So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white. The whole town glows ruddily with matter, with solid substances. In twenty seconds, perhaps even sooner, the crisis may return, and the whole process begin all over again. Things will pass into themselves, like devouring serpents that greedily consume their own bodies. Life will plan itself unaided, and at random, on the first coarse and yellowing sheet of paper that comes to hand. The plan will grow and grow, bursting and pullulating with details, like a kind of lengthy narrative, its handwritten words gradually nibbling away what free space remains. The point of the ballpoint pen moves forward, on and on, very fast and in a small neat hand, tracing a wriggling, broken blue line, from left to right, next line down, left to right, next line down, and so on. When the whole surface of the paper is covered with this scribbling, the tip of the ballpoint still goes on searching. It finds blank spaces between the lines or down the margins. It fills them all. The words on the page now run in every direction. But the ballpoint still goes on searching indefatigably. It overscores what it has previously written, it crams every cranny, first making fine scratches like tufts of hair, then a whole fuzzy topknot, and finally a large sooty cloud. There are still words, more and more of them, interminable adverbs; the crosses on the t’s trace a kind of straight line from one side of the paper to the other. Too much overwriting has produced the occasional hole. About six inches from the top there is an accidental and quite unbearable row of looping o’s. But the words keep flowing back, and suddenly, after using up several thousandths of an ounce of dark blue ink, after hours on the job, after working through three ballpoint pens, as though a million spiders had wandered over the page, at nightfall only one empty space remains—a tiny star-shaped patch at the bottom left-hand corner, preserved by the slapdash loop of an 1, in some word now otherwise obliterated—‘Iliad’, maybe, or ‘calamity’, or ‘Lilliputian’. Then the hand grips the ballpoint pen, all slippery with sweat now, and closes the loop of the 1. During the accomplishment of this act, in silence and fear, something akin to darkness, a sense of solemn peace, like the deepest night, spreads over the paper. The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; and nothing is left now, beneath that bent forehead, before those weary, burning eyes, except this vast page of writing, in which all the words and letters have melted into one another, the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible.
Looking out of the window, or down in the stair-well, head squeezed between the banisters, or lost among the mirrors of a cinema foyer, or—more simply—just stubbed out at the bottom of a jam-pot doing duty as an ashtray. Tobacco coming out of the body, thrusting through the skin, sticking to the glass sides of the jar. Head still burning, a mass of close-packed embers, but guttering down to extinction, giving off carbonic gas. Occasional tiny explosions from glowing fragments of wood, and that sickening smell given off by the dead cinders, rising gradually towards the ceiling, the acrid stink of cooling ash. On every part of the street, on every house, over the whole town, Besson descends and settles: like a fly circling round some imaginary lamp, moving in a random course across level or uneven surfaces, leaving its trail of excrement and microbes behind it.
These white houses, that square you can see, these still, tranquil streets are the areas in which he deposits his eggs. This neighbourhood is his domain: here he hunts, sleeps, lives, and perhaps reproduces in season. In front and on all sides of him cars speed to and fro, passing, repassing. The continual snarl of their engines forms a harsh, metallic song: the rhythmic pulsing of valves and pistons, vibrating bodywork, the silent whirr of the fan, and so on and so on, all that blurred mass of minuscule sounds, endlessly affirming the existence, as a construct, of the internal combustion engine, in all its beauty, power, novelty, warmth and regularity. A view from a telegraph pole. Or even, if you prefer it, arched over the road like a bridge, body curving slightly, set on pillar-firm limbs, back supporting the passage of all those swarming creatures known collectively as ‘mankind’. This sudden joy that comes over you, this manic passion for bright metals and translucent inflammable liquids, the sense of roundedness, the smooth enamelled skin you’ve acquired, which turns you into an object, and the delight, the indescribable sense of optimism that hits you, yes, there, between the radiator cap and the rubber lining of the windshield, the joy of being made out of sheet-metal, thirty-six B.H.P. with direct injection, and kindling, down under those steel cylinder-heads, the explosive spark that irradiates out on combustion like the spokes of a wheel. Opel Olympia. Ford V.8. Man-into-car enclosed within this room with its four unyielding walls. The insect is flying round the table. It came down from the ceiling during the night, Through the open window drift the sounds of falling rain. The insect is a gnat, a square millimetre of black body and wings, its flight sustained by some invisible plane surface, as though the horizon that suddenly tilted its plexiglass sheet and left no sign of any living presence on it save this one solitary creature. Inside the room atmospheric waves eddy and multiply. Bodies of gas move from one corner to the other, knocking against the bed, the skirting-boards, the door, the two open windows. This undulatory movement intensifies, becomes more precise. The gnat, crushed between two layers of oxygen, lies there on the table, asphyxiated, delicate legs just quivering their last, one wing half torn off and adhering to the creamy matter discharged from its abdomen. But the air in the room has suddenly changed to water, and the to-and-fro movement passes through this new body, braiding its texture, tying slip-knots into it. In the aquarium objects smoke through the water, sometimes leaving a trail of bubbles behind them. Strange noises, rumblings as of an earthquake, the motive force behind heavy vehicles, now make themselves heard: the S.P.A.D.A. trucks, enabled thus to pass through the walls of the room, arrive loaded with transistor radios, barrels of olive oil, refrigerators. The oscillatory motion of this matter steadily increases, reaches a high peak of intensity, a regular rhythm which nothing can disrupt. With effort certain obstacles at the back of the mind are removed—things such as human flesh, the breasts and bellies and buttocks of women, perhaps even a face, the face of a young goddess, with fine features and a Byzantine profile; deep sad eyes, set at a curious and touching angle to the line of the nose; the expression of a statue, all statues, eyes looking gently upward from the inclined head, revealing a sclerotic pattern of unhappiness and yearning regret, endlessly repeated; a tiny mouth, set in a firm line above the chin, and that lone pale, almost translucent body, draped in blue material. Near her, a man lying on a divan stretches out one hand in token of command, and calls, like Orsino Duke of Illyria, for music.
