Trio

by Robert Pinget

  Such is the superficial aspect of the meadows. But beneath the surface, I know that they are tombs.

  December 21

  One may attach oneself to any ribbon. They sinuate through all the towns at the approach of a disease, either to conjure it or to provoke it. A gyratory movement is established, which sweeps the interested parties along in its train. The last to get moving are ejected laterally and form a buffer at the corner of the buildings. To tell the truth, no sooner has he joined the ribbon than each demonstrator degenerates in the web, where he becomes filified. In the workers’ districts this superribboning is liable to cause disasters. Some time ago, the wave had become so compact at “Navigation” that it even dragged the buildings into its wake and rolled on as far as the Forest of Grance. No trace of either stones or inhabitants was found there. The web had devoured the lot.

  Normally, the ribbons stop after six days. The disease either recedes or breaks out with violence, according to the rogations. It sometimes happens that the desired epidemic is considered to be insufficiently virulent. Then they hurriedly construct artificial ribbons. But their power is far less great, and the supplementary virus obtained never satisfies the need. This is what inspired the dictum: “evil be the virus of the evil ribbon.”

  March 15

  One would like to be a Colorado beetle or a cockchafer so as to be able to gorge oneself on the sap of their plants. It is instantaneously intoxicating, but deteriorates on contact with our oral mucus. It has to be ingested through tubes. The pleasure is very mediocre. A study is in progress of the chemical composition of the mandibles of the cockchafer, in order to market a liquid gum based on its formula. Then one would merely need to paint one’s throat beforehand in order to ingurgitate this beneficient sap.

  March 16

  Along the cutting edge of the lintels, along the sharp edge of the windowpanes, along the blade of a penknife, their sympathies advance backwards. How timid they are! The imperceptible drawl with which they weight a word makes their declarations of love falter. They cannot continue, they barricade themselves in. If you question them about their emotional troubles you will never forget their response. I felt the greatest respect for them, but I believe that this is precisely what makes them suffer. They would prefer to be ridiculed.

  March 17

  The parks are overrun by leguminous plants of the Papilionaceae family. They stifle every form of vegetation and proliferate in vast Carinas. You get absorbed in the valvulations of the lianas, and then you find yourself surmounted by stamens. Mortises hollowed out in the trunks serve as a base for the props underpinning the upper floors where, in the botanical species, capillarimeters are located. A permanent check on the suction obviates any impoverishment of the soil. The unemployed can sign on at any branch of the Chlorophyl Center as assistants. They are invaluable to the children, who pester them with questions and use them as guides to the labyrinths. One of these government employees, whom I know well, piloted me around on a corolla. No one else was there. The marvelous tissue was melting in the sun and was as dangerous as a glacier. We made two crossings, equipped with the appropriate chisels, carving out our path, and bursting the blisters. What a joy to the eye! Every fold, in the shape of a cornet, opened out below onto the immense panorama of the garden! The capillarimeters seemed no bigger than acne pimples, the greenhouses looked like drops of water. The incurvation of the carinas, the assistant explained, promotes fructification. I had thought this was natural, and expressed my astonishment. He interrupted me with these words: “Nature dixit—genius fix it.” Their habit of talking in proverbs is one of their defects.

  The people who sleep in the parks are licensed by the government. In the twilight hours, when the strollers go home, they install themselves in the copses with their bird-organs on which they play the sempiternal Air of the Allobroges. Their crutches, which are their stock-in-trade when they go to mulct inns, crash down through the sewers and pervade the hotels.

  March 18

  Their artists work in isolation. They have no public. As they are recruited from common criminals, they are banned. Any kind of contact with them is a felony. Their penitentiaries are of a greater variety than ours and convicts may be placed in any artist’s studio.

