The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  My exuberance cannot be contained. I have to go out, to plunge into the midst of beings of light, the living to whom I still belong. I want to enjoy everything. After all, it isn’t every day that one dies, and that day is a significant date.

  Go out? With that face—what are you thinking, my friend? But others don’t see me thus, can’t see me…

  Just to be sure, I’ve just taken a photograph. The print is very pale and old, but it reveals my usual face. I’m still their peer, in appearance. Champagne and women for me! If necessary, I’ll close my eyes…

  CHAPTER SIX

  After my night of celebration, I went forth this morning, in broad daylight, through the avenues and the squares, to see what had become of the world. Oh well! Everything appeared to me in its customary degree of decrepitude: skeletons, cadavers, the carcasses of dogs and horses, vehicles worthy to be sold for scrap—in brief, everything to which I’m accustomed. I’m dead, and nothing has changed in the universe; may I say that it’s a trifle disappointing?

  Disappointment gradually turns to anxiety, obliging me to think rationally about my condition. It seems to me that yesterday’s terror was not without foundation, and that my gaze should have been extinguished at the moment when I died. Nothing happened, fortunately—but why?

  Ought I to suppose that humans can still see after their death? That spiritualist explanation offends my positivism.

  Should I, on the hand, say to myself: my eyes, like the rest of me, are still incontestably alive. Nothing, therefore, is more natural than continuing to see. My optic nerves, still living, continue to offer the bacilli a culture medium in which they are quite naturally pursuing their march into the future. Little do they care that they have reached the date on which I shall pass away from life, which certainly holds no interest for them. So the process continues, I simply see things as they will continue to be after my death, without having any cause for astonishment in the fact that there has been no particular has change in the proffered spectacle.

  All of that seems convincing. Here I am, though, dispossessed of my own time, if I might put it thus, of the pride of the thinking subject, who always has a tendency to believe that when he is gone, everything is finished. I have been reminded that I am of no importance with respect to the universe. I knew that, but still…

  I make the further observation that, seeing things as they will be after my death, they are visible to me despite the fact that, in the normal course of affairs, I would never have been able to see them. I would never have been able to see my corpse, but I can see it! It is, in a way, the eye of purgatory that I direct at the world from now on. There are bound to be surprises in store for me…

  Truly, I can no longer bear to look at my dead face, and I have just smeared my mirror with soap in order not to see myself any more. And when I write, I can’t bear the sight of that fleshless hand, which is visibly decomposing. I had to go and buy a pair of gloves.

  These gloves—new, as I have every reason to believe, and as my sense of touch confirms—offer me the indescribable appearance of moldy, stiff, cracked and split rags. Evidently, suede deteriorates sadly over time. How could I make a choice in such circumstances? I could have bought pigskin, which appeared to be more resilient, but the price put me off. The eye of purgatory can still count. It has to—my reserves are diminishing.

  I wanted to know what my visual advance was, and I was lamenting the fact that I had no certain means of estimating it when chance came to my aid a little while ago in the Luxembourg. It’s sufficient to look at the infants being taken for walks in prams. They can’t be more than one or two years old, but I see them with the small serious heads of adolescents, like some kind of miniatures of boys of 13 or 14. In their turn, those individuals that I deduce to be schoolboys by the remains of satchels that they carry under their arms, have the faces of mature men. The entirety of humanity, marching in step, is progressing at an interval of about 15 years before my eyes, pushing at its head an avant-garde of skeletons in whose ranks are the dead of the next 15 years. Those corpses are playing croquet on the terrace of the Queens of France.

  Armande’s first visit since my death. She appears to me still alive, and will therefore live longer than me. I told her that, jokingly, like an old man flattering another—a tone that was much easier for me to adopt because she appeared to me wrinkled and grey-haired, at least 20 years older than she is. Was I mistaken in my estimation the other day? Perhaps I’m 20 years in advance.

