Vacancy had taken complete possession of Joseph’s mind; the boy could stay there, leaning against the shop-wall, staring straight ahead of him, for a whole year, no doubt. Indistinguishable from the grey wall, spread out right in the middle of the daubs of paint, more invisible than a stain, he could have gazed and gazed to his heart’s content. Nothing would have moved, for his gaze would have somehow paralysed the scene; in this place, covered with dust or perhaps with snow, abominable time would have gained no hold. For the boy’s gaze would have gone beyond, to the very heart, it would have sought in the midst of things for what is called the picture, the imperishable, serene photograph, nature in person, neither living nor dead, where the world makes only one single, majestic movement of birth, of fulfilment, and there the gaze would have stopped, have ceased to be a gaze, have become in its turn an act of complete enjoyment, the delectable fusion of two beings without purpose.
But the time had not yet come, for Joseph. For him, life was still to be long; a burden with no future and no joy, which he would probably have to bear for at least another fifty years. The moment of infinity was not yet due; time would be long, his body would be eager for food and movement. The trivialities were awaiting him, men’s jobs, exchanges of idle words, money, women, all that, all that, all this hideous fatigue piling up ahead of him. He must pull himself together, tear his eyes away from the fascination of the empty scene, close his whole body to the wind that had begun to enter into it.
Joseph left the support of the wall and walked on again. He went down the road towards the town. He began to pass people. The earth was decidedly a populous place; in all directions there were moving figures, faces, legs in action. Nothing was at rest. At the street-crossings the traffic lights blinked away with an electrical purr. The houses were all different, some tall, twelve or thirteen storeys, others squat, painted beige, others ancient, with colonnades of a sort. There were a lot of shops, and people were crowding round their windows. Noise was rising from all sides, confused, jerky, and smells were wafting out of all the doors, tiny living particles which had broken away from the hot objects spread out for sale: sausages, brioches, textiles, flowers, oranges, chickens, coffee, books, fish, cars. The colours were harassing, too; they glowed on walls, on clothes, in the backs of shops. Blues, yellows, golds, milky whites. The light falling from the sky was reflected back from their varnished surfaces, it got into your eyes, thrust itself into your head; phrases took birth under its familiar impulses, sterile, half-formed phrases. Their echoes had magic power, which disturbed everything, made you a man once and for all. No escape from them: there they were, mixed up with every passing second, they were subjugating you to time and space. Words stamped on the memory, engraved on it, prisoners of the same form, indelible, indecipherable. They sang. Or they lit up, one letter after another, without fatigue, O.L.I.V.E.T.T.I. Feverishly they jotted down on pieces of cardboard their little breathless, aggressive, unhesitating signs. One was their property, one listened as they talked, one never denied them anything. KODAK. Aspro banishes pain.
If you want to
Give
Your friends
A treat
Remember
Offer them
A Martini
Philips is more reliable.
I like Shell!
HERTZ
Coca-Cola
Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet.
Végétaline for fried potatoes.
Esso Motor Oil Anti-Sludge
TERGAL Polyester Fibre and Wool
Gillette Razors
Have you Macleaned your teeth?
TELEFUNKEN
Adelshoffen
Honda
State Express Filter Kings
Eterna-matic
The Astorians
Persil washes Whiter
Triumph of pain—Treachery of the eyes, the ears, the skin. One has to trudge through this desert all one’s life. To see and hear. To hear and see. To eat. To laugh. To talk, smoke, drink. To feel. To procreate. To write. To breathe. To be in pain. To bleed, to tremble. To be angry. To suffer. To cry out, to sleep, to wait. Fatigue is everywhere. There is no way, really no way of avoiding it. One has to toil, to feel hot, to feel cold. To caress. To enjoy. To understand, to understand without pause. Every day. Like that, every day, without exception. To urinate. To taste. To let oneself be carried away by useless words, to adopt paces and habits. To seek for phrases, to stretch one’s ears and eyes, to stretch one’s skin. To pretend to love, to love really, perhaps. All that, not even for nothing; for it’s not even possible to resort to nothingness so as to determine one’s life; man is not alone; vulgar, garish things inhabit him, shape him. There’s no way of judging. There is no absurdity, for there is not even any separation between what is and what ought to be. God, if he exists, must be left in full control: never, no, never, shall we really know what a little worm man is.
