When I opened my eyes, I perceived with a shiver of horror that I was no longer holding anything in my arms but a corpse, her sides ultra-Baudelairean22 in their stickiness…
In the consequent disturbance of my recovery of consciousness, I thought I really had killed her. She remained inert on the divan. Her face spoke of the calmness of death, the release that follows the throes of agony. She was no longer breathing. Had I choked her in a crisis of dementia? I stood there mute with anguish.
Finally, she breathed an “I’m dead…” that brought me back to life. Keeping her eyes closed, she repeated: “I’m dead.”
And dead, she rose to her feet. Doubly dead for me, in fact. Her cadaver with the vitreous eyes was no more appealing than a scarecrow. I sensed, brutally, that I would never play out the comedies of the living again. She raised her arm in order to caress my hair with her hand. Before those fingers of death, which were approaching my face, I recoiled abruptly.
“One might think that I scared you.”
One owes the dead the truth. Unblinkingly, I replied: “No, you horrify me.”
With the staring eyes of a cadaver she shot me a glance—oh, what a glance! But I sustained the shock, as with a sword. Hated seemed to strike sparks in the silence. The dead treat one another harshly. Unceremoniously, I commanded: “Go away!”
She got up abruptly, as if stung by a whiplash. She didn’t say a word; she left.
If she had demanded an explanation, my reply was ready: “I too want a living lover.”
Is it really true that I want a living lover? Have I not passed the stage where one is free from all lust? When I look at myself full-length in the mirror, the disappearance of my sex has something symbolic about it.
I’m learning to understand the solitude of cemeteries. Dagerlöff, dead; Babar, dead; Armande and my concierge, dead; and me…
The circle of my acquaintances is evaporating around a center that has vanished itself. Life grows distant. Before my eyes, like a devouring canker, a nothingness expands that I sense to be infinite.
The skeletons to which my vision is getting accustomed are decomposing in their turn. See now how the rib-cages are losing their sides, permitting the sight of sad voids, like those of teeth. Elsewhere, it’s a tibia that is missing, or clavicles. It’s rare that I find a skull intact. One could believe that the whole human race were trepanned—trepanned by the future: the vengeance of time on those crazed brains…
Those missing bones permit me to identify my contemporaries more easily. Initially, when they enjoyed the integrity of their skeletons, I confused them all. Now, I’m more able to tell them apart. Babar, who must be buried in a damp and unhealthy place, has lost his arm-bones; nothing remain to him but the stump of a humerus. He doesn’t understand why I call him the jovial one-armed man when I encounter him on the terrace.
For a few days now, I’ve also observed a femur-less cadaver that seems to follow me at a distance. One might think it the skeleton of a legless man, maintained at a good height above the ground by a phenomenon of levitation.
I’d like to invite a few comrades to the studio, to observe their reaction to my recent canvases before organizing an exhibition. I won’t let on that I paint according to nature; they’ll all be presented as imaginary compositions. If I’m thinking about an exhibition, it’s not out of concern for fame, but in order to make a little money. My banknotes, already reduced to dust, are disappearing for good into the pockets of suppliers. The gas still has to be paid for…
I perceived the legless man, who seemed to be spying on me from the street-corner.
In the semi-darkness if the stairwell, as I climbed up with a bottle of varnish for my canvases, a voice that seemed vaguely familiar said: “Liar!”
Then I recognized the legless man, ensconced in a dark corner.
“What’s that?”
“Liar—I know that you can see.”
I shivered momentarily. Who, then, had succeeded in penetrating my secret? An abrupt intuition caused me to say: “Dagerlöff?”
The legless skeleton leaned forwards. I recognized the old madman’s fashion of greeting someone.