  There’s no question of loving her as I see her now. My love for her is not the sort that lasts 20 years. It’s necessary to make her understand that our relationship is sliding on to the plain of friendship. Is that a consequence of my coldness, or my death? Once a sweet and worthy girl, she is becoming bitter and acerbic. Our tiffs have become more frequent.

  My ink is paling before my eyes to such an extent that I have to add Indian ink to it in order to continue to be able to write, and I can see the moment coming when I shall have to replace this yellowed paper with a piece of parchment, if I want to continue to keep my journal.

  The idea that I can see what I should never have been able to see has revived my curiosity with respect to my own vision of the world. I have given up the photography that can show me nothing new—always the same trees, the same houses, the same women—in order to revert to the testimony of my eyes. I even record that testimony, with the result that my canvases are scarcely more than scenes featuring skeletons. People will think that I have a macabre imagination. I don’t care. One must paint, first and foremost, that which one sees… and then again, these characters reduced to their bones are admirably suited to the yellowed, crusted and opaque shades that the brightest colors are for me, even as they come out of the tube. I see nothing on my palette but bitumen, greenish blacks and violets with winy glints, which are the very colors of decrepitude, in harmony with my new subjects, of the genre of Fêtes galantes au cimetière.19

  Quite frankly, I no longer have much choice of genres. Could I dream of a career as a portrait-painter, hope to capture the delicate nuances of the psychological expression of a skull? Should I risk myself in dead nature, however appropriate it may seem? Dead nature, the three Cézannian aples, disappeared from my horizon some time ago. Nothing remains to me but the resource of paintings in which flesh, in the manner of Rubens, melts away, evidently treated after its passage to the grave; that is what I do, bringing the composition back to the format of Watteau, which is more economical.

  Yes, I am letting myself be carried out to sea now. Attraction is not exerted by the world to which I belong, but by the one toward which I am going. And it seems to me that things are evolving with even greater rapidity than before. In the streets, entire houses and buildings are disappearing. The Eiffel Tower has been reduced to the condition of a shadow; the Opéra no longer appears to me in any form but that of a cloud of ash—is it fated to burn down again in the near future? On the other hand, the Obelisk lasts; the stone of the desert has seen other eras. Yesterday evening, while out walking, I saw something that struck me with amazement: miraculously suspended skeletons crossing the Seine in empty space. It took me a moment to realize that I was seeing the Academicians going home after the weekly meeting, using the walkway of the Pont des Arts, which is no more than a memory in the epoch attained by my gaze.

  Remember that thou art but dust, and to dust thou wilt return.

  No need for me to remember—I see it constantly. Nevertheless, one cannot help starting when, lowering one’s gaze distractedly upon oneself, one encounters—as I have just done—through the dust veil that is a pair of trousers, one’s own patellas and tibias exposed in broad daylight. Thus, in my turn, I have become a skeleton…

  I have, however, only been dead for a little while. My cadaver will not last long, Does that mean that I shall die in a distant country, where my remains, exposed to the vultures, will be rapidly reduced to me bones? Or that, interred in the common grave with the poor, the quicklime wi
ll soon do its work upon my flesh?

  I would have liked to keep my skin for longer.

  I have cleaned the mirror in order to see myself full-length. I’m horrible. The gelatinous and transport muddy substance that my flesh will become only appears in places. In general, there are putrefied shreds with sticky gleams adhering to my bones. I was surprised to find myself wanting to tear them away, for the sake of propriety, instinctively clutching at the skin of my abdomen—which held firm, fortunately! Then I overcame my repulsion and began a “Portrait of the artist by himself” according to that vision, in the genre of the flayed man of Bar-le-Duc20—but I shan’t raise my eyes toward heaven; it’s too pretentious, and against my principles.

