On either side stretch rows of what seem to be brick houses, all similarly constructed, without balconies or cornices or ornament of any kind. Here there is only what is strictly necessary: regular walls pierced with rectangular openings; it does not suggest poverty, only work and economy. For the most part, moreover, these are office buildings.
Severe façades, rows of small, dark red bricks, solid, monotonous, patient: a penny profit made by the “Resinous Wood Corporation,” a penny earned by “Louis Schwob, Wood Exporter,” by “Mark and Lengler” or by the “Borex Corporation.” Wood export, resinous wood, industrial woods, wood for export, export of resinous wood, the neighborhood is completely devoted to this commerce; thousands of acres of pine trees, piled brick by brick, to shelter the big ledgers. All the houses are built the same way: five steps lead to a varnished door, recessed and with black plaques on each side showing the firm’s name in gold letters; two windows to the left, one to the right, and four stories of similar windows above. Perhaps there are apartments among all these offices? They cannot be discerned, in any case, by any outer sign. The employees, still not wide awake, who will be filling the street in an hour will have a good deal of difficulty, despite being used to it, recognizing their doors; or else maybe they enter the first one they come to, to export at random the wood of Louis Schwob or of Mark and Lengler? The main thing is that they do their work carefully, so that the little bricks go on piling up like figures in the big ledgers, preparing still another story of pennies for the building; a few hundred tons more of totals and exact business letters: “Gentlemen, in answer to yours of the…” ready cash, one pine tree for five bricks.
The row is broken only at the perpendicular, identical crossroads, leaving just room enough to slip between the piles of ledgers and adding machines.
***
But here is the deeper trench which the water carves through these brick days; along the quay rises the gables’ line of defense, where the openings instinctively grow more myopic and the ramparts thicker. Down the middle of this cross street flows a canal, apparently motionless, a straight corridor men have left to the original basin, for barges loaded with wood that slowly move down toward the harbor; last refuge, too, in the suffocation of this drained land, for the night, the bottomless water of sleep, the glaucous water rising from the sea and contaminated with invisible monsters.
Beyond the channels and dikes, the ocean releases its hissing whirlpool of monsters whose coils are here confined between two reassuring walls. Still you have to be careful not to lean too far over, if you want to avoid inhaling them.…
Soon the series of brick houses begins again. “Rue Joseph-Janeck.” Actually this is the same street that continues on the other side of the canal: the same austerity, the same arrangement of windows, the same doors, the same plaques of black glass with the same gold inscriptions. Silbermann and Son, exporters of pulp wood, capital one million two hundred thousand; main warehouses: four and six Quay Saint-Victor. Along a loading basin, carefully piled logs behind the row of cranes, the metal sheds, the smell of machine-oil and resin. Quai Saint-Victor, that must be somewhere over there, to the northwest.
After a crossroad, the landscape changes slightly: the night-bell of a doctor, a few shops, the architecture a little less uniform, giving the neighborhood a more livable look. A street branches off to the right, forming an angle more acute than the preceding ones; maybe he should follow it? It’s better to follow this one to the end, there will always be time to turn off afterward.
A wisp of smoke lingers on the ground. A shoemaker’s sign; the word “Provisions” in yellow letters on a brown background. Although the scene remains deserted, the impression of humanity gradually increases. At one ground-floor window, the curtains are decorated with a mass-produced allegorical subject: shepherds finding an abandoned child, or something of the kind. A dairy, a grocery store, a delicatessen, another grocery; for the time being all that can be seen is their lowered iron shutters, and in the middle, outlined against the gray sheet iron, a lace star the size of a dinner plate, like the kind children make out of folded paper. These shops are small but clean, often repainted; almost all are food stores: an ocher butcher shop, a blue dairy, a white fish store. Only their colors and the sign on their pediment distinguishes one from another. Again, open blinds and that cheap net curtain: under a tree two shepherds in classical costume give ewe’s milk to a tiny naked baby.
Wallas continues on his solitary way between the drawn shutters, walking along the brick walls with the same elastic, confident gait. He walks on. Around him life has not yet begun. Just now, on the parkway, he has passed the first wave of workmen riding toward the harbor, but since then he has not met anyone else: the employees, the businessmen, the mothers, the children on their way to school, are still silent inside the closed houses. The bicycles have vanished and the day which they had inaugurated has retreated behind a few gestures, like a sleeper who has just stretched out his arm to turn off the alarm clock and grants himself a few minutes reprieve before opening his eyes for good. In a second the eyelids will rise, the city emerging from its false sleep will catch up at once with the rhythm of the harbor and, this dissonance resolved, it will again be the same time for everyone.
