri, fluttered his shoulder-blades, drummed his phalanges. I was slightly surprised to find him so well-articulated.
“That’s impossible,” he declared. “I couldn’t have been mistaken. Is my entire life’s work slipping away? To be thus frustrated of my glory? You surely made use of the compress? I inoculated your optic nerves with a bacillus progressing in time…”
The worthless individual was indicting himself before my very eyes, shamelessly. He was glorying in his crime! It seemed to me that I could see hatred emanating from the orbits of his skull. When he cried: “I’ll have to do it all over again, doubling the dose…” I could not retain myself any longer.
For some time, I had been nursing a desire to seize him by the throat, and only the sight of that unbreakable, unstranglable vertebral column was stopping me—but my fist unclenched. I encountered, with some surprise, a soft but resistant mass, in advance of the hole of his nose. The skeleton collapsed on to the carpet with a dull thud.
The Eye of Purgatory Page 18
