Tomorrow, she’ll receive a telegram summoning her to take her place again, at double wages. Not tomorrow—this evening!
This evening…provided that Tornada doesn’t keep me shackled much longer.
He’s making me pose, that satanic surgeon. I’m still posing for the Maecenas that succeeds the typist. He’s a financier who funds literary prizes. He’s sixty years old. He’s thin, as if stretched, with a nose like an owl’s beak and spatulate fingers adapted by nature, one might think, to his social function, with the result that the nose can be convinced that money has no odor and that the fingers handle banknotes with more expertise.
I thought at first that he admired me. At any rate, he made use of fragments of my verse. He murdered them, but one doesn’t frown at the prosody of a profane individual when it’s you he’s quoting publicly I understood later that he was merely drawing vanity from my rosette at his receptions. Later still, Lucienne told me that he had tried to seduce her. We mocked his stooped bearing, on emerging from his dinner-parties. I thought that she had resisted him. Could I still believe it? He only looked at the portrait. He asked for Madame. When Anna told him that she had gone out, he fled.
And Tornada still hasn’t arrived!
Oh, I’m not anxious. Scientific interest alone would bring him back to me before I’m put in the coffin. Why should he hurry? He has a few hours in hand as yet. He promised me my escape for after lunch, but “after lunch” can vary between two o’clock and five—it’s only four. He’s so busy. Something urgent must have delayed him. He must have gone to tell his story to the Prefect of Police. One has to wait in offices. He loves me, that man.
Another hour passes. In order to help me to be patient, destiny sends me Raoul Givers. He’s another competitor for the Titon chair, who gathered a few votes.
I scarcely know that historian’s amiable physiognomy, rarely frequenting the forum, always buried in libraries. I’ve only seen him once. As a gallant colleague, he came to apologize for standing against me. We chatted cordially. He assured me that he only wanted to use it as a stepping-stone, that he would stand down in my favor at the first turn, that he would ask his partisans to follow his direction. I assured him of all my assistance in the following election.
Now he’s the only remaining candidate, but he doesn’t rejoice in his good luck. He favors me with a look of pity. Worthy colleague! He has no suspicion of the reversal of fortune that is to come.
The reversal of fortune…oh, I can certainly talk about reversals with Lucienne, who has come back. It’s for me that it will be produced, that change of fortune! And what a reversal!
“You’ve written to me, Madame, to ask me to accompany your husband?”
“Yes, Monsieur, I’d be grateful if you could be one of the pall-bearers. Professor Tornada, who is one of our friends, suggested you for that assistance, in the circumstances.”
“I will be all the more flattered by that choice, Madame, in that I can render homage at the same time to the memory of Professor Tornada.”
“Forgive me, Monsieur—what do you mean, to the memory?”
“What? You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
Then, Raoul Givers, the third candidate for the Titon chair, takes a fresh newspaper from his pocket, unfolds it in front of the stupefied Lucienne, and reads her the front page headline: Professor Tornada crushed by autobus.
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
Chapter IX
I had only once been a witness to a sentence of death. Those kinds of spectacles are not good for my nerves. I am temperamentally hostile to the ugly things laid out before tribunals. I fear participating, in no matter how small a measure, by the fact of my presence, in a judicial error. I find the passions exposed in the course of a cause célèbre, not only by the criminal but also by those who have the mission to prosecute and defend him, revolting. But I was writing a drama at the time; it was necessary for me to describe the judiciary apparatus; I thought that I might even gather, from the assertions on either side, impressions useful to my work.
I had, therefore, obtained from a friend of mine, powerful at the Palais, the favor of a reserved seat. Well, when the verdict was pronounced, I saw the condemned man receive it like the blow of a sledgehammer, go pale and lose consciousness. But he was soon reanimated, his eyes shining with hope, clinging to the appeal for mercy that his advocate caused to shine before his eyes. In the final analysis, if the clemency of the Head of State were not to be granted to him, he would only find out about it a long time afterwards, after the final preparations, and all of his distress would be concentrated in an hour, softened by the consolations of a priest, gorged on rum, and would even give, in certain cases, the relief of spitting on the public.
Whereas I...
For me, it would be death without words, without alcohol, without bravado. The most terrifying end is that of a man who retains all his faculties, follows his own funeral, hears himself fall into the grave, and plunges into the beyond, after I don’t know what frightful death throes!
I had no more hope! Oh, how my drama of the heart, the theft of my collections, the vulgar publicity of the Académie, the handsome Guy, and the unspeakable Jojo faded away before the perspective of being really dead, before the cessation of life! At the very most, Ninette and the Vestal floated above my unanimous disinterest in the people and things I was about to quit—but for the rest of the world, the splendid apathy of Saint Jerome in his grotto, Diogenes in his barrel. The great human causes, the predilections of my talent, no longer counted for anything! I only had pity for myself.
Tornada was dead—deader than me, as dead as I would be before long.
And how I envied him for having found his end under an autobus!
I imagined him, maddened by the theft of which he had been the victim, crossing a street, without imagining that the world existed for anything but his formula, struck by the heavy vehicle, dragged for a few meters, howling and screaming, and finally being unable to avoid it passing over his entire body, his head exploding under the wheels. A bad minute—but how much more desirable than the agony that awaited me!
