by Rene Daumal
“But,” I queried, “what do these unfortunate people drink?”
“Alas, lime tea or unfermented grape juice. They obstinately refuse to touch the tiniest drop of alcohol. The sight of a glass of beer turns their stomachs. Didn’t I tell you they’re quite incurable? But come and see for yourself.”
3
Lifting a curtain, he revealed a door secured by a number of complicated locks, then from his pocket he took a bunch of keys and a flask which he held out to me.
“Best line your stomach while I’m opening up,” he said, “we might have to go an hour or two without touching a drop,” and he began to rattle around with the locks.
The door opened silently and suddenly we were in Paradise. A light! Chandeliers! Gilt moldings! Wallpapers which could have been mistaken for genuine tapestries. Couches deep as coal trucks covered in cascades of artificial silk. Bright fountains gushing verbena, camomile, mint, orangeade and lemonade; and goblets made of a silver-plated metal much lighter than solid silver and so much more convenient! And all simply for the asking, within sipping distance. Libraries with electric catalogues and push-button retrieval of books. Plywood desks fitted with gramophone, wireless, and separate sound film projection. Patchouli-scented breezes. Glycerine dews which never evaporate on lawns of waxed paper which never fade.
Angels inside filmy skeins inflated with hydrogen floated through the cataracts of limelight, their soft hands waving aeolian harps from which there emerged like snow the rustle of Viennese waltzes and jolly military songs—in a word something for everybody.
4
My guide, pausing a moment to savor my astonishment, touched me on the shoulder and said:
“And they set all this up themselves, I should perhaps tell you. They are very ingenious and enterprising and the Authorities do everything in their power to place every kind of facility at their disposal. I shall now show you round the various departments and you will be able, if you wish, to talk with the patients. But say nothing about drinking or the lower depths we have come from or about their illness for they might turn nasty. We shall first see the Stadium.”
This was the name given to a vast, sanded rectangle overlooked by a monumental, articulated, metal statue of the Human Machine, adorned with flowers made of tinsel and cellophane left there in bunches by pious hands. The afore-mentioned pious hands were at the moment placed flat on the ground where they were being used as feet for human bodies which were racing round upside down beneath the gaze of a large crowd of people seated in tiers. The first to reach the end of a particular track was given a fresh lemon drink and a bowl of salad, on which he feasted, clearly thinking he was really something. Others were playing at diving head first from the top of a ladder: whoever fell from the greatest height and managed to get up within ten seconds was declared the winner and wildly applauded. Still more were applying themselves to countless different games that all involved outdoing the others at pulling, pushing, running, jumping, thumping, or being thumped. A few resorted to instruments of torture and machines driven by motors that went bang! from time to time. Fatal casualties were stuffed and there was a collection of them in Museums which the orderly advised me not to visit.
“It would make you too thirsty,” he said. “Anyway, let’s not dally here. Not far away there’s a colony of farmers who grow potatoes to feed themselves so that they will have the strength needed for growing potatoes. Others have started to build houses, after which they’ve had to invent mechanical men to live in them, textile mills to make clothes for the robots, more robots to work the textile mills, more houses for the robots to live in, so that everybody lives at such a feverish pitch of activity, so enthused by work are they, that you’d have the greatest difficulty in having a few words with the least busy of them.”
“And they do all this without drinking anything?” I ventured.
“Nothing more than citric fruit juices and most of all barrel upon barrel of elbow grease at working temperature, as a result of which they are all as drunk as ducks, only they don’t know it. But we’d better press on before we get completely dry.”
5
Scrambling up a hillock covered with celluloid flowers, I expressed my surprise how a whole universe could be contained in a garret. The orderly explained:
“It’s the same here as anywhere else, but here it’s made quite clear: space is generated by need. Let’s say you’d like to take a walk. You simply project in front of you the necessary space which you walk across as and when. The same with time. Just as a spider secretes the thread down which she climbs, so you secrete the time you need to do whatever you have to, and you proceed along this thread which is visible only behind you but usable only ahead of you. The key lies in working it out properly. If the thread is too long, it goes into loops and if it’s too short, it snaps. If I were not afraid of catching thirst talking, I’d tell you why it is so dangerous for the spider to have a thread that goes into loops behind her.”
“Would it be that when she wants to go back up, swallowing her thread as she goes, the tangles would get stuck in her gullet …?”
“And no chance even of a drink to make them go down. You’ve said it.”
6
From the top of the hillock that we had finished climbing in silence, a jumble of palaces in every style, stations, lighthouses, temples, factories, and miscellaneous monuments spread out at our feet.