“You didn’t recognize my bones, eh? Vile liar, playing a role! Yes, I’m Dagerlöff—who is, moreover, your traveling companion. You tried to deceive me. In order to have a clear conscience, I tried the experiment on myself. Monsieur Poldonski, there are now two of us moving beyond the causal world, and you can no longer abuse me with false reports. I have the same eyes as you, with which to penetrate appearances. Oh, you may tremble in your carcass…”
Beneath his gaze, the power of which I knew from experience, I felt myself so suddenly naked, in fact, that I shivered and instinctively brought the flaps of my jacket back over my breast. He was talking loudly, though, risking attracting the attention of the neighbors. Better to continue the conversation and regulate our affairs in the studio.
To begin with, sitting face to face, we stared at one another—if one might put it thus—in silence. In bright light, we measured our reciprocal debris with severe but invisible eyes, like two women weighing up one another’s costumes.
He had not only lost his femurs, but his rotting iliac bone was riddled with worms. A dull greenish mold was growing between the vertebrae of his spine and, the sutures of his skull having given way, he had the appearance of having taken for a head the carapace of an old crab, bristling with spines. Some kind of black corrosive slime was spreading over his sternum. His state of decomposition was much more advanced than mine.
“You should have had yourself cremated—that would be less sickening!” I said, to break the silence.
He made no reply, and I perceived that he was looking at the canvases that I had lined up at the foot of the wall with the intention of varnishing them. The interest that they appeared to inspire in him began to flatter my vanity.
Nodding his crustacean carapace, he said: “That’s it—that’s exactly it. Life itself, if I might put it thus, just as we see it…”
With that, my sentiments in his regard began to change. I forgot my grievances. The enthusiasm for solitude and the need to be on guard that a human interlocutor always reinforced within me were yielding in the present instance to a feeling of release. I couldn’t see him, or so very nearly…he was dead, like me. We were the only two creatures in the world able to understand one another, to speak freely. In the final analysis, I found myself confronted by someone like myself.
He stood up in order to look more closely at the painting of the funeral, with the skeleton of the horse pulling the hearse in the foreground. Then he came back to the Fêtes galantes. Noticing that the femurs were crossed, retaining between them the distance of invisible flesh, he praised a modesty in those bones that the living did not have.
“It’s because it has been preserved from impure contact that the skeleton is the most durable part of the individual,” he said.
I would have preferred a more pictorial critique.
Running his eyes over the array of paintings once again he said: “You don’t see the forms?”
“The forms? Do you mean the volumes?”
“No, no—the forms! I call them that for want of another name. Diaphanous forms, like immaterial tissues, which pass with immutable serenity through the crowd, through walls…” Seeing my incomprehension, he added: “It’s true—perhaps you don’t see them yet. Although I started second, I’m further advanced than you, having doubled the dose. All your visions”—his gesture embraced my canvases—“are of the residues, the last vestiges of a world that is receding before our eyes. The level of time is rising for us like a tidal sea, and we no longer see anything emerging but the high peaks, the most durable scaffolding—which, little by little, will turn to increasingly lacy filaments…but all in all, that still recovers the world to which we once belonged. By contrast, the dawn of a new world is bound to project its first gleams. The distant lineaments of the next position of equilibrium are bound to appear to us, who are su
spended between two worlds. It is the glimmers, the harbingers of the new and unknown world, that I call ‘the forms.’ ”
I was staring at his ancient jaw, which was trembling under his voice like the beating of the shutter of an abandoned house.
“The forms? Do you mean the angels?”
He laughed. “Where do you think I’m taking you?”
“I’ve begun thinking of it as a kind of purgatory…”
“The word is too precise, overburdened in a fantastic sense by a religious vocabulary operating without the support of actual experiences like ours. It risks diverting a voyage that, as you must be aware, no longer has anything predetermined about it, bathed as we are in a universal free will, far from any causal universe… In these conditions, the slightest influence might direct us along a false path. We must remain impartial, and wait to see around what residue the reconstruction will take place.”
“But what about the forms?”