The only pedestrian, Wallas advances through this fragile interval. (Just as a man who has stayed up too late often no longer knows to which date to ascribe this dubious time, when his existence loses its shape; his brain, tired out by work and waking, tries in vain to reconstitute the series of days: he is supposed to have finished for the next day this job begun last night, between yesterday and tomorrow there is no place left for the present. Completely exhausted, he finally throws himself down on his bed and falls asleep. Later, when he wakes up, he’ll find himself in his normal today.) Wallas walks on.
2
Without going out of his way or slowing down, Wallas walks on. In front of him a woman crosses the street. An old man drags toward a back door an empty garbage can that had been standing on the edge of the sidewalk. Behind a window are stacked three rows of rectangular platters containing all kinds of marinated anchovies, smoked sprats, rolled and loose herring, salted, seasoned, raw or cooked, smoked, fried, pickled, sliced, and chopped. A little farther, a gentleman in a black overcoat and hat comes out of a house and passes him; middle-aged, comfortable, frequent stomach trouble; he takes only a few steps and immediately turns into an extremely clean-looking café, certainly more appealing than the one where Wallas spent the night. Wallas remembers how hungry he is, but he has made up his mind to eat his breakfast in some large modern restaurant, on one of those squares or boulevards that must, as everywhere else, constitute the heart of the city.
The next cross streets intersect the one he is on at a decidedly obtuse angle, and consequently would lead him too far back—almost in the direction he is coming from.
Wallas likes walking. In the cold, early winter air he likes walking straight ahead through this unknown city. He looks around, he listens, he smells the air; this perpetually renewed contact affords him a subtle impression of continuity; he walks on and gradually unrolls the uninterrupted ribbon of his own passage, not a series of irrational, unrelated images, but a smooth band where each element immediately takes its place in the web, even the most fortuitous, even those that might at first seem absurd or threatening or anachronistic or deceptive; they all fall into place in good order, one beside the other, and the ribbon extends without flaw or excess, in time with the regular speed of his footsteps. For it is Wallas who is advancing; it is to his own body that this movement belongs, not to the backcloth some stagehand might be unrolling; he can follow in his own limbs the play of the joints, the successive contractions of the muscles, and it is he himself who controls the rhythm and length of his strides: a half second for each step, a step and a half for each yard, eighty yards a minute. It is of his own free will that he is walking toward an inevitable and perfect future. In the past, he has too frequently let himself be caugh
t in the circles of doubt and impotence, now he is walking; he has recovered his continuity here.
On the wall of a school courtyard there are three yellow posters side by side, three copies of a political speech printed in tiny letters with an enormous headline at the top: “Citizens Awake! Citizens Awake! Citizens Awake!” Wallas recognizes this poster, distributed throughout the city and already old, some kind of trade-union propaganda against the trusts, or liberal propaganda against the tariff rates, the sort of literature no one ever reads, except, occasionally, an old gentleman who stops, puts on his glasses and carefully reads the whole text through, shifts his eyes back and forth along the lines from the beginning all the way to the end, steps back a little to consider the whole poster with a shrug, puts his glasses back in their case and the case in his pocket, then goes on his way in some perplexity, wondering if he has not missed the point. Among the usual words some suspect term occasionally stands out like a signal, and the sentence it illuminates so equivocally seems for a moment to conceal many things, or nothing at all. Thirty yards farther on can be seen the back of the plaque warning drivers of the school crossing.
The street next crosses another canal, wider than the last, along which a tug is slowly approaching, pulling two coal barges. A man in a dark blue pea jacket and a visored cap has just closed off the bridge at the opposite end and turns toward the free end where Wallas has just started across.
“Hurry up, Monsieur, it’ll be openingI” the man shouts.
As he passes him, Wallas nods.
“Not so warm this morning!”
“Winter’s coming,” the man answers.
With a low moan the tug salutes; under the cluster of metal beams, Wallas glimpses the trail of dissolving steam. He pushes the gate. An electric bell indicates that the workman at the other end is about to set the machinery in motion. At the moment Wallas closes the gate, the roadway behind him comes apart, the platform begins to tip up with a noise of motors and gears.
Wallas finally turns into a wide avenue that looks much like the Boulevard Circulaire he left at dawn, except for the canal, which is replaced here by a central sidewalk planted with very young trees; adjoining houses of five or six stories alternate with more modest structures of almost rural appearance and buildings evidently used for industrial purposes. Wallas is surprised to find more examples of this suburban mixture. Since he has crossed the street to turn right in this new direction, he reads with even more surprise the words “Boulevard Circulaire” on the building at the corner. He turns back, disconcerted.
