Scraps
Page 14
Aside from the gymnastics that used pieces of equipment and other controlled maneuvers in the course of which my perception of the void by which I was surrounded and the idea of a possible fall (even beyond the actual fear I had of breaking my neck) caused me a frightful anguish, the principal evil was what my brothers and I called the “Chinese torture,” an exercise for making one’s shoulders supple and developing one’s thorax which was practiced on the rib stall, a series of horizontal bars attached to the wall one above the other, on which one placed oneself, back to the wall, holding on by one’s hands and feet, in a position I can no longer reconstruct in detail but of which I recall that it was very painful, since one had to push one’s shoulders as far back as possible, the teacher helping by pressing hard with both hands. In the blue-green light of the vast hall, with its glass roof, I’m sure my grimaces were scarcely less dreadful than those of a slave tied to a cross, when it was my turn to undergo the “Chinese torture.”
With all my being I rejected the suffering I had to submit to, my back glued to the rib stall; but this rejection came to nothing: groaning or stoical, there we were, deprived of all help, without the means to steal away or even to cut it short.
No physical pain resulted from the exercises on the equipment and on those in which the question of vertigo came up; there I struggled only with shame and fear: fear of falling, shame over my awkwardness, shame over being afraid and yielding to that fear. To climb the pole or the knotted rope was nothing, either. The smooth rope demanded a greater effort but, clinging tightly with one’s hands and legs, one felt passably safe, all the same. Negligible also was the sliding board: using either poles or ladders, one climbed up to the platform, then returned to the ground by hurling oneself, for a brief descent, onto a toboggan consisting of an inclined plane made of a broad waxed board; this was not supposed to be a feat of strength but a pure recreation alternating, from one class to the next, with the giant stride during which, clutching ropes that were attached, at the very top of the gymnasium, to a disk capable of rotating, and ended, at their base, in a sort of short ladder with three or four bars allowing one to hold on better, several of us at a time would turn round and round, running first then abandoning ourselves to the motion of the merry-go-round thus formed when the speed became sufficient so that, the centrifugal force exerting its effect and we, the satellites, tending to move away from our gravitational axis, the ropes were led to take a position closer to the horizontal and we—the satellites—to spin for a certain time without any possibility of contact with the ground. Things became more complicated, however, with the estrade, a sort of broad platform much higher than I was from which, one after the other, we were made to jump, at first forward, then backward (which, barring an accident, I could never bring myself to do, so much did my flesh creep at the sensation of the yawning emptiness behind me and the idea I had that I would not fail to bang my chin on the edge of the platform); worse, still, was the trapeze, nauseating with its pendulum movement that did not stop while you turned upside down, as they ordered you to do, so that for a moment your head was down and the slim cylindrical bar of wood on which your two hands were closed seemed to transmit all down your forearms the aerial uncertainty of the ropes. These latter two exercises perhaps offered the advantage over the “Chinese torture” that I could, to a certain extent, escape doing them (remaining inert and as though paralyzed by a fear that I didn’t have to simulate); but what I couldn’t avoid in any way was the humiliation with respect to myself and to the others: to have “withdrawn from a competition” (as they say in racing language) and to know that I had behaved like a “wet hen,” no more no less, to hear the teacher declare mockingly that my “rear end was too heavy.” During at least the entire first part of each class, I was uneasy, asking myself whether we would have to perform any of those detested exercises that day; thus preoccupied, I moved about without any enthusiasm and displayed only a feeble application even to those exercises I had no reason to dread, some of which I would even have enjoyed if I had not been wondering anxiously about what the rest of the class might contain that was physically unacceptable.
Making no effort to do anything, except to make as little effort as possible, I attended the sessions but only participated, in short, at arm’s length, without ever really involving my body in them, unless compelled and forced, or—to be more precise—sometimes allowing it to be involved in them, but allowing this despite myself (as one suffers an illness) and never involving myself deliberately. Under such circumstances of almost total apathy (when I hadn’t actually withdrawn), any progress, even the most minimal, was strictly out of the question; a docile and even fairly studious pupil where school matters were concerned, I would have to rank myself, where gymnasium matters were concerned, in the category of the dunces from whom the most one obtains is that they give proof of being present and whose attitude, as for the rest, is an obstinate refusal, a negation assuming the form of the inertia and muteness of a stone.
If I was always an awkward boy who seemed encumbered by his arms and legs, or unsure of them, I must say there was nothing congenital about this; what has to be blamed, I think, is not a defect inherent in my physical constitution (which appears normal to me insofar as the word normal can correspond to anything definable) but rather a certain softness against which my instructors were not able to take action early enough or with enough energy. Would it be accusing them unfairly to reproach them for having allowed me to acquire such bad habits in the gymnasium, whereas there they had an excellent setting in which to correct this character flaw and, most likely, could easily—at least in this particular area—have neutralized its effects with a progressive training such that I would have learned, little by little, to triumph over myself?