“I can’t say anything more. You’ll see them soon. What are they? Once again, I wouldn’t want to influence you. Sometimes, I think about the dead, who have undertaken this same voyage before us. I’ve told you a little about the maladies caused by a hurricane of accelerated time. If there is one thing we have learned for certain from the experiment to which we have subjected ourselves, dead and alive at the same time, it is that the distinction between life and death is not as radical as vulgar minds believe. All hopes are permissible. The dead have gone before us; we are following in their footsteps. What if we catch them up?”
His skeleton shook feverishly, and an emotion came into his voice that I had never heard there before. He had forgotten to play his usual character.
“I will confess to you, Monsieur Poldonski, that there is nothing I desire more passionately than to find the dead. Finally, I would be able to see her again—her! I would be able to hear her voice again—my daughter! The drama of her disappearance is still as present in my mind as on that first evening. My child, my only passion, a unique being, a prodigy—she was prone to fevers—she left the shelter of my roof one evening, ran away…days followed one another. I only found out much later: she was dead—but she was haloed with the strangest of glories, dead but in possession of the secret that the living pursue in vain… My daughter Apolline—shall I admit it?—it’s for her sake alone, fundamentally, that I’ve launched myself into this adventure, with the hope of rejoining her, of bringing her all at once the 20 years of affection that are waiting, accumulated in my heart, and finally to learn from her lips the ultimate meaning of the mystery of death…”
His voice broke with the emotion. I was strangely calm and cold, perhaps in a spirit of contradiction. He had stretched out his arm, and I felt, with a shiver of disgust, his warm and sweaty hand on the back of mine. If necessary, I could listen to him, but physical contact was too much. Any appeal to sympathy has always left me cold. He did not persist.
“Monsieur Poldonski,” he said, heading for the door, “when you see the forms, tell me. We shall search together. Two of us will have more chance of finding her…”
I accompanied him on to the landing. Seeing his legless upper body, suspended in mid-air, effectuate a series of little aerial displacements, I understood that he was going down the stairs.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I looked for the forms all day yesterday, without success. It’s fated that the old imbecile will trick me until the end.
The thought having occurred to me that the forms might be phantoms, I spent the night wandering around Montparnasse cemetery, peering through the gates into the pathways receding between the tombs. No phantoms, save for whores on the sidewalk unable to sell their virtue. One ends up being brought down to Earth when one goes in search of phantoms!
I brought three friends, collected from the terrace of a bistro, back to the studio, including the inevitable Babar, to show them my recent canvases.
From the corner to which I retired, in order not to influence them, I saw my visitors’ bones passing back and forth in front of the painted bones. They said nothing, and obviously did not recognize themselves on the canvases. From a certain agitation of jaws, I understood that they were chuckling quietly—it’s difficult to make out the laughter of a skull. It was, at any rate, inevitable that they would begin to talk nonsense.
“The idea’s amusing, but a trifle monotonous.”
“Probably not new.”
“Unfortunately, one doesn’t make paintings with ideas.”
“I defended myself; I mentioned the Orcagna in the Campo-Santo.23 They became more acerbic.
“There’s no point seeking a literary effect in painting.”
“Painting begins and ends with sex.”
“You’re forcing yourself into a blind alley.”
The advice began to rain down:
“Stick to nature, then, and look at it like an animal.”
“Paint anything at all, if you want, but paint what you see.”
“It’s the eye that counts, not the imagination.”
Exasperated, I threw them out, and remained alone before my canvases—symbolically enough…
No! I shall not be one of those who persist and beg their contemporaries for a modicum of renown. Between them and me, the last bridges have been broken, and there will be a moat, an abysm of indifference. I shall remain on the side of my vision, my canvases, far from all the rest. It’s not the bait, the externals of life that retain me, as they retain all those birdbrains. I paint the depths, and that’s what they can’t forgive me. I scare them with my truth. Well, if they’re afraid, let them run away! As for me, all the bolder for being alone, I shall be able to plunge even deeper…
Rejected everywhere, what remains to me? My disease. That’s enough! One is not oneself without one’s faults.
