Trio

by Robert Pinget

  From this may be deduced:

  1) That it would appear to be a Will.

  2) That Artaxerxes, in his last Will and Testament, violated the principle of the unity of succession. To delegate such a duty to several people implies that the sovereignty is to be shared.

  3) That an idol had disappeared (?), or, more plausibly, that religious beliefs were on the wane.

  4) That the Will was not respected, as Artaxerxes was succeeded by Darius II alone.

  Which is mysterious.

  I must confess that I have always been fascinated by everything to do with the civilization of the Medes and Persians. A haughty, passionate, monotonous art. A history of conquests in which cruelty and excess triumph …

  The recent archaeological discoveries at Susa and the sudden infatuation of the sciences of the Orient with the era of the Achaemenids have enabled me to establish the following facts:

  The Will in question cannot be earlier than 430 B.C., six years before the death of Artaxerxes, that is. An inscription unearthed in 194 … explicitly reminds us of the absence of any text relating to the succession before the thirtieth year of the reign. Furthermore, a second Will, dated 426 B.C. and known for a certainty to be apocryphal, in referring to the first, provides an interpretation of the clause: “To my sons.” The document with which we are concerned was therefore the only known Will.

  We know from some tablets discovered in the foundations of the palace of Persepolis that the King’s sister, who had been converted to the Greek religion by a Phoenician, was denounced as a heretic. The sovereign had her eyes put out (bas-relief, British Museum). Would there be a clue here to the case of the missing idol? To come back to the more plausible hypothesis, it must be admitted that after the defeat at Marathon, the menacing force of Greece and the spiritual currents spreading from Athens over the whole of the Near East left people’s minds in a state of utter confusion, hence the abandonment of the ancestral beliefs.

  Artaxerxes’s sons (with the exception of Darius II) perished, one after the other, while out lion hunting (see the ancient Syrian legends), hence after 430 B.C., since they are mentioned in the Will. From this it might be inferred that the court dignitaries were aware of the King’s wish to divide the power. So the “lion hunting” would merely have been a fable to which they gave substance.

  Why, then, did the King not recast his last Will and Testament? Was he prevented from doing so? And by what intrigues?

  To this day, we do not know.

  A FOOTNOTE TO THE ORESTEIA

  Persuasion was held by the Greeks to the one of the supreme virtues, and I will concede that it is entitled to our deference. What is so admirable as its magic power? It is one of the faces of love, particularly when it mystifies. The Achaean warriors charged Ulysses-the-Crafty with the task of feeding all the baloney to the skeptical. He was immortalized as a hero, and as the typical lover, the man who triumphed over the sea (we would call it the unconscious, today), and who returned, ten years later, to a wife past her prime. Well yes, that’s how it is.

  In Eleusis (now just a large village), they still tell a story that confirms my views.

  The poet Aeschylus, at the time he was composing the Oresteia, resided in Athens in the Thalassa district. The main duty of his maidservant, Aglaia, was to keep visitors at bay. The poet couldn’t bear anyone to be around while he was working. One day, when he was furious because he couldn’t finish a line in the Agamemnon, Aglaia comes into his study. Aeschylus fumes with anger. The maid flattens herself against the wall. She explains that three young men have called and that they want to speak to the master on a matter of the greatest urgency. He doesn’t want to know. She stands her ground, and ties herself up in knots with contradictory excuses. “You’re becoming a liar, Aglaia,” says he. (The Greeks loved to play with words.) In the end she vamooses, but to get her revenge she advises the young men to start yelling under Aeschylus’s window. Which they do. The poet appears. The air calms him down. He listens to the lads. They’ve come to ask him to attend the rehearsal of a play of their composition about which they would like his advice. Aeschylus asks them:

  “How old are you?”

  “Between seventeen and nineteen.”

  “Your play is worthless. We must suffer, to understand.” And he draws the curtains.

  Ten years later, at his summer residence, the same young men come to see him. He doesn’t recognize them.

  “What do you enjoy?”

  “Women,” says one. “Men,” says another. “Adventure,” says the third.

  “We must suffer, to understand.”

  And he goes back into his hole.

  Ten years later, the three make their way to the cemetery in Eleusis, Aeschylus’s hometown, and bow their heads in homage before the urn containing his ashes.

  “What are you doing?” the urn asks them.

  “Making war.”

  “We must understand, to suffer,” it murmurs.

  FIRENZE DELLE NEVI

  “A town?”

  “A magnificant town! It was destroyed by avalanches, and disappeared at the end of the Renaissance.”

  “On Mont-Blanc?”

  “On the southern slopes of Mont-Blanc, 4,700 meters up. Founded around 1230, it was just a small alpine hamlet until the time of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who gave it its brief splendor. Florence, which he had endowed with the most beautiful monuments and made into the center of all the arts, was continually stirring up revolt. A clan of envious puritans was undermining the popularity of the prince. He decided to keep the Tuscan city in check, and, by a wager worthy of a great creator, entered into competition with himself.

