The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  Oh, why have I not thought, felt and loved better? Now, instead of wandering among so many unknown faces, I find a thousand memories around me, a thousand opportunities for delight. Instead of being an anonymous crowd, the world of forms is a beloved crowd in which everyone speaks intimately to my heart. Why has my life been so poor?

  I’m reduced to the reading of two or three meager faces. I’m paying the penalty for my solitary pride. Was it necessary for the error of my life to become visible to me for me to recognize it and repudiate it?

  Of my father and Dagerlöff, no sign. It’s certain that the dead no longer have forms.

  I was trying blindly to work the gas stove on which the handful of pastries that constitute my dinner needed to be cooked, and my thoughts were lingering on the poverty into which I have sunk, when the sensation of a presence made me turn my head. A form was indeed there.

  At first glance, its face told me nothing, although it inspired some repulsion in me. It should not be thought that all the forms are as lovely as angels; they are often hideous. This one was not so much hideous as disagreeable in its choice of expression, which was suggestive of a pretentious mediocrity. It must be harsh and miserly, and even more sensual—I could see that in its nose. In the rather pronounced creases of the forehead there was something reminiscent of the lines of a hand that spoke of a spoiled future. To what forgotten acquaintance did it correspond? Was it the skeleton that addressed me intimately, but which I had never been able to identify?

  I was asking myself that when it turned slightly, and I saw a little birthmark behind its left ear.24 It was the form encountered in Dagerlöff’s apartment—the form of the murderer! Shivering with fear, I adopted a defensive stance. What did it want from me? It circled around me. I never took my eyes off it. Had it come to kill me too? Or was it a warning that it was giving me? Confronted by my obvious hostility and resolution, it disappeared—but its visit upset me in the extreme.

  Who is that form? It doesn’t have a frank gaze. Every time I tried to meet its eyes, it looked away, like those madmen who mistrust an interlocutor. When I went to see my poor father in the asylum, the inmates turned their eyes away in the same way, in order not to see me, not to be distracted, to remain in confrontation with their sickness. The mystery intrigues me, and brings the Dagerlöff affair back to mind. Shall I be disturbed again by the police?

  In the course of a period of insomnia, not long before dawn, Armande’s form came quite casually through the window and stopped at the foot of my bed as if to study me. Was she moved to pity by my poverty? Personally, I felt no shame in her presence, and in a leisurely fashion, I examined the face in which intonations, nuances and meager memories mingled their features. “Oh! My beautiful hyacinth!” declared the circumflex accent of her slightly taut upper lip, raising away from her white teeth. “Why are you always growling?” was the slightly ironic wrinkle that hollowed out a parenthesis on her left cheek when she smiled. Then, a more attentive study revealed—alas!—signs that I had not set upon the face myself, signs that originated in another, perhaps my successor: a sad projection of the cheekbones, a beauty-spot beneath the corner of the left eyelid, which clearly corresponded to thoughts of love emanating from a foreign source. A seed of posthumous jealousy crossed my mind, before yielding to a thought of renunciation that was instantly inscribed on her slightly oversized mouth—which was open as if to speak, although she had not said anything. At the same time, I found an expression in her gaze so indulgent, so compassionate and fundamentally affectionate—a forgotten expression I had left centuries behind—that I wondered why I had not succeeded in loving her.

  I was asking myself that gravely and regretfully, almost dolorously, when I saw Armande raise her eyes. I turned round. Horror! On the other side of the bed, the form with the birthmark was there, watching us both. What did it signify? What had it to do with our tête-à-tête? Armande seemed to be acquainted with it. Was it my successor? My surprise turned to consternation. How could Armande be interested in, and perhaps attach herself to, such an individual? Suddenly, all the love for me of which she had once given evidence seemed retrospectively soiled and vitiated. I wondered why I had been unable to love her? There was the answer, before my eyes: how could I love a woman capable of choosing such a lover? I, who, even in places of ill-repute, could not bear the sight of another man coming in to seek his pleasure…

  I wanted to warn Armande, to put her on her guard, to tell her everything I knew. I cried out to her, under the spur of an irresistible impulse, without reflecting that the forms can neither hear nor speak. The neighbors banged on the walls angrily. The two forms disappeared—and I remain alone, racking my brains in the effort to understand.

