Ouvrez le ciel, fermez l’enfer!
[Open heaven, close hell!]
sang—black under their white robes and backed up by the choir of everyone else present—the ounsis at the home of Lorgina Eloge the mambo of Port-au-Prince, the evening of the “coucher des ignames” [laying down of the yams].
Ici comme devant la mort
Le plus lâche fait des efforts
[Here, as when faced with death,
The worst coward tries his best]
had been scrawled firmly and without a mistake by the hand of a stranger on the wall of the latrines of the Centre Semi-Permanent de Revoil Beni-Ounif (South Oran) at the time of that “drôle de guerre” [“phony war”; name given to the Second World War during its first phase] during which all servicemen—or almost all—explained their sexual inertia by referring to the myth of bromide.
Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée,
[Nothing is created or destroyed]
an axiom that the older of my two brothers quoted with the profound air of a philosopher and that I myself—without at that time knowing Ronsard, who tells us that Matter remains and form is lost—savored as rich with meaning, unlike other dicta such as: Take not back what you give. He who leaves his place loses it, or He who sees a mote in his neighbors eye sees not the beam that is in his own.
Faux témoignagne ne diras
Ni mentiras aucunement. . .
[Thou shalt not bear false witnesses
Nor lie in any way . . . ]
in which “... gnagne” [ . . . nesses] instead of “. . . gnage” [ . . . ness] could prove my mediocre skill as reader if not the excessive stammering of an enfant grognon [peevish child], the lazybones repetition, the dunce exaggeration of the gnangnan [spineless, flabby] tone in which the Ten Commandments are recited in earlier days when “holocauste” [holocaust] with its burnt taste evoked the fires of Pentecôte [Pentecost] which rôtissent les côtes [roast the ribs].
Bien d’autrui ne convoiteras
[Thou shalt not covet another’s goods]
nor his wife, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything considered by the gleaming, concupiscent eye, since according to the Rédempteur [Redeemer] (glimpsed behind his bars like Daniel le Dompteur [Daniel the Lion Tamer] in his pit) a camel would pass through the hole—or the eye—of a needle sooner than a rich man would enter heaven by thought, by word, by deed, or by omission.
L’entendez-vous, il blasphème!
[Do you hear him, he blasphemes!]
shouts Caiaphas, tearing his clothes and abandoning the Son of God to insults and spitting.
“When an electric lightbulb bursts,” my older brother also explained, “one really should call it an implosion rather than an explosion.” The small death signified by any abrupt irregular motion—an arrest of consciousness, an interruption in the uniform flow of time—and as well illustrated by dreams of falling or startled wakings as by electric shocks, sudden jolts reverberating in the soundbox of a phonograph, magnesium lights (like those I used to have to suffer when they took me to have my portrait done by the photographer Otto), or those detonations which I detest, even more perhaps when one waits for them and they only occur after some time (as in the old days on the boulevards, at the Kinéma Gabka, an old movie theater with “imitations of noises,” in that film in which a clown, clearly an adult, played the role of a beret-clad boy whose balloon suddenly begins to inflate—unless it is the boy himself who inflates it with a bicycle pump—and succeeds in filling the entire volume of the room just before the final burst which one predicted would be noisier and noisier as the seconds went by).
The fire and overflowing river in the Götterdämmerung. The collapse of the temple of Dagon when its two main columns were toppled by Samson, a slave with blinded eyes who had until then been turning a millstone. The Sardanapalian end of the prophet Jean de Leyde footing the bill for an orgy in the course of which his stores of gunpowder were set on fire (which is what the curtain falls on in the last act of Meyerbeer’s opera). In Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre, the rue Delgres, which slopes steeply down in the direction of the seacoast and whose name commemorates a man of color who, defeated by Bonaparte’s soldiers, blew himself up along with the rebels under his command. In Martinique’s Saint-Pierre, a black form: allegedly that of the girl killed by fire and water, caught in a trap when she tried to flee what one can never more than temporarily foil. The last firework launched by a toro de fuego, the whirling “crown” sent high in the air and representing the soul which has supposedly been exhaled—in a final, tumultuous sigh—by the wooden and cardboard toro.
