Two hours later he was on his way. Then he began to think. Up to then he had not had the time.
'The spots begin mainly on the face and the extremities of the limbs.' This was a sentence he had noted in the medical manual.
What did it matter that only two months had elapsed since his last contact with Rhadidja - too short for the incubation period? It was perhaps two years earlier that she had infected him.
'How tragic it would be if one couldn't kill oneself. The absolute futility, the irreducible wickedness of physical suffering! But when I'm in a really bad way, and suffering too much, I'll kill myself. (That revolver I was so keen to lend to old Dandillot!) Say I have four to six years of lucidity in front of me - and getting them must be partly a question of willpower and organization. The only problem will be to balance, during this given period of time, my pleasure (as long as it remains possible), my work, and what I owe my son. On the work side, I shall have to conclude my opus, not where it would naturally have ended, but within the framework of the second chunk which is now in progress and which I should be able to finish if I organize myself properly; that would be the only way to conclude it without skimping it. As for Brunet, he'll be twenty when I die, so he can shift for himself. No, there really isn't any problem, except that of arranging my time even more carefully than I have up to now. I must ration myself with extreme care.
'I used to say, thinking of the next war: I must learn to dominate the war. Now: I must learn to dominate my disease.
'Unquestionably, it's painful to die at forty. But I might have died at twenty, in the war. I might have died a hundred times since the war, with the sort of life I lead. Leprosy makes me a condemned man, but no more immediately so than I already was without it.
'In another sense, this disease is a renewal of my life. A new element of interest in my life. My life loses in duration, but will gain in richness and variety, as well as being cleared of the dross which still encumbered it, in spite of my vigilant hunt after dross. Sudden death would have been fine. Death in six years' time is fine too; it gives me time to turn around. The awkward compromise would be death in two months' time: two months of useless consciousness, since two months is not enough time to sort oneself out.
'A good test. Enrichment of my experience of adversity, which was inadequate. I shall need all my humanity to face up to it.
'As for death itself, that is even less of a problem. If only they would stop bothering us about death. What will become of us after death? Sensible people don't ask such questions. They make an act of faith or they don't, and that's the end of the matter. Besides, even granting that death is something to "think" about, it will be time enough to think about it a week before I polish myself off. A healthy man doesn't think about his death until it's under his nose. Children talk of death as of a joke that never happens. There again, we should take a leaf out of their book.
'How right I've been to get a lot done! How right I've been to enjoy myself!
'During the war, I knew that from one minute to the next I might be killed, or disfigured, or maimed, or go mad. And yet, on the whole, I enjoyed myself in the war.
'This landscape is symbolic. Behind me, my life and all the people in it, like this animated valley. And in the background, my work, like the mountain. And I, a traveller hurrying against the night.'
His mule stumbled and recovered its footing on the steep track, battered by thousands of hoofs and buttressed by beams sunk into holes in the rock. The nag was led by an old man with a pale skin, a round, snowy head, and the calves of a ten-year-old child, while a younger man, unbelievably gorillalike, pulled its tail with the utmost energy. It was impossible to tell whether its tail was being pulled in order to encourage it or to restrain it; the whole secret seemed to be to pull the animal simultaneously forwards and backwards, and it was this that made it advance. O thou, Creator of the universe, how inscrutable are thy ways! The two guides worked themselves up with shouts full of vowels, which echoed and reverberated at every bend in the track. The whole landscape around them recalled those book illustrations for which the stingy publisher has instructed the artist: 'Don't use more than three colours.' The reddish pink of the soil. The white of the snow. The blue of the shadows on the flanks of the hills, and of the soft sky. On the slope of the mountain above them, forests of young trees were mirrored in the clouds. On the slope below, wadis had forgotten their mission in life ('wadis that have betrayed,' thought Costals, haunted as always by the act of betrayal) and had become tracks, littered with boulders and only distinguishable by their ribbons of oleander; and then a stream of red ice, like a stream of red-currant jelly or a trench full of freshly coagulated blood. Flocks of sheep, which were the very colour of drought, passed above their heads, flitting by like shadows, and the sheep-dog crunched the hardened snow. There were mummified shepherds who had been there for five thousand years. And grasshoppers, motionless too, and marked down by pneumonia, on the snow-clad bushes. And great white falcons wheeling and gliding with the grace of Egyptian dancers.