The road, as it crossed the town, had become a boulevard. In a gentle slope, it led Joseph down to the sea; at this point there was no beach, only a sort of overhanging cliff. Joseph leant on the iron railing and looked at the precipice. And then, all of a sudden, another fascination loomed up to take possession of his mind. The abyss became a narrow, deep, absolutely empty well. Right at the bottom the water gleamed in the sun, like a tiny puddle; an almost imperceptible movement ruffled its surface, troubling the reflection of the sky; little waves were going and coming in all directions, crossing one another, mingling like the waves of the wind over an expanse of grass. At the edge of the abyss, thick black rocks lay side by side; from time to time an exceptionally large wave heaved up the surface of the water and covered their rumps; the transparent water spread over the rounded masses, filled up hollow places, cascaded down furrows, swam where it lay, like smoke. Then the wave withdrew, and strange dark mouths opened out and closed up, seething with bubbles; soon, where they had been, along the shiny rocks, nothing was left except a fringe of foam, a patch of tattered, dirty froth, drifting away over the sea like spittle.
Joseph stared down into the abyss for a long time. With his head bent forward, over the balustrade, he felt himself gradually invaded by dangerous vertigo; the precipitous fall of rock, the ebb and flow of the water, flat like a manhole cover, the noise of the surf, were all calling to him. He let his body curve forward, as though drawn by an invisible air-pocket. He saw himself falling, rising in reverse, towards the centre of the earth. His fixed, wide-open eyes were already staring at the point of impact; they were already feeling the hard, undulating surface of the sea, they were melting into the whirlpools like great, indolent pieces of seaweed.
Just as he was perhaps really about to fall, to shoot over the iron railing and be turned to stone, someone touched his arm. Joseph looked round and saw a man staring at him. He heard a voice asking him a question, tearing him out of his dream. The voice said again:
‘Don’t you feel well?’
The man was watching him with a sort of cruel gleam in his eyes; Joseph saw him very distinctly; a tweed jacket, gold-rimmed spectacles, bald head, lines round the mouth and on the forehead. The man’s hand was still on his arm, and Joseph saw a metal ring with two entwined initials: X.C.
He freed himself with a jerk. The man, who was about fifty, said hesitantly:
‘Don’t you feel well?’
Joseph muttered:
‘Yes—Yes, I’m all right …
And he walked quickly away.
Further on he went past a school and saw the time by its clock: 2.30.
He looked at a kind of war memorial as well, a great slab of white marble with names carved on it. The ground really belonged to these dead. The rocks, the olive-trees, the beaches, the rows of vines, were all their property. One could pretend not to know it, but they, with their names carved there, with their tranquil names spreading over the slabs, they owned everything, they were the masters. They were vigilant, hidden underground, they were watching everything through the portholes of their tombs;
they were the secret judges, and nothing escaped them.
Joseph went on his way. He wasn’t hungry, and didn’t know what to do. So he went into a non-stop cinema and sat through the film two or three times. It was Quand la Marabunta gronde, Sept heures avant la frontière, or something of the sort.