  How could Armande have met that specimen? What was it doing at Dagerlöff’s apartment? Could she have sent him there to avenge herself for having been left by me? Had he killed the wrong man, thinking that he was killing me? My thoughts became lost in these enigmas. The world of forms scares me. It does not offer the security of the real world. Anyone can enter your place of residence at any moment. One is no longer in one’s own home.

  I have returned to the material. I was walking through the streets—which is to say, between two hedges of upright dust, representing that which will remain of the capital’s stone in 1000 years—when I was suddenly dazzled. What were those marvelous flashes? I was in the Rue de la Paix, where the future lost gems of ancient Lutèce glitter in the jewelers’ windows. A surge of enthusiasm lifted me up and dropped me again, quivering with lyricism. The last farewell of gold and platinum suns! Greetings, little rings of Saturn, bracelets worn on the arms of invisible elegant ladies! Perhaps the forms are no more than a mirage while you, your reality, truly defies the centuries, and the world is only turning to ashes in order to provide a better contrast, O sole truly precious objects in this casket of ruins!

  Why should I not appropriate a platinum bracelet? Do archaeologists do anything different? My eyes tell me that I am in a desert, my thoughts tell me that there is no theft when one is all alone…be brave, then!

  But there are the forms! Oh, I shall have spent my life not giving way to my desires!

  Which way should I turn? Should I give in to the last temptation of matter? Should I, on the contrary, turn to the forms? There’s still time to make a choice, if I don’t want to fail in death as I’ve failed in life—but what lesson should I take from everything that has happened to me? One might think that I were being given a glimpse of the solution, that I am being urged on to the right path, but that, like an imbecile examinee, I don’t understand anything, haven’t discovered anything…

  It’s inexorably fated that I shall waste all my chances.

  Going out on a sunny day, when all the forms are frolicking, is like walking along the sea-shore during a regatta, amid the ostentatious marquees, with the swarms of gulls, while the “white nations at play” wave scarves in the air from the balconies.

  Seated in an arch of the Pont-Neuf all day, I never ceased watching the space traversed by those rapid courses, those faces, made more beautiful or uglier, but which never have the insignificant visages of reality. Each one makes of its neighbor either a caricature or an ideal painting, but at any rate, charges it with the meaning that it did not have in its natural state. And the whole of the invisibility that I am privileged to see extends like a vast deck of cards, playing God only knows what game!

  It was warm, and I had automatically taken off my hat. When I went to pick it up from the stone bench, it was full of coins. I had been mistaken for a beggar! How pathetic I must look! At the end of the day, though, here is a kind of employment, for which I have been searching—one in which one is paid in true metal and not in invisible paper. The coins are encrusted, as if they had spent an eternity underground or in a numismatist’s cabinet, but they are currency.

  I shall go back to install myself there instead of the Tuileries. And since I’m good for nothing, why look for anything else?

/>   If I were to date this journal with the millennialism of the world as my eyes see it, I would probably have to write 4000 or 5000. It’s a long time since all the skeletons disappeared.

  Everything around me is ashes, to the point at which, in the streets, I can only discern the passing cabs by the volume of their powdery mass. Machines and living things are combined in nothingness; only their movement still reveals them: “That’s moving, beware!” is all that I can say.

  What I have left to guide me is odors. Displays of food smell, like gusts of wind, and are my lighthouses—but one can’t describe odors very well. Fundamentally, as soon as one can no longer see clearly, one has little to say. I sense things as the brain of a dog senses them, and like a dog, there are times when I am entirely accustomed to my poverty.

  There are other times, however, when I groan: “Why have I been delivered to this fate? Why has my life been aborted?” I rebel; I clench my fists. Who can I blame? God? Destiny? Society? All of that is the same to me…

  I go on and on! Even the forms are now changing their appearance. Their faces are blurring, seemingly less pronounced, less diversified. Individual visits are becoming rarer.