It must have been seven o’clock. The days end late in summer. I still had about two hours to engrave in myself the things I was going to quit, to retain the sounds that I would no longer hear—and then the box; tomorrow the humus; and beyond that...
Ah, beyond that, what would I find, behind the great curtain?
Oh, my funeral light, how soft you seem to me!
Oh, my customary noises, how harmonious you are!
One only realizes the joy of perception when one reaches the limit of no longer being able to profit from it!
People are passing by in the street outside, wearied by work, crushed by destiny, cursing, lamenting and appealing to death: those people do not suspect that their misery is a species of voluptuousness, which they in enjoy by virtue of not being already suspended above the abyss, as I am!
Oh, if only I could believe in future reparations! I call in vain upon the faith of my childhood.
My wife came back after having escorted my unwitting perturbator to the door. It was only decent that she stayed a while. She started scanning the entire article devoted to Tornada’s crushing. Then she happened upon another article, which, I deduced from the movements of her eyes, which went back and forth between her reading and my cadaver, concerned me: some documentary chronicle of the man and the writer that I was.
At first she lent a certain attention to it, but all effort has its limits. She soon shrugged her shoulders and turned the page before having finished. This time, she no longer took her eyes away. Of course! She was on the fashion page. There were drawings, and the article was signed by a Comtesse. When she had read the last line she looked at her portrait to compare the dress she wore two years ago with the one advertised in the article. She fixed her choice on silhouette number 3, already indicated by her finger.
Even the ambition of
her future costume ended up wearying her. As seven-thirty was chiming and she wanted to be there when I was put in my coffin, in order not to be accused subsequently of having neglected me completely, she had the inspiration of preparing her fingernails for the following day. She ran to her bedroom, came back laden with implements of coquetry, and set to work: serious work, comparable to that of an artist. She clipped, filed, gnawed, scraped and polished with a feverish activity. At eight o’clock she was still polishing: Boileau’s ghost would have shuddered at the ease of it.
I’m joking. It’s just that all passion, once massacred, provokes frantic reactions. I despised her mightily, that slut! I would have converted all her actions into sins. Her presence was torturing me.
But she swiftly hid her apparatus. Someone had just knocked on the door.
“I beg your pardon, Madame. I know that it will soon be time. Would you permit me…?”
“Certainly, Mademoiselle.”
“And also to bring…?”
“Ninette? Oh, no, Mademoiselle; it’s not a spectacle for children.” She refused with the same air of sugary dignity with which she had forbidden my daughter a puppet that was too old for her. It is truly only women of that sort who reprimand improprieties loudly, protecting mores. “No, not Ninette,” she repeated. “But you, Mademoiselle, gladly. All the more so as these emotions are killing me, and I shall not be able to make the effort to witness the definitive separation. So, for want of my father, whom I asked to replace me, but who has been retained...”
Oh, I know what is retaining Jojo. It’s the last hand of cards, the last drink. His presence would have been as odious to me as that of his daughter. Heaven cannot refuse me another witness!
“Will you render me that service again?”
Mademoiselle inclines her head, and Lucienne takes advantage of it to withdraw. Right! Destiny is weary of being ferocious. I shall see Ninette again.
And there she is, in fact. There she is in the arms of her new Mama. Poor dear, she’s already asleep. Her eyes only open with difficulty. She doesn’t complain, though. She’s so docile.
In response to Mademoiselle’s plea, she repeats: “Papa, I promise to be very good, all my life, until the moment when I am with you, in the Good Lord’s Heaven.”
She blows the supreme kisses, and her heavy head falls back on to the shoulder of her carrier.
Eight o’clock. Voices in the antechamber. The sound of trestles bumping in the drawing room. They are making preparations for the parade.
Mademoiselle comes back in hastily. She has no more tears. She has no more words. She is grief incarnate.
She leans down and breathes: “They’re here. Adieu, my Master, my poet...”
She slips on to my finger a gold ring that she has never taken off before, which she had from her dead fiancé.
O virgin, who loved me without hope, and who would have become my wife nevertheless, your offering will permit me to overcome the terror and revolt of the violation to come.
Men appeared. There were four. Two were carrying the coffin. Oh, Tornada had not been stingy. The box was in ebony, with sculpted silver handles, an interior padded with white silk. Had my demoniac friend foreseen that he would not see his stupid experiment through to the end?
The men, astonished by my contracture—“He’s very stiff, this one!”—took me from my bed and laid me in the coffin. Liberated from the odious smile of the portrait, I no longer received anything but the distraught adoration of the Vestal.
And that was my last wonderment.
I was enveloped in a sheet.
The lid closed, plunging me into absolute darkness.
Then the blows of the hammer, a blowtorch, grating sounds, following a rectilinear course. Someone is soldering. Then nothing more. Nothing more than extraordinarily muffled sounds. I feel myself lifted up. I am turned in order to pass through the doors. I am bumped going through my study. I continue to progress and am finally stable, high above the ground, on the trestles in the drawing room. Trestles…all of life. A little of death...
