18
I ADAPT. Intermittently.
I have spent hours thinking about whether I’ll fall back on the black-eyed girl.
What are the chances that I’ll try again? None, I think. Because suicide requires a beneficiary, or beneficiaries. Someone whom we have decided to punish or, on the other hand, to instruct (see Brutus). I have no beneficiaries, and so I can no longer kill myself, just as I can no longer send a telegram.
This is sophistry.
To begin with, there’s a question to be resolved: To what extent am I still alive? That is, the possible subject or object of suicide? That pitiful doubt is fundamental; indeed, if I were to take my own doubts seriously, those of a Hamlet or a Descartes would appear mere jests by comparison. Inertia and cowardice, hiding behind decorous excuses, hold me back. Pretexts. My agnosticism was but willed ignorance; my amoral readiness, pure escapism. Pretexts. I could define myself thus: a funerary mentality that encounters actual death with dismay, while yearning for the essence of Death, Death triumphant and universal (from which of course one is exempted.) Someone who has created this entire story down to the last detail, invented the so-called Event of the night of June 2, in order to have a haven of hope, to realize the ancient dream of immortality, an immortality (we understand) that is mine alone, alone as I always wanted my life to be.
And so this entire story is merely the lugubrious invention of a crazed solipsist—and petty slacker—who stubbornly refuses to believe he will die.
•
This morning I was awake before daylight, after a dreamless sleep. Awake, and soon thereafter I was on my feet walking, in a state of perfect automation. Or a raptus.
In the waking subject a raptus is caused by a) a permanent condition of stress, or b) an acute emotional impulse. In my case both causes pertain and the condition is imposed, forced: it’s mine and that of outside forces at once. I started up the car and drove off without, for a while, having any idea of what I was looking for or where I was headed. In practice, my destination was Teklon, the airport. My reflexes quite pointlessly readied, I drove fast. I was crying.
In truth, howling. Not in fear, not in pain—in agony. A frantic nostalgia, the harsh privation of and bitter regret for an irreparable loss. In forty minutes I was at Teklon. Without an instant of hesitation I headed for the offices, in a building to the right of the airport entrance that I had never before entered. I searched for cardboard and paper to write on. I made twenty or so signs, working feverishly, and then I placed them around the customs’ hall, the ticket office, in the bars and outside in the plaza leading to the runways. They all said the same thing: “Anyone who comes by please contact me, please get in touch”—the message was written in English, lingua franca of airports—“whoever you are, for heaven’s sake come find me or get me word somehow. I am at Widmad, only thirty-seven kilometers away. Look for the man-who-was, there is but one of me. The person writing this is that same ex-person, he’s all there is.”
Consciousness was not yet will; I did what I did without proposing that I do it, passively, and the text of my message proves it. Gratefully, I accepted the relief it brought me. I saw nothing at Teklon, my stay there was brief. I think I saw, out there on the runway, that the Tupolev 62 is still resting a fraternal wing on the Pan Am DC9.
I’m at Widmad now. Wondering whether I was dreaming, whether I just invented this parenthetical anxiety to find people. Invented it, I mean, in order to justify my actions.
And now I’m back home. I think back to the vision of those two airplanes side by side on the runway. It could be paramnesia. But halfway up the valley, did I or did I not discover that the creek had flooded the road? My wheels sank into the water up to the hubcaps. I go to look at the car; it’s lathered with mud, fresh mud. I drove those roads, it’s not paramnesia.
This problem of paramnesia, of false memories, already afflicted me back at Villa Verde, during the final period in the clinic, when I was getting better. Karpinsky tried to reassure me: “Not at all—no need to be alarmed, the matter has nothing to do with your neurosis. No, the Analysis considers this a positive symptom. And here,” he said smiling, “we can put our faith in the Analysis.”
O Dr. Karpinsky, I beg you. I need to see you. I don’t care where or how. But we must meet.
At times I find myself talking to him aloud, as if he were here before me.
Karpinsky, my friend, I have no one but you. Transference has nothing to do with it, and you know that. I am alone. The world is me, and I am tired of this world, this me. Show yourself, please.
