The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  On the terrace of a café, I had another drink, on the fringe of a crowd dressed up for a celebration. I was feeling even more indecisive than usual, troubled and depressed by my recent meditation, when, abruptly confronted by a Valkyrie in black satin who was swinging a silvery rabbit-fur stole with the insolence of a winning gambler over a Rubensesque rotundity, a voice rose up within me: “There’s the 300th!” The figure 299 seemed as ridiculous to me at that moment as the 4.95s of the nearby bazaar. I needed a round number.

  The change of mood that followed was catastrophic. Curiously enough, my resentment rebounded on Dagerlöff. He was the one who, with his speeches, had turned my thoughts toward women; it was because of him that I felt myself pursued by a procession of three hundred phantoms, a cohort of furies who seemed to be calling for help to all their sisters in the world, to destroy me, to extinguish my flame little by little, to end up pushing me, cold, useless and empty, into the Inferno. A disquiet, a fear extending as far as anguish, rose up within me…I sensed the advent of a crisis. At the first pharmacist’s shop I came to, I bought my usual drug.

  The capsules worked. I took another two, and sleep arrived.

  I was still asleep when the doorbell woke me up. I thought that the concierge was bringing me a letter. The old bag rarely came up, and only when she scented through the envelope that it was a matter of bad news: bills, tax demands—she never missed a single one. Ordinary letters she was content to give me when I passed by her lodge. At the second ring, I went to open the door. It was Dagerlöff.

  It was 8 a.m. The studio was freezing. I plunged back beneath my bedclothes, sighing: “You’re the very last person I was expecting…”

  “I know. A person of my age and my sex has lost all hope of being expected…”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “What does the time matter! My dear Monsieur Poldonski, my genius has finally had its reward: you see before you a thinker at the instant when he has just made the greatest discovery of his career. Have you ever tried to catch a fly?”

  Huddled behind the rampart of my bedclothes, my only reply was a troubled stare.

  “The threatened fly takes flight ahead of your hand, as if it had divined your intention. An observation so simple and so banal that it might seem trivial, discouraging any prolongation of reflection—but an observation, nevertheless, that contains the seed of the most remarkable discovery to be made in this world…

  “Have you ever, perchance, while walking in the fields, caught sight of a crow or a magpie, and made the playful gesture of aiming your stick at the bird as if it were a gun? It takes flight, as if you had just taken aim with a rifle. I could multiply examples, but I prefer to give you the brilliant explanation of all these behaviors right away: animal species do not all live in the same time!”

  “Ah,” I said, in a perfectly neutral tone.

  “Why should human time be that of animals? The crow and the fly, living in advance of our time, foresee our gestures of capture or death, and are able to escape us. The displacement can also be the other way around. The cow watching a train pass by seems stupid to us because, being behind our human time, it only perceives the locomotive at the moment when the rearmost wagon passes before its muzzle. As a general rule, wild animals live slightly in advance, domestic animals with a delay of variable magnitude—hence the difference of fates experienced by a wild rabbit and one fed on cabbages. All the so-called miracles of instinct that confound human intelligence are explicable with the greatest of ease if the time of the ant or the bee, clearly in advance of ours, permits them to see the larva in the egg, the future queen in the larva, the honey in the pollen, and, I dare say, the stupidity in the entomologist’s head! The swallow and the sparrow regulate their migrations according to a summer time inconceivable to the ornithologists thinking in terms of winter time. To sum up, as I have told you, living species are not all in the same position on the line of time’s flight…”

  He paused; as a precaution, I never took my eyes off him. His excitement did not seem dangerous, and even conferred a strange beauty on him. I got up circumspectly and put on my clothes, avoiding turning my back on him. He collected himself, and soon recovered his loquacity.

