The sea was flat, wide. Rays of light, coming from some undetectable source, struck the crest of each wave and made it sparkle. The horizon was bare and stiff, and queer red haloes hovered in the west, close to the atmosphere.
Under the sea, beneath the expanse now turning green, the whirlpools and reefs were innumerable. Silently they were rending the layers of water, devouring space; but a sort of opaque paralysis enfolded them, slipped into their crevices, intruded into their wounds and kept them motionless. There, hundreds of yards down, in muted listlessness, life had its roots too. Fish swam blindly round and round, near the mouths of caverns. For them it was always night. Never did the sun set amid flaming clouds. Never did the moon shine with frozen brilliance in the centre of the darkness. Light and darkness had intermingled below the liquid surface, and there reigned perpetually a sort of blurred glimmer, coming from nowhere and never lighting up anything.
But on land one didn’t suspect that. Standing on a sticky rock a few inches from the fringe of the sea, one could only see masses of black matter, probing into the liquid sphere. The sheet of silence was purplish-blue, moving its tiny wrinkles imperceptibly; it was undulating smoothly, swaying forward, breaking, returning, spreading out like a patch of oil, retreating a little, then advancing again, without fatigue, without end, with a sort of melancholy, mawkish, inscrutable obstinacy.
This was motion but not movement; the waves advanced landwards from the furthest horizon, but so to speak without moving. It was motion in the heart of immobility, the sound of silence, the aggression of flat, lethargic zones, nothing more.
To the left the bay ended with a tongue of land, almost transparent amid the fluidity of the atmosphere, which sloped gently down into the sea. On the cape, umbrella pines were planted, their complicated outlines silhouetted against the mild sky. Along the shore were invisible creeks, hidden by the darkness, and others which gleamed faintly in the light of the street lamps, crowded with stranded boats and huts.
While night was falling and the shadows thickened, the heat seemed to be gathering towards the liquid surfaces, round the bay. Big crimson patches, like pools of blood, floated in the trough of the waves not far from the shore. Other blisters, sheets of fuel oil, pools of petrol, were drifting along, continually changing shape, glinting or being temporarily extinguished, with the indolent gesticulations of jellyfish. Shoals of fish broke surface, and a few bellies shone for an instant. A thick, heavy smell, pungent yet sweet, rose from the deserted waves. The wind carried it in puffs to the shore, and one might have taken it for the breath of some animal. The night, no doubt about it, had sunk down into the sea; it was awakening mysterious impulses, it was kneading the flabby flesh of the lampreys, dilating the mouths of the anemones. One heard the same lapping sound all the time; but by listening attentively one could make out a great, confused clamour rising from the depths of the water, a deep, nasal chant, the bursting of bubbles, the hissing of branchiae, the yawning of shells; objects were undoubtedly growing larger, under the weight of the darkness. The heat, stored up all through the day, could at last escape from the depths, and the invisible tumult was swelling the liquid matter like a tide.
On land, the last reddish flares were fading out along the horizon. Three rocks standing in a row near the shore still had a tiny crimson star on their brows. The three wet gleams would shine for a few minutes alone in the darkness, and then abruptly go out, and nothing would be left.
Round the open bay, despite the white perforations of the street lamps, darkness was continuing its advance. It was steadily taking away the colour from things; the grains of sand on the beach, at one time many-coloured, were turning grey; they were melting into one another, liquefying, becoming gaseous. The earth had been hard and burning in the sunshine; now it was going to mingle with the air. The water was going to climb up its slopes, to invade the hollows between the dunes, to flow along the little valleys; the rich, salty, smooth liquid would filter into the fields. It would rise into the branches of the trees, it would enter the darkened houses. It would even get into men’s throats, it would invade their veins and muscles, it would nourish them gently while they slept and knew nothing about it.
Near the cape a cemetery was resting in the darkness, surrounded by a high stone wall and cypress hedges. Under the marble roof of a superb mausoleum erected to the memory of someone unknown, an owl had built her nest; she kept watch there every night, breathing with the hoarse, regular sound of a sleeping chest, and men all had their different legends about her; sinister tales of people buried alive, of vampires or necrophagi.
In the distance, in the opposite direction from the surface of the sea, the hills rose gently skywards. Invisible in the night, they lifted up their chaos of vineyards and pine-woods. The hollows between their ridges were purple-coloured and silent, and the cold air crawled over the undergrowth, leaving dewy tracks behind it. In the tall grass somewhere towards the centre of the cape, a crazy grasshopper was uttering its saw-toothed call. A dog was barking in the garden of a villa, its discordant cries awakening long echoes all round.
Breathed upon by the sea, the tangled branches of the laurel bushes were gradually retracting and their colourless flowers were closing their petals. Lethargy was rising from every point of the land, an unerring delicacy which was entering into all the leaves and holding them rigid. And yet it was not sleep; sleep was not current here. Everywhere, beings and objects were beginning to crackle, to stir. The earth buried in darkness was trembling imperceptibly, with the kind of shivering of vermin at work. The clamours were innumerable; the black odours were multiplying in every corner; they were emerging from burrows, from hiding-places under the carpets of leaves, like so many reptiles.