  The forward march is accelerating; I have passed entirely into a skeletal state. I’m perfectly content with that. The last islets of decomposing flesh have disappeared, and neat bones appear from head to toe, with present no unpleasant malformation. Such as one is, etc. I contemplate myself in my definitive form. Pieces of clothing extend a very tenuous veil around my remains; it’s discreet and decent—but the metallic buttons of the trousers, braces and suspenders set disparate patches of rust around my new silhouette. I’ve just got rid of these accessories. I want to be free and clear.

  An odd way of attending to one’s toilet and taking care of one’s appearance!

  Having gone out this afternoon to visit my supplier of paints, I saw the first passer-by whose path I crossed start. An old maid of 30 or 40 uttered a squeal at the sight of me. A little group formed at a distance, whose members stated at me, sniggering.

  A taxi-driver gave me the key to the enigma by shouting at me as he passed: “Are you getting some fresh air?” I had simply forgotten to put on the cloud of dust that comprises my trousers and had inadvertently come out in the nude! When one sees oneself in a skeletal state, the difference isn’t so great.

  I went back home rapidly, pursued by the cries of street-urchins, who shouted: “Madman!” Others proposed going to fetch a policeman. I almost gave myself away by shouting back: “Don’t be so proud of your rotting carcasses!”

  That won’t help my reputation in the quarter.

  A hilarious scene: a funeral procession on the road to Montparnasse cemetery. The horse drawing the hearse, the coachman, the widows and the orphans were all in a more-or-less skeletal condition. Only the dead man, enclosed in his massive oak coffin, remained impenetrable to the gaze and seemed fresh—I almost said alive. Comical, comical, those bones which had others in tow. They are not aware, since they do not see it, that everything ends up the same. I’m going to paint a little picture: The Burial on the Boulevard, which will outdo Père Courbet and his Ornans Maccabee.21

  One cannot live in an environment of dust and dead men without suffering fits of depressive melancholy. I am like those prostitutes who, absorbed by their trade, know no more of humankind than a sad phallic vision. Oh, the voyage into causality is scarcely diverting, and the horizons of the landscape disappear beneath exceedingly grey mists. It is necessary to learn to distinguish things by their contours alone, increasingly blurred, to cultivate the soul of a dung-beetle in order to be able to live in such putrefaction…

  I have told myself over and over that I am the eye of purgatory, but it scarcely consoles me. I’ve just been wondering whether I might not do better to put on dark glasses, buy a white cane and simply declare myself to be blind. But I would excite pity! Anything but that. Then again, does one ever know…?

  Why? Why this ordeal? I read. Books hold together much longer than humans.

  An atrocious scene, sparked by God knows what: an Armande, older than I had ever seen her, burst into reproaches that I could more-or-less comprehend. Live with me was becoming impossible, it seems. I never did anything with her, never paid her the slightest attention. My monstrous egoism had finally killed all love, etc.

  I looked at her coldly, as an old man looks at his aged companion, with no affectionate interest, with the detachment of a psychiatrist observing a hysterical crisis. Every woman is a hysteric when she wants to be. I watch various sorts of bizarre creases being born on her wrinkled cheeks.

  “You could be 100 years old and not be more jaded!” she cried. “You’re freezing my youth. Personally, I love life. Come on, how long is it since you kissed me? It’s been so long, do you even know?”

  My gaze does not leave her face. I know full well that I’m irritating her by looking at her in that fashion, but I watch her turning apple-green while her nostrils become pinched. An expression of distraction—or, rather, an absence of expression—congeals her facial features. One might think them a painted cardboard mask…

  Abruptly, I realized that I was watching her die! Fate had brought her to my apartment on the day of her death!

  Instinctively, so upsetting was the sight of her face, I murmured, as if I were kneeling by her death-bed: “My little Armande…”

  “Your little Armande! You think that you can get out of it with words. I’ve had enough of your words that say nothing. It’s too late now, too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “Yes, it’s over. I’m telling you that quite clearly, so that you’ll understand: it’s over.”