“From here,” said my indefatigable guide, “you can see the counter-celestial Jerusalem, home and capital of the Top Escapees. If your eyes have got used to the built-up chaos down there, you will notice that the city is divided into three concentric areas. First, you can see on the outside a zone cluttered with aerodromes, seaports (look at all those cranes and things swinging about down there), railway stations, hotels, and shoeshines; that’s where the top-class Top Escapees live, the Fidgeters. In the intermediate zone, there where you observe the churchs, skyscrapers, statues and obelisks rising up, live the Fabricators of useless articles. The central areas, where you see those splendid glass constructions and harmless telescope barrels and that large weathercock there over on the left, are the home of the Clarificators. And can you make out the cathedral, right in the center?”
“Yes. Who lives there?”
“The gods, you might say, the cream of the Top Escapees. We’ll drop in on them and, believe me, you won’t have a dull moment.”
“And will we be able to get a …”
He silenced me with one terrible look.
“Think about it all the time,” he said, “but never talk about it. Come, let’s pay a call on the Fidgeters.”
(You shall learn hereafter how he cruelly misled me about the gods.)
7
A few minutes walk and we were standing in the entrance to the city’s largest airport. The five-star Runway Hotel had just fired off a canon shot by way of announcing that the Prince of Fidgetry was a guest that day. He was scheduled to stay five minutes, as we were told in confidence by a hunter. It was an unexpected slice of luck, the orderly explained as he pushed me into the lift, and he still had not told me why by the time he’s blown out a lock with dynamite and lands us up in the Prince’s room. He is lying in his bath-trunk (one of his own inventions), a telephone receiver at each ear, four dictaphones directed at his mouth, and three myrmidons standing guard, revolvers in hand.
“Let me do the talking,” my companion said. “You wouldn’t know where to start.”
He goes up to the Prince and the following dialogue takes place:
“Where from?”
“Cape.”
“Where?”
“Chaco.”
“Which way?”
“Klondyke. Hurry.”
“What?”
“Rifles, machine guns, opium, pornographic books, religious tracts.”
“How much?”
“Millions of piasters. A hundred thousand victims. Ministerial crisis. Five divorces.”
“Are you happy?”
<
br /> “Haven’t got time.”
A loud-speaker bawled: “His Highness’s aerobus stands without.” The three myrmidons each fired three times in the air and a fourth round of shots came uncomfortably close as we decamped.
“Rather dull chap, His Highness,” I said.
“That’s because you don’t know how to use your eyes. Come along, I shall show you rather more observable varieties of Fidgeters. And more dangerous too.”
8
“We shan’t bother with the intermediate types,” he went on as he led me into a large rococo mansion. “We’ll go straight to the other extreme. Just step into this gambling room here and look around you. There’s no risk, nobody will notice us, or if they do, they’ll think we work here.”
Around a roulette table, a hundred or so men of every race and color, each with his national flag stuck in his skull, were playing for very high stakes. The croupier was a sort of Janus with a head like one of those projected double-hemisphered world maps, each hemisphere a face but arranged rather differently from those that hang ordinarily in classrooms. On one were grouped all the mother countries and on the other were all the colonies.
They were playing loser-take-all. I got the idea that the wheel was fixed, but a specialist explained later that “this was not so; the only rule was that there was no maximum stake; and the money wagered, since it was negative money, was inexhaustible so that the steepest martingales were acceptable.” I give you this explanation for what it’s worth. Notwithstanding, the players thrust onto the baize whole fistfuls of lead soldiers, model tanks, miniature field guns, expurgated Bibles, linotype machines, mock-ups of modern schools, gramophones, cultures of all the bacilli with which they were infected, papier-mâché missionaries, packets of cocaine, and even samples of doctored alcoholic liquor, so adulterated that not even my guide or I would have wished to taste it; mark you, when I say alcoholic liquor, or tanks, or missionaries, it’s only a manner of speaking, just as people talk of farthings, cart wheels, bobs, sovereigns, ponies, bundles, and grands to indicate different quantities of the same currency, for these liquors, tanks and missionaries and the rest signified nothing more than particular amounts of the money used by these big gamblers. We sometimes call our money brass even though it’s made of paper; in the same way, their money went under the generic name of civilization.
Every time a punter lost his stake, the twin-browed dealer raked in the benefits of civilization, his mother-country face breaking into a hideous smile beneath which you could see all the cells in his epidermis cringe with pain, while his colonial face turned purple and glistened with a mildew of blood, fires, and shame.
Whenever a player lost heavily, that is when he had won, the croupier rewarded him with an appropriately shiny medal. Already a few were almost vanishing from sight beneath coats spangled with Stars and Grand Crosses.
9
I could stand this nauseating spectacle no longer and refused to visit any of the other gaming rooms. The orderly expressed his approval.