The regular spectacle of daytime had been destroyed. No more lines, no more colours, no more relief. The bay was constantly changing shape, at times it was so wide that one couldn’t see across it, at other times it was narrow, its curve closing in like a circle. The cape either advanced far out into the sea, or drew back until it was no more than a ridiculous stump. The outlines of the trees were dancing. The rounded hilltops, stretching away out of sight, were always changing their position or softening like fleece; sometimes three hummocks would vanish simultaneously, over towards the skyline, and one would see a big black hole dug out of the earth.
As for the sea, there were moments when it was so flat and deserted it made one ache; at other moments it suddenly rose up on the horizon vertically, like a rampart; or else it took on the appearance of corrugated iron, and colours began to shim-ner miraculously on it—clusters of rubies, golden iridescence, deep, violet pupils gazing out.
The landscape was trembling like this, tirelessly composing and demolishing itself. The earth’s calm, ecstatic beauty was made up of these orgies and metamorphoses. One couldn’t prevent them. One had to be content with staring, eagerly, with all one’s eyes. Standing on this little promontory, with the noise of the surf at one’s feet, one had to understand it all, to love it all, just for a second. The immense curve of the bay. The cape. The hills and the mountains. The indelible sky. The reflections of the street lamps, and the red gleam of the lighthouse, going out, lighting up again, going out, lighting up, going out, lighting up. The muffled smell and the veils of shadow. The fierce cries of animals. The twinkling houses. The menacing clumps of trees, where two or three mysteries lie concealed. The invisible air. The asthmatic breathing of the necrophagous owl in the cemetery. The strata of fat earth, populated by torpid insects. The flight of the blind bats. The shimmering of the stars, of the millions of stars sunk deep in the sky, so far away that it’s really not worth thinking about. The ripples that move forward of their own accord over the deep water, over the black water, over the water that is a horizontal chasm in which the dizzy mind of man is lost, over the boundless liquid that hides abysses, over the great, eternal surface, so flat, deserted, where night and day are mixed together like seeds of two different qualities.
There you are. T
he world is alive, like that, in tiny, hard blows, in slidings, in seepings. In the shrubs, in the caves, in the inextricable tangle of plants, it sings, with the light or with the shadows, it lives an explosive, restless life, heavy with cataclysms and murders. We must live with it, like that, every day, lying with cheek to the ground and listening ears, ready to hear all the galloping and all the murmuring. Thrust our nerves right into the earth like roots and draw nourishment from its martial, incoherent strength; we must drink long draughts from its spring of life and death, and remain invincible.
8. Then I shall be able to find peace and slumber
I TOOK a good look at the room before shutting my eyes. The four walls, the door, the two windows; I looked at the electric bulb dangling from its wire in the middle of the ceiling. The dark grey wallpaper, and the things concealed in darkness. I saw the table, and not far from it a sinister profile with a sort of beak open in sneering laughter—the chair with my clothes heaped on it, no doubt. The light coming in streaks through the closed shutters, and the headlights of cars which make moving haloes along the ceiling. I saw all that. Then I closed my eyes.
Now, in my closed eyes, white lines are still imprinted, sailing over my retina: the streaks across the shutters, the corner of the ceiling, the mass of the table and the disturbing profile, the electric wire with the lamp at the end of it.
I hear the noise of the cars coming into the room. They skid as they take the bend just below my house. The roar of their engines approaches, passes, and then gradually dies away, mingling with other noises.
On my retina everything is square; square.
Silence comes at certain moments, and then one can listen to the jingling of a manhole cover which has water pushing against it all the time. Music rises faintly from the bar downstairs. A woman’s heels go clicking along the pavement, very fast.
In front of a kind of whitish frame, probably deriving from my memory of the cube-shaped room, I see what looks like a shoal of little red and blue fish swimming by. They hurry on, twisting about, too many to count.
Blurred, indistinct forms are moving on the far side of a brown space. One might take them for human figures.
Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. My watch, on the bedside table. It taps regularly against the empty air, and then, all of a sudden, the sound rises, broadens out, expands. It accelerates, it slows down again. Becomes shrill, clangs dully, chirrups, creeps. There are echoes. I don’t understand. Who says the works of a watch are always the same?
The smell of crushed-out cigarettes in the ashtray, which must also be on the bedside table. This soon becomes sickening, acrid. I feel as though my throat were full of cigarette ash. Another noise, the blood pulsing against my ear-drum, which is pressed into the pillow.
A blood-red veil lies across my eyes. Clusters of orange-coloured spots spatter over everything and drift downwards. I try to get a look at them, by practically squinting, but they break up at once and are replaced by layers of different colours that look rather like mountains.
A motor-bicycle is approaching from far away, from the other side of the town. I hear it coming nearer, going over crossroads, changing gears. The sound of the engine stops abruptly; it must have turned behind a building.