  Far from being blunted, the sensitivities of this vermin increase in proportion to their guilt. When an interested observer, defying the risk of prosecution, goes to see them and admires one of their works, this feeling that the visitor is a kindred spirit is so unexpected that the criminals lose their heads. They whirl around, throw themselves on the work and trample it, lacerate it, pulverize it. Then they disappear into the walls, where for the rest of their lives they are racked by qualms of conscience at having deceived people.

  March 19

  If you lose a contour, or a segment, or one whole side of your body, the hachured surface is reduced by the same amount and your armpits are no longer included in it. You wander around with holes in you, carrying your charcoal-drawn silhouette in a satchel. Your cheek becomes emancipated. Your prominent jaw commutes between your neck and your glottis; the wings of your nose erupt in pharyngeal edemas; nauseating liquids ooze out down your apophyses. Your truncated sphincters flow back towards your nerve centers, your epigastrium becomes subdivided. The satchel finally drops, too, your hand becomes invaginated, and the sketch so carefully made the day before is stained with liquid manure. This is the result of a plasma deficiency. It frequently happens during country rambles. Several comrades have gone for a day’s outing and come back unrecognizable.

  March 20

  This is the plectrum they use in orchestras. It is retractile in the hands of nonprofessionals, hence difficult to operate. But what harmonics it elicits! The instrumental solos, which are more in vogue, are confined to the higher registers. My eardrum can still only pick up the occasional snatch of a melody. Lack of flexibility. But regular listeners appreciate almost no other music. You can see it in their faces. They denote such spirituality, while the piece is being played, that their expression enables me to imagine the eloquence of the musical phrase. The slightest acoustical disturbance —a glove being pulled off, a lace coming undone must certainly destroy the whole impression, for the soloist is requested to repeat the piece at the end of the concert. The encores are to a certain extent the failures. In the most select concert halls, listeners are obliged to wear special clothes made of soundproofed material.

  The public flocks to the concerts where a singer of either sex is due to appear. Indeed, in their amazing concern for their art, they have cultivated a breathing technique which abolishes respiration. In this way the essential monotony of the melodic line is safeguarded. But at the end of the recital the virtuosi are irrevocably exhausted. They die in front of the ecstatic crowd. A ceremony bears them away from the stage to the cemetery. As the corpse goes by, every listener, one after the other, comes and breathes in from the martyred mouth what little oxygen has been introduced into it by the hiccups of the death agony.

  March 29

  There are numerous blanketers. This uninteresting trade is a popular profession here. During the very long apprenticeship the various aptitudes are demarcated. No one is ever sure of the result, for the appearance of a twelfth sense—or, according to some, a thirteenth—takes place only after superintensive training. Whal then occurs, to the blanketer who has a genuine vocation, is a “blanket” phenomenon nicknamed “voltage” by clinicians. Strictly speaking, this is undefinable. It is a halo. The subject’s nervous tension is transferred to it en bloc.

  The ordeal which constitutes the investiture of the future artisan consists in confronting him with the prototype of a carding-brush of no practical value—which unites all the essential parts, enlarged twentyfold, of all the material needed in this work. The candidate is bound hand and foot, and, using nothing but his voltage, he must be capable of making three blankets of varying thickness and weave. These test-samples are the property of the syndicate.

  June 1
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  Marks, topographical signs, and standard measures of all sorts — whether monetary, spatial, or whatever—are symbols that are as antiquated as the embolismic concordance. It’s ages since this whole arsenal of conventions was practically abandoned.

  Indeed, disciplines such as for example geography or astrology now stimulate only those whose intelligence has become sclerosed, following the example of mathematics.

  Nevertheless, there is still a danger threatening their teaching, and that is the superstitious survival of scientifico-historical notions which no longer correspond in any way to the evolution of their minds. Hence, in university lectures, frequent confusions and anachronisms. A distinguished professor recently risked the statement that the druids used to immolate the azimuths and centipedes of Reason. This is regrettable. But I am optimistic, in spite of these aberrations. For they do no harm to anyone except the academic young, who in any case are more and more losing their memory.

