The Eye of Purgatory

by Jacques Spitz

  It was while taking an aperitif, for which—for the sake of prudence and to avoid running into any of my friends—I had gone to the Lion de Belfort. As on previous days, the ice-bucket that had been brought to me contained nothing but water. Instead of grumbling, I picked up the kind of perforated shovel or ladle that serves to pick up ice, distractedly, and extracted a piece of water from the bucket! I mean what I say: a piece, resembling transparent frost and clinging miraculously to the shovel, without flowing. At first I sat there, nonplussed, and then I understood that where I saw water, there was in reality a piece of ice that naturally stayed on the shovel. Therefore: I see things in the location where they are, but in the state that they will be in subsequently.

  I no longer see the clouds because they have already condensed into rain. This morning, I could not see the stubble on my cheeks because I was about to shave it off. I see the tap-water yellow and dirty, as it will be when I have washed my hands. I see the dog in the state in which it would be after being run over, the shop as it will be after the fire, and so on.

  With this principle, everything becomes clear. For two pins, I’d say that the anomaly has re-entered into the order of things, and man is a creature so stupidly attached to reason that I have am almost calm this evening. A curious virtue of explanation…

  Well, no! That attachment to rational order, which resembles that of a dog to its master, has something servile and revolting about it. No, I won’t be satisfied! My indignation remains intact. How have I deserved what has happened to me? And why has it happened?

  I’ve been trying to work, but it’s literally impossible. When one is prey to an unknown malady—and what a malady!—it occupies you entirely. Sitting before the blank canvas, palette in hand, I said to myself: I see things in the location where they are, but in the state that they will be in subsequently. Why then, can’t I see my canvas finished? I’d have nothing to do but paint over it! But I continue to see it as white, perhaps a little greyer than is natural; what does that imply? Of course! It’s because, continuing to see things where they are, I continue to see the colors that will cover the canvas on the palette where they still are. It would have been too convenient if my malady had been able to help me out!

  Unless, as I remain incapable of work, the canvas only remains blank because I shall never begin the painting! My own deductions are thus blocking my activity…

  Oh, my head!

  I had to go out, to see an intelligent optician, if the species exists. Knowing that it was no longer a matter of hallucination, I ought to have been calmer—but all day long, a new thought tormented me: I’m seeing things in the state they will be in subsequently, but how much later? In order to try to find out, I had an idea.

  Before dinner, I returned to the Boulevard Saint-Michel, to the shoe-shop. People were stopping to look at the window, where the charred shoes were no longer on display. The debris of ruined furniture was being brought out. So, my vision must be one day or two in advance.

  An unhealthy curiosity made me stare at the passers-by as I went home. In the crowd I counted three cadavers.

  A brief moment of hope: the tap-water was running clear. Was I cured? Alas, it was impossible to make the soap foam, since the foam has been long dissolved at the moment when I see it. Why the clear water, then? Because, collected by the filtration plants, gutter-water becomes limpid again after a few days…

  But in that case, my vision is making further progress into the future.

  I remain pale and panting.

  After an examination that seemed conscientious, Quirinez, a professor of ophthalmology at the Faculty of Medicine, certified that my eyes are in perfect order. It’s true that, in fear of being sent to Saint-Anne, I did not give him any explanation. Eyes perfect? Then it must be hallucination. I no longer understand…

  I no longer dare go out. Anxiety grips me at the thought of the unknown spectacles that might perhaps be offered to me, and before which my surprise might betray me. For appearing normal for as long as possible is the absolute condition that must be observed, if I want people to leave me in peace. I can no longer offer myself that luxury of the normal person—being eccentric! It’s necessary for me to hide from human beings the fact that I am not like them, since that is now true. Look out for myself! If not, the herd will take its revenge! It seems to me that they’re already suspicious of me. I’m not so stupid as to say to one of them, while tapping him on the shoulder: ‘You, old man, have no more than 48 hours to live!’ They haven’t stopped burning witches!

  But the walls of the solitude, within which I was once complacent because I knew that I had built them myself, resemble those of a prison now that they are imposed upon me. Universe, resplendent universe offered to my window, what did I not tell you, only a few days ago?

  I just re-read what I said, in this very journal. What burning straw my enthusiasm was! With a bitter smile, I turned the pages in reverse order, going back through the days. I wanted to kill myself—what a silly idea! I arrived at Dagerlöff’s chatter. What has become of him?

  Oh! An idea crossed my mind like a lightning-flash! A mere hypothesis, but my brain has been on fire ever since…

  When he brought me what was needed to cure my migraine…

  I can no longer remain still. I must see him, this very night.

  The animal was not at home. I waited on the landing for an hour. I shall go back tomorrow morning in order to set my mind straight. Will I be able to sleep?

  At 9 a.m., I bruised my fist again, fruitlessly, knocking beneath the visiting card that read: Christian Dagerlöff, genius. Battle-weary, I went to question the concierge.

  “Would you, by any chance, be Monsieur Poldonski?”

  “Yes.”

  “Monsieur Christian told me about your visit before departing on a voyage, and asked me to give you this letter.”

  “On a voyage? For how long?”

