As I went home, though, they reappeared to me twice more on the Boulevard Raspail, firstly in front of the prison of the Cherche-Midi, and then further on, near the statue of Rodin, where they were moving through the cabs and buses cluttering up the crossroads. It was getting dark, but the artificial lighting did not change their appearance at all.
So I can now see the forms! A sort of delight grips me this evening in my studio as I write these lines. The sensation of a new and unknown power takes possession of me. Is my martyrdom not futile, then? I repeat, in a voice as soft as that of a child saying his prayers: “You have seen the forms, you have seen the forms…” And my head spins.
But why all that wasted time? Why haven’t I seen them before?
The answer springs to mind instantly: the forms could not appear to me while there was still a living being in the universe accessible to my gaze. They could only reveal themselves in a world situated beyond all human life. Now, being more than a century in advance, but having conserved the faculty of sight, I am able to glimpse them in their movements without them suspecting it…
I’m sure now of not having been the victim of a hallucination. I really can see that which no gaze ought to see. I am plunging into the secrets of the afterlife through a crack in a mysterious doorway.
I’ve spent all day spying on the forms and studying them.
It is not enough to want it in order to make them appear. It’s certainly necessary to think about them, but another unknown condition is also necessary. The superimposition appears abruptly, and the phenomenon can be manifest anywhere.
It’s difficult to distinguish their features, so rapidly do they go past. They seem infinitely flat, while being obedient to the laws of perspective. They have human faces. One might think of them as photographs of some sort—or, more exactly, those engravings that preceded photography, in which shades are made of thin, tightly-packed parallel lines. They remind me of the illustrations in the Magasin pittoresque, or those photographs of celebrities that one finds in the historic pages of the Larousse illustré. They are undeniably very busy, but their occupations remain a mystery.
They do not talk among themselves.
What are they? I no longer think about anything but them at every moment of the day. Not only does their mystery excite my curiosity, but the appearance of life that they bring attracts me, restoring the familiar physiognomy of the world. They have faces, faces that I can barely make out, but which are nevertheless human. I am no longer alone in a décor of death. They are like sparks shining over ashes. In their company, however distant and mute it may be, something warms in my heart. In the evening, when mist falls, when gloom envelopes and lends substance to the skeletons and ruins of the real world, if the forms appear to me, I might almost believe that I am still witnessing the movements of living beings.
Whether it is the bizarrerie of their illumination, the transparency of their appearance, or some secret property of their nature, however, I feel incapable of painting them. A little while ago, when it was still light and they were racing through the crowds on the boulevard, I took a sly photograph while hiding from them. I’ve just developed it; they don’t appear in the print, which only shows the ordinary passers-by in the grotesque costumes that I had forgotten.
The photographic lens does not see the forms. They must, therefore, be immaterial—and yet I can see them. Are they, then, the shades of the dead, as Dagerlöff appears to believe? But why should I see the dead revive because I see things 100 years in advance? I’ve only ever seen the present—or, more exactly, the fraction of the present that will endure for a long time.
Let’s silence our imagination and appeal to the rationality that has never deceived me. What is it in the present that lasts the longest, and which is immaterial? Answer: ideas. After the bodies, the cadavers, the skeletons, it is the ideas of human beings that are most durable. I am therefore seeing the forms of ideas. Judging by the manner in which the majority of brains function, there’s nothing astonishing in their being a trifle vague—but why do they have faces? An idea has no face.
Tried in vain to stare a little longer at a form yesterday evening, at the exit from the Opéra, when an authentic procession of phantoms came along the avenue of the same name. Their transparency renders observation uncertain. I need to go compare my viewpoint with Dagerlöff’s.
They haven’t yet appeared to me when I’m alone. Yesterday evening, at a moment when I was stretched out on the divan, dozing off, the sensation of a presence made me open my eyes. To my great astonishment, there was a form in front of me, as motionless as a large photograph on the wall. And it had Armande’s face! Armande’s face as I used to see it.
Strangely enough, though, the features that I recognized did not appear to me distinctly, by virtue of their plastic character. How can I explain clearly that which I saw confusedly? In the motionless face of the form that was considering me, I recognized Armande by the curious feature that something there must correspond to the fact that she always took the poorer of the two knives from the dresser. That was the striking detail, indicative of her physiognomy. One might have thought that the emotion formerly experienced in confrontation with that proof of delicacy had now become concrete in the face, permitting me to identify it, to give life an expression to the phantom’s pale form.
I spoke to her—softly, in order not to frighten her—but she was unable to respond, for sure. As she moved around the room a little, I still saw in her face a tone that she had once adopted in order to sigh: “How difficult you are to love!”
At the clothing store’s, where I discreetly interrogated the young page-boy, I learned that Armande was still on the staff, and that nothing untoward had happened to her. He volunteered to go fetch her. “Not on your life!” I replied.
It is sufficient for me to know that Dagerlöff’s hypothesis is false. The forms are not dead people. I shall go tell him.