  June 13

  In the burying-ladies’ huts, there is room for only one person. When you are going home at night, you are only too glad to stop at one of them. Their occupant is rarely there. Her task requires her presence elsewhere, among the bushes, or the ravines, which she examines at dusk. A strange task! So you go into the shed, where digging tools, hoes, and grappling-irons are piled up pell-mell. The cutting-up hemp has been rammed into a crate, it’s merely the work of a moment to throw it onto the fire and thus thaw yourself out a little. This custom of cutting up corpses with hemp goes back a long way. By dint of unremitting friction on the joints, the burying-ladies finally manage to detach the flesh, which they stuff with bits of lint before tying them to the grappling-irons. Next, they pitch them down, simultaneously, into the bottom of the twelve or so surrounding wells. It is only the carcass and the viscera that are interred, and not by the burying-lady herself, but by her nearest neighbor. They travel leagues through the woods in order to meet each other, and sink waist-deep into the bogs.

  The grubs that they fatten up in these marshes are as big as sausages when they come to eat them.

  But their existence can only be called wretched. It consists in sleeping standing up in their shacks, suffering from cranial rheumatism—at the frontoparietal suture, which is very slack—from which they have no respite, fighting against the blisters that periodically erupt on their epidermis—and these may sometimes attain the dimensions of the shack and the strength of its framework—and living in fear and trembling night and day in case they’ve left a grappling-iron down a well …

  They mate amongst themselves, without the slightest desire, and give birth to edible daughters who are a kind of saprophyte.

  July 28

  “You can take it or leave it”: an injunction frequently used by hairdressers. Their clients make no bones about it. The poor women know their duty; they hang their heads. To prevent the spread of dandruff, they are scalped. Then their cranial periosteum is curled. The slum kids adore this calcined odor. During the operation they hang outside the windows in bunches. They get dispersed with insecticide. But since the hairdressers’ salons are located under the ballast in the stations, and the upper parts of their heating pipes serve as buffers for the freight cars, the kids don’t go far. They wait for the next client, perching on the gauges. And every time, it’s the same to-ing and fro- ing. The railroad employees have signed petitions. Waste of effort! The wives of the minister responsible are all clients.

  July 29

  When you make an inventory of your matches, one thing strikes you: how few there are. What! this derisory portion allotted to each national is the sole source of light in the country? Judging by the light they diffuse—and there is never any shortage of it either in the built-up areas or in the countryside—there must be some sort of magic at work.

  They often maintain that God has too much pleasure. And from there to doing without daylight by having recourse to this makeshift expedient, there is but a step. Potential rebellion? Ill-disguised rancor? I’m merely making an observation. The natural light is suspended. Polyhedral receptacles, mounted on steel shafts, keep it prisoner. These pseudo-street lamps, whose architecture is of the greatest austerity, are the characteristic feature of the landscape. No more is needed to divert the thoughts of a layman from their habitual course and fill him with doubt. The match solution, which is only a last resort, even for the nationals—which they don’t deny nevertheless provides some opportunities for certainty. How many times have I not burned my last twig to convince myself of this! The moment it has burned out, others spring up between my fingers—irrefutable proof of the mystery.

  Let anyone try to tell me, after that, that they don’t believe in God! The pseudo-street lamps are the childish symbol of the temptation.

  July 30

  The redhibitory songs which the malcontents hum in the mornings tend to help them recover their desire, or return to a less precarious mental state. This matutinal drone expresses great candor. But we should be on the alert for rapid metamorphoses: these are due to the ferryboat “noyou.” Contrary to appearances—the suavity of the refrain—the tremolo is not in order. Watchword: not to employ any reflexive verbs in the threnodies you hum. “Noyou” is the pleonastic reflexive pronoun which means: “we to ourselves”—“nous nous à nous-même,” in their language. It has been stigmatized by popular imagery, which represents it in the form of a small modern replica of Charon’s ferryboat.