•
I burst into the vestibule of the Hôtel Victoria, scattering gangs of cats that were evidently up to no good. For two hours now I’ve been at work stacking up chairs, carpets, newspapers, anything I can find that’s combustible.
The Victoria took its name from the days when Queen Victoria, crowned empress of the Indies at the urging of her minister Disraeli, a Jew and an intemperate English nationalist, stayed here in 1890. With its bald domes, its hoary festive air of invitation, it’s a relic of colonialism at 1,200 meters above sea level. I’ve decided to rid the valley of this anachronism by setting it on fire. I am certainly no pyromaniac; just the opposite, I suffer from pyrophobia, and Karpinsky knew it. However, I’ve discovered a newborn hatred for the gouty little queen, Victoria, and it astonishes me that not just Lytton Strachey but the great Gandhi himself spoke so kindly of her.
At two fifteen PM exactly I light the avenging match. By two thirty, the sitting room has become a pyre, and I leave. I go out to wash off under the rain. I’m covered in ancient dust up to the armpits and sooty all the way to my ears. While I wash myself I notice that in the direction of the plain, to the north, the clouds are breaking, or lifting. The rain turns silvery. On that side, the heavens seem to look down on things attentively. On my works.
My friend, not tangibly present, not material, is nevertheless here; he reveals himself in strange and unexpected ways, but he’s here.
The bookstore in front of the station is the only shop not offering me anything, nothing I can use, nothing that has anything to do with me. Of all the successors, the worst of all possible successors has been chosen, or at least, the least bookish. I haven’t opened a book, old or new, for years.
It was he who guided me toward the bookstore. In the window, the usual vanity fiction, in four languages, the usual mass market nonfiction. In the center sits a tome with a pale-blue jacket trimmed in red. A Guide Bleu? I look again; it’s not the Guide Bleu. Where the title ought to be appear two lines printed in Italian. Ti aspetto. Non qui. He’s waiting for me, but not here.
It wouldn’t be hard to lay hands on the book, I’d simply have to break a window. But I don’t consider it. It doesn’t arouse my curiosity that the words are printed in Italian, which he didn’t speak, didn’t understand. Nor does it surprise me that I hadn’t noticed that book the couple of times I passed by the shop in these last few weeks. I have other questions to put to myself.
First of all, while he has kept his promise, will I be able to keep mine? He says, “not here.” And therefore certainly not at Widmad. So I will have to abandon the sole plan I’ve been able to make, or that instinct has imposed. (A defensive, or conservationist instinct—or the comfortable resumption of habit?) I’ll have to leave my trusted Widmad. Leave, for where?
Just the other day I swore to myself I would never go beyond Lewrosen again. Below Lewrosen. Not only was this commitment made completely freely, but there are also my inhibitions to consider. I cannot go back to my house up the mountain. I can no longer go, here in Widmad, to the southwest part of the town, where the skulls vanished, which means I’ll never get as far as the outdoor market, the wooden bridge, or the Zemmi, my beautiful creek.
I can no longer look at myself in the mirror. Because I am sure that fear has been engraved on my face. I carry it on me.
I no longer use
the mirror, yet I still shave with care every morning. I’m beginning to reacquire a taste for personal cleanliness. Right now—it’s not raining—I’m in the pool with my swimmers; the water’s heated and I have soap and a sponge and I’m scrupulously washing myself. Soon I’ll get out of the pool and dust myself with some sweet-smelling talcum powder. Then on with the pantyhose, a (superfluous) garter belt decorated with pale-blue rosettes, and some gigantic lacy panties.
For a few days now, I’ve been wearing women’s underwear, obtained from the Grand Emporium.
My physical heft, which has grown, adapts pretty well to these unusual garments, although my muscles do swell the nylon of the stockings dangerously. When I undress in the evening I’m not troubled, either physically and psychically; those powerful, hairy legs look merely clownish beneath their black veil. I expect I’ll extend this style of dress to outerwear as well; women’s clothes are inviting, now that the foolish fad for female trousers has subsided, and they don’t weigh on you this time of year. I saw a white dress with red polka dots, an underskirt, and bolero. There’s nothing autoerotic about any of this, I might add; my sexuality has never seemed to me deviant, and anyway, for quite a while now it has languished, as it should.
