The cross, then, which for a certain time I had kept in my pocket like a coin attesting to a vanished era or like the entry token to a paradise of my own invention, was lost to me in the same way that so often, emerging from my dreams, the object was lost that had proved to me that at least once this marvel had existed. Even before I had been irremediably deprived of this small treasure whose existence was reassuring since I am always seeking some sort of philosopher’s stone (the absolute held in one’s hand or encompassed with a single look, like the perceptible mass of the fledgling fallen from the nest; the object with a special aura whose discovery would fill the hole of solitude; the event immediately presenting itself in the solemn arrangement of a crucial experience; the thing with any sort of rigor which the magic of formulation endows with a fascinating power), even before this proof of my former, but quite real, embroilment with Khadidja was filched, the war had ceased to be a distant background against which my actions appeared in profile without there being any precise relationship between them and it; recalling me to the brutal truth of certain primary imperatives at the very moment when I was neglecting them in favor of the comedy I was enacting for myself, this war, having become intensely present, stripped me of my great primary role and seemed destined to reduce my employment to that of a mute character without any other contribution than the dumb show of his eyes, now unsealed and opened wide by horror. In the Landes, where I was sent in a military capacity (having been assigned to the munitions depot of the Sen, near Labrit) and where the exodus, driving my wife from Paris, had led her quite naturally to join me since she was my wife, we watched, by the side of a road where this encounter had immobilized us, as a heavy convoy of trucks and armored cars filled with German soldiers went by. Not entirely released from my obligations by the armistice, which had just been signed, that same day I had to go to another camp in the region, to which I had withdrawn because it was situated on the other side of the demarcation line in that area which the occupying forces were willing to spare temporarily. As we watched these troops, which had been almost imaginary up to then and, reading this page of history with our living eyes, as we found ourselves together like two children on their way to school staring hand in hand and mouths wide open as a regiment files by, this as we were on the point of saying good-bye to each other, I understood, as an obvious truth, produced in a cartoon strip image, that our fates were inseparable since now and henceforth we recognized (without saying a word) that they were bound together for the difficult times inaugurated by this scene and it was therefore improbable that a bond whose firmness had been thus tested would later loosen. Not long after that, the infamy of these times was to be harshly revealed in a scene of the dimensions of eternity even though its real duration, in fact, hardly exceeded a few seconds: my wife and I, back from Limousin, where she had joined her family and where I too had gone as soon as I was demobilized, were returning to Paris by train, uneasy about the responsibilities that the new course of things had imposed on us, even if only on the very prosaic level of our family interests, whose defense we were now the only ones capable of trying to safeguard; the Germans assigned to check those crossing the line did not even examine our papers but ejected a Jew traveling in the compartment next to ours: “Jude! Jude!” they said furiously in that tone of hateful superiority that will only be assumed by the most appalling idiots, without wanting to listen to the protests of the unfortunate man, who was explaining how he was on his way up to the capital to find his family again, lost from sight since the exodus. Measured against this, the queens of Sheba and other concubine queens issuing from the harsh reflections of the sterile expanses or from the thin radiance that, every year, again gilds the houses in which our old Paris spleen settles no longer had more than the diaphanous and almost substanceless grace of stucco figurines in a rococo decoration. As for the jewel that would soon be reduced to even less than those enchanted coins which turn to dry leaves the day after the payment, though I had endowed it with the magic of a slipper given by an attendant of Isis or some other mother goddess to one she has initiated into orgiastic mysteries, this complacency did not last: very soon, I was surrounded by realities too harsh for me not to regard any yielding to such reveries as vain and—all poetry having been absorbed—the rigorously worldly conviction gradually took shape that I had behaved toward my benefactor not as one of the elect but as a nonentity, for the more I mulled it over the more obvious it was that since one gift in all humanity demanded another, I should have responded to this one with something more tangible than a dreamily romantic thought.