I have a funny taste of toothpaste in my mouth. I’d like to spit.
Confused thoughts form in my head, as though coming from the back of my skull. Thoughts, thuds of thought. The words march round them, but not a word can manage to get a hold, to build its nest. They’re not thoughts; they’re inclinations. The curious thing is that there are pictures marching parallel to them. But the inclinations and the pictures remain separate. I think: train, running, lying down, height. And the pictures are: man wearing a hat, a fight with knives, a rocket, a crocodile, an arena, a laughing face. In fact there are other things as well: snatches of opening sentences, words that ring out clearly, perfectly audible; and topping it all there’s a kind of voice telling a story, saying, let’s suppose: ‘Everything’s all right. Afterwards you must come back the whole way again. No, not like that. Go back to where you started from. Yes, take the first turning on the right, and go on till you come to the church. When you see the dome, you’ll have to turn left. Etc.’
But I’ve no sooner heard, felt, seen all this, than consciousness of time returns, and the whole structure disintegrates. The voice is ahead of the words, the pictures thrust forward before the inclinations are finished and last until long after they’ve disappeared. It’s consciousness that puts a stop to everything. It flattens me on the bed, it catches up with me on the wing and brings me down on the pillow, it turns everything into a kind of memory.
The risk of scattering is present all the time. It seems to me that everything in my head is falling apart, and that I’m dissolving into emptiness. At this, with sturdy force, my mind braces itself. It turns to stone. And cohesion is restored. The thoughts become comprehensible again. The pictures, the words, the snatches of sentences, all fall into pattern. Like magnetized particles, they collect along the lines of the impulse and they serve, they talk, they construct, all the time.
Sometimes I’m caught in pockets of emptiness. I begin by hovering above the mattress, my body so light, so full of delicate volatility, that I cease to live as a body. I become diaphanous, I loiter half-way through space, like a cloud of smoke. I have no bones any more, and no meat. I evaporate into the air, I have membranes, and nothing is holding me back. Whether I’m rising or falling I don’t know. But in my organs nothing is struggling any more. The blood is no longer toiling upwards, the sinews are no longer supporting me, the cartilage is receding and ceasing to hold in position. The vertical prison is vanquished. At last, to be released from the necessity of fighting, of growing, of stretching desperately skywards … And then everything in the mind, too, goes away in freedom. Tons and tons of movements rise, descend, parade around me. It even seems as though the thoughts were spreading outside, emerging through my nose and ears and busying themselves in space, making a bed for me. Desires roll up into balls, not far from me. In the depths of a black cavern, an impulse is palpitating, isolated at last from me, visible. I can touch my words, my visions. And I, what is called I, has become nothing. Emptied out, relieved, my huge head is leaving me. I’m free at last. I’m free at last. I have no name any more, I no longer speak a language, I’m nothing but nothingness. I belong to life which is dead, annihilated, transfigured by the splendour of the evacuation. A breath. I have no more thought, my soul is an object. I lie as on a tomb.
For a tenth of a second my eyelids parted; and the darkness, just now so black, has changed into a shower of dazzling light that enters the shadows of my brain and strikes everything, like a streak of lightning. A single snow-and-crystal picture leapt into hiding in my very depths; a pure, cruel, clear-cut picture, its design as delicate as a bat’s wing, its lines like spider’s webs. It remains there, immobile, a veritable sun which has come forward, a gigantic disc, filling the horizon from side to side. It’s my room, I recognize it, with its denuded furniture, its walls, its ceiling. The electric bulb hangs in the middle of the picture, but that is not what’s burning, that is not what is lighting up the space in this way. Never did the sun give such light, even in August. No lamp, no brazier, no incandescence multiplied tenfold by hundreds of mirrors, by lenses, no fire sprung like a volcano from the heart of darkness, ever displayed such fixed whiteness; this light is unendurable, it has pervaded all the elements of the atmosphere, it hovers, dances, emanates, dissolves, burns and breaks, it consumes my eye-balls. Pain looms up beneath its blows, its ceaseless darts, which come so close together that they form one great, terribly heavy wall. I am shot through by the light, I fall, I press my face to the ground, my whole body vibrates, and the influx, the kind of throbbing music, enters into me, lifts me up, builds throughout my own flesh its marvellously abstract structure in which every pang, every blow, every twinge of the nerves, is a stone, a work of art, a harmonious theme at work.
Behind the old man’s body, while neck and head continue to climb upwards, two gigantic wings are slowly unfolding.
Once again I am fighting somebody; very quickly, I don’t know why, the landscape has laid itself out around the scene of the combat. Mountains, brooks, forests. The sun blazing in the sky. In the distance, the entrance to the gorges. Everywhere is desert, sand, barren stones. I struggle, I strike blows. I leap about. And at the same time I hear another voice, wordlessly describing the battle.
It all relapses again; the scenes get muddled, and it seems to me that inside my rolled-up eyes, towards the top, things are shaking furiously, like in little bells.
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