  July 31

  Wobbly knees are immobilized on bail. The bail money is paid when children are born. It is collected by the register offices. Earth taken from molehills, with the addition of pulverized Molasse and water has proved to be an excellent “barbotine,” or potter’s clay. Provided that a supply depot can be found not far from the place where the sick person collapses—for he cannot be moved—they immediately immobilize his knees. They coat them with barbotine and leave it to dry. The patient stays on the ground, wherever he happens to be, until a decision has been taken by the coater on duty at the supply depot. The latter declares the fall to the register office himself. The bail money is then reimbursed to the parents, or, if they are dead, to the victim. It is irreclaimable in cases where they haven’t managed to master the wobbling. It’s a barbotine-insurance.

  September 1

  Their dwarfs are sold at auction a few days after their first bout of jaundice. They are much sought-after by religious communities who destine them for the vocation of candelabra. When they come of age, a paraliturgical service is celebrated for their benefit: this is reputed to endow them with petrifying grace, and it invests them in their sacred charge. A bogus priest places them on the altars while a mixed choir intones the “Nanum neutrum Deo.” A poignant ceremony, on condition that grace descends. Unfortunately, I have seen some burlesque ones in which the dwarfs, not in the least petrified, bawled their heads off and had to be tied to the tabernacle. You could no longer hear the canticle, the deacons and sub-deacons broke out in a sweat, and the faithful lost their faith.

  September 5

  The relative importance of their acts bothers them. And when you think of the intentions some of us impute to what they do! They do not have this amour-propre: they counter you with an uncontrolled gesture, phrase, or absence. That they are not creators—in the sense in which this function demands a permanent watch on oneself—that I will grant, but what is serious is that their attitude leads us to doubt the validity of the work of art. “Even so,” I used to say to myself when I was in their company, “if that is the truth, just one more second’s obstinacy in my researches and I shall become a clown, a liar.” I had to reflect at length before finally justifying my dissimilarity. As I am incapable of being a gentleman who walks, who smokes, who sees his friends, my natural reaction is to invent, in clay or on canvas or on paper, a walk, a taste for smoke, or a visit which makes my arteries throb.

  And that is why I am now convinced that in a work of art we do not try to conjure up beauty or truth. We only have recourse to them—as
to a subterfuge—in order to be able to go on breathing.

  September 6

  A person of medium height, by my side, stepped onto the automatic weighing machine. We’re always interested in other people’s weight. With apparent nonchalance, I watched the needle. It went all the way around the dial, once, twice, three times … What does that mean? One ton, two tons, three tons! I was at a loss. The person wasn’t upset. And then I heard, coming from her ribcage: “Hallo, hold the line. I’m connecting you with Warsaw. Who’s speaking? Shares, 320-4, debentures … , etc.”

  This woman was a telephone exchange.

  September 8

  Blizzards, while they do not occur every day, are nevertheless so frequent that they have had an influence on their habits and customs. And in particular on their diet—with the reservation that they only cook hailstones for very precise purposes.

  If a little girl, or a boy, shows signs of irascibility or violence, they cultivate this tendency and elevate it to the dignity of a national virtue—by giving them a surfeit of explosives. Of these, hail is one which has the advantage of operating by delayed action.

  The moment the blizzard has abated, cooks, nursemaids, and mothers are to be seen everywhere, rushing out of doors and filling tubs with hailstones.

  They make them into puddings (by adding baking powder and other ingredients) which the child devours. There must be an idiosyncratic phenomenon here, a need inherent in these choleric temperaments, for I never heard tell of any child who made the slightest fuss about taking this tonic. Where are the dramas associated with cod liver oil!

  They persevere with this treatment for three or four years. The child grows “in age and in anger.” He becomes insufferable, but he must be treated with the greatest circumspection. At puberty, he becomes subject to trances: to demolish a street door, a party wall, a drainage system— this is mere child’s play to him.