The disease has made progress, by which I remain frightened.
Astonished only to encounter decrepit skeletons on the boulevard, almost missing the cadavers of yesterday, whose mummy-like skin was still slightly reminiscent of life, I wondered how far ahead I might be. I had recourse to my indicative clock, which is in the Luxembourg, along the wall of the Orangerie—the place where skeletal mothers exhibit the dear fruit of their loins in the sunlight. I interrogated 20 baby-carriages with my gaze, leaning over the youngest infants swaddled in their rags. Well, I found nothing but tiny skeletons!
Thus, even though it has just been born, a creature appears to me already dead. Now, it’s inadmissible that all these children will die young. Some of them will reach maturity and grow old. If, even so, I see them all, without exception, in a skeletal form, the conclusion is unavoidable: my gaze is reaching at least a century in advance, an interval after which everything presently alive will be no more than bones.
“Smile at the Monsieur,” said a mother flattered by the attention with which I was examining her progeny.
I don’t know whether the monster hanging on to its bony rattle smiled, but I laughed, dully and sadly, for I knew that henceforth, I could not hope to see a living creature. I was alone in the middle of the 21st century.
No human gaze will ever again meet mine. For me, flesh has disappeared. I am living exclusively in a universe of death. It’s a landmark, a definitive severance. Melancholy will not leave me alone this evening…
If I go to the Jardin des Plantes tomorrow, shall I see the elephant alive? Or perhaps the parrots…?
I was idling beside the large fountain in the Tuileries, to which my sadness had drawn me. Around me, skeletons of all sizes were following the ordinary routines of the living. Children were playing, rolling hoops of which I could only see the shadows, or maltreating some sort of boat, whose wake alone showed in the water of the basin. On the stone benches, adult skeletons with phalanges ornamented with ivory needles, were knitting empty space untiringly. Further away, under the rotten trees, whose foliage only existed in its rustling, other skeletons were pursuing the perennial amorous conversations two by two. I contemplated my universe of d
ust…
And abruptly, the forms appeared to me!
At a stroke, as if in superimposition on my grey reality, a host of white forms irrupted. They came from every direction, passing, running, stopping and starting again. Moving patches with human contours, which floated without regard for the ground, the sky or obstacles, gliding without any apparent effort through an impalpable ether…
I thought it was a hallucination, like those dancing spots that the Sun leaves on the retina; I rubbed my eyes, but the forms were still there.
Their comportment, quite different from that of humans, did not seem to be due to chance—like the fall of snowflakes, for example. Each of them gave the impression of going somewhere, but their activity did not cause the slightest disturbance in the progress of the real universe, that canvas background where the living continued to circulate without seeing anything of the incessant passage of white shapes. I stood there with my mouth open, and murmured: “The forms!”
They were extremely pale, almost transparent. As one of them came within range, very rapidly, I made out the features of a human face. The forms! I am not longer looking forward to them! I can see the forms! The chair on which I was sitting made the gravel grate beneath my trembling body. I rose to my feet, and tried to follow one, but it was gliding too rapidly.
Then, as suddenly as they had appeared to me, the forms disappeared.
“What are you doing, Riri?” cried the voice of a little girl nearby.
I rubbed my eyes again. Had I been dreaming? Had it been a hallucination, quite distinct for once? I was beginning to think so when, with the same suddenness as before, the forms reappeared. I blamed the hour, an effect of the Sun. I turned my back to the setting Sun. Everywhere, behind me as in front, the forms populated the gardens. A kind of fever gripped me. Like a child running after a rainbow, I set forth in pursuit of them. Taking advantage of a moment when one of them became motionless behind a couple, I threw myself forward abruptly. I encountered nothing but empty space—but people were looking at me; my attitude must have seemed strange. I made an effort to collect myself, and drew away at the pace of an innocent stroller. The forms had disappeared.
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