  “He didn’t say. He doesn’t talk much, you know.”

  This is the letter:

  Dear Monsieur Poldonski,

  The custom is to surround death with mystery. One does not advertize it. At the most, it is insinuated, in heavily veiled words, to the moribund questioner. Since the departure for the great voyage has always been thus vested with a somewhat clandestine character, it is necessary for me to respect that tradition when it is a matter of another great voyage—I mean the voyage in causality.

  I have told you in passing, to the extent permitted by your anxious levity and your ill-concealed incredulous irony, something about my endeavors. They have concluded; Parabacillus Dagerlöff, obtained by the growth of selected species cultivated in the marrow of Siberian hares, has adapted itself to human myelin.

  In this bacillus, the advancement in time—the same one that confers upon the Siberian hare the presentiment of the boyar shotgun or the muzjik snare, and ensures its salvation by flight or a clever detour—is a few seconds. In the improved conditions of culture that sufficed to secure the glory of the all-too-mortal Pasteur, the gene corresponding to the specific character of advancement is transmitted to the next generation in such a way that the advancement in time of the microbial colony increases with every generation. It must be added that the proliferation is particularly rapid in living myelin, and that the cultural milieu is then sufficiently impregnated to participate in the temporal advancement of the bacilli…

  A life’s work is summarized here in the space of a few lines, but these lines have an importance that has scarcely ever been equaled: they bring the means of the great escape! To the overturned imagination of the perceptive reader, they offer the view, as far as the eye can see, of a line of flight, as material as it is ideal, by which to escape the causal universe. They open the door of the fourth dimension! Time is vanquished!

  But it is not the time that is multiplied by the imaginary of the mathematician—that irremediably fictitious and abstract time—which has been put in our possession; it is biological time itself that it will become possi
ble to command in its guise, as if to lift a lid of the universal box, in order to offer life, until now prisoner of bleak and dismal causality, the key to the fields of infinity!

  What good, however, would it do to quit this world if one could not retain a point of contact permitting the transmission of the impressions sensed in the world beyond? The dead, who undertake that voyage in their radical and inept fashion, departing in their entirety, never come back to tell the tale of their adventure. It is therefore necessary only to depart along the line of time’s flight in detached pieces, so to speak, risking no more than one finger, one hand, or one sense: one gaze…

  Parabacillus Dagerlöff, which can only live in the neurons, offers precisely what is required in this regard. By accentuating its vegetative character, one can maintain it in the vicinity of the location of its seeding. Instead of spreading through the entire nervous system, it will remain localized…in the optic nerve, for example.

  For this, I needed an experimental subject, a man who was not, if I might put it thus, cold-eyed: a young man free of attachments, sufficiently alienated from the world not to oppose injurious resistance to the adventure; a man whom desire no longer attached to the flesh. I needed a man, in a word, already brought to the frontier of life and death, for whom a light push would suffice to send him sliding forth in the toboggan of the unknown. A man disposed to suicide would be very well suited to my project.

  Ought I to warn the man? To offer him the bargain frankly? Fearful of last minute changes of mind, I preferred to act with more discretion. The experimental device was, shall I say, hardly evident—so mere a matter as a simple compress to place over the eyes…the contamination of the optic nerves would begin immediately…the bacillus would proliferate at its ease…and slowly, without any noise or fuss, the gaze would set off toward the new horizons of a infinity unknowable until now…

  To you, the first voyager departing into causality, I, who remain on the departure quay, wave my checkered handkerchief, that of an inventor and forerunner. You are going into the future, entering into History, and if I add that, nevertheless, you will not be leaving the present, I shall have achieved that temporal salad from which I anticipate the ruination of familiar causality…

  The impatience that I experience to discover your impressions has given way, for the moment, to a certain prudence, which, in anticipation of the possible fits of an irritable character, commands me to put a little ordinary space between us. Given that I am only taking a brief excursion to the suburbs, while you are setting out boldly for the most open sea of all, I humbly abdicate all superiority in your regard, and declare myself, my dear Monsieur Poldonski, your admiring servant…

  The letter is here, on my table. I sense that I have not finished re-reading it. It is written with a goose-quill on exceedingly silky Chinese paper.

  Is it him or me who is mad?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  For two days, I have been hesitating over the best course of action to take. Go to see a doctor with Dagerlöff’s letter? He would laugh at me. Go to the Pasteur Institute to obtain information about the bacillus? The Institute isn’t far away…in fact, it’s so close that I might decide to go there. And that box, seen from without, with its little brick outbuildings, doesn’t look very threatening…

  A little while ago, haggard and disorientated, passing in front of the terrace of the Coupole, I was caught by Babar. He had a Rumanian friend with him, a hospital intern, a typical block of Oriental grease. I slipped unobtrusively into the flow of the conversation: “And, is one able to disinfect the optic nerve?”

  The other blew into his cheeks. “It wouldn’t do you holy daubers any harm, and perhaps you’d paint us tits with something other than Camembert!”

  He thought he was being funny; I was obliged to smile for politeness’ sake. And this was the response of life to the anguish of the invalid!