  But why should ideas be eternal? They are a little more durable than material appearance, but in the end, time must reckon with them as with everything else. The forms’ faces are paling because the thoughts, sentiments and remembrances of others that comprise their features are paling. Forgetfulness is doing its work; everything is subject to the mill of time.

  Nothing remains of each form but a sort of vaguely-inexplicable supportive frame.

  The only signs still distinguishable in the anonymity of forms are those corresponding to reputations capable of piercing the oblivion of centuries. Thus, on the Pont-Neuf today, I saw a famous inventor pass by, in the form in which he will be reproduced in the textbooks of the future, bearing by way of a caption an amulet saying: The inventor of…God knows what! I’ve also seen a great actress in Roman costume; a modern Ninon de l’Enclos (who could that be?); the shock-absorber king; and a saint who had, I swear, an authentic halo…

  All ridicule and all glory makes a fine mixture in this elixir of renown. The spiritual universe is being distilled around me. I can only see what will remain of this sunny day in the eyes of the most distant future.

  And what of me, the great painter, who thought himself a kind of genius? I have not seen myself pass by. That’s the confirmation, the certainty, of my irremediable failure…

  An odd destiny mine has become: the man dreaming on the Pont-Neuf. Today that brought me a little more than 20 francs.

  “I don’t feel well.” Does that sentence still have any meaning when, for such a long time, one hasn’t felt anything at all? My illness goes back to the day when the forms first appeared to me, or, even more distantly, to the day when, having decided to end my life, I began this voyage…

  How can I define my illness? I’d like to know…why has my life been spoiled?

  As Irma, my landlady, a former acrobat said to another of her lodgers about me: “Poor Jean isn’t right in the head.”

  The odor of a cool wine-cellar exhaled in the torrid streets in the July sun caused me to go into an archway and plunge myself into its shade as if in cold water. Huddled up against a phantom pillar, I didn’t take up much space. The place was calm and deserted, apart from the forms, of course, which were passing by as usual but are no bother when one is as used to them as I am.

  A voice that called me “old chap” asked me what I was doing there. I didn’t know myself. My interlocutor was nothing but a little swirl of dust that I could scarcely make out in the gloom. He reeked somewhat of snuff-tobacco, but his voice was more pleasing. We started chatting and, as one thing led to another, I told him a little about myself: “Personally, I’ve wanted to steal, I’ve wanted to kill, I’ve wanted to kill myself…”

  “Did you think about the blackening of your soul?” he asked.

  “Who still believes in souls?”

  He started. I was talking to the curé of the church into which I had entered.

  For some time, he talked to me in the fashion of the catechism, of the Hell that awaited me. I let him talk, in order to give him pleasure. I knew much more than he did about death and its consequences. Without making it too obvious that I was setting him a difficult question, however, I asked him what one could see when one made the great leap.

  “The important thing is not so much what one can see as saving one’s soul.”

  The priest still thought he could save his soul! Ironically, I said: “But what does one have to do in order to do that?”

  “Love God and one’s neighbor.”

  “As for God, I’ll believe in Him when I understand why, having given me life, He has permitted everything I’ve attempted to fail lamentably. Things have happened to me that I can’t tell you, but do you think that making me a tramp is pardonable?”

  “My son, my son!” he sighed. He told me that he would pray for me, and gave me 40 sous. That was the least stupid thing he did.

  To recommend me to love! Does he not know, then, that an intimate idea of oblivion paralyzes the very possibility of love?

  Fundamentally, I’ve had it.

  Reduced to the essential, to its four elements, my universe was holding firm against the millennial assaults, but now I have reached the point at which water, which had thus far continued to flow with the calmness of an eternal representation, has disappeared…

  This morning, it did not run from the landing tap, although I could hear it glug-glugging. All day long, I didn’t see a drop pass under the Pont-Neuf. The last bath in which the unknown woman of the Seine fished up her secret has run dry! And a little while ago, at the soup-kitchen in the Place Maubert, the jug seemed empty to me. The water was there, however, I could feel it. I was able to drink it—although I prefer wine—but I could no longer see it.