But nothing here is real: these eyes and hands have no existence, the guitar, the mist-shrouded landscape, all are illusory. The oscillatory motion reaches down to the deeper points at the back of the mind, dredges up young untroubled voices, afternoons spent leafing through the dictionary, sitting in the pleasant slate-grey common-room, with its leather armchairs and cake at tea-time and bells ringing the Angelus. Noises dwindle away, giving place to a kind of magical silence: soundlessness such as exists under a glass bell, or in telephone booths that let through nothing, almost, except the vibrations immediately beneath them, a hair-fine thread floating on the air that alone serves to remind us of that other world outside. Then, after a little more time, a little more suffering, one finds oneself enclosed by four walls, a floor, a ceiling; a closed door, two open windows. Continual restriction. Hollow, hollow. Equilateral.
For the last time during this immense day-and-night there appears that supreme synthesis, that stunning of the senses, that conscious abrogation of mind which is known as hatred.
Besson stands outside the building now, hidden in the shadow of the arcade, eyes devouring the whole sweep of the scene before him. Hands thrust in his pockets, right shoulder resting against a pillar, he feels an inexplicable stiffness spreading through him, centred somewhere in the back of his neck, but makes no resistance
to it. The sun is rising, or setting: it makes no difference which. Buses come and go, brake to a jerky halt along the kerbside. From time to time a green wall of metal interposes itself between those staring eyes and the middle distance, and sits there, shuddering in time with its engine. There is a smell of exhaust gases everywhere; nothing can disperse them, not even the upward-moving air-current that rises skyward with the force of a plane on vertical take-off.
Millions of tiny holes in the tarred macadam, all made by women’s stiletto heels.
In a trash-can attached to the bus-stop sign lies a half-eaten tangerine, exuding acidity. Memories of plums brush lightly across the cornea of the eye, with just enough friction to start a tear, a fleeting pain much like grazing one’s skin against the rough surface of a wall, the small pleasures afforded by something utterly insignificant, the sharp impact of a cigarette-butt lying on an ashtray’s edge, smoke curling up from it—everything is there, really everything, nothing has been forgotten. The whole pattern comes together at this moment before his eyes, there between the two pillars, presenting a panoramic spectacle from which not a single element is missing.
The picture is complete now. If there are still a few movements down in its bottom left-hand corner, they are caused by nothing more than streaks of colour gliding along their set tracks, masses of black metal (or grey, or green), the shadows of human figures walking. It is as if a sudden breeze had got up, blowing away their mists; as though the latent power inherent in matter, cube upon cube of electric energy, had slowly invaded the air and all open spaces. At an angle of 24°, behind the public lavatory, stand the stark trees and the wrought-iron palisade dominating the harbour. Cast metal, wherever you look you see cast metal. The landscape is naked in the half-light. The street-lamps have just been lit—or are about to be turned off. You can see this by the glow of that neon-blue star that flashes on at each cardinal point of the compass: NORTH, flash, WEST, flash, SOUTH, flash, EAST, flash. Each object is lightning-struck in turn: the surface of the street, first, where all noises sound like the screech of brakes. Is it a fierce heat, come from God knows where, a kind of sun blazing out through the windows? Or is it a Polar freeze-up, with blue iceberg reflections, a pale and whirling whiteness, misty, vapour-shrouded? Perhaps it could even be a mixture of the two, the weird result of setting a fiery furnace at the very heart of the ice? Two extremes in conflict, penetrating each other’s defences, in a tearing orgy of mutual annihilation. As though a giant hand, a hand without any body attached to it, not a god’s, rather the crude fist of a worker, its joints all muscle-bound, as though this human hand had seized both of them, ice and fire, and crushed them together in its palm, while away on the periphery of things, beyond reach of the hand, the two bodies thrashed and reared amid drifting clouds of steam and vapour.
Then each vortex returns to its own sanctuary at the earth’s centre, close to the liquid core of the planet. But where the hand holds them fast, there remains two colourless, shrunken cords, hardened by intense agony into spirals of twisted glass.