After an hour, as the sky changes, his inner sky changed too, clouded over a little. He felt a little afraid, not of his leprosy, but at seeing how he functioned in the opposite way to other people, in not being afraid (perhaps it was out of mere contrariness that, in circumstances where everyone would have been afraid, he had not been). He compared himself to that patient of Revault d'Allones, who seemed to see his life unfold without him, who no longer reacted, and went to ask the doctor to restore his lost feelings. Always out of line, always the dissenter, always bled-es-siba, like the old kaid. 'Inhuman?'
Aware, too, that in not being more afraid, he was being cheated of something. No doubt, as regards 'character', his insensitivity was a gain. But still, the fact remained that he was cheated of fear. (As he was cheated of jealousy with women, not being jealous by temperament: which was honourable in terms of reason, but was also a loss, after all.)
His spirits began to warm up a little - was it an instinctive reaction, to make good this deficiency?
'We laugh, we play the fool with Nature. She lets us be. We tease and provoke her some more, we pull the tail of Cybele's lioness. Whereupon, with one blow of her paw, she splits our heads open, and it serves us right. We provoke the sea by showing off with all our ships and submarines. It goes on like that for years, and then one day we sink to the bottom, and it serves us right. The airman provokes the sky, and one fine day, without fail, the sky will lose patience with this infant and his puff-puff. His aeroplane crashes, and it serves him right. Nature has punished me in whatever sphere I have provoked her. My passions have always been of the kind one pays for in one's body: war, adventure, love affairs, dangerous company. I pay. When Mephisto, in Faust, bursts out in sores all over, it's because he has gazed too long at the backsides of the angels.
'From that point of view, it was really rather scandalous that I hadn't had a dose of the pox, considering the way I live. From another point of view, it was clearly an inadequacy in my personality. Two lacks: the pox and the law-courts. Now we have something much better.
'If I'm cured, what a lesson it will have been for me! A lesson? My life will go on exactly as before.'
They passed the ruins of a massive kasha of red earth, full of the melancholy of power that is no more. Screeching like tom-cats, crows wheeled above the sleeping forests as though they took them for fabulous herds. The silken beat of their wings made a sort of rhythmical hissing sound, very like the sound of a panting dog.
'Leprosy. Like the kings and the Popes. And like the conquistadors. It's odd, the ancestry of an anomaly is always a fine one.
'Morbus sacer, that too. The Greeks, who in certain epochs tended towards the neuropathic, used to render divine honours to disease, "provided it was really powerful". Leprosy would have merited these honours.
'Trace all the great lepers in history.
'"Without the camp" - the curse upon lepers, as formulated in the Bible. But have I ever been anywhere e
lse but without the camp?
'A heart painted on my tunic, like the lepers of the Middle Ages: symbol of the heart I lack, according to women. And the anaesthesia of the skin, symbol of my so-called (partially true) moral anaesthesia...But all this is literature, unless I'm utterly mistaken.'
Urchins went by, hooded like the infant Harpocrates depicted on Hellenistic terracottas; and sturdy, impudent-looking little girls, unveiled, but putting their hands vaguely over the lower half of their faces as they passed.
'Pack of trollops. Not Rhadidja. Nor Jeanneton, nor Marina, nor La Fleur. But the rest of them. Now we'll have some fun: I'll bung the whole lot of them full of leprosy, the sluts. For we must still enjoy our pleasures. So kiss my spots, sweetheart: they're birth-marks. "Lepers seek oblivion in an intense sexual life" - another sentence from the medical text-book. Infect the entire globe - that would be something to be proud of. Where did I read about a consumptive who spat in his wife's soup, so as not to be the only one to croak? [Cited by Dr Fiessinger (Author's note).]
'I was surprised I wasn't more upset. It's the memory of the evil I've done that prevents me from suffering.
'If only the human race could perish with me! To be able to tell myself on my death-bed that in dying I'm not losing a single person!
'Malebolge.