  “It was necessary to identify the situation of different species in time—that was my task. Elementary organisms, less impeded than others by the accomplishment of complex functions, must find it easiest to advance in that race against the watch 14 that is life. Microbes, in fact, have shown me that they are at the head of the troop of species. Other surprises were in store for me. In certain conditions, the characteristic advancement in time specific to microbial species is hereditary, transmitted by addition to the following generation. To put it another way, with each new generation, the advancement in time of a microbial colony tends to increase. It can even be transmitted in the milieu of a culture. I thus arrived at a surprising and enlightening explanation of human mortality by virtue of infectious disease: microbes, proliferating in the patient’s blood, communicate to that blood an advancement in time such that the invalid dies of it—the microbes have carried it with them into the future!

  “But are you really dead because your blood, your liver or your kidneys, having encountered harmful microbes, are found to have gone through their normal evolutionary cycle at an accelerated pace? Do you not undergo somewhere, with a disconnection of time, the number of years that, all things being equal, remained of your life? Linked as we are to our familiar universe, we see the individuals that precede us dying before our eyes. Mourn them if you will, but recognize too that they are showing us a means of escaping our causal world, in allowing themselves to flow through time along the fourth dimension of the universe…”

  Perhaps he believed that he had come to talk nonsense to me. Extracted from my bed, I had no intention of wasting time, and reminded him that he was here to pose.

  As I made a few rapid sketches, something curious happened: his face, animated by excitement, appeared in my drawings to be dull and secretly tainted. Depressions and pits of shadow were hollowed out in the planes of the forehead, temples and cheeks. One might have thought that he was sculpted out of a piece of Swiss cheese. Was that his true character, revealing itself in spite of him, beneath my charcoal? When he began to talk again about his causal world, the memory came back to me of the previous evening and the grudge I bore against him.

  “Because of you and your forays against the world, I asked myself whether women…” And I told him the story of the 300th.

  “The eternal pursuit of a phantom through thousands of feminine manifestations—such is the lot of the male, and such is the principal force that attaches us to this world more than gravity,” he said. “We need to understand the deceptiveness of the life that has made us. We need to see the inverse of the tapestry of the world, which seems so tempting, woven of a thousand sordid threads of desire, collectively assembling all creatures! Perhaps then we would experience a redemptive retch, which would permit an escape from its baneful attraction, a removal from the base equilibrium of the causal universe, and a departure…”

  Like a cat falling on its paws, he always came back to his hobby-horse. Aggravated, I exclaimed: “Oh, don’t pester me any more with your speeches!”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, without the least hint of regret. Then, he murmured softly: “Did the 300th have such a deleterious effect on your morale, then?”

  Scarcely desirous of his sympathy, and out of bravado, I said: “She was a beautiful girl, who pleased me well enough at the time…”

  “As she has pleased others.”

  “Undoubtedly. At the time, one scarcely thinks about that. Retrospectively, the adventure is certainly less flattering. Is that what weighs upon me? I remember that on several occasions, on the point of entering a place of ill-repute, if I happened to see another man coming out, my desire was suddenly annihilated.”

  “Interesting, interesting,” he said, with a little unsavory whistle that made his
white beard vibrate. “For the 300th, you too were obviously only a number in a sequence…”

  “Given her profession, I don’t doubt it.”

  “Perhaps you were the 3000th or 4000th…”

  “What!”

  “At three clients a day—that’s the minimum required to make a living—we end up with a figure of about 1000 a year, and she would only have to be active for three or four years… You find yourself in the position of having insidiously acquired a kind of link with 4000 of your peers. Doubtless it’s the gravity of that burden that oppresses you slightly…”

  “A link with 4000 of my peers?” I repeated, a trifle choked.

  “Four thousand? Much more!” he exclaimed, scribbling in pencil on his sleeve. “For that woman, the 300th, was preceded by 299 others, each one of whom gave you approximately the same gift, given that you have selected your lovers in the same easy milieu. It’s necessary to multiply 4000 by 300—which is to say, 1.2 million—to calculate the number of…”

  “You’re making fun of me!”

