Aminadab 0803213131

by Unknown

  niture he had polished so well was still catching the light and prolonging the day; he said to himself, thinking of all the facets of the desk: "They are mistaken to think they will soon be done." But the two observers prob ably did not have the stamina to wait for the darkness to be complete, for it seemed to Thomas that he had hardly had the time to close his eyes and open them again, when he saw on the steps several lamps whose red light was very different from that of the twilight. They had a glass ball on top to serve as a lampshade, and on each one was inscribed short sentences that glowed from the fire. Three of these sentences struck him in particular; the first was written in gothic letters and carried these words: The lamps of love are lamps of flame; the second, more drawn than written, said: I lit up his ignorance; as for the third, it was so long that the words he read seemed to be only a small part of it, although the deciphered text needed no comple ment: The day sings praises to the day, and the night teaches knowledge to the night. These lamps shed a pleasant light, and Thomas, while remain ing convinced that they had been lit prematurely, did not ask that they be taken away, which in his opinion, he would have been right to do. But realizing that the mottoes he had just read probably had a much more im portant continuation or reply on the side facing the bedroom, he asked the young man to tell him what they were. The latter looked over at Lucie for a moment and said: "In the uppermost sections of the vaults, some of the panes of colored glass are no doubt broken and are letting the light of day pass through, for at such an hour we should be in complete darkness, whereas only the vestibule is filled completely with shadows. This is sur prising, but we can do nothing to counter this phenomenon. For as long as the night is not yet complete, you will have the right to remain in the room, and you can choose between prolonging your stay here another few moments or disregarding this unexpected delay and withdrawing to the bedroom right now. You are therefore free to decide. Nevertheless, since it is not always easy to judge the exact moment when night falls, there is every reason not to wait until the last minute, which would oblige me to act swiftly and would deprive you of the precautionary treatment that will be indispensable to you." Thomas noted with pleasure that he was not mistaken in his sense of the day's long duration. To emphasize this advantage, he said: "I wish to claim the fullest extent of my rights." "Of course," said the young man. "I cannot act against your will." 182

  Lucie walked over to the lamps and bent over them with her tall thin form; Thomas thought she was going to turn the glass balls around so that he could see the other sentences, but either because the lamps hades were too hot, or because she had never intended to do this, she overlooked the desire he had expressed, and stepping past the line of light, she entered the third room. The young man did not want to remain behind; he indi cated with a few gestures that he was not responsible for the decision, and in a single stride he had climbed the two sets of stairs. But his absence was brief. If they had gone to prepare the room, their work could not have been very meticulous. Thomas said as much to his former companion, and he added: "Why was it precisely you whom they sent to me?" The young man thought about this question for a moment, then he slipped his hands under Thomas's arms and, with an abrupt movement, stood him upright, holding him tightly against himself. In this uncomfort able position, the two of them climbed the stairs; Thomas was squeezed against the chest of his guide, shoulder to shoulder, and was walking back ward, able to see only the vestibule and the room he was leaving. "Of course," he said to himself, "it is still the middle of the day," and he pro tested the abuse of which he was a victim by resisting with all his might. To his great surprise, he was less weak than he thought, and he succeeded in paralyzing his opponent by tightly clinging to him; he was the same size, his shoulders were almost as large, and he was able to prevent him from moving around by pressing hard against the steps. In the course of this struggle, he looked closely at his old companion; he tried to deter mine what resemblance there might have been between them. If there was any resemblance, it was not very striking. Perhaps his eyes were the same color, and the shape of his face might well be identical, but there were little spots here and there on his skin that made any confusion impossible. He was discouraged nonetheless by the analogy between certain features, and holding offhis resistance, he let himselfbe carried away by the young man, who took him straight to the bed and laid him down on it. "Now," he said to Thomas, "rest peacefully. I will keep watch in your place and will inform you of any important events." He drew the curtains, leaving only a narrow gap through which the room could be observed. Then, sitting on the bed, he took a piece of bread out of his pocket and ate it ravenously. Thomas, happy at first to be lying on a real bed, soon grew anxious. The bed was narrow and short, and