Whether it comes to me in the form of a catastrophe or whether, bourgeois style, I feel it slipping between my sheets one day, death, whether violent or not, is not, for me, “natural,” and I cannot conceive of it as anything else but an accident, which can only happen unexpectedly, even if it is unavoidable. The end of the world, if I admit the existence of nothing beyond my own person, or an end that I will furiously impute to my “bad star” if I sense that others stay on while I leave, this accident is not only an absurdity in itself (the unexpected descent of a deus ex machina with the preposterous behavior of a spider which abruptly unwinds its thread and plunges into the soup) but makes my whole life absurd, degrading it—as it would any possible life—to the rank of the bad scenario that will not really be resolved but will end because, in one way or another, the performance must end. I am less afraid in the country than I am in the city, because there the prospect of the changes that will be undergone by my body (future shrub, tree, or other sample of the botanical world like the wheat in the form of which Persephone returned to life) appears to me less frightful than when I am surrounded by town life; but whether I am here or there thinking of death, the little drop of absurdity that thus fell into me at a time I no longer remember ceaselessly extends its ravages, and isn’t my truth as a man reduced to nothing here and now if fear will not allow me to recognize death as one of the essential components of an intrigue that constantly presupposes it and each episode of which can have only a fallacious signification if I have to blind myself in order to be able to carry on with my business? Since this death from which I try to turn away—but which I know, nonetheless, is there—breaks my life down even before the latter has come to an end, will I be taking absurdity to its highest degree if I hope to be able to make something of that life, having fulfilled one initial condition: that I stifle my horror and watch it come, my eyes wide open, my mind clear, so as to play my part without wandering away nor attempting to be devious toward the destiny awaiting me? The conversion that I ought to bring about therefore has the amplitude of a total revolution, one such that instead of hating the family—in a sort of childish rejection—because the fact of my belonging to that ancestral formation is, for me, a guarantee of death, it would be, on the contrary, by endeavoring to scorn death that I would seek to place myself outside the normal framework of families and would attempt, without rebelling against genealogies, to turn myself into a creature from another planet through his nonconformism with respect to the common horror.
Tattoos on the sky. The zodiac. The delicately chiseled ear disks worn by the opera singer playing the role of the goddess of the underworld. With my eyes, I follow in a dream the rotation of naked bodies in a half-dark space while the ray of a projector, continually moving about, carves in their skins—which it illuminates only in successive portions—scars assembled into complicated figures, numbers, or the coats of arms of these acrobats. As long as death does not seize me, it is, finally, an idea that must not be thrust aside but tamed instead. Such is the meaning, perhaps, of my recalling a few meager experiences, trifling fragments in which something resembling death seemed to occur and which, I persuaded myself, would upon examination yield to me a few features with the help of which its face would become a little less mercilessly alien to me. But to pass away is, by definition, to fall into a formless hole which no cartography, real or imaginary, permits one to delimit, a
nd I know perfectly well that I elucidate nothing if I say that I am supporting, resting on the palm of my right hand, a heavy column of marble (decorated as the columns in certain frescoes in Pompeii appear), a majestic weight the burden of which oppresses me to the point that I would have cried out if, at that precise instant, someone hadn’t woken me; and that it clarifies nothing, either, to tell how, being slightly drunk, I went into my kitchen one night to eat some bit of food and swallow a little water before going to bed, then remained standing there stock-still, smoking a cigarette, my back against the wall, and thought how I was inevitably going to have to die, while my gaze alighted now on the gas meter, now on the Roberval balance with its two copper plates. I could just as well summon up certain elements of the Antillean landscape: the old chimney of the distillery, for instance, that juts up sometimes in the middle of a bouquet of palm trees and is the symbol of the “factory” (as the dungeon is that of the feudal market town), or those great hemispheres of rusted pig iron—true sorcerers’ cauldrons or cooking pots of grandmammas all black and wrinkled—which were originally boilers for processing sugarcane juice but are used nowadays as firepots for heating the plates on which cassava flour is cooked; these are seen most particularly in the vicinity of Basse-Terre, near the remains of the “habitations” dating from “antiquity” (as it is described to us, my walking companion and I, by a peasant who designates thus the whole of the time prior to the abolition of slavery).