The house in the Rue Quincampoix was naught but ruins in the midst of an islet of rubble. The staircase whose steps had vanished gave me vertigo, but in the end, the old man was still in his hovel—which, for other eyes than mine, was still intact. He was still legless, obviously, but his skeleton had not deteriorated much since our last meeting.
I was making him party to my investigations, with an understandable volubility and excitement, when a whitish shadow became manifest behind him, and I saw his own form appear and then move distinctly around the room, resembling him so closely with its shaggy white hair that I began to follow it with my gaze as the conversation continued. The response, necessarily, came from the skeleton immobile in his armchair, to which I turned my head in order to bring me back to reality.
“Do you see it?” I asked the grimacing skull, then.
“See what?”
I turned back to the form. Signs corresponding to the visiting cards ordered at the fairground both, the reference to the génie—“military, no doubt”—appeared distinctly. I could even see the three bizarre holes, the murky hollows that had surprised me in the sketch I had tried to make of him—the sketch of his true face. And in its arms, the form was holding a doll, the doll in the green dress that I had once seen here. There could be no doubt about it.
“But, your…”
“Your what?” said the skull, in an irritated tone. “Go on.”
Then something surprising happened. In the form with the living face, the skull appeared, the hideous, caved-in, flattened skull like a crab’s carapace—and at the same time, I read there clearly that he was lying to me: that he had lied, and that the forms were invisible to him!
The discovery left me breathless. I had almost forgotten my grievances in his regard, the absence of scruples with which he had used me as a guinea-pig and my desire for vengeance—but learning that he was still lying to me was too much to bear, and brought out all my wrath.
Without suspecting anything, he said: “You can see the forms, good for you! I didn’t wait for you. I’ve found Apolline by myse
lf.” Brusquely, he threw a large photograph at me and said: “Here she is!”
I looked at him in amazement. His deceit caused me some consternation. Not only did I know that the dead had no forms and that the forms could not be photographed, but how could he think me so ignorant as not to recognize on the photo the face of “The unknown woman of the Seine?”
“Yes, that’s her—my daughter, Apolline. I never identified her, to allow her glory the prestige of mystery. Now I’ve seen her again, though, her very self, in the other world. Perhaps you expect to find me delirious with joy? The incredible, unthinkable thing that I desired above all else and against all else has finally been granted to me. The unrealizable has been realized. My daughter! It has been given to me to find her, to speak to her—but my heart has not burst with joy! I tell you that without any disturbance, almost coldly. Wait, listen.”
He took the photo back and his skull leaned over it.
“Why does the interruption of a life end in that smile? One only has to look at that face, at that smile, which drives way back into the infamous kitchen of art and mystery the smiles of the Mona Lisa and that of Buddha, to comprehend that the being here present knows the secrets of the afterlife. The secret on which those lips seem to be forever sealed, in order to allow nothing to filter out but the upsetting testimony of a smile—that’s what I went in search of, plunging into the abyss…and I’ve learned it from her very self…me, her father. And I’ll tell you what it is…”
He paused for effect. I observed that his form took advantage of it to come and place itself behind him, and that it was cradling the green doll, the last relic of the dead Apolline.
“You resent me, Monsieur Poldonski. The stone resents the sling, the shell the cannon that fires it, the son the father who has launched him forth into the world. You won’t resent me any more when you know the secret. Here it is:
“The world into which we have come is so utterly denuded of resistance that it gives us the frightening privilege of unlimited liberty. Made of our pure desires, the world is such that we can find anything there, exactly what we want to find there. Our desires, and nothing more.
“Nothing more!” His voice rose to a roar. “That is the consternating response, the nothingness in which all effort is swallowed up, the revelation that innocence alone can welcome with a smile, but which leaves us, those of damned to consciousness, nothing but the illimitable tedium inherent in Omnipotence…!”
I was hardly listening. I sensed in his speech a new perfidy, a desire to destroy the magic of the new horizons that had revealed themselves to me. My anger mounted—but my attention was attracted to the back of the room by a new fact: another form appeared next to his, a form with an unknown, antipathetic visage, surreptitiously marked with desire, with something cowardly and spineless in its expression: one of those vile and hateful faces of which one says that one wouldn’t like to meet then in a dark alley…
Who was this prowler? The two forms appeared to know one another. Oh, he had nice friends, the old man who claimed to be searching for his Apolline!
Was this the obscure pimp who had been able to tip the body of the poor unknown woman into the river one night?
I did not have time to ask myself many questions. The two forms were now pursuing one another madly around the room. A presentiment of what was about to happen preceded the sight of it. I understood that the skull, the skull crushed into a crab’s carapace, was about to be flattened, right there in front of me, by the pimp, who was raising a brutal menacing fist. By virtue of a reflexive movement, in order to protect myself, I turned around to seize the first thing that came to hand—a set of tongs placed on top of the stove. I heard a dull thud, followed by the sound of a collapsing body. The legless skeleton had quit its armchair and was lying on the floor. The two forms had disappeared. Everything in the empty room had become calm and silent. What did that settlement of a mysterious account signify?