To back out right at the beginning, not even to try (for fear of not succeeding or merely out of indifference): a mixture of pessimism and laziness, the one laying the basis for the other so that a vicious circle was created. Was the leap from that height, which seemed so far up to me, so very difficult that my chances of success were almost nil and it was therefore natural that, convinced of my failure and without courage as soon as the preparatory run toward the jump began, I made only a vague symbolic attempt? Or did it quite simply demand an effort that I, defeated beforehand because this way the matter could be settled more quickly, declared myself incapable of producing without even having tried to engage in the experiment? Pessimism and laziness: was the first truly profound motivation or merely an excuse for the second? Could the latter be the terrain outside of which the former could not develop, given that if I must speak of myself as someone who, in large and small things, has always tended to become discouraged, the reason for my despondency is not so much my fate as a human being, considered in itself, or any one painful situation in which I might temporarily find myself, as it is my absolute certainty that I lack the energy required to be equal to what—generally or specifically—destiny requires of me? Disregarding a certain superficial pessimism that amounts to predicting the worst in order not to be disappointed and is also akin to superstition (never to rejoice in one’s fate because that would risk attracting bad luck), there is something inside me that should perhaps more fairly be called “defeatism”: what is the good of going to so much trouble for an undertaking that can only come to nothing? Useless for me to run any risks or become in the least anxious about anything, since, even if the game is worth the candle (which is doubtful anyway), I know I am powerless to attain the goal. I despair of myself, in the end, much more than of things, and what appears insurmountable to me is not so much the obstacle in itself and all the various difficulties it represents as the apathy that makes me the equivalent of an invalid and is the reason, for instance, why I decide not to climb a mountain all the way to the top, stopping as soon as I sense the approach of the moment when I will suffer from vertigo, as soon as I foresee that I will be hampered in my movements at the very instant when, so long as one is in control of oneself, one will n
ot run any serious risk (ordinary fear, in other words, being more powerful than vertigo, since even before it actually seizes me I am afraid of becoming prey to it, and dread the fall, with its completely prosaic reality, that might result from this diminution of my faculties). Undoubtedly it is too late, now, to go back; it won’t be in the period of my decline that I become less timorous and I can only brood, as over a shameful thing—without hope of being cured of it, for the ill took root too long ago—over my ridiculous ineptitude at all sports, whether the luxury sports (tennis, at which I am worse than anyone, skiing, which I have never gone in for) or what one could call the “useful sports” (swimming, horseback riding, driving a car, boxing). Certainly there is nothing particularly serious, in itself, in the fact of being a dreadful swimmer (capable, at best, of a few strokes), a pitiful horseman, a nonexistent driver (received my license when I was eighteen but never drove after that), and totally helpless when it comes to fighting. For anyone who is anxious to make an impression this is quite vexing, and knowing how to ride a bicycle can’t be, from this point of view, more than a meager scrap of consolation; when one remembers—as I do—having fallen a number of times during a single riding class, consumed by a distress aggravated at each fall by outbursts of laughter (coming from a tall, lanky Englishwoman who rode bareheaded in a masculine outfit as though to demonstrate clearly that anyone who wished to could be virile), one is not proud of oneself if one progressed no further than that in one’s equitation, among other violent exercises. But these deficiencies, apparently, are venial, because when I think about it, there isn’t much chance that I will be shipwrecked, fall in the water, or have to swim across a river, also not much chance that I will be obliged, even on a trip somewhere, to get from one place to another on a horse the handling of which would demand real equestrian skill and because, however quick one may be to take offense, life remains possible even for a person who doesn’t have the pugilistic talents of an Arthur Cravan, as long as he renounces the pleasure (supremely wholesome though it is) of playing at being a righter of wrongs everywhere and at every hour of the day; as for cars, though people use them constantly it scarcely bothers me that I don’t know how to drive one, because I can leave this to others and tell myself that if I should have to learn, there will always be time. A charge more serious, however, than these deficiencies, in which it would seem nothing very important is involved, is the fundamental weakness of which they are the symptoms: not to have taken it upon myself to overcome the apprehensions that paralyzed me, to have allowed this sort of impotence to settle deep inside me, is an indisputable sign of cowardice; the subject of a remorse and a piercing regret, as may be a youthful mistake for someone who—now completely ruined—thinks of that early mistake which, far from representing only a misstep after which he quickly regained his balance, led him insidiously (but decisively) into the path he should not have taken. Cowardice and youthful mistake will perhaps appear to be big words to use in connection with those little evasions that were habitual with me during the gymnastics classes at 5 rue Pierre-Guérin in a glassed-in backyard. Yet I am sure that such words are required: it hardly matters that my cowardice bore only on trifles, then, and that my youthful mistakes were neither misdemeanors that could send me to a children’s court nor even the sorts of acts that cause their author to be regarded as a bad apple without, however, thereby exposing him to any legal sanction; I know very well that, by shirking this way, I was behaving with the same faintheartedness as I did each time it might happen that, having attained adulthood, I eluded, out of fear, the performance of a duty whose correctness and gravity I was quite aware of; and I also know very well—whence this piercing regret—that it was through the accumulation of such trifles that I acquired the habit of never exercising my will and little by little settled into that cowardice which I believe, up to now, I have succeeded more or less in masking (even while crying it from the rooftops, as if to appear to sin through excess of scruple), though I can’t be sure there won’t ever occur, for me, circumstances such that—past all sense of shame—I will allow it to burst into broad daylight.