When Joseph came out of the cinema it wasn’t so very light any more. The sky was covered with grey clouds, and the people in the streets were hurrying to get home. In front of the cinema the boy hesitated for a moment. Then he turned left and walked up the road towards the suburb again. He walked for quite a long time like that, while the shadows deepened and the first strips of neon began to light up in the shop windows. Men and women were always the same, everywhere; in their pale faces the features didn’t move, their noses remained fixed and their wrinkles grew no more numerous. And yet they were in movement, constantly, they were living uninterruptedly. Their footfalls rapped out along the pavements, counting the seconds, the minutes, the hours. Even if you saw nothing pass, you should be under no illusion; their skin was crumpling, their hearts were wearing out, then and there, gently, with every gesture, at every opportunity. Sometimes their children were scampering round them, those little morsels of flesh and blood which had come out of themselves and would be old one day. Men and women might escape all massacres and all wars, they might emerge unscathed from poliomyelitis and railway accidents, but they wouldn’t escape from their children. That was the truth, which must be known once and for all. In forty years, or perhaps sooner, these will be words written by a dead man. And in two hundred years, in any case, nothing that exists today, nothing of this second, will still be alive. When you’ve read this line, you must turn your eyes away from the mean little scrawl. Breathe, take a strong, deep breath, be alive to the point of ecstasy. Because soon, truly, there won’t be much left of you.
Joseph halted on the kerb, near a bus-stop. To the left of the metal post, which bore the notice 1A, several people were waiting. Two women in raincoats, a man in a brown suit, a student, a workman, and three other women carrying bags. Joseph studied them at his leisure, one by one. They had undistinguished, rather ugly faces, marked by the fatigue of the day’s work. The man in the brown suit was finishing a cigarette; the student was carrying books and kept tapping on the ground with the toe of his right shoe; the two women in the front row watched the cars go by in silence; the workman’s hands were thrust into the pockets of his overalls; the three women at the back were chatting, two of them animatedly, the third putting in a word now and then. When the bus arrived they would go off in it, without looking back. They would get off the bus further along, on the edge of the town, and go home to cook supper. Their houses would be hot and noisy, with a wireless or television set talking to itself against the dining-room wall.
Joseph ran over every detail of their faces, as though he meant to caricature them. Long noses, straight or too-curled hair, dark-ringed eyes, faint moustaches, crows’ feet, dry lips. Why should all this have to change? Weren’t things all right as they were? A mawkish sadness emanated from these creatures; wreaths of memories rose up from every angle of their faces. That precise instant, that meeting of nose and lip, of a lock of hair and the line of a cheek, had no existence. So that was reality! A passage, a fall, a burial. For the days of childhood had gone by right enough, as well. The childish bodies, the bright laughter, the clean eyes. And the time of their mothers’ childhood had succumbed too, with its long dresses and pigtails. Everything was buried one within the other, under layers and layers of filth, excrement, oblivion. These women’s faces, so clear-cut in appearance, so firm that they seemed to be moulded in bronze, did not really exist; they were only gelatine, trails of mud, rottenness, abscess, gangrene!
A tanker-waggon came slowly along the boulevard; Joseph saw it from a long way off; it was snorting like a pig, the iron plates on its flanks were rattling, the glass panes of the driver’s cab were flashing with dark glints. Overloaded, no doubt, it crawled painfully along the kerb, its effort so visible that it seemed to be tearing off scraps of asphalt. On the front of the roof there was printed, as though in letters of fire, a magic word:
TOTAL
Joseph watched the approach of the word, of the ridiculous yet haughty sign. He felt something stir inside him—fear, or perhaps obedience. Then he looked at the wheels of the lorry, and his recent vertigo swept over him again. The bulging surfaces were revolving, advancing ponderously alongside the pavement, and the sort of pattern that was stamped on the rubber seemed to zigzag as it went down towards the ground. There, everything vanished under the weight of the tanker-waggon; the elastic mass crushed down on the sanded surface and the wheel went on turning, advancing, without a jerk, without a pause, like the gigantic mouth of some devouring beast. A smell of vulcanite hung in the air, mixed with the clouds of petrol fumes; in front, behind and to either side there must surely be silence. For all violence seemed to have concentrated in the belly of the machine, of the quivering, steel-plated monster on whose brow the magic word was written, while from each open wing, as though from a mouth, there poured the uninterrupted cascade of the wheels, the torrents of black rubber stamped with Z’s which tore this weight from the motionless ground and hauled it forward, toilsomely, majestically, advancing so slowly that they seemed hardly to move from the spot.
