One has very few things to do, once one reduces oneself to the essential. I would not have thought, before this cure of solitude, that one can take up so little space in life, and that life can take up so little space in you. It is as if I were seeing my life shrivel up a little more with every passing day, beneath the magnificent foliage of boredom. I interrogate my past, seeking memories, and find ashes: a dull grey powder. There is certainly more to pile up in the building’s dustbin. My past, the residues of my life, defy the sieve of memory; nothing remains of it. So much the better.
My gas heater is out of order.
I was beginning to think that my disappearance had provoked little enough concern in the circle of my acquaintances when the doorbell rang. For a change, I went to open the door. It was Armande.
“What? You’re here!”
“Why did you think that I wasn’t here?”
“I ran into Babar; he told me that, having knocked on your door several times, he thought you’d gone away.”
“Ah! You’ve run into Babar…”
The color of her lips had faded to the cyclamen red that gives her complexion a sallow, almost cadaverous tint. She was wearing a hat that I did not recognize, mauve and grey, whose fabric was so skillfully tormented that it had to be elegant. All that was revelatory, but the astonishment she experienced at finding me at home was even more so. Of course! She had only come as a precaution, in order to go find Babar again in full peace of mind. So it was through her, my titular girl-friend, that I must share a confraternal relationship with Babar!
Under this new blow, I stammered: “Why Babar? Why the vilest of all?”
She looked at me in surprise, pretending not to understand. “I was going past the Dôme, unaware of anything. He was on the terrace—he beckoned to me. What did you think, then?”
Crushed by disgust, I replied: “I believe in God, the Father almighty…”
“So that’s it!” she said, with a theatrical sigh.
“Yes, without a doubt, that’s it,” I went on. “You’ve deceived me with an animal that a zoo wouldn’t want. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“Jean, my dear Jean!” she sighed, adopting an imploring expression. “How can you…”
I had decided to throw her out if she mentioned illness. For once, I was thinking clearly and rapidly; I didn’t want anyone to question my mental balance. I told her what I thought of her, with irony and detachment. She became angry, and launched into a torrent of reproaches: that I was leading an impossible life; that I would try the patience of a saint; that I always attributed to others the falsest and basest motives, although, even while I claimed to be a painter, I was never capable of seeing anything, just as I hadn’t even noticed her new hat; that she sacrificed herself for me without getting anything in return; that I took her to eat in wretched restaurants when she could be going to Fouquet’s; that everybody told her that she was an idiot to attach herself to a phenomenon like me…
She went on like that for a quarter of an hour. She got carried away by her own words and her eyes gradually began to protrude from her head. They became grey-mauve, like the hat she had accused me of not seeing. A toad’s eyes, they disgusted me. The last effort of good will I was making in order to listen gave way, and my attention wandered in order to study the bizarre texture of a patch of damp on the studio ceiling. By looking at it hard, one could imagine it as a horse that was rearing up in front of an egg-cup. The stain had intrigued me before, but never as much as at that moment.
Profiting from a moment when she was drawing breath, I said: “There’s no point continuing; I’m not at home.”
“You’re not at home?”
“My mind has gone out.”
Bewildered, she said: “Where to?”
Then, to finish it off, I replied with the utmost seriousness: “I’m voyaging in causality.”
She shot me a glance as concentrated as a searchlight. Her head remained motionless for a moment, like that of a chicken which, while scratching the earth, has found a garter. Then, picking up the gloves she had thrown on the chest of drawers, she exclaimed: “Oh! You’re voyaging in causality? Well, send me a postcard.” And she fled down the stairs.
So, at the very moment when you’re wondering whether one ought to remain a citizen of the world, look what surf the world throws up at your very feet, in the attempt to retain you! Oh, misery of miseries!
Everything down here is intent on deceiving me: men, women, not to mention myself. Men are sad puppets, women funereal whores, and I, devoid of talent and greatness, am a coward for having condescended to live for nearly thirty years in such company.
I shut myself up again. What, then, is this fate of ours, and which dictates that to accomplish anything, anything at all, even the most elementary actions, it is necessary for us to struggle painfully? So, to say that the world f***s us over is a vulgarity that has not even the excuse of being exact. I know full well that I’m in a bad way, but if that’s the solution…
A note from Dagerlöff asking me to go see him! These laboratory assistants have a nerve, haven’t they? Anyway, he wearies me with his inept old codger’s verbosity. Every time I’ve seen him, I’ve come away with the impression that he has been shaking a dusty rag in my brain. He ought to get his ideas in order! Mine are clear, and sufficient; I’m waiting for my decision to finish ripening.
I’ve sorted out my canvases and brushes. I shall leave my palette tidy. The palettes of great painters—those who are exhibited after their deaths—always resemble a plate abandoned by a lover of Camembert. I shall spare my problematic admirers that nausea. Instead of distressing me, the thought that I will never paint again gives me pleasure. I found a new tube of chrome yellow. I squeezed it out until the last drop, with a sort of sadistic intoxication; I imagined that I was strangling light.
I wonder whether I should sweep the studio one last time. What does a little more or a little less dust around my own matter?