'I'm sure that after a time I shall wonder how I managed to live without it. One gets used to everything. I'm sure one gets used to hell.
'And let's not forget our work, damn it! Job, leprous on his dung-hill, joins Mme Roland in the tumbril [In the tumbril taking her to the guillotine, Mme Roland asked for paper to write down her impressions (and was refused) (Author's note).] when he cries: "Who will provide me with the wherewithal to write my dissertations? Who will give me the means to transcribe them in a book?" That was Job's ultimate regret - not having a fountain-pen. He ought to be the patron of men of letters. We'll write a novel about leprosy, if we have a little time to spare. And our ultima verba, of course. Besides, writing one's ultima verba is enough to prevent one from dying. And our complete works bound in sterilized leper's skin - the skin cuttings were such pretty colours in Lobel's book. And I trust they'll write theses about us - lepers stimulate literary men. Maistre and le Lépreux de la cité d'Aoste, Huysmans and Sainte Lygdwine de Schiedam, and that prototype of the bogus masterpiece by a bogus genius, la Jeune fille Violaine.'
He saw that dusk was falling, and thought: 'What do the changes in nature amount to compared to the change that is taking place in my body at this moment?' On the horizon, the mountains grew blurred and disappeared; now there was nothing to be seen but the snow on the summits, like shrouds suspended in the sky. Then everything changed again; the mountains reappeared, grape-purple and pink in colour, and in those high places dedicated to nature-worship there began the daily sacrifice of the Sun. The silence was total. No more beasts, no more birds, no other life but that of the immeasurable winds; or the tiny sounds of the snow or of a stone coming loose and rolling down the embankment of the track, or of a dead branch breaking off like a warning. For a moment, through a break in the clouds, a ladder of gold descended on to purple rocks. For a moment, in a valley, a lake could be seen, of a violet so intense it might have been a vast bed of violets. Then, suddenly, all was shadow, and the spirits emerged from the dark mountains.
Sure, now, of arriving before nightfall at Souk et'Tnine, no more than a kilometre away, Costals dismounted and dined off the fruit, cakes and milk which the kaid had given him of his poor riches. These substances, having reached his belly, helped to modify his attitude to life. His first reaction to the threat had been one of calm, partly because his lunch had bolstered him up. Then, exhausted and weakened by the hard journey, and his stomach having emptied, he had indulged in a bout of confused exaltation: his defence against the terrible reality had then been the one we all turn to - the impulse Andrée Hacquebaut had had when she decided he was an invert, or when she persuaded herself that he loved her, the impulse he himself had already had when he sought to gild the pill of marriage by systematically working himself up in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is our natural bent that saves us from everything. In times of trial, the man of pleasure takes refuge in pleasure; the man of imagination, if he can convince himself that the ordeal he is living through was once faced by men who inspire him, takes a liking to it. 'Men are troubled, not by things, but by opinions about things,' says the Ancient. Yes, but what saves them, too, are opinions about things. Costals, with his romanticism, had attempted to construct a world in which he would not suffer unduly, and he had succeeded, for human nature is extremely well adapted; one has only to manipulate it with a little intelligence. Now, fortified by rest and food, he had recovered his original serenity. The supposed benefits of his disease had reinstated themselves in the foreground of his consciousness: an interesting experience, a better use of the time that remained to him, his life concentrated on essentials. 'That which is noble in my nature is safe,' says Mephisto, while his body bursts with sores.
Meanwhile they were descending the last slope of the mountain, returning to the human world, the gentle world of humanity, and Costals felt the same emotion he had once felt on a scorching August day in Paris (in the place de la Bourse) when an itinerant pedlar had proffered some violets: violets! an evocation of cool winter in the midst of this furnace! Unleashed waters resumed their course, with the delicious roar of distant artillery; the night was full of invisible running water. Invisible? Here was a stream whose sinuous coils, as of a bludgeoned viper, shimmered in the darkness; here were waterfalls, grandiose by virtue of the rocks and heights from which they fell, charming because they looked like long sparkling oriflammes or the unfurled tails of Arab horses. The moon had appeared, flanked by tiny Venus (like an ox flanked by an ox-pecker bird), and the constellations glittered on the further slope, like snow crystals in the sun. A vast sky inlaid with bright forms, a night wreathed in whispers and voices. In sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine (there was a dog running behind him, whose course down the slope he could only guess by the noise of the stones it sent rattling down); in sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine (there was an insomniac bird that uttered a shriek of connivance); in sight of the first lights of Souk et'Tnine, Costals had a thought that was a little strange, but full of peace: 'After all, it's only me who's dying.'