For a moment Joseph was seized by a desire to throw himself under the enormous wheels, to make himself into a road, and to feel the pattern of the rubber being stamped into his skin. It was a temptation resembling the one he had felt two or three years before, when he was thirteen. One evening he had unhooked the native dagger from a trophy on the drawing-room wall, taken it away to his bedroom and there, alone, had pressed the point against his chest. Anxiously, he had heard the dull vibrations of his heart climbing up the blade of the knife to his hand, clenched round the hilt. He’d tried to press a little harder, so as to pierce the skin. But he had jerked the dagger away, not so much because it hurt as because he was terrified by those vibrant heart-beats. Never would he forget it: the disgusting intoxication of feeling that life and soul can be deflated by a single prick, like a bladder full of air.
The tanker-waggon went past, close to the kerb, a few inches from the boy, who didn’t move; then, blowing its horn, it drove on, out of the town. Joseph, with a last glance at the women and the men, who were still waiting, walked away too.
Among the thickening shadows of the kitchen, the old woman was still seated in her wicker armchair. Nothing had moved. The plastic curtains were hanging at the window, the walls and ceiling had the same pale marks, and on the table the provisions were still spread out, just as they had rolled out of the bag. Joseph advanced a few steps into the room, trying to see through the dusk. His eyes fell on the body lying back in the chair, shapeless under its dress. The old woman’s feet were flat on the ground, both pointing in his direction. Her head lay against the chair-back, her face was expressionless. With closed eyes, pinched nostrils and tight lips, it was attached to the rest of her body like a block of grey stone, almost without need. One had the impression that one could just as well have taken it off and put it somewhere else, like a cushion.
The approach of darkness had covered everything, as it were, with whitish, dusty cobwebs, which floated on the surface of things and gathered in corners. The vague glow from the sky was still coming in through the window, but it was not lighting up the room: on the contrary, it was removing colour and outline from the contents of the kitchen. Like water, water dirty from having done thousands and thousands of washes, the shadow was muddying the living shapes and picking out, in the old woman’s face, everything that was decrepit and lacklustre. For a few seconds, even, Joseph had the impression she was really dead. He tiptoed up to the armchair and whispered:
‘Mademoiselle Maria? Mademoiselle Maria?’
Bending over the ashen face, he saw the faint signs of life: a palpitation of the nostrils, a wheezing slightly gurgling respiration, movements of the eye
s beneath the closed lids. He touched the old woman’s shoulder with his hand and said again:
‘Mademoiselle Maria?’
‘Mademoiselle Maria?’
She seemed to hear; her lids quivered, her lips parted. A strange sound emerged from the yellow, dried-up mouth where the blood had clotted:
‘Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.’
‘Does it hurt you?’ asked Joseph.
Her eyes appeared, between the swollen lids; two glassy, transparent eyes, without a tear. The voice struggled to speak:
‘Ah. Ah. I can’t see any more. Ah. Ah. I can’t see anything any more. Ah. Ah. Ah.’
But these words wouldn’t come. Somewhere in the brain they had got stuck, hidden with the tons of pictures and memories, and they could not escape from their prison any more. Soon, in a few hours at most, they would be rotting underground, the words, they would be obliterated like the pages of a dictionary. The songs and poems were finished. Words were only reflections, fleeting reflections easily covered by the darkness. The ideas, the fine phrases, the monuments, those are the vain imaginings. Not one of them will beget life, not one will escape the order they are trying to battle with. And if it must be said, there is not one temple, with its marble arcades, not one tool, not one book that is worth the tiniest gnat lost in the world.
Joseph listened for a moment to the murmurs which were trying to cross the barrier of her mouth. Then he began to speak:
‘Do you hear me, Mademoiselle Maria? You hear me, don’t you?’
The dark face assented.
‘I want—I want you not to die. I don’t know how to put it—You understand? Try to speak to me. Try to tell me something. Like just now. What you’re seeing. For you are seeing things, aren’t you? You’re seeing things? I’d so much like—Tell me what you see. Like just now, like just now, you remember?’
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