To open one’s veins it is necessary to have a bathroom. A bottle of alcohol and opening a gas-tap are the preferred means in California according to Davys, an American college friend who had as much talent as a postcard. The rope has its adherents and, for that matter, a certain tradition among painters…
Men are as lacking in originality when it comes to dying as they are at living. Evidently, only the result matters—but one would like to have a choice of means at one’s disposal as varied as that of hors-d’oeuvres. Nature has more imagination than we do when she’s the one delivering the final blow. To list the infinite diversity of diseases and fatal accidents on the one hand, and the few means of suicide on the other, and to draw conclusions as to the poverty of the human mind from the disproportion of the two columns, would be a pleasant occupation for someone who is determined to die…
I know full well that they think I’m mad, But what does that facile word “mad” mean? That I don’t conform to the idea they have formed of me? Then they’re right, since that’s why I’m dying. I refuse to resemble that which they want to see in me: a satisfied swine made in their image.
What irritates me is that I would have been able to love this world with a little more…
Then again, these thoughts weary me. I don’t know what to do with my time. The moment has come to make a decision.
I’ve made my decision; it will be tomorrow.
At dusk, the hour appropriate to the semi-ghost that I am, I took one last turn around the quarter to satisfy yet again the ambulatory mania that has devoured so many hours of my life. The gloom was cold and damp with rain. The trees on the boulevard extended black skeletons over the hurrying passers-by. Montparnasse cemetery had closed its gates, imprisoning its dead for the night. On the wet roadway the cabs, fearful of skidding, were moving slowly, as if following a funeral convoy. The entire city was like a vast burial vault with streaming walls, where those who thought they were still alive seemed to be pursuing some posthumous activity. I was walking in the midst of that
décor, slightly haggard, like a condemned man walking to the guillotine, when a shadow that had taken refuge between the porcelain forget-me-nots and silvered pots of a memorial mason’s window-display grabbed my arm as I passed by.
It was Dagerlöff. “Where are you going?” he asked.
“To my death.”
“That’s not very original. Instead, help me to stop one of these cabs, which refuse to see my signals.”
To be obliging, I hailed a few drivers, without obtaining any response but mocking laughter. Vexed, I turned toward him. “What possessed you to come to this wretched quarter?”
“My sainted Apolline, the daughter I lost…the drama of my life, around which my thoughts have turned for 20 years. Not that she’s there”—he gestured toward the wall of the cemetery—“but every anniversary…”
He was going to subject me to the confessions of a inconsolable father. I extended my hand to him, brutally. “Goodbye—I’m in a hurry…”
“To go your death?”
“Yes—I’m killing myself tomorrow.”
He didn’t blink, but his blue eyes, like those of a kitten, settled their gaze upon me in mute interrogation. By way of diversion, I laughed. He’s more intelligent than I thought; my attitude didn’t put him off. He knew immediately that I was serious.
“Permit me to take my hat off to you,” he said, baring his head in spite of the rain. In response to my protests, he went on: “No, no, you’re heading for a coffin, and custom obliges me to receive a little water on my skull. Why should I not render to the living man the homage due to his corpse? The man who is not going to die salutes you, Monsieur Poldonski. You have decided to plunge head first into the world behind the great blackboard of death, on which we, the living, continue tremulously to write and erase the insoluble equations of mystery… Were it not for the duties that I owe to my discovery, I might allow myself to be tempted by your example—but why consent to precipitate myself into darkness when, with a little more perseverance, I am assured that…”
The animal! I had just told him that I was about to die, and still he saw in me, as ever, nothing but an audience. I had no discretion to maintain.
“You know, words, phrases…I’d rather be left in peace.”
“Peace? But you’re going have it so soon, and eternally into the bargain, that you can surely tolerate me a little longer.”
The fact is that he didn’t want to let me go. He started trotting along beside me like an old black dog. Perhaps, after all, the buzz of his speech rendered his presence less burdensome than that of a silent creature.
We arrived at my apartment. I threw myself on the divan. In my habitual surroundings, I was able to recover a few thoughts to offer a few comments to my final interlocutor on the decision I had taken. It was strange to take for a confidant an old lunatic with whom I had no connection. The mania of explanation definitely only leaves one along with life…
Afterwards, a headache, more violent than those I usually had, was hammering my skull. I complained of it loudly, and an idea struck me. “Wouldn’t you, a laboratory assistant, have a drug that would permit me to end it all immediately, painlessly?”
“It would be better to cure your migraine.”
Cure me! So he hadn’t understood anything of what I’d tried to explain to him! It was enough to drive one to despair. Anger took old of me. “Get out!” I roared.
“I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” he said, to save face, as he took flight.
There you go! Is it possible to find anything more inept than that last interview with one of one’s peers? Decidedly, I would not succeed in anything, not even death. Oh, no one could write a dialogue in the manner of the Phaedo 16 about me! My death will be considered, if it is ever considered at all, as that of a poor cretin. I hoped, I confess, in company with that old madman, to find an opportunity to suspend a few pleasant nihilistic garlands around my passing. Instead of that…well, let’s say no more. That which I have within me, and what I have to say, will remain unknown to the end.