Phenomena are now transformed into states of being. The void has struck at the very heart of this big square between the surrounding apartment blocks, bringing all movement to a halt: the man who was running towards the steps of the church, that other one getting off the bus, the helicopter passing over the river, the child playing hopscotch in the arcade, the hundreds of flies blazing invisible trails everywhere, between the wheels of that coach, or towards this garbage-pail, or in the vicinity of that sixty-five-year-old woman. The movement of an American car, an Oldsmobile by the look of it, has been brought to a halt in this square by the mere existence of four or five reflections glinting on its beige bodywork. There is no more movement now, no more action. Even the normal swarming dazzle in the sky—that misty agglomeration of countless million tiny points, black, grey, white, blue, red or green, which formerly kept up a ceaseless dance, soaring upward heavenwards or sinking slowly back towards the ground—has entirely ceased to function.
The sky is as spacious as ever, but with that stipple of black dots gone dead, nothing remains but a half-tone screen photograph, newspaper style, blown up to enormous dimensions, and embracing the entire visible landscape. The still points coagulate, become a more intense black, increase in number—and there is a pigeon. They space themselves out, become almost imperceptible—and there is the sunlight reflected on a young girl’s face. Eyes become dark hollows, noses are accentuated, mouths tend to be optional. This fierce and incessant rain of dots leaves both people and inanimate objects looking calm but cheerless, as the colour drains slowly out of them. The process is a very simple one, and one gets the impression that as these impalpable surface layers peel away, angles become sharper and cleaner, the framework stands out, ridges are stripped bare to the bone. The plane-tree has been drastically reduced to a mere black skeleton of its former self. The modern apartment block has crumbled away and is now floating up in the blue empyraean like a cloud. Men’s faces have been replaced by a strange inhuman mask, dead white, hollow, with great empty eye-sockets and a bird-like beak. In an old worm-eaten foreign tome, dated 1683, and entitled The Visions of Dom Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, Knight of the Order of St James, the following passage is to be found:
Howsoever ye others know not what Death may be: it is ye yourselves who are your own proper Death: Death beareth the features of each several one of you, be ye never so mighty, ye are your own deaths. Your skull is Death; and your features are Death; that which ye term dying is the conclusion of life, and that which ye term birth is the beginning of death: in like fashion, that which ye term living is but dying in the midst of life: and bones are but what death leaves of your kind, and what remaineth behind in the sepulture. If ye were well apprised of this, then each would have a mirror of Death within himself all the days of his life; and then would ye see divers truths, as that all your houses are full of dead men, that there are as many dead persons as living, that though ye hear not Death, natheless ye walk beside him all the days of your life. Think ye that Death is but bones, and a carcase, and that Death cometh not unto your person ere ye behold a Skeleton that holdeth a Scythe? Thus do ye deceive yourselves in heinous wise, for ye shall be bones, carcase and skeleton sooner than ye may conceive.
And further off, away beyond the square where everything has come to a stop, the whole town lies spread out between the sea and the mountains, quite motionless, like a great sombre pool. This battered skin, with so many countless wrinkled contours, this purple-tinged coverlet of fine interwoven thread, is in fact the town’s upper surface; and blackness has flowed into every hollow of it, silently, as though filling a mould. Here is the photographic representation of death; and above and below it the tragic twilight raises a long and voiceless chant, unfurling its purple ribbons across the horizon, whole spools of purple ribbon, bright crimson streamers, bloodstained dressings, shot-torn tattered ensigns, lightning by the barrelful, lurid orange storm-clouds, bombs bursting to reveal vermilion craters, the whole majestic airy procession that forms a refuge for the last outpourings of passion, torture and war. There: now all is poised in ardent stillness.
As the sun retreats, or the street-lamps are extinguished, the world grows steadily darker, with inceasing calmness and serenity to match the broad swathes of crepuscular twilight now drawn across it. The sea’s glinting surface has burnt out. Ships lying at anchor send up columns of black smoke to mingle with these violent reds and golds. Here too colours have become so elongated, so extended, that they might as well not be colours at all: it would make no odds if they were transposed into smells, or phrases of music. The humble, hackneyed odour of a brioche, lard and butter mingled, all interwoven from an off-yellow colour and the taste of vanilla, insipid, too insipid, then, suddenly piercing it, the tart flavour, pencil-sharp, of one dried raisin.
Or look at this man, riven by the white lightning-flash that struck down on the tree. The rescue party makes its way back down the mountainside in the rain, g
ently bearing the blackened body on the stretcher, taking it back to the widow, who will lose her wits. Rising through light like the length of a drawn sword, passing joyfully into that agonizing effulgence, he vanishes from sight as the boiling, turbulent mass closes over him; moves on with it now, up, up, to the topmost peaks of the world, plunged naked into the volcano’s maw, carried up to that field of black azure that lies beyond all human values. Made light. Purified.
Or else, again, the dull thunder and murmurous confusion rising far out in some kind of sea, those glaucous, malleable rhythms—and then, hundreds of yards, perhaps miles away, so far off that it seems to lag behind the rest, the sound of a warning siren, the reverberations of war: like a cat miaowing, exactly the same as a cat miaowing, all alone on a vast and dreary expanse of tin roof.
1 Presumably a reference to the ballet Le Festin de l’Araignée, by the French composer Albert Roussel (1869-1937) [Trs].
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