Oh! There…I’m choking! I’m going to succumb soon, for want of air, like those poor men trapped in sunken submarines...
But no, I’m not choking! What am I imagining, then? Asphyxia, for the moment, at least, is impossible. Tornada has ballasted me with oxygenated substances. Have I been breathing, for three days? No, I’m going to continue living.
I want to continue living.
I want to live!
It’s inconceivable. I’m not renouncing it!
Chapter X
What I’m renouncing is writing a description of that night in the coffin. It was abominable! No longer, this time, because my state of death permitted me to conceive the ugliness of others, the baseness of passions, but because my brain, which I had believed, the day before, no longer to be functioning integrally, subjected as it was to the exhaustion of the 222, resumed its processes with an ardor and a lucidity that my most valiant hours of intellectual creation had never known.
Reader, put yourself in my place! Or rather, never put yourself there; only imagine it. Imagine that you are lying in a quilted box, nailed and soldered shut; that you will never get out again; that you are going to die slowly; that you might perhaps witness, in the case that the injection allows your conscious self to subsist longer than your organism, the invasion of your body by horrors that I don’t want to describe...until, integrally devoured, you take on the hideous aspect of the ruin that is the skeleton, condemned itself to the scattering of time.
Imagine that, and you will conceive the terror of my night.
Who was keeping vigil over me? Was anybody keeping vigil? Who came to feel pity before me funeral decor? Were there candles, or was my black sheet confounded with the night? Was the Vestal writing her hands nearby? And Lucienne?
I could easily imagine the use that Lucienne was making of her night. She was accumulating, in sleep, resistance for the morrow. The day of the parade would be exhausting, dressing early, putting on make-up—the make-up of mourning, with a hint of affliction, but not enough to appear ugly—the undulation in the undulated crêpe, and then the appearance in public, the repeated thank yous, to recommence at the church, to recommence at the cemetery! Before crying oof! the performance, the ennui, the fatigue...
In the midst of my torment, however, one clear and precise phenomenon was imposed. I note it from the viewpoint of physiological curiosity, to show what a marvelous calculator Tornada was in his anticipations. One cardiac pulsation every five minutes, he has affirmed, sufficed for the relentment of the 222. And indeed, at each interval of approximately five minutes, I heard, now that no other noise distracted me from it, the beat of my heart resonating in my temples.
That soon permitted me to string together the particles of eternity, with sufficient exactitude to calculate the hours that were flowing by and anticipate how many still remained to spend in my apartment.
At about three o’clock in the morning, I almost fell asleep, but the dread of losing the thread of the hours gave me the firmness to maintain my cerebral presence. I was aided by the powerful suggestions of art.
I reviewed famous paintings; I recited magnificent poems. I no longer had the strength of association required for any personal creation, but the beautiful images and the beautiful legends reanimated me. Thus a poet finds in himself the resistance to his misfortune.
I asked myself what life would have been, what sums of joy it would have brought me—setting Emeline and Ninette aside—if I had not received a taste for artistic heritages. The society through which I had passed had only seemed to obey the most despicable instincts; self-interest was the basis of all action; suspicion and envy dominated collectivities; generosity was only apparent, and in spite of everything, a form of egotism.
I remembered something Tornada had said, one day when I was complaining bitterly about the jealousy of my colleagues after the success of one of my books. “Humanity is nothing but an aggregation of beast
s of prey. We only begin to reflect when someone shows us a cudgel.” And he added: “But that might only be temporary. Someone will come along—a surgeon, for example, or a biologist—who will put that right!”
What did he mean? What was he meditating?
My calculating of the hours corresponded exactly with what I was still able to receive from my surroundings. I had thought at first that the world was absolutely lost to my senses, but my hearing acquired an exceptional acuity in the circumstances and, on the other hand, my coffin, in spite of its padding, formed a resonant box accessible to all vibrations
I thus perceived that, at eight o’clock in the morning, the windows of the room where I was resting were opened, in order to dress the coffin, and that my awning was dusted; then the windows were closed again. My beautiful old Moroccan vase, situated on the right on a sculpted wooden stand was broken while that was being done. I would have liked no longer to be annoyed by that, since I was condemned to death. The dead ought no longer to be clinging to material possessions, obviously—but my annoyance was so sharp and so persistent that it isolated me from the arrival of family and friends, and left me the surprise of feeling myself, at ten o’clock exactly, lifted up and jolted inside my coffin.
The ceremony had begun. The brutes carrying me took me downstairs head first. I was unable to suffer in consequence, but one has one’s habits.
When I was downstairs, more trestles, a further station under the porch; then another displacement, to be hoisted into the hearse and to go to Saint-Pierre-de-Chaillot, my church. The route was so familiar to me that I waited for the jolts in going along a street where the causeway had broken up. They were, indeed, produced, but were not as bad as I anticipated. After months of waiting, the potholes must have been filled in. The administrative negligence took me back: the war; Germany; the devastated countries; the Fascists, the Communists…is it not curious that those preoccupations can still haunt a man being taken to asphyxia?
The Exploits of Professor Tornada (Vol. 2) Page 23