From the moment—now thrust back, as well, into a sort of prehistory—when, deciding to shake off my torpor, I rid myself of my bands of silence, I have done nothing else, therefore, though without discovering anything positive, than try, one after another, various different paths and passageways. Lacking experiences capable of enlightening me, might I not have some resting places that—whether bastions or oases—might function as wayside altars for my anguish?
At Nîmes, during the international crisis that preceded the Munich Agreement, everything on which I had based my life up to then seemed to me to collapse like a house of cards and I could observe then that the only external objects the sight of which procured me some repose (because I had the impression that those things were marked by grandeur, even on the scale of the war) were the Roman monuments: the Maison Carré [square house], the temple of Diana, the arena. On a more modest level, I am clearly less unwilling to accept the certainty that I must die when I look back upon various pastimes that delighted me as a child: for instance, fishing for tadpoles which we would keep in an aquarium with the hope of seeing them turn into frogs, an expectation that always disappointed us, my brothers and me, in our keenness as experimenters watching over the unfolding of a natural process and determined to observe it de visu, for, of the three stages of the metamorphosis (two feet, four feet with tail, and, lastly, loss of the tail), I’m quite sure we never got beyond the first.
Fishing for tadpoles, a sport for the summer months, was practiced without any other implement than one’s hand, very close to the fortifications and the Bois de Boulogne in the shady streams leading to the “Auteuil pond” (the former, like the latter, now gone, because the racecourse, quite some years ago, swallowed up the spot where they were). The “pond”—which I knew long after a certain little English boy was taken for walks there, later recalling it when he imagined the story of Peter Ibbetson and his life, more than half dreamed—the “pond” was this pool, invisible before one emerged from the path that forced its way through the greenery, and its banks were girdled by a regularly traced walk, a beautiful, almost circular track that inspired footraces, just as the neighboring copse lent itself to games of hide-and-seek. At the end of the pool closest to the mouth of the path, there was (it seems to me) a bridge with parapets of imitation wood, with fake branches of cement above the tracery from which one leaned down to contemplate the sudden zigzags of the “water spiders” moving by almost horizontal leaps, with an automaton-like precision, on the surface of one of the streams. It was at the same end, probably, that a certain hillock stood, leveled, for me, in oblivion until just recently when, at Nemours, my sister and I, urging each other on, talked about it, but concerning which, since it reappeared thus, not without some relief (like a theater’s practicable door that one sees again in a new light after its eclipse behind a curtain or a screen of clouds), I remember that we climbed it following a spiral path and that, like one of the most disturbing attractions in Luna Park and one of the figures in the Game of Goose—which, they say, was handed down to us from earliest Greek antiquity—it was called the Labyrinth.
Translators note: An asterisk is used to indicate text that appeared in English in the original work when this would not otherwise be clear from the context.
SPIRTS NOTEBOOK
Les Tablettes sportives [sports tablets] (not bars of chocolate but tablets one writes on)—this was the name of an annual that, for three or four years, the daily paper L’Auto published before the war of 1914-18.