In that hall where, as in other similar places, a dancing class (attended, for her part, by my older sister) was held certain evenings of the week, I therefore got off to a bad start and neither of the successive directors—not the first, who, it seems, came to the point one day of telling me to do whatever I wanted (to which I answered politely that I wanted to do nothing) nor the second, driven to use more energetic methods—succeeded in pulling me out of my rut. If they could have instituted actual sanctions against me (even if only the sort of punishments people inflict on you in school), would they perhaps have managed a semblance of discipline? But in such intermittent classes as these, both of them (the brutal Hercules as much as the fat, smiling potbelly) had no recourse and they would have needed, in compensation for the impotence in which they necessarily found themselves, all the severity my parents didn’t have in order to overcome my unwillingness by means of appropriate retributions and to put things back in place.
Simple indifference, a natural propensity to do nothing, under our first director; fear, positive repugnance toward the painful things he commanded us to do, under the second, who horrified me. “He’s common,” said my mother, whereas my maternal uncle—more indulgent toward athletes, perhaps because during his adventurous life he himself had worked with his body, appearing in circuses—said: “He’s a good fellow.” It didn’t matter much to me whether vulgarity was a predominant trait in this gymnast or whether his deep-seated loyalty overshadowed his clumsy bearing and his indelicate manners; I was not comfortable in the presence of this large, strong man who seemed to allow no means of evasion either for himself or for anyone else and whom I had often heard extolling “willpower,” which meant a good deal more than a mere swelling of the biceps.
His massive fighter’s body, his broad, rather pale, and perhaps slightly bilious face, his little mustache without points (a circumflex accent set between his lips and his nose), his smell, about which I only know that it existed and I didn’t like it, but which I can’t define (the stale odor of food? of sweat? or something more profound?), the ability my elders attributed to him to “control himself” (otherwise, what might his rages have led to, terrible disruptions!)—I can’t see which of these physical or moral characteristics I might fix on to describe his person more concretely than as an image without thickness, without any value even as caricature and almost as alien to reality as were, for instance, to the great flabby, overhanging mass of swollen yellowish canvas which—at the time of the first Salon de l’Aéronautique—struck me with an anguish I concealed even though it was difficult to bear, certain satirical postcards published when another French dirigible, the Patrie, was lost, and which depicted the military balloon racing away, its mooring lines broken, while in the upper-left-hand corner a North Wind with the face of a bearded old drunk blew full cheeked.
How, then, am I to describe him, if I wish to invite him to appear here as one does someone involved in an incident as a witness if not a protagonist? And where should I pick him up, at what point in the fairly long period during which he numbered among the acquaintances of my parents, who respected him because of the indisputable integrity he had until the day when his exemplary willpower was undermined by the taste he acquired for drink? Should I depict him in civvies, as he was when he tormented me during the years preceding the other war? But I don’t even recall, any longer, the clothes he wore when he inflicted his lessons on me. Should I describe him as a soldier, with the sky blue jacket and kepi of a second lieutenant or infantry lieutenant, at the difficult time when his men (according to what we learned) nicknamed him “the Boxer” because his ready punch made him so unpopular? But thus outfitted—and already, in actual fact, half out of our orbit—he no longer has more than an uncertain relation to my gymnastics teacher. Why not, given these circumstances, try to apprehend him indirectly through an event that I did not witness myself but that
was imprinted on my imagination more than any detail experienced with the senses and illustrates better than anything else the capacity for decision, and the control over a body as agile, if need be, as it was powerful, by which he impressed me so? An event that, at the time when it occurred, was the topic of quite a few family conversations and caused me to regard its hero as a kind of superman; an event that, in truth, can be contained in very few words and by now seems very banal to me.
The wife of our physical-education teacher was, if her rather colorless appearance has correctly imprinted its image upon me, a sickly looking Italian Swiss with a white, perhaps freckled complexion and hair tending somewhat toward the reddish; neither ugly nor pretty, but rather graceful because she was so slender, and generally dressed in black or in dark colors, which given the pallor of her skin made her look like a half-starved orphan or young widow. The couple lived—on the first floor, I’m quite sure—in the same building occupied by the gymnasium, and it was there that this long, fragile creature, whom people were astonished to see paired with such a colossus, gave birth to twins. The thing very nearly came to the worst possible end: the parturient suffered a violent hemorrhage—so violent that, according to my mother, “the blood ran under the door”—and if this woman, whose face was so pallid that one wondered how a body as manifestly anemic could contain so much blood, was to be saved from this critical situation, there was not a second to lose; everyone admired the coolness and the sportsmanlike qualities of the husband, who, going off in quest of some medicine or some other means of rescue, jumped directly, it seems, into the stairwell by leaping over the banister in a single bound and came back carrying the desired object when it was thought that he had scarcely left the house.