  “During his ascent of Mont-Blanc in 1488 with his friend and counsellor Luigi Campanello, nicknamed, ‘Luigi the Capricious,’ his companion, catching sight of the village isolated in the snow, cried out: ‘Che bellissima Firenze potremmo costruire qui!’ The idea was born. Within two years the wager had been won. We can imagine what a tour de force this constituted! Carrara marbles were transported through Tuscany, Liguria, and Piedmont. Thousands of masons, artisans, builders and architects headed north. An extraordinary treaty with the Duke of Savoy (February 12, 1489) fixed the toll traverse, arranged for the employment of Savoyard workers, and laid down the remuneration to be paid by the Medicis in exchange for their services.

  “The chronicle of these events has been conserved in the Ambrosian library in Milan (C. 621. XI b.)

  “In 1491, Botticelli completed the fresco in the Municipio, or Town Hall. This building, a replica of the Strozzi Palace, was adjacent to the dome on which Bramante had employed his genius. A square in front of it formed a belvedere above the abyss.

  “On 7 June, there was a fair to celebrate the completion of the work. The most unlikely procession was to be seen in the streets: peasants from the districts of la Maurienne and Faucigny, from the Valais, and even from Lombardy, wild with admiration, mingled with the elegant gentry from the court.

  “And the setting sun illuminated this prodigious spectacle: Florence resuscitated amidst the snows.

  “What is to be said about the silence of the Information Service? Monopolized for centuries by a bunch of hirelings, it infiltrates everything. They make us believe the moon is made of green cheese. Open any encyclopedia and you’ll see that H. B. de Saussure was, in 1787, one of the first to climb Mont-Blanc! It’s intolerable.

  “But the Savoyards haven’t forgotten. It is the tradition, in certain families, to name the first son Laurent.”

  JOURNAL

  November 1

  Ah, those fingernail races! They’re one of the great attractions of these parts. The whole world and his wife uproots himself with his family, his house, his terrain, and comes and camps here for several months, for as long as the races last, in a specially reserved site. Whatever his financial situation, everyone finds the means to perform this rite. The unemployed are rare, for a sizeable labor force is needed for the harvest. The collectors go to work a year i
n advance. They visit every residence, whether official or not, with sacks which they fill with clippings, with broken nails, with nails that have been extracted—they can acquire an inexhaustible supply of the latter in garrets, on account of the tortures. They’ve stopped bothering about animals’ claws ever since the day they ran wild and pounced on the spectators.

  Once they’ve been collected, then, the nails are piled up in silos adjoining the racecourse. Usually there are only a few weeks to go before the start of the games. They are used for leveling the terrain and especially for stabilizing the atmosphere. This operation was delicate and even dangerous, only a few years ago. Today it is carried out with the aid of valves and giant compressors laid out along the track. The people who live in the neighborhood are warned when the stabilization is due to begin. They have to decamp within twelve hours. But there are always some hundred thousand laggards who get caught up in the currents and torn to shreds. This provides some extra nails.

  The inaugural day arrives. People can sit wherever they like, entrance is free. It may be said that in theory people prefer to be at a certain altitude, that of the silos, for instance, or one or two thousand meters higher up. The very sight of this multicolored crowd rising up in tiers several kilometers into the sky is magnificent enough. What can be said about the entrance of the nails into the arena? There is nothing with which it can be compared—unless it be a snowstorm. At the signal, they rush off towards the East.

  November 5

  In high summer, mauve placards are stuck up all over the country to announce that the leaf-picking is about to start. All the natives are mobilized for a week. The territory is transformed into a veritable parade ground. The State health services are entirely responsible for the transport, board, and lodging of the workers. Given the density of the population, and that all private industries and businesses have to suspend their activities during this time, it is easy to imagine the extent of the task incumbent on the abovementioned authorities.

  At first I didn’t quite understand the reasons for this transfer of the inhabitants from one province to another on the opposite side of the territory for this chore. It’s a question of productivity. I had the honor of being introduced to one of the members of the top organizing committee. He is a morose little man who has spent his life in perfecting the administrative mechanism of the “leaves week.”

  When they have arrived at their destination, the groups (about a million souls) are divided up into squads of a thousand in the province to be stripped. These squads, commonly known as “the dryasdusts,” set to work immediately. This has been going on for so long that men, women, and children can climb trees like monkeys. Every native species of tree is a legal target.

  Under this system, however, varieties tend to disappear in favor of one basic type of tree which is something between an apple tree and a horse chestnut. Hedges, copses, and the vegetation of the heathlands are similar targets. Every leaf must be picked without its peduncle; this requires great dexterity in the operators. The peduncles, which normally fall in the autumn, will be collected by private firms.

  As the gathering proceeds, whole cartfuls of leaves are unloaded into the canals crisscrossing the country. They discharge their load into the rivers. At the mouths of these rivers this fearsome accumulation is controlled by a system of dredgers and cranes along the bank, thus raising a vegetal bastion which, when the seadrift reaches it, slowly decomposes until the spring.

  The exploitation of this huge, putrescent wall is begun in March.