  To live with that poison! And what a poison! Just now, in the short journey from the bistro to the studio, I had crossed the path of a dozen cadavers! The bacilli filtering my vision must be communicating to it an advance that has already reached several weeks—for that much time must surely pass before all those people die…

  I can see the shadow of a padded cell projected on my walls…

  On awakening, I resume a life akin to a nightmare. For a moment, I still hope that I might find myself cured. Oh, I demand no more of my guardian angel—I only want to be a man like others, like the most stupid of those who, without knowing it, simply enjoy the pleasure of seeing the world as it is. But no, the malady is still there.

  I was ruminating in this fashion, sitting on my bed in a state of bleak stupor, when Armande arrived. Was it Sunday already? As, above all, I don’t want her to suspect anything, I pretended to be jovial and exuberant, but my cheerfulness rang false. I joked about my worn pajamas and the untidiness of my increasingly sordid apartment as I set the table for us to breakfast together. Before spreading out the tablecloth, I noticed a small patch of dust on the table, and tried to blow it away.

  “Is that how you treat 100-franc notes?” she said—and I saw her bend down to the floor, pick up the rectangle of dust, which miraculously held together, and set it down delicately on my plate. My surprise only lasted a second—the time to recall that banknotes are incinerated on their return to the Banque de France, and that I was seeing that one in the state in which it would be in a few months’ time. I shall have to be careful if I want to preserve the last of my money, preferring payment in coin.

  “It’s only paper, after all,” I said, casually, so as not to alert her attention—but my precaution was unnecessary; her thoughts were elsewhere. I saw her making little gestures, striking poses in front of the mirror, studying herself carefully. And to tell the truth, I thought that she was dressed less elegantly than usual; her jacket and skirt were stained, her blouse yellowed by the smoothing-iron, and the ladders in her stockings were plain to see. Suddenly, she turned to me and asked: “What do you think of my little outfit?”

  “Is it new?” My voice choked as I posed the question.

  “I wear it for the first time in your honor, and you don’t even notice!”

  Tears came to my eyes. The incident was especially telling. If I could no longer see the efforts that anyone made on my behalf, that was yet another part of life that had escaped me. I buried my head on her shoulder and, recovering her scent, keeping my eyes closed in order to caress her with blind hands, I assured myself that she was intact, fresh and firm. She declared with a joyous laugh that spring had made me very affectionate. I then leaned out to look at the spring—we were at the studio window. On the far side of the parking-lot, the branches of the plane-trees were decked with little withered yellow leaves, like debris on the end of a broom.

  “One scarcely notices spring in Paris.”

  “And those buds bursting forth in glossy little leaves!” she exclaimed.

  I had not yet realized that the spring greenery could only appear to me in the colors of autumn…

  It is necessary to fight. Not so much against the microbe as against depression. A painter I am, a painter I remain. I shall work through and against everything. I begged for an original point of view from which to see things, and I have it; involuntarily, but I have it. I shall paint it, this world, in its colors of decomposition and death—and I shall force my peers to proclaim my genius. Genius imposes its own vision. It only needs to be powerful—and mine is powerful enough, since I am its first victim. This neglected butcher’s stall, this stinking refuse-tip, which is nature in springtime for me, people shall see with my eyes. I shall force them to recognize the verity of the future. To work!

  The malady must make frightful progress from one night to the next.

  To reward myself for a morning’s work, I allowed myself a walk in the “rich neighborhoods.” Well, staring at the male and female passers-by, I saw nothing but a procession of tatterdemalions filing along the most aristocratic avenues. Flabby felt hats, jaundice
d and singed jackets, greasy and wrinkly trousers—all the men were dressed like tramps. But was I say about the women? Bundles of rags, drawers full of old clothes, protrusions of ambulatory mites! The most curious of all were the hats, like old lampshades quivering with innumerable tawdry ornaments, such as one sees on the heads of madwomen. I could have imagined that the city had been invaded by an army of scarecrows, but I knew that I alone was guilty. To confirm that, it was sufficient to look at the shop windows, where the same tattered and shredded assemblies were on display, which obviously could not be on offer in any but brand-new condition.

  Sometimes, the contrast between the rags and the measured deportment of the wearer, the “donkey bearing relics” attitude of a woman showing off a new dress, even drew a smile from me. Confronted with a tramp kissing the hand of an escapee from an asylum, who was getting out of her rattletrap like an empress, I could not restrain myself. They must have thought me a madman. I was inventing nothing, however; I was merely seeing things in the state that they would subsequently be in, and, thus bringing them back to their true value, I could judge them more sanely. What are these rags, these trappings, to which one pays respects, and of which one is so proud? What are these customs, this civilization, built on the crease in a trouser-leg and the carnation in a buttonhole?

  The art-dealers of the avenue were exhibiting their traditional little women ticking the breast of a spaniel or a parrot, all painted in white lead without their darker shades surpassing a sugary pink. Well, these St. Honorés of painting had taken on a certain patina—not a Rembrandesque patina, to be sure, but a veil of shadow that attenuated their processed-meat vulgarity. I drew closer. Cracks in the varnish like those I saw appearing could surely only appear after of a year or two? Was I already that far ahead?