  “The million might be surprising, but the arithmetic is correct and irrefutable. And take note that the figure is an underestimate. Indeed, the women with whom you have associated pursue their careers thereafter, and the count of your successors continues with every hour of the day or night, inflating the indicated total…”

  Suddenly, I exclaimed in an aggressive tone: “I see what your game is: your age has inspired you with a rancorous jealousy of my libertinage.”

  “I’m not passing judgment on your lustfulness; I’m dwelling on it because it interests me. Your rebellion is symptomatic in itself, and puts me on the track of new reflections. The cost of so-called amorous relations is beginning to become clear to me. The bond that I have been seeking between the texture of the causal world…”

  I had heard enough. I showed him the door, almost brusquely. He left, radiant and satisfied, the bowler hat perched cockily on his rebellious hair. I could see that he was amused by my nervousness.

  Letting myself be possessed by an aging laboratory assistant, a loquacious mountebank—that was where my quest for picturesque humanity had led me! He thought I could be influenced; I would show him that he was mistaken. In the meantime, I opened the ventilator to change the air in the studio once he had gone. Alas, it was my brain that could have done with an airing!

  Until nightfall, in fact, the old imbecile’s words continued to haunt me, preventing any mental concentration on my work. Finally, I decided to go out. It was dark, and it was raining. The agitation of the street, replete with umbrellas and damp reflections, initially had the effect of a refreshing compress applied to my feverish forehead. Passing anonymously, like everyone else, I let myself move with the crowd. On seeing me in my old mass-produced raincoat, who would have suspected that I had a bizarre and secret link with a million men? But the thought that, in the midst of the crowd, I was probably—almost certainly—rubbing shoulders with some of those counted among the million, began to harass me, and would not let me alone. I found those men hideous, stinking, filthy…

  In the Metro, the sight of women nauseated me. I saw in my mind’s eye the thousands of invisible threads woven on the inverse of the tapestry by the needles of feminine bodies to agglomerate us all, holding us prisoner within the mediocrity of the general design. It was to that glue, I was sure, that I owed my inability to work. The people in the carriage were crowded together, obliged to brush against another. Desire displayed its viscous cloth all around me and I saw men wriggling with the smug convulsions of agonized flies. With a surge, I tore myself free from that magma to regain the outside air.

  I found myself in the Champs-Élysées; it was 7 p.m. The blast of anguish that had almost stifled me had given way to the evocation of Armande and the kindness that she strove to show me when she was in a good mood. Was I not in need of sympathy? Of the presence of a creature I could consider to be mine alone? Armande was an oasis. I caught as she came out of her building.

  I intended to be affectionate, but I was jealous. At the restaurant to which I took her, the men looked at her with an insolent insistence. I saw the tide of desire flow ignobly around her, ready to submerge my last haven. And far from seeming offended, Armande seemed flattered. I was in a hurry to be able to take her away from their gaze; the waiter hardly had time to fetch the bill. Outside, it was still raining. Several cabs went by without stopping. I had a fit of bad temper.

  “Why are you always grumbling?” Armande said placidly, beneath her umbrella. “You said yourself the other day that it makes people…”

  “Don’t you understand that I’m at the end of my tether? I can’t bear it any longer…”

  “Bear what?” she said, stupidly.

  I shrugged my shoulders without replying.

  As soon as I found myself alone with her, at home, I began to get bored. Her presence prevented me from thinking—and by all her gestures and intonations I saw that she was treating me as if I were an invalid child. Finally, she left. I started writing in order to try to understand. I don’t understand. This must change, or it will all end badly.

  All day, I have tried to work without doing anything worthwhile. Toward nightfall, Babar rang my doorbell, verbose, half-drunk and repulsive. He had come with good intentions: to take two of my canvases to a dealer whose acquaintance he had just made. I raised difficulties, without giving any reason for my hesitation; all the time he was here, I was asking myself whether he too was one of my companions in pleasure. Womanizer as I knew him to be, it was very probable; the women of the quarter are not so very numerous…

  Seen from that angle, he appeared to me more particularly hideous, with his absence of chin, his slack lip, his ill-shaven cheeks and his little yellow eyes that disappear into eyelids as sticky as his lips…

  How was I able to accept his acquaintance? To allow him the possibility of coming into my home? I steered him gently toward the door.