  November 7

  The whole of their private life is autopsied in their eyes, even when they are lost in thought. When you walk down the street you are surrounded by decorticated beings. They present a spectacle of monstrous psychological division. I met almost none for whom the present had any importance. They project everything into the future. A future constituted of present and past preoccupations. Encumbered by this impossibility, they trudge from distress to downfall.

  They are dangerously haunted by eternity.

  As for the children, I think they resemble our own. They dream of buns, balloons, and toy ducks. But they stagger under the weight of their anxieties, as heavy as planets.

  December 2

  The crowd didn’t flinch at the sound of the leaves being torn off. It seemed as if it were being absorbed into an indiscernible, illocalizable object. This wasn’t the first manifestation of the sort. The most celebrated one, so I was told, was that historically classified under the name of Good Friday. I made this comparison because a little girl by my side began to desiccate. First, her hair fell out like hay. Then her face, which had become fibrous, dropped down over her doll. With one hand the little girl hugged the fetish to her bosom, and with the other she tried to hold her head up. But her hands had become glued to her body, down to her pelvis. She took two more steps. Then her legs broke.

  I had never before seen a mob immobilized. The place is usually so full of movement that you can only keep your eyes on an individual, or a couple, or at the very most a group. But at that moment one could only too easily take in the whole assembly. I had no need of proof, the spectacle was hypnotic. It was only when thinking about it later that I realized that the ease with which it could be seen confirmed its reality.

  December 3

  You ask your way, as a matter of habit, of a passerby. He doesn’t answer. Right away, you are jerked out of your automatism. Because it’s true, the way is there in front of you, almost on top of you.

  The difficulty of fighting against your mania to understand is in proportion to your isolation. I am only now, thanks to a few friends, beginning to liberate myself to a certain extent.

  One of my first experiences was buying my bread without leaving my house. It took me an hour of tension to be able to relax; an hour to delimit the feeling of bread and to confine my desire to my teeth, my palate, and my esophagus; an hour to evacuate the decision; an hour to abolish the time which had elapsed (I checked, later); and there we were, the bread was on my table, I was eating it.

  All this was the result of an incalculable effort. They make no effort at all: they have never lost this astonishing faculty.

  December 4

  After the rains which saturate the furrows, the season of solidifying fogs arrives. These are dry vapors which emanate from fossils. They are extremely dense, and float around for several days at the level of the tall grasses, then later spread out at the average height of human lungs. The organic reaction of the natives is instantaneous: they grow, until emersion of the respiratory apparatus is achieved. This temporary change of stature gives rise to the traditional pleasantries. A dwarf will be nominated president of the “Lanky Club,” a bigot who has finally reached the height of the font will scratch her initials on it, a girl nicknamed “the giraffe” will be given some stilts by her friends, etc.

  Without this spontaneous hypertrophy, it would be impossible to survive. The fogs petrify everything on their level. With people, therefore, the region around the waist, which is then immersed, rapidly becomes like a slab of marble. This causes the momentary arrest of the lower functions, while the legs continue to move normally. I have been told that many natives with spiritualistic tendencies can’t wait for the foggy period to come and put the brakes on certain of their appetites. The others, the creatures of habit, are obliged to lie or sit on the ground, below the fogs, that is, for as long as is necessary for the blocked organs to thaw, if I may so put it, when they want to use them. They have to do this three or four days in advance.

  The small animals aren’t disturbed. Nor are the large ones; pulmo- narily, they are above the fatal level.

  The foggy season, which returns about every ten years, lasts for six months of the Gregorian calendar.

  December 18

  When they are trying to escape from shame, they are the most pitiable creatures I have ever seen. Since the transparency of their souls is not merely constitutional but also an active function, a little like a walkin
g windowpane which might go and shatter itself against an obstacle, no base action is the attribute of the person who commits it. It comes within the network of turpitudes that binds all these people together.

  This kind of permanent link of omniconsciousness should, it would seem, exclude the feeling of the irremediable, which is egotistic, and substitute for it that of complicity, of collusion. But this is far from being the case; the sense of shame persists. I have seen poor wretches who were at odds with it perch up in the trees like owls and remain there sleepless for nights on end. The structure of sin and remorse, of their interpenetration and mutual influence, rose up, tangible and useless, in front of them, and up there on their perches they gave the impression of being false meeting points, artificial intersections.

  For their notions of the absolute are deficient. They have but a vague knowledge of divine mysteries and allegorical redemptions, whose disproportion to their wealth of emotion is such that the slightest lapse from honesty plunges them into dejection.

  Oh, those trees, with their weight of suffering flesh …

  December 20

  Superficially, one might take the meadows for doors, for the sides of swing doors. They open out lengthwise onto little fences, but close with difficulty if one ignores their inscriptions. The inscriptions serve as hinges. They are periodically replaced, blue letters alternating with red ones. This produces a pretty effect at the changeover, before all the inscriptions are unified.

  Their agricultural work is backbreaking. They have to activate the doors at the same time as they tread down the excrescences that tend to form on the fences. I tried this, with the help of a peasant. But just as I was making an oblique movement over the unexposed part I let go my hold, the excrescence came and knocked on my foot, and the man only just had time to push me back out of the way. I had a narrow escape from what they call “rape” in those parts.