I prodded the heap of bones on the floor with my foot. Nothing stirred; he had to be dead.
What would people think if I were found alone in company with a cadaver? Suspicion could not help falling on me. What explanation could I give the police? Sweat tricked down my back. The best thing to do was to disappear without alerting anyone. I set the tongs down noiselessly and went out, closing the door carefully—a door that locked by itself, fortunately.
Now I’ve returned to the studio. Was I followed? I don’t know. How could I recognize the police, with my eyes? The whole scene unfolds gain and again in my imagination. The two worlds are overlapping. It’s intolerable that the one I’ve left behind, that of the shameful living, is still pursuing me in the universe of forms that my gaze has finally attained…
Discreet enquiries made in a bistro in the Rue Quincampoix have just confirmed it. Dagerlöff really has been murdered. His concierge might have seen me, given my description. Judicial errors occur easily. Prudence commands me to move to a new neighborhood. I shall abandon the studio and cut myself off from my past and my habits. A suitcase will suffice for my personal effects. And by doing a moonlight flit, I shall save the last month’s rent.
I’m taking my vision with me—that’s the main thing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I’ve found a little rooming-house far beyond the Nation. I told the landlady that I’m almost blind, in order to explain my groping in places that are unfamiliar to me. Such places are sordid, but one of the advantages of my condition is that I no longer see any difference between my lodgings and Claridge’s.
My anxiety is easing. Little by little, I’m calming down, and I’ve already observed that the forms of the twentieth arrondissement lose nothing by comparison with those of Montparnasse.
I my organizing my new life—if I can still use that word—and plunging back into the world of forms. They appear to me now in an almost continuous fashion, so persistent that, far from seeming a superimposition upon reality, it’s the real world that I have to strive to grasp behind the white veils that pass back and forth.
Since I’ve extracted myself from the familiar frame that gave it some cohesion, the old real universe glides even more rapidly through they greyness of its future ashes. What good is there in moving around and undertaking journeys? The landscape progresses of its own accord behind the window of my motionless apartment. I’ve adopted a kind of permanent observation post. Every day, I go to install myself on the terrace of the Tuileries, facing the Place de la Concorde, and I watch the world fall into ruins.
Cars, buses and passers-by, whose very contours tend to disappear, are no more to me than whirlwinds of dust beneath a vast sheet of immutable sky. If I close my eyes, life is there, close at hand, with its appeals, its cries, its ardors and its tumults, which press upon me from every direction; if I open them, I’m suddenly distanced by several centuries, and I see nothing more than a breath of wind stirring a desert of dust, a petty ripple running over the surface of a frozen planet.
That final agitation, whose manifestation is so vain and sterile, is the final adieu of the world of the living. It’s a hand waving a handkerchief at a ship that has departed for eternity.
But is it true that I’m alone in the immensity of the ocean?
Suddenly, a host of sails surrounds me. The forms are there, very close, secretly bound to the evolution of the dust. These forms are the ideas exchanged during an instant of the world. The universe is losing its material face, and revealing its obverse of thoughts and sentiments. All the passions, ambitions, amours and smiles that are hiding in the whirlwinds of dust become visible to me. It is an abrupt emergence of stars in a sky overwhelmed by darkness. One might think it a change of lighting that makes the invisible light up, more durable and more eternal, while the perishable flesh blurs and recedes into the shadow of the tomb.
It’s impossible to make out the skeleton of the chair-hirer in order to get away in time. Every time, I have to pay.
Why go out at all? Even in the depths of my miserable room, the f
orms come to visit me, and I can see them for longer, more distinctly. I’ve seen my mother—insanely—from whom I’ve heard nothing more since her last letter from Argentina. Does she still think about me, then, since her form has come? I’ve also seen Babar. He has recovered his trunk, which seems to be the symbol of the vulgarity that life demands of its faithful. I read more indulgence in his keen little yellow eyes than I had expected, and the kind of delicately narrow-minded intelligence that constitutes a solid and reliable tool for those bent on success. Form that he was, he must have been surprised that I didn’t offer him anything to drink. I drink alone now. We looked at one another for a long time, but without our thoughts making a connection. How did I know that Armande had deceived me with him? On his elongated earlobes there was something like the marks of my former lover’s fingernails—those pointed, red-varnished nails that I had always detested…
If I were a living man like others, that clairvoyance would be annoying…
My mother had not changed much, even though all the events of her adult life must have drowned all my retained memories of childhood in her features. I was able to see what a minimal role I had played in her life. On the nape of her neck, however, there were still the little blonde curls that caught the links of the gold chain from which her watch was suspended, so that it swung like a noose when she leaned over my bed when I was a child…
Experience now permits me to recognize the features and expressions that give each form a face that is the work of others’ thoughts. The forms are supports of some kind, on which are inscribed and imprinted the thoughts and sentiments that they are able to inspire in others.
The Eye of Purgatory Page 22