Experts who no doubt had realized—or calculated—that one of the main characteristics of the true sportsman was that he hated any sort of encumbrance, the editors of this notebook had chosen for their publication the form of a small pocket book in which were recorded, along with the various official records up to that day, the results of the championships or other important events that had taken place during the year and also all the performances worthy of being remembered through “statistics.” On the cover—cream for one of the installments, gray for another, pale green for a third—a series of medallions contained the portraits of some celebrities: an aviator in a helmet, a jockey in a silk cap, a cyclist in a round-collared jersey, a boxer wearing his gloves, or any other figure already popularized by the illustrated magazines. The printed content, reduced to the most succinct pieces of information, was nevertheless rich in expressions the perusal of which left one daydreaming: “Omnium” [open race, handicap, or championship], “Critérium” [eliminating heat in boxing, racing, etc.], “Biennal” [biennial], “Triennal” [triennial] sparkled with Roman nobility alongside “challenge”* (which was pronounced chalange), evoking long strides over an expanse of green or flights of oars, powerful but nonetheless silent, between the banks of a river; “huit rameurs de pointe et barreur” [eight rowers (as opposed to scullers) and coxswain] referred to those freshwater coursers, whereas “racers”* [racing yachts] and its matching “cruisers”* [cruising yachts] (pronounced as they should be, the one réceurs, the other crouzeurs) created a great noise of engines and splashing on the surface of the sea; the names of pugilists of color—Joe Jeannette, Sam Mac Vea, Jack Johnson—glittered in the boxing column and those of Anglo-Saxon jockeys such as Fred Archer, Tom Lane, Percy Woodland, appeared elsewhere alongside those of the filly Sauge Pourprée [purple sage] and the colts Endymion [bluebell], Negofol, or Faucheur [daddy-longlegs] (the crack horse who broke a leg and about whom the racing press published health bulletins for a long time); on the inside of the cover—or on some other page given over to advertising—one learned that “The Sport* (pronounced thé sport) dresses well.”
At the gates of Paris, and very close to the neighborhood I still consider somewhat mine because I was born there and lived there almost continuously until the beginning of the last war, there are two open-air spots—the Auteuil racecourse and the Parc des Princes cycle-racing track—which represented, in my younger days, a little what the arenas represent in a bullfighting country and which hung a curtain of crowds and shouting in the background of some of our walks.
My brother Pierre and I only rarely went to the Parc des Princes: here under our very own eyes, Daragon ran a race of eighty kilometers, here before us, the pacer Lawson in his leather helmet abandoned (quickly and without harm to himself) his motorcycle, which burst into flames, and here we also saw several rugby matches, including one between France and Wales; it was within the trough of this track that the “Bol d’Or” [golden bowl] took place, an annual twenty-four-hour race the posters for which I recall admiring (long-distance r
unners behind their pacers in cars) but which—for the simple reason, perhaps, that the refusal was a guaranteed thing because it would have meant our staying up late and because our instructors, in any case, would not have been so indulgent as to accompany us to spectacles they judged to be stupid and, for that reason, pernicious—we never urged our parents to allow us to attend.
Much more attractive to us, and within reach, was the Auteuil racecourse, whether, on the day of the Grand Steeple* [grand steeplechase] or some other major event, the sum of one franc paid out for each of us gave us the right to enter the “pelouse” [public enclosures], or whether—and this was most often the case—it was enough for us to be, at the right moment, at a certain point on a road outside the racecourse bordered by a riding track that went partway around the racecourse.
From this observation post, my brother and I could watch the jockeys—in multicolored caps on their horses, whose coats gleamed—jump a hedge, then climb a grass-covered knoll behind which they would disappear. “Chestnut, white scarf, chestnut cap”: the colors of the Lieux stable; “cherry, sleeves and cap corn”: the colors of the Veil-Picard stable; “sea green, belt and cap orange”: the colors of the Hennessy stable. We knew that it was in this enclosure and for these riders with their sparkling finery that people (those whom we sensed were crowded in the bleachers and whose clamor we could hear at the moment of the finish) placed bets and sometimes ruined themselves, like that former colleague of my father’s who, after having had his own “carriage and team,” had lost through gambling the entire fortune he owed to speculation and now touched him modestly for a hundred sous when he met him at the Bourse. A marvelous place, this vast grassy terrain, because of the epic struggles that took place here, the considerable sums that were won or lost here; a place that was fascinating but rather shady, against which our father fulminated, worried by the idea that later we might become “gamblers”; an almost supernatural place, in a word, where everything seemed to be weighed in terms of grace or disgrace, fortune or misfortune.
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