If anything, I imitate the great Japanese actor Omagàta, who played only women’s roles, dressed as a woman. But there’s no hint of any kind of mental disorder in me; my reason is precise, vertical, unassailable. In my case, at present, madness is to be excluded. My reason calmly processes events and experiences, tries to extract ego-fundamentalist, ego-inflationist juices. Without any direct involvement on my part; I just let it act. I wouldn’t, however, exaggerate the importance of rational thought, which plays a consultative and representative role in human behavior. In me and in anyone, a healthy dose of illogic probably has beneficial effects, conveys immunity; it’s a normal defense mechanism, like antibodies.
19
REASON intact, garrulous to the point of presumption, the individual in me is liquidating. The psychic individual, bien entendu. I’m an ex-person.
There are long-ago precedents: when I was twenty I would ask myself, what am I, what sort of human being will I be? My pessimism was rhetorical, though. I did come up to the human average (with a degree of approximation, a narrow fluctuation above and below), and I maintained it. An example: I often called myself bête, stupid, an animal. Something une bête does not do. For a normal person functioning under normal circumstances, such uncertainty is formally contradictory, psychologically specious. Ça sent la littérature. It smells of literature.
Why am I now, ever since June 2, an ex-person?
There’s an obvious interpretation, which is: the social context, interpersonal connections, and the consequences of their disappearance, necessitate it. But these are sociologism’s wobbly gelatin words, and I discard them immediately in favor of another interpretation: humanity will cease to be when time ceases, and in the same way.
If time is abolished, we presume that humanity as such will lose substance. It’s a supposition that smells of philosophaillerie, of pompous philosophizing, but I don’t reject it out of hand, it’s not banal. Meanwhile, though, why has time been abolished and a year zero established that’s destined to remain forever zero? It’s my impression that this has been the case since June 2, yet the phenomenon remains to be explained. If time is the shape of internal feeling, so long as there is internal feeling (that is to say a conscious individual) there must also be time.
In The Possessed, Dostoevsky attempts to provide a theological-poetic explanation. He puts it in the mouth of one of his characters, Kirillov, if I remember correctly; he says, “When mankind achieves true happiness,46 time will no longer exist. Time will then be superfluous.” So have the dear departed found true happiness? I’d like to think so. The poor things deserve it.
What seems certain is that as a human being, I’m finished. It’s not that mine is a half-life. I’m not a specter drinking Don Hermanos brandy, not a corpse smoking Capstan (Navy Cut) in my pipe—but neither am I myself any more, not even that little that I was. I survive thanks to some unknown artifice. Inside a decompression chamber, or under an oxygen tent. Deprived of my identity, and yet, the height of strangeness, fully able to recall it.
What’s also certain is that I’m beyond time. A categorical confirmation? The problem of leisure time, free time, no longer affects me. A problem as old as humanity, and (very likely) its original sin, is the question: “Then, afterwards, what will I do?” I simply don’t ask it of myself. I am discovering that eternity (for one like me studying it from a parking orbit47 in space) is the provisory become permanent. The instant dilates and dilates, and in empirical terms that means a condition that can be eternally postponed. I act, but cannot estimate how long the action will take, I only know it’s incalculable. I’m filling my pipe, but when will I be ready to take a match and light it? Will I ever be ready?
A parte objecti,48 eternity, I realize, is hardly the orthodox one, it coexists happily with mobility, succession, change, with dawn and dusk. With the hordes of cats (plump and well fed) that jostle in the streets, howling and paying no attention to the mice, of which there are many. There’s little that’s arcane about it; eternity does not resound with a voice like thunder, as Bach imagined. It’s made up of the usual queues of bumper-to-bumper cars, their batteries just slightly depleted, and of neon tubes that emit alternate flashes of the usual chrome yellow and oxyhydrogen blue. A metaphysician, any metaphysician would turn up his nose at this kitsch eternity.
Whoever’s responsible doesn’t seem to have cared about being thought a great director. He didn’t need to.