  Thus, my gaze has reached a point in the fantastically distant future at which, in consequence of some cosmic catastrophe, some encounter with a comet, our planet’s water has evaporated.

  That I am en route for eternity, I can no longer doubt. I shall reach it at the moment of my death, my true death—that’s certain. It will have been granted to me to see Time unravel all the way to the end of the reel, to witness the evolution of the world until its final moment, the end of millions of years. So shall it be, as my curé would say.

  The Sun is so pale that I could see the stars in broad daylight today. It’s going out, that much is certain.

  To measure my advancement, to find a clock appropriate to the task, I need to direct my attention to the supposed objects of eternity; I got up tonight to watch the constellations. Well, two wheels of the Great Bear’s chariot disappeared before my eyes! Constellations treated like vulgar taxis! Nothing escapes the Scythe of Time. The sphere of fixed stars is nothing but a soap-bubble, the immutable sky nothing but a sand-castle. Vanity of vanities!

  When the Earth disappears, how shall I walk without suffering vertigo?

  All day, in spite of cruel pains in my legs, I ran all over the city trying to find forms that still had faces, in order to catch the merest glimpse of life. Nothing—they’re all as pale as blanched leaves, and they’re shrinking. “This universe is disappearing like the other,” I said to myself as I came back.

  But just now, on going down to the office to fetch a quid of tobacco that I had forgotten on Madame Irma’s mantelpiece, I saw the form with the birthmark appear in the mirror! Over that one too, the eraser of time has passed, but it has not lost its antipathetic expression, and I saw the birthmark clearly reflected in the mirror.

  Just my luck that the only form conserving a distinctive mark should be the one that I can’t stand! What good does it do to change the world, if the same ill-luck follows you everywhere? I went swiftly back to my apartment to escape the vision. It almost followed me upstairs. One might think that it knows that it irritates me, and that it’s eager to impose
its presence upon me.

  It’s becoming an obsession. I encounter it everywhere: whether I go to empty the dustbins in the Avenue Jean-Jaurès, queue for greasy water at the Belleville barracks or am at my post on the Pont-Neuf, that bitch of a shade torments me. It arrives, mingling with others, impersonally, without seeming to be doing anything, then stops on seeing me, makes as if to go away or come closer, turns so that I can see the birthmark…an entire atrocious routine. Who can it be, for God’s sake?

  In the middle of the Boulevard Voltaire, exasperated, I shouted names at it—the names of slight acquaintances of yesteryear, as if it might hear me and reply to me! A policeman told me to shut up. I was causing a scandal getting angry like that, with no reason.

  The form is that of someone who is thinking about me. But who can still be thinking about me in this rotten world? And so disgusting an individual, to boot! I sometimes think that there was someone in my life who secretly wanted to do me harm. That would explain why everything I attempted has failed…and I shall die without knowing who…

  The form with the birthmark has played a dirty trick on me; I jarred my hip as I was going down a stairway under the Pont-Neuf; yesterday evening a car knocked me down on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir. Something that must be after my blood has got its claws into me, and I don’t know where it will end up. When one sees things from afar, one obviously sees things less well—but above all, no ambulances, no police. I got back to Irma’s house as best I could.

  I’m in my bed at present, but I’ll have to get up to go out in search of something to eat. Whatever it is, it will make amends, the bitch. Needless to say, it’s holding up better than the others; instead of shrinking, it’s retaining its dimensions and even an appearance of physiognomy. Taking advantage of the quietness of the room, I look it straight in the face whenever it’s motionless. It’s a head that respires mediocrity, with a receding forehead and the fearful expression of a hunted beast: the head of a degenerate, such as one sees in newspapers, without a collar. Might it be Death? No, Death is a myth, an allegory, and I know that the forms are real. Might it be a companion in poverty, a killer paid to murder me? But why? Everyone at the rooming-house knows perfectly well that Père Jean of the Pont-Neuf hasn’t a sou. Vengeance? Armande, Dagerlöff—all of that’s been obsolete for a long time…