  And indeed, her eyes had taken on the glaucous appearance already observed in the mirror on the day of my death. In spite of everything, in spite of her furious tone, I was moved.

  “We can’t leave one another like this—you’ve always been so brave.”

  “That’s it, yes—a brave girl, one that someone picks up and sets down like an umbrella. Have you ever thought about me—about what I might be thinking and feeling?”

  That exhausted face of a dying woman hurling such reproaches at me—the conjunction was cruel.

  “I’m only asking that we be polite…”

  “Polite? Monsieur would like to be polite! It’s enough to make one die laughing! You can keep your politeness—the time for it is past. I know now that you have nothing in your breast—stones have more heart than you have.”

  She was breathing hard. With the realism of an overly precise décor, the convulsions of her death-throes gave a semblance of verity to the imprecations emerging from her mouth. That was idiotic; I felt for her, because of the dolorous spectacle she offered to me—the compassion, or at least the pity, that one feels for a dying woman—but the violence of her language blocked all my good intentions. I would rather have surrendered to those lying promises that a death-bed calls forth.

  “Calm down. It will get better.”

  I don’t want it to get better; I don’t want it to get anything at all. When one has felt as you have made me feel, that one is worthless, one goes away…I’ve been patient as long as I can, Now I can’t, any longer. I want to go somewhere else, where I count for something…”

  Then, still because of that visage, I sighed: “Can one count for anything after death?”

  “What I want is to sense a presence, an affection, someone who appreciates you… Anyway, if I talk to you like this, it’s because I’ve found...”

  “I rather doubt that.”

  “You’re making fun of me! It’s over!”

  Indignation, or the approach of death—I couldn’t tell which—made her move her head up and down nervously: little thrusts of the chin, which jutted out, abruptly stretching the creases of her old woman’s neck. I ended up not knowing where we were. She made her preparations to depart, with a vague hint of comedy suggestive of a false exit. I felt an unhealthy desire to keep her with me in order to assure myself that she was really going to die. At the same time, the thought was haunting me that one does not throw a dying woman out into the street—that one ought to be kind, especially at such a moment. Oh, I knew well enough what the real remedy was: to furnish her proofs of my attachment.

  I set my bony hand on hers, on which the veins were standing out in relief on a shiny crust, the tattoos of old age. To the touch, her skin was softness itself. She withdrew her hand.

  “You
mustn’t hold a grudge against me,” I said. “I’m sick—sicker than one can believe.”

  “Don’t try to move me to pity!”

  I smiled, conscious of the superiority of my role. “I’m not at all like other men.”

  “Yes, I know—your genius,” she retorted, ironically.

  “My genius, or something else—perhaps a keener way of seeing.”

  “And of feeling nothing.”

  “Of feeling, at least, that we’re very stupid to argue when our days are so few.”

  I said all that because she was going to die, out of respect for tradition. She was stronger than me—but what good was that, since her 25 years gave her no suspicion?

  I sensed her softening. At the same time, to avenge myself for having to be humble, for having allowed my secret to be penetrated, a horrible desire—a necrophiliac desire—was born in me. I wanted to deceive her with herself one more time, with that ruined flesh, so different from the one that I had loved—and to be completely honest, I wanted to soil the memory that I would have retained of her. It also seemed to me that by insulting death, I was affirming, with the rights of life, my entitlement to belong to a world from which I found myself unjustly expelled. She was only a dying woman, but when one is a skeleton oneself, has one the right to be choosy? From beyond the tomb, I could still return with the daughters of men. Like a fallen angel, I could escape my inferno…

  Was it temptation, then, that she brought me? Were all her acid remarks, her reproaches, even her insults, nothing but darts to reawaken my ardor? In succumbing, if I decided in her favor, it was myself that I was condemning. Even that was tempting…

  I no longer knew what I was thinking, but I took her in my arms and pressed my lips upon her firm, smooth face, flourishing with health and life…