To settle the last echoes of the scene, I am confiding them to paper—and, in so doing, recovering a little of my serenity.
Without any sadness, without pity for my fate, in the silence of the night, I coldly run my gaze over the wall, as bare as my life would have been, the dirty plaster ceiling that separates me from the celestial vault….
In the lamplight, the horse rearing up in front of the egg-cup becomes once again what it is: a patch of damp. Let us apply ourselves to seeing everything as it really is: a practically inoffensive nothingness. And to begin with, let us not see in our head, in the very thoughts and that pain lancing through it, anything more than the displacement of particles among nervous filaments confused to a greater or lesser degree. An electrical current stops when one presses a simple switch. Do I think that I am killing electricity when I turn a commutator? No. No more stories, then, to make up in my head, with all its ideas…
I must…
The animal came back! I hoped that, full of repentance, he was bringing me the pill I wanted. He came back with a damp compress! To soothe my headache! He tried in vain to put it in a good light, to play the hypocrite.
“So, the man who has decided to kill himself cannot bear an insect-bite. You have need of all your strength to take the plunge, and your struggle against physical illness is getting in the way. This compress on the forehead, properly applied, directly over the eyes—the eyes that are the origin of all irritation of the nervous system…isn’t the first instinctive movement in the struggle against suffering to lower the eyelids? Keep it over your closed eyelids for as long as possible…”
I remained mute. My gaze cut through him. He finally understood, and went away, abandoning his compress. That ultimate intervention ought not to trouble my serenity. A sleeping-powder. The compress, since the compress is there. A few more hours’ sleep. And, looking things squarely in the face, tomorrow morning at dawn, I shall boldly open the gas-tap.
CHAPTER THREE
Something extraordinary has happened to me. I woke up cured!
My resumptions of consciousness on emerging from sleep are always immediate. When I woke up, this morning, I initially experienced a diffuse sensation, a sort of internal inflation of unknown nature, which surprised me until—at the moment when my misty gaze, encountering a pool of pale sunlight displayed on the wall facing my divan, recovered therein the magic of color—I recognized the sensation that is inflating my bosom as happiness: the happiness of which I had lost even the memory, the very idea; the joy of existence, quite simple, quite bald, given gratuitously, without cause or reason, accompanied by an appetite for life that multiplied my strength tenfold and made everything appear to me with a stupefying facility.
I got up—no, I leapt up. My body anticipated my intention; I felt nothing but the freedom of an indescribable lightness. I felt strong, irresistible. The universe around me offered a smile of infinite indulgence, full of inexhaustible future promise. An incredible adventure! Was that still me?
I had to look at myself in the mirror. I recognized myself—who would have believed it?—with delight. My tousled hair had taken on a Venetian blond tint; my stubble-blurred cheeks made the smooth hauteur of my forehead stand out; my gaze met itself, as limpid as a deep pool. Dare I confide it to this piece of paper? There was a powerful genius there! Then I thought: “It can’t last…”
It did last, and full consciousness didn’t diminish any of the magic of that Thousand-and-One-Nights awakening.
I opened the window. For a long time I contemplated the view over the roofs: that magical universe made of bricks, zinc and slates, lacy, bristling and eccentric, full of unconscious humor, beneath a spring-like blue sky through which regattas of little white clouds pass by, arriving on a light easterly breeze that flattens out the plumes of smoke, transmuting them into an impalpable duvet charged with caressing the cheeks of the sky. The dome of the Val-de-Grâce is refined by the effects of a hem of sunlight. Th
e unfinished parking-lot that raises its concrete carcass above the neighboring hovels is a gigantic open cage for chirping sparrows. The chimneys rise up like hollyhocks; I almost expect to see them flower! I have become stupid. And to think that I was to die this morning!
How can this transfiguration be explained? I have found my way back to reality. Instead of seeing things from the darkroom of myself, I see them as they offer themselves to clear and naïve eyes. It’s good to be alive.
I made haste to go out, to expose myself to the smile of the universe.
That was an exquisite stroll, in which there was nothing other than pleasure to assure me of the amicable presence of things. I saw houses, streets, dogs, carriages, people—and I found them all admirable! The ground was admirable for being hard enough to sustain my footsteps; the air was admirable for being keen enough to invite me to hasten my pace; the cornering cabs were admirable for not running me over, the people for putting movement and color into the décor of the world. The entire mechanism ran without a hitch, with an accurate sense of value, without the need of any orchestra-conductor. And what can I say about the warm croissants dipped in coffee with cream! I need to put the brake on my enthusiasm, or I will no longer believe myself…
I shall write to Armande, make overtures to my friends. By way of an ex voto,17 I will paint in large golden letters on the wall of the studio: Life is admirable.
The enchantment continues. I might have dreaded that it was a matter of an unstable impression, of a peak moment, but when one grasps the truth, or is grasped by the truth, one does not let go of it again.
I met good old Babar at Gugenlaert’s. He was a trifle deflated—he had not been given the commission for the fresco in his local bistro—and I was obliged to cheer him up. I did so with such vigor that he seemed surprised.
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