“It’s always six of one and half a dozen of the other,” was his comment. “There are some who play chess, others who play bowls or poker dice or cup and ball, but really it’s their Fidget that makes them do it. They are convinced that they have succeeded in breaking out of our institute. They are so convinced of this that they manage to be everywhere except inside their own skins. Occasionally, there is the odd one who, because his path lies in that direction, happens to get inside himself where he flounders and acknowledges his inner being; when that occurs he blows his brains out more often than not. You cannot see their Fidget. Their carcasses stay pressed round some green-topped table, but they themselves travel to the ends of the earth or the ends of their country or factory or their house, depending on the scale of their operations, but wherever they are active they bring a swarm of disasters. They call it ‘governing.’ They are all great organizers. They have money and status. They are incurable. But here’s our bus, let’s hop aboard.”
It was a very ordinary bus, and suddenly deprived of stimulating impressions from outside myself, I was once more conscious of the painful sensation caused by the dryness of my throat and mouth. My companion understood the look on my face and said:
“Best not talk about it. But if you must, you can skip the obscene words. We’ll get by without them.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ve got this awful unquenchable. I’d give anything for a stiff or a glass of chilled. Don’t suppose there’s any chance of blanking even a driblet?”
“We shall have to visit the Fabricators and Clarificators before getting to see the gods. When you’re there, if you behave properly, you might be allowed to breathe the vapors rising from the lower depths through the trap door. More I cannot promise. But rest assured, the return trip will be very short: just the time it takes to think of it. But we’re there.”
10
The Fabricators of useless articles, whom we shall simply call the Fabricators for brevity and to avoid wounding their dangerous susceptibilities, never call things by their name. Some live in houses made entirely of glass which they call ivory towers; some in concrete boxes which they call glass houses; large numbers in photographic dark rooms which they call Nature; and many more in dog-headed baboon cages, vampire caves, penguin parks, performing-flea circuses, and puppet theaters which they call the world or society: and they all dote on and pamper one of their internal bodily organs, usually one with something wrong with it, such as intestine, liver, lung, thyroid, or brain, stroking it fondly, embellishing it with flowers and jewels, stuffiing it with the choicest morsels, calling it “my soul,” “my life,” “my truth,” and they are always ready to launder in blood the most trifling insult to the object of their inner devotions. They call this “living in the world of ideas.” Fortunately, with the aid of a small pocket dictionary which my guide had brought with him, it was not long before I was perfectly capable of understanding the dialects they spoke.
11
The Fabricators are unbelievably ingenious. Everything is grist to their skills. I even caught sight of one or two who could make the most useful things quite unusable and this, in their language, they call the greatest achievement of art. One of the cleverest of them had just completed the construction of a perfectly uninhabitable house and, seeing my astonishment, condescended to explain:
“When a tree grows, it’s not to provide homes for birds. The bird is a parasite on the tree just as human beings are parasites on houses. The building which I have created is itself its own meaning. See how simple, how bold the lines! a cement pole sixty meters high supporting those double-walled rubber globes! (And indeed the effect was of a bunch of gigantic red currants painted in many colors.) No walls or roof or windows; it’s a long time since we jettisoned such superstitions. Each globe is decorated inside in accordance with my specifications, and a central lift enables the visitor to inspect them without fatigue. The temperature is kept exactly at the ideal level for the ideal human organism as defined by our experts. It is the only temperature at which nobody feels comfortable: some shiver and others sweat. That’s how science in this day and age serves art to make houses uninhabitable. This one should last at least six months.”
12
We bade a polite farewell to the great architect (at least this was the title he used) and went on our way. Fabricators of every description were at work around us, some in yards outside, others inside in glassworks and doubtless many many more toiling away secretly in the upper stories of the houses. The strong were cutting stone figures of men, women, animals, monsters, or nothing whatsoever. The weak worked in plaster and modeled in clay. The finished products were to be sent off to dwell in requisitioned ex-palaces, and on Thursdays and Sundays large crowds would come to worship them without having any idea why. As I pointed this out to the orderly, he whispered in my ear:
“Be silent, you wretch! If ever you say that word ‘why’ aloud, you’ll not get out of here alive. Haven’t I told you and to
ld you that they are incurable? Let me tell you their secret. You recall that each of these Fabricators has a sickly internal organ which is his principal concern. He knows that if he allows nature to take its course, this organ will die with him. If he’d remained below with us, this is precisely what would have happened. Instead, he has hit upon a quite sublime ploy: he makes useless objects; since they are useless, no one uses them; since nobody uses them, they never wear out; ergo, they will last a long time. There’s a logic of sorts there. Now in each of these objects—and here’s the secret of which the public has no idea—he hides a small fragment of the organ. When it’s all used up, the man dies. But this darling, sickly organ, preserved inside many varied shapes and guises, lives on, sometimes for centuries. It beats Alexis Carrel and his everlasting frog’s heart. And as to being sublime, it’s better than the pelican, it’s as good as anything in Roman history. Unfortunately, once someone has sworn to devote his whole life to his poor little misshapen pancreas, whatever birds’ names he uses to call it by, there is no hope that the Authorities can ever cure him—or his pancreas.”