  although its dimensions were perfectly adapted to his body, it gave him the impression of being meant for a much smaller man; there was also a large hole in the middle, formed no doubt by the thousands of bodies that had already been there, and Thomas had great difficulty keeping himself from slipping into it. The young man paid no attention to this uncomfortable position and made it even more cramped by sitting across the whole width of the mattress and gradually forcing his companion into the hollow spot that threatened to engulf him. As he ate, he said, no doubt out of polite ness: "I will always have good memories of the time we spent together. Your company was a pleasure, and I appreciated your way of living. I will reproach you with one thing only, which is that you did not follow my ad vice more closely. In my opinion, this dwelling did not suit you; you were made for life in the open air, and your organism could hardly tolerate a long reclusion in these rooms that are insufficiently ventilated, overheated, and contaminated by the frequent presence of the sick. Your bad physical condition is what hindered you in your searches, and in the end it has been responsible for your failure." Thomas merely replied: "But I have succeeded." "Most certainly," said the young man, "you have succeeded; I am not here to contradict you; but you know very well that one always succeeds and that that is not what's important. I simply wanted to point out to you that you chose the wrong path and that you would have been well advised to stay in a climate that is more appropriate to your temperament. The success you have gained, however laudable, will not leave any deep traces; it will not be recorded in the annals, believe me." "I know," said Thomas in a low voice. "And yet you were not lacking in fine qualities," the young man con tinued. "You were industrious, persevering, sensible. You made enormous efforts that should have put you in the foremost position and earned every one's esteem. I regret that all this strength was squandered." "What was I lacking, then?" asked Thomas. "You didn't recognize your own way," said the young man. "I was placed with you in order to enlighten you whenever you wished. I was like another you. I knew all the pathways of the house, and I knew which one you ought to have followed. All you had to do was ask me. But you preferred to listen to advice that could only lead to your loss." Thomas tried to remember whether he had not turned to Dom several

  times without ever receiving an intelligible response; but these things were too old, and he was too tired; so he said: "What was the way?" "You turned your back on it," the young man answered in his quiet and somewhat fatuous manner. "Your ambition was to reach the heights, to pass from one floor to another, to advance inch by inch, as though, simply by walking on, you would necessarily come out on the roof and stand in the midst of nature's beauty once again. A puerile ambition that quite simply has killed you. What deprivations did you not force on yourself! What weariness in this pestilential atmosphere! And these stories that were as deceptive as they were depressing, these contacts with men already eaten away by vice! Anyone would have succumbed in your place. Yet the true way was already laid out; it was a gentle slope requiring neither effort nor consultation. In addition, it took you toward a region where you would have led a life that would have been worth the trouble. There, truly, you were at home." "And where was it?" asked Thomas, his eyes half closed. "In the underground floors," said the young man in a
n unctuous voice. "I cannot speak to you about it as long as I would need to, and it is not with words that one can explain the inextricable beauty of the basements and the cellars. You must judge it for yourself. You are a man from the coun try, and you would see immediately what a feeling for life one has in these places carved out of the earth; there one breathes a warm intense odor that inspires disgust for the more enclosed rooms. The layout is very curi ous: despite the maze of hallways that intersect, bifurcate, and turn back on themselves in complex, dizzying circuits, it is not possible to wander astray, and you see perfectly clearly where you are at every moment. Enor mous signs, employing a system of arrows and dashes, show every thirty feet which route to follow in the section where you think you are lost; go to the right, and you descend ever farther beneath the foundations; go to the left, and you approach the basement and the entrance. That is the only rule that remains; as for the rest, you are perfectly free." "Free?" Thomas repeated. "Yes, free," said the young man. "You cannot imagine how shocking is the contrast with the life of the house. They constitute two modes of living so opposed that, while one can be compared to life, the other is hardly more desirable than death. Down there, the tenants cease to depend on the rules whose power, already weakened at the approach of the great door18S

  way, is completely suspended when one passes through it. This great door, contrary to its name, is only a barrier made of a few pieces of wood and a little latticework. But against it, the forces of custom are shattered, and the imaginations of the tenants depict it as an immense carriage entrance flanked on every side by towers and drawbridges and guarded by a man whom they call Aminadab. In reality, access to it is very easy, and a sudden downward slope is the only thing that indicates to those who pass through that they are now under the earth." "Did you say 'under the earth'?" asked Thomas, trying to raise himself up to hear better. "How curious." "That's exactly right," said the young man, looking around with an air of triumph. "Have you never thought of the advantages there would be in living underground? They are many. First of all, you are no longer subject to the alternations of night and day, which are the cause of endless diffi culties and the principle source of all our anguish and worries. Thanks to an installation that costs very little, you can, as you wish, remain continu ally in an agreeable light or -and this is preferable - in a gentle darkness that leaves you absolutely free in your actions. I hasten to add that there are many absurd prejudices concerning the darkness underground. It is completely false that the darkness there is total or in any way distressing. With a little adjustment, one succeeds very well in distinguishing a sort of clarity that radiates through the shadows and that is deliciously attrac tive to the eyes. Some claim that this clarity is the inner truth of objects and that it is dangerous to contemplate it too long. Do not believe it, for it goes without saying that once one has decided to set oneself up in these regions, it is not in order to find the atrocious furniture or the jumble of objects and implements that make up one of the torments of life in the house. On the contrary, it is yet another advantage not to have within reach these uncanny objects that are supposedly so useful but concerning which it is at bottom impossible to know what they are, what they're used for, what they're supposed to mean. The earth -this is a well-known fact is a medium for nourishment, in which each body finds its subsistence, in which breath too is a sort of food, and which offers extraordinary pos sibilities of growth and duration. As soon as you enter into these under ground spaces, you are stunned by the impression it makes, which is like the end of a bad dream. Until then, you have always hoped to escape from the worries and the responsibilities of existence, but you lacked courage, 186