He cannot have been walking in a circle, since he had gone straight ahead ever since the Rue des Arpenteurs; he has probably walked too far south and bypassed a segment of the city. He will have to ask his way.
People in the street are hurrying past on their errands, Wallas prefers not to delay them. He decides on a woman in an apron who is washing the sidewalk in front of her shop on the other side of the street. Wallas approaches but he is not sure how to ask his question: for the moment he has no precise destination; as for the police station where he is supposed to go a little later, he is reluctant to mention it, less from professional discretion than because of his desire to remain in a convenient neutrality rather than carelessly inspiring fear or merely curiosity. The same is true for the courthouse which, he has been told, is opposite the police station, but whose faint artistic renown is not enough to motivate the interest he would appear to be taking in it. The woman straightens up when she sees him beside her; she stops the movement of her broom.
“Excuse me, Madame, can you tell me how to get to the central post office?”
After a moment’s reflection, she answers:
“The central post office; what do you mean, the central post office?”
“I mean the main post office.”
This does not seem to be the right question. Maybe there are several main post offices and none located in the center of town. The woman looks at her broom and says:
“You’ll find a post office right near here, on the parkway.” She points with her chin. “People usually go there. But it’s probably closed at this hour.”
So his question meant something: there is only one post office with a telegraph office open all night.
“Yes, that’s just it, there must be a post office open for sending telegrams.”
This remark unfortunately seems to awaken the woman’s interest:
“Oh, it’s for sending a telegram!”
She glances at her broom, while Wallas tries to get off with a vague “yes.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?” the woman says.
The question has not been asked in a specifically interrogative way, rather as a polite, slightly dubitative wish; but then she says nothing more and Wallas feels he must answer.
“No, no,” he says, “thanks.”
This is a lie too, since a man has died during the night. Should he explain that it is no one in his family?
“Well,” the woman says, “if you’re not in a hurry, there’s a post office here that’ll be open at eight.”
This is what making up stories gets you into. Now to whom would he send a telegram, and what about? How can he manage to get back where he started? Observing his dissatisfied expression, the woman finally adds:
“There’s a post office on the Avenue Christian-Charles, but I don’t know if it opens before the others; besides, to get there from here…”
She examines him more attentively now, as if she were calculating his chances of reaching his goal before eight; then she glances down at the end of her broom again. One of the bristles, half undone, lets a few sprays of quitch grass stick out on one side. Finally she expresses the result of her scrutiny:
“You’re not from around here, Monsieur?”
“No,” Wallas admits reluctantly; “I’ve been here only a little while. If you’ll show me how to get to the center of town, I’ll find my way.”
The center? The woman tries to locate it in her own mind; she stares at her broom, then at the pail full of water. She turns toward the Rue Janeck and points in the direction Wallas came from.
“Just take that street. After the canal you turn left on the Rue de Berlin and you’ll come to the Place de la Préfecture. Then you just follow the avenues; it’s straight ahead.”
The prefecture: that’s what he should have asked for.
“Thank you, Madame.”
“It’s a long walk, you know. You’d be better off taking the streetcar over there, you see….”
“No, no, I’ll walk fast; it’ll warm me up! Thank you, Madame.”
“At your service, Monsieur.”
She puts her broom in the pail and begins scrubbing the sidewalk. Wallas starts walking in the opposite direction.
His reassuring course has been re-established. Now the office workers are coming out of their houses, holding the imitation leather briefcases that contain the three traditional sandwiches for the noon meal. They glance up toward the sky as they come out of their doorways and walk off, winding brown knitted mufflers around their necks.
Wallas feels the cold on his face; though the season of cutting frost that freezes the face into a painful mask has not yet begun, something like a shrinking can already be felt in the tissues: the forehead contracts, the hairline draws closer to the eyebrows, the temples try to meet, the brain tends to shrink to a tiny benign mass on the surface of the skin, between the eyes, a little above the nose. Yet the senses are far from being benumbed: Wallas remains the attentive witness of a spectacle which has lost none of its qualities of order and permanence; perhaps, on the contrary, the course is growing stricter, gradually abandoning its ornaments and its slackness. But perhaps, too, this draftsman’s precision is only illusory, merely the result of an empty stomach.
The sound of a Diesel engine approaches behind Wallas … the vibration finally fills his head completely, and soon passes him, trailing its cloud of asphyxiating smoke—a heavy long-distance transport vehicle.
A bicyclist who has just got off his vehicle is waiting in front of the white barrier, at the end of the drawbridge that is just being lowered again. Wallas stops beside him and both men stare at the under side of the platform which is just disappearing. When they again see the top of the roadway, the man with the bicycle opens the gate and sets his front wheel on it. He turns toward Wallas:
The Erasers Page 4