Before the blossoming of the June of Liberation, the four years of Occupation were a long winter whose rigors, cruel even to those whose lives fell short of being real hell, were nevertheless tempered by the solid counterpart of the sympathy among people of the same opinions and all the joys that could be extracted from the trifling things that in the old days one hadn’t prized at their true value. If I had required many months in the desert to learn all that an expanse of grass could signify in the way of promise of happiness and also what intoxication could be derived from a sudden warmth emanating from the marble that is, by definition, a whore, I required the Occupation to be able, for example, to recognize the value of a few simple days of tranquil freedom in a countryside where one is welcomed in an honest and cordial manner, the suffocation of the city finding its antidote—then more than ever—in the salubrious air of those less populous regions settled, in growing numbers as the oppression became heavier, by what were called the maquis, as though the group of outlaws—as a group of partisans would be regarded by the police—had merged with its scrubland surroundings through an osmosis comparable to that whose image is proposed to us by fauns, centaurs, and other creatures still involved up to the waist in pure nature. This slice of life less peasant than pagan—in the most complete etymological sense of the word—I happened to witness during one of the visits I made to Saint-Leonard-de-Noblat, before the search (or rather the burglary) carried out by the Gestapo had driven to another refuge those whom I periodically went to see there, has not ceased to move me, just as much because I associate the memory of it with the memory of a Khadidja now remote enough to have one foot in mythology as because of the guise of a lull assumed in my eyes by each of these visits to the country. One morning full of birds singing, apple trees in bloom, and rhododendrons whose fragrance recalled that of sevillan jasmine, I saw, on the outskirts of a farm managed by some Poles, a ewe being shorn: tied down to a table, the animal was bleating and attempting to get free, while two men busied themselves passing the shears over her; little by little relieved of her thick wool, she presented herself as though unclothed, and the sight of her pink udders was disturbing, feminine breasts which jutted up between her two back legs (and not, as one would have expected, between her front legs or arms); thus lying down and, it seemed, prepared to be put to death in all placidity of spirit on the occasion of some spring sacrifice, it was of the famous Battle of the Minotaur series executed by Picasso that, despite its solar brilliance, I was immediately reminded by this almost human ewe on her back on the wood of a table like—in the etching in which the only source of light is a candle held by a little girl who is also carrying a large bouquet—the woman in toreros costume, chest bared, who has collapsed tragically over the back of a lame horse; but, as in the toros, what predominated in this recall to the bitterest realities of life, which necessarily imply the reality of death, was the gladness of a fiesta in immemorial harmony with the progress of the seasons. As I thought about it later, the exposure in full sun of this animal who seemed about to have its throat cut and who, being only by allusion a woman, seemed more naked than any other, and more present at the same time as extraordinarily alien, appeared in its ambiguity to be closely related to the Algerian woman with the striding walk of a goat girl who bled so suddenly from one of her ears at the moment of the festivity for which our bodies were preparing, not unlike a clock with incomprehensible works.
“Gentlemen, and cric!. . . and crac!”
Whereas her still-enduring image needed no feature I might have added to it to affirm its contours, I had chosen to see Khadidja as an equivocal fleshly disguise assumed by the angel of death in order to insinuate itself close to me and cause me to absorb, without rebelling against what is just as natural as beauty, the supremely poisonous idea of the fall that lay ahead. Could it be that the feeling I had, that with her I had touched the depths, and that she had led me, as though by chance, to penetrate the secrets of the deepest level of organic life, in itself persuaded me to regard the woman who had been my companion for several days as more than just a faun who had amiably welcomed me into her miry lair? Could it have been her gravity as guardian of the threshold, and that species of white simar (after the ear suddenly wounded to the point of bleeding, the song of one possessed, and the jewel she seemed to have caused mysteriously to spring up from the ground) that elevated her—when a sentence in which the word sun caught fire allowed her to fill the emptiness that yawned between us—to a rank to which she certainly made no claim and at which she probably would have laughed had she learned that I had bestowed it on her? Did it come from the shadow that floated over her because of the Colomb-Béchar incident, a simple fight between women with at most some clawing, or a true brawl after which she would have had no other solution but to take off? Or was it immediately founded on the deadly character she derived from her North African beauty and from everything that her face, so curiously inlaid (the blade of a dagger or scimitar), conveyed that was brilliant, suspect, and dangerous, like the name of the Algerian town I read about when I was a child in a story by Alphonse Daudet, “Milianah,” which lays out before me a sunny street scene filled with the smell of leather, with striped rags, beggars, cripples, and perhaps knife thrusts, a dusty luminosity the impression of which I rediscovered in part when, as an adult, I was taking some air on the balcony of the pension in Cairo where I was staying and saw a poor young wretch without any legs dragging himself down the middle of the street in his pitiful box on wheels by holding—either clutching it directly with his hands or by means of some extension—the axle of the back wheels of a hackney carriage? Wasn’t it true, though, more than anything else, that Khadidja the nocturnal, Khadidja the solar, coughing in her large iron bed and probably infected with syphilis, harbored enough death in her so that she would have been the last one to let me forget, when I caressed her, that unless one drifts lazily with the flow of habit or abandons oneself body and soul to animal innocence, one can’t embrace any creature in shared pleasures without a whisper of the gloomy angel being mixed in with the obscure discourse one wrests from it, since it is difficult for us not to view the loved object—confounded as we are to see it lost in the tenuousness of the instant (that very instant in which we possessed it)—as the evil messenger who, behind its seductive guise, recalls to us what is precarious about what we have? But for all of this to crystallize around her form, it was still necessary for Khadidja to exchange her tawdry carnivalesque finery (her fiery red blouse, her oriental pants or the poor faded undershirt she would pull off with both hands when stripping completely) for the robe which, falling to her feet and hiding her long, agile legs under its fullness, endowed her with a surprising majesty: abruptly seeing her clothed in garments at once chaste and royal, this deplorable courtesan in whom I had tasted (as in the suddenly innervated arms of a sea nymph from a Roman mosaic) a unique combination of hardness and softness, how could I have helped, once the thick curtain of lands and sea had fallen behind me, but orient her memory to the point of changing this portrait doomed to become too quickly confused into the effigy of the creature who, toward midnight, appears within your door frame to notify you—implacably though in the most caressing tones—that the final expiration is close at hand? The older I get—proceeding on a course parallel to this dizzying succession: the “phony war” that had collapsed in the exodus; the Occupation, at first partial and then, abruptly, total; the uprising, heralding the Liberation; followed by the various phases of the peace and the disquieting hybrid known as the “cold war”—the more I tend well and truly to see Khadidja, loved so unthinkingly and so fleetingly, as the first woman with whom, where love for love’s sake is concerned, I began to experience a decline that has continued ever since (as though we met at a zenith that was thenceforth passed) and therefore the one who appeared—like a statue animated by the imminence of some plague or assassination of Caesar—at the exact point where my path began to bend in the direction in which one wishes, in vain, not to see it bend.