  and you could not renounce the desire to continue. Down there, hardly have you descended into those long tunnels that pass through hundreds of feet of earth, when you feel as if you have woken up. First, you are free. The room you thought you would never leave has disappeared; you are at home wherever you happen to be, and you no longer live in fear of violat ing instructions that are unknown to you. Next, you soon understand that the earth aspires to a profound union with you, that, far from reducing your efforts to nothing through the action of a law that is unsuitable to you, it works slowly, with a delicate art, to shape itself to your form, and at the same time it tries to draw your breath to itself and adjust it to its rhythm. What you feel is so gentle and pleasant that you think it is a dream; but you are not dreaming; nothing is more real. On the contrary, you begin to rise up and to seek out new underground spaces that you have never seen and where you come to a stop, holding yourself upright, with your arms spread, against the wall of earth. Then you look across the layers that form enormous heaps of dust, and you are surprised to notice that your vision has been altered, for your gaze - and this phenomenon appears odd and even humiliating when one speaks of it at these heights, but down there it seems much easier to explain -your gaze makes you think of fine crys tal plants that have rapidly grown from the moldy earth on which your eyes have opened. This is no miracle, despite what simple-minded people may believe. But it is a manifestation to which some importance can be attached. These arborescent shapes, although - need it be said? - they in no way resemble real bushes or trees, are a sign of the elevated form of union that exists between you and the milieu in which your life is fash ioned. Just as the night makes one's eyes sparkle in order to draw truly nocturnal images from them, so does the earth bring them to fruition in the only forms it is allowed to propagate and in which it places all its love. Some like to use a comparison to explain this phenomenon: they say that this earth with which you are surrounded is pure night and that plants and umbels are born from your eyes so that nature might take greater pleasure in the act that passes through every part of it, just as it sometimes happens that a man who has studied the law sees judgments and sentences leaping from the eyes of the woman most dear to him. But that doesn't matter. The fact is that you feel a great satisfaction. It seems to you that such a change announces the return of a totally bygone era, which you no longer even remember, so far has it receded into some fabulous distance. Your hope

  is that these light vegetable forms will live and prosper, these forms that are still so fragile that most often they wither and fall apart. But you are patient; from your breath you extract your food and your sleep - a small part of the reserves allotted to you - and this is a sacrifice you make with all your heart, in order to nourish this seed that holds on by a mere thread but within which you feel the strength of stubborn memories. Naturally, for someone from here who lives in a feverish haste, the wait would seem exaggeratedly long; but that is not the case with you; from time to time you make exciting discoveries, and these are enough to occupy your time. For example, you notice that your fingernail is split down the middle and that through this small breach something that had disappeared from your memory has reawakened and is returning to life. Of course, it is still too small for you to be sure that you are not mistaken, but the hope it gives you is no less great, and you endlessly examine the minute specks of dust that scatter when the least little breath falls on them. During this time, your eyes too have undergone a transformation, and far from being hindered by the obstructed view and the triple branches proliferating through the earth, they become larger and deeper, and their roots extend down the back of the neck to the top of the shoulders. You begin to be somewhat fright ened by this unexpected development, then you feel that your strength has magnified tenfold and that soon the hole in which you think you are con tained will not be able to hold you. For your fingernails are now open; at the ends of your fingers, you see tiny flowers, almost imperceptible but already well formed, which look like the buds of a heliotrope. Where have they come from? How could the seed have persevered enough to sprout under the nail? It is only a small mystery, but you are passionately ab sorbed in it, and you come to believe that during your great journey, you carried a grain of pollen under your fingernail; this is probably only a fan ciful idea that you yourself do not accept, for you kn
ow very well that your entire past life has perished; nevertheless, you cannot help staring at these little leaves gently rising and swaying. Their growth is much more rapid than you expected; it even becomes quite bothersome, and since the roots are very fragile and have not gone any farther than the tips of the fingers how could they have? -you are obliged to keep constant watch over these delicate shoots. At times, everything appears to be dead; it seems that you have judged your own strength too hastily, and the earth itself hardens as if ancient suspicions were being revived. But these are only moments of dis188