  He wasn’t annoyed; he merely said: “It’s no better, then.”

  “What’s no better?”

  “Your bad mood makes me anxious.” A reflection that succeeded in irritating me. What had my bad mood to do with any of them?

  He adopted a sympathetic tone, with smiling eyes, which set vulgar wrinkles upon each of his temples. I couldn’t stand it anymore. He’s gone now, but the obsessive thought continues to assail me with even greater force: is Babar one of my companions in pleasure?

  I’m giving up work. I’ve spent all day at home, thinking and doing nothing. The doorbell rang twice. I didn’t open the door. No human contact; I’m sterilizing myself.

  I had to go out to buy something to eat. Result: having seen an African in livery barking at the entrance of a cinema, I asked myself whether, by chance, he too might not be a colleague. After all, it’s quite possible; women are such animalistic creatures. It’s insane to entrust them with—how shall I put it?—a part of one’s dignity. Even the Vestal virgins were not up to the task of keeping the sacred fire…

  There must be some truth in what that scurvy old Dagerlöff says: women weave the tapestry of the world. They gather the human herd, debasing it, eager to maintain it in mediocrity by inculcating within it the sordid concerns of the stable and its litter. They find it quite natural that the world rotates around their sex. The bees in a swarm attach themselves together by the legs and the wings, which is already not very pleasant to see—but what can one say of humans, who are attached to one another by their pubic hair? Heartsick, I can no longer paint landscapes.

  The sunset, seen from my window, was very beautiful this evening, with those pale wintry colors, milky and diaphanous, which contain a part of infinite space without letting it appear. There, the skylight opens on something else. One could breathe, and perhaps live happily, if one’s gaze never quit a winter horizon, pure and naked…

  Someone rang the bell, and shook the door. Stretched out on the divan, I didn’t budge. I expected the door to open of its own accord, but it he
ld firm. It understood; it’s a friend. Later, in an hour or two, I’ll go see whether the visitor has left a note on the mat. I’m not in any hurry. It’s no bad thing to put a little distance between myself and humankind. When one wants to do great things!

  How much time one needs to think when one is alone for a while! Time to figure out what one is doing. The unfortunate thing is that, instead of thinking, one becomes bored. That’s the way it goes! One expects thought, and it’s boredom that arrives. Tedium must have the ability to paint itself. That would be an appropriate extra-human subject for me. Boredom in a winter landscape: an opaque patch in the middle of an opal, enclosing infinity, of course.

  I wipe my brushes with pages torn out of an old book. Just now, I lifted up a leaf spotted with ochre and vermilion, and read: “If you are at odds with this world, you are not obliged to remain a citizen of it.” I looked at the author’s name on the back of the book; his name is Plotinus.15 I was wiping my brushes on Plotinus. He thanked me with a piece of advice: why remain a citizen of the world?

  Everything depends on the way things are said. That advice, offered in such a calm and amenable fashion, has insinuated itself into my thoughts much more profoundly than a brutal invitation to suicide. Not to remain a citizen of the world is not to deliver oneself to death but to change nationality, to accomplish a formality, to leave the city with the disgusted expression of a well-bred man who has gone astray. To depart in those conditions would be almost pleasant. Discreetly, one offers a lesson in good taste to others, to those who remain and gorge themselves to the full with the coarsest of spectacles…

  On impulse, I tried to read some of the pages that remained in the book, but it quickly became incomprehensible. My Plotinus only wrote one good thing, a single sentence. That’s not bad, though. They won’t be able to say as much for me after my death.

  Curiously enough, I am more at ease when nothing is happening in my life.