“Cric, gentlemen!” (“And cric!” repeats the chorus.) “And crac!” (The chorus repeats “And crac!”)
My life, which does not need to think in order to continue, goes more quickly than I advance through the twists and turns of what I am writing about it. For months now (and if I were to count them, I would only augment the anguish caused me by a daily increasing lag) I have been pursuing this tale, though it is simply an outline—quickly skimmed by anyone who will want to read it—of what will have been, even including its sequence of repercussions and the end of them, an episode that I would describe as a “Don Juan adventure” if I hadn’t played in it the modest role of a client to whom this same cross was perhaps awarded as, for advertising purposes, a shopkeeper awards a premium. Whatever I may do to improve my text, nothing will render its reality obvious for all that and I have no power over the dubious idol now armed with her phantasmal spur by the trace left in my brain by the asperity of pinkish flesh that lay above the humid ravine opening in the brown of her thighs. After what will soon be fifteen years of prospecting in all directions—in a series of marches and countermarches that I began when Béni-Ounif was still very close and that have ended in this sort of memorial wake during which I have tried to put into somewhat intelligible form an adventure that, in its time, had charmed me because at each moment it seemed to take form quite independently of me—I am still only reaching the end of the second stage I had set for myself: these Fourbis, which are supposed to be followed by hazardous Fibrilles, then by difficult Fibules or buckles by means of which the whole thing will have to be adjusted. I am so slow that the practical pursuit I began with (the search for a set of rules, which I would have ample time to apply after they were discovered) has been replaced, in fact, by the drafting of a sort of testament. New signs are being added to those that, for so long now, have obliged me to acknowledge my decline. I see them in my external appearance—wrinkles evident enough so that my facial expression is easily a grimacing one, a more pronounced baldness (whence the need to resume the hairstyle of an ascetic or young convict), a frequent swelling underneath and around the eyes (the right eye, especially, sometimes indiscreet to the point of nearly watering), a belly whose muscles are relaxing despite the happy absence of obesity, a greater vulnerability to sleeping too little as well as to eating too much—and the bitterness that I feel about it interferes with all the rest: whether because of the mood (I like to think) or inclination of a mind beclouded by the accumulated diversity of its literary and other works, or the unremitting disgust (I’m afraid) that one inevitably conceives for his own body, or (which would be the worst) pure and simply decay, one is no longer seized except rarely—and almost always without the beautiful spontaneity of youth—by priapic enthusiasm; as though all sensuous images were dissolving in the perception of this humiliating inertia, one remains almost insensitive to the presence of the other and has only, at the very most, an infantile desire for effusion (to embrace, to be embraced), unless the evil spell is finally broken by the good luck of some caress; since there is nothing magical now about lying undressed next to someone in bed, one loses the pleasure once found in vestimentary elegance; one shuts oneself up in a narcissism that is no longer superficial (that of someone acting as though he were in front of a mirror) but that of Narcissus himself drowning in the depths of his viscera (worried about the functioning of his internal organs and hardly having eyes, any long
er, for what is outside); beyond this almost physiological tendency to withdraw, one feels even more alone and as though in fact deprived of a respondent because a friend died with whom, there being implicit harmony, one could choose to say nothing at all or (without boredom) talk in order to say nothing to each other; except for a few fortuitous escapes, one walls oneself up, gets stuck in the mud, is no longer able, even, to explain oneself. Not making love, one loses that minimum of contact with life and (a play on words disguised as a word of conclusion) loses touch with everyone else. Twenty years ago already, I noted this one evening before going to sleep, and, if I had nothing to add as to the reasons one can have for feeling separate from others, I would now be on the verge of an irreparable exile, since I abandon myself less and less often to the pleasure that allows one to know one is virile and since in this way, at the same time that a primary means of responding to the need to act upon another person—even if only on one single person who is alive and acknowledged to be so—is growing more remote, the great source of wonders proves to be nearing exhaustion.
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