18
Costals arrived at the front door of the Marrakesh hospital, and went past without entering. He was funking it. 'It's five past nine. At twenty past nine I shall know I'm done for.' Then he rapidly retraced his steps, and with a smile of resentment and fortitude, went in and asked for Lobel.
When Lobel arrived, they went into his office. Costals took off his jacket, rolled up his shirt-sleeve, and showed his forearm without a word. He was still smiling, but it was a different smile, a quizzical smile as if to say: 'You must admit it's genuine all right, and that you didn't expect it.'
Lobel bent down and scrutinized the spot, while Costals watched him intently. 'This is the moment when he'll lie to me. I wouldn't be a writer of psychological novels if I couldn't see through him now.' But the doctor's face remained sealed.
'No other marks on your body?'
'Not so far as I could see.'
At the hotel, he had not dared to examine his body for fear of discovering more marks, like a consumptive who does not dare examine his spittle.
'You haven't been blowing your nose more than usual? No tingling sensation at the tips of your fingers?'
'No.'
A pause. Ah! this was the moment of truth. 'How is he going to break it to me? Probably he'll say: "No definite symptoms, but you'd better have some treatment, in case...." What! he's putting his hand on my arm. That must mean that he's about to come clean. He wants to give me courage.' Costals felt himself turn pale inside. Passionately he murmured the prayer from his childhood missal, giving it a human meaning: 'Say but the word and my soul shall be saved.'
Lobel said:
'
The thing is, you see, you're a very nice chap ... but you haven't an appointment, have you?'
Silence.
'I wouldn't want to keep you waiting. And I can't see you for another hour. Have you anything you need to do in Marrakesh?'
'No, I haven't anything to do in Marrakesh,' said Costals. glum and icy. At the same time he was thinking: 'The brute makes soothing noises, like all doctors; only I've got leprosy. If the spot wasn't suspect, he would already have laughed in my face. And if it is suspect, then that's that.'
Lobel calculated aloud, and then: 'I can see you in forty minutes. Wouldn't you like to look around the town. Marrakesh is quite picturesque, after all.... Oh, of course, it's not the same sort of thing as the Eiffel Tower.... '
'He'll drive me mad with his Eiffel Tower.' Costals allowed himself to be led to the door, and went out.
'Would he talk about sight-seeing to a man when in forty minutes' time he was going to tell him he had leprosy? Why not? Before telling D. he had cancer, the doctor made him sign some limited editions of his books.
'So I'm a "nice chap"! And if he had read a eulogistic article about me by the most stupid academician, he'd be calling me cher maître. But he's never heard of me, and so, as he can only judge me by my face, he tells me I'm a nice chap - in other words that I'm a half-wit. And indeed that is what I must be. "Nice" to Solange. "Nice" to Andrée Hacquebaut. "Nice" to Rhadidja.'
Never would Costals forget those forty minutes killing time in Marrakesh: they were enough to cure him of Africa for the rest of his life. 'Sometimes it's the world that is the theatre of an imminent unknown: the eve of a revolution. This time it's inside my body that the catastrophe is brewing. And there's nothing I can do but look on - until the revolver shot. But can I even count on that? X. and Y., who tried to kill themselves while there was still a tiny glimmer of hope for them, and failed, never dared make another attempt - they both admitted it to me - when they knew the game was up.' As the appointed hour drew near, his anxiety increased. He remembered a friend who, telephoning to hear the result of a Wassermann test, took care to put the call through from a café, with a glass of rum at hand which he could gulp down at once if the result was 'positive' and he felt himself about to pass out. After thirty-five minutes, Costals could bear it no longer and returned to the hospital.
The Lepers Page 12