•
These are the thoughts I bring with me as I climb the stairs of the bourse, heading toward the portico that will shelter me from the driving rain.
I’ve moved here permanently. To what I used to call the Golden City. Not the pious city of the fifty churches. Chrysopolis.
On the night of June 2, logic collapsed and from that moment, it deviated or crumbled piece by piece, yet of all the illogical things that I have seen and heard perhaps the most extravagant is that I am here, and not going away. An ex-person, truly. Out of my skin.
The disgust I felt for this city-symbol was sincere, profound; it was certainly in no way socio-ideological. Nor did it derive from any aesthetic or naturalist preferences; while I considered the Malga Ross the antithesis of the city, nevertheless my Malga Ross was not Gauguin’s Tahiti, or Thoreau’s Walden.
My aversion had a serious moral basis; it was disapproval, condemnation. Spontaneous. By that I mean, thought out by myself, without the help of Marcuse, maybe with some Savonarola grafted on, or more likely, some evangelical fire from the neo-pietistic revival. Not for nothing did my maternal ancestor (whose name I bear) teach at the paedagogium of the illustrious August Hermann Francke.49
The feeling was tortured, miniloquent,50 categorical. Impersonal. The early detection industry, the mountain motorways, Henriette: none of these weighed in much.
Today I recognize that I must let the feeling go. Not “in a manner of speaking,” not superficially. Unguardedly, wholeheartedly.
•
In short, I understand that I must reject what there is that speaks of me in that disapproval. A considerable part of my ego collapses; for me this is a deep shock, and I don’t exaggerate. Disapproval turns out to mean I’m incompatible. Its roots were physical, organic.
A sea swell. After surviving so many trials my tiny paper boat finally falls apart. Curiously, this little catastrophe brings about no positive changes. I’m seized, instead, by a vague but keen desire to repent. And by a pitiful contrition, solace of the neophyte penitent. My zeal is genuine, if somewhat diligent, my intentions firm, if vague (very vague). Yes, what distinguishes this psychological retreat of mine is its sincerity. I’ve returned to perfect naïveté.
In a different moment, I imagined that very
soon men of every race and place must join in solidarity (something I called socialidarity or socio-solidarity, quite different from humanitarianism or charity), imposed on the Planet of the Economy by ever-shrinking space, bringing to an end all the empty sermonizing on love and peace based on mystical beliefs and tablets of the law. That was many years ago and I was duly disappointed. Anyway, no socialidarity would have been enough to make me accept Chrysopolis. And why therefore do I accept it now? Is this just unwitting self-coercion, or if not unwitting, unwarranted? In practice, gratuitous? The crazy drift of the paper boat come to Chrysopolis to sink.
I’m out of the rain now, under the portico of the stock market, and I take off my jacket to wring it out. The doves and the crows that were milling around underfoot rise up squawking. Crows, or rather the larger ones, ravens, Corvus corax, ill-omened birds of the battlefield.51 Someone once said the stock market would be humanity’s last battlefield. The birds, however, are fraternizing. Never seen anything like it.
When and how did I decide to leave Widmad, the place where, after spending a whole lifetime in Chrysopolis, I had gone to detach myself deliberately—and not in cowardly escape, or merely to enjoy a comfortable retirement, clean air, and meditative silence? Doubtless I was thinking of Karpinsky. His message, the “not here.”
If it was his initiative, though, it means Karpinsky stands against all moral judgment, all material truth. Judgment, it is clear, even in the most disinterested conscience, implies condemning something, someone. There is no morality and no justice that doesn’t judge and doesn’t condemn. He doesn’t say: You are wrong to judge Chrysopolis and what it embodies in a certain way. If anything, he makes me feel I must transcend, disavow. Myself. An ascetic tour de force, a high-wire act. Self-disavowal has always seemed to me a kind of spiritualistic freak show.
I have no concrete proof this initiative of mine is directed by Karpinsky. I know he cannot come to me, but the reasons he doesn’t don’t lie in him. I see his hand in this, thoughtful and diplomatic. He’s worked on me to bring me to his level, using his deep knowledge of me. He effected the raptus with a series of subtle suggestions.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 12