My anger gave way to a mad rage. I wanted not only to kill him, but to see him die. But how can one see a skeleton die? It’s necessary to break it, to tear that heap of bones and vertebrae to pieces. I ran to the lumber-closet where my tools were kept. When I came back with a rusty hammer and a chipped saw, the skeleton had disappeared…
It had got up by itself, and the studio door, still open, showed me which way it had gone. I stood there breathless, leaning into the darkness over the stair-well…
Had the wretch simulated the fall in order to create an opportunity to flee? Had he divined from my behavior, in spite of everything, that my sight had been affected? At any rate, given how inept I had been, he now knew my intentions in his regard…
But why do I see him in a skeletal state? A cadaver, like the others, fair enough—but a skeleton? Is it because I am going to kill him?
No. It’s simply that my malady has made more progress, and the apparent erosion of the world has been further accentuated for me. I encountered several skeletons in the course of a walk through the poor neighborhoods. Dagerlöff was merely the first that I saw, that’s all.
I said the poor neighborhoods, on the fringe of the fortified zone—where, departing from the most sordid present, my eye is able to encounter the image of the most advanced decrepitude. Doubtless, people die in Passy as well as Belleville, but all the ambulant cadavers I encountered in the vicinity of the Etoile were the cadavers of the rich, cadavers who will be placed in oak coffins or leaden biers, defended for a long time against the worms—while the cadavers of poor people, ill-protected by pine or buried directly in the earth, attain the purity of the ossuary more rapidly, and my advancement is sufficient already to see them in a skeletal state.
The first one that I saw was moving alongside the ditches of Vincennes with a slightly limping gait. Fortunately, Dagerlöff’s visit had prepared me; otherwise I might have thought in terms of a fantastic resurrection, the commencement of the Last Judgment. I had to say to myself: “If he were dead, he would be in the cemetery, underground; I wouldn’t see him. So, since I see him here, upright and walking, it’s obviously a living being with which I am dealing.” My criterion for distinguishing the living from the dead could no longer be based on their external appearance, it had to rest solely on movement. When it moves, it’s alive; when it no longer moves, it’s dead. Noble simplicity!
I stopped to speak to my first skeleton, to chat with him. He was a former mechanic fallen into poverty, a rag-picker, a street-singer, something of a jack-of-all-trades. I don’t know why he inspired more sympathy in me than an ordinary living person—and I found it amusing to converse with a skeleton who joyously raised an ulna over a bar. By force of habit, I spoke to him in the imperfect tense, as if he were already dead. He was not offended, thinking that I was alluding to the times of his splendor, when he earned 100 francs a day working for Renault. I cannot describe the color of his eyes or hair, but one of the fingers of his right hand had been cut off—one bone lacking on the glass he was holding. I wondered whether he was fat or thin, and, not daring to touch him, I asked him the question indirectly. He passed his phalanges in front of his iliac bone, like someone thumping his chest.
“Life makes one thin,” he said.
Never had a skeleton seemed to me to speak so truly. We parted as good friends. Appearances did not put the usual obstacles between us.
On the return journey, I encountered two more of them: one fishing with a line in the Saint-Martin canal, the other running for a bus. I experienced no surprise; at the end of the day, it’s a habit I’ll acquire. Skeletons appear to me to be simpler, nicer lads, poorer chaps than the others. They wear their destiny with a humble dignity of which I would not have thought humans capable. They reconcile me to some extent with the human species.
This evening, reflecting on all this, I said to myself: “When you no longer have a sou, you can get a job with a medical radiographer!”
The number of skeletons is increasing. I study them curiously. They are now appearing in the privileged quarters. Yesterday, in the Rue Royale, I couldn’t help laughing: a skeleton walked toward me wearing a sumptuous sable cape over its shoulders! The animal-fur had lasted longer than the flesh of the beautiful woman, that’s all—but the contrast was irresistible. I was face to face with a fashionable lady.
In the new state in which I see them, it will be necessary for me to learn to distinguish men from women.
I also see the skeletons of dogs, a trifle hairy—which confirms that hair maintains its integrity longer than flesh.
In front of me, in the Rue la Boétie, walked a skeleton whose bearing and urgency I honestly admired. Gradually, I have become a connoisseur. The play of the joints was supple; the curvature of the vertebral column rose up faultlessly; a binocular-case beat his side: a handsome sportsman. Momentarily, he turned his head and I uttered a cry. In its orbit one eye—and one alone—was gazing at me: an eye in which, naturally, all the expressive power of the individual was concentrated. It shot me a cold, icy and penetrating glance, making me shiver.
“What’s the matter with you?” an insulting voice said to me.
My gaze could not tear itself away from that cyclopean eye. Finally, a tip of the hat freed me from the mutilated glory. There went a man who does not suspect that the most durable part of himself is the glass eye that he encloses within his eyelid!
On examining them more closely in bright sunlight, a light mist, as transparent as gelatin, surrounds the skeletons, marking the location of their actual flesh before it becomes that God-knows-what which has no name in any language, but in which guise I see it.
By their shadows on the sidewalk, I can distinguish men from women.
Taking the Metro to come back from Dagerlöff’s lodgings—I wanted to settle his account, but he wasn’t at home; he was suspicious—I had to spend an hour crowded in a compartment where there were already four skeletons and a rather large number of cadavers. Instinctively, I maneuvered in order not to be pressed up against one of the skeletons—a legitimate apprehension and an instinctive repulsion, also a vague fear of catching something…but the cadavers with the mingled debris of clothes, corsets, suspenders and the ribs of umbrellas into the midst of which I was plunged were even more repulsive. I was obliged to make us of my usual means of defense: I closed my eyes. Then, through the medium of my other senses, I found myself immersed once again in the warm, fraternal human bath of bodies, whose existence I had forgotten. A kind of blissful languor took hold of me. I found life that was softly upholstered, in harmony with my own flesh…
Why had I cursed it before?
From time to time, however, it was necessary for me to open my eyes to read the names of the stations. Then, I found the dead who encircled me, level with my face. A shiver of horror ran through me. Where was the truth?
There were no living beings except for me and a little girl of 14 or 15, with a frightful woman’s face. All things considered, I’d prefer to see nothing but skeletons. They’re more sterile, more chaste, more British than those who are still meaty.
I’m starting to wish for an aggravation of my curse!
It seems to me that an eternity has gone by since I could see my acquaintances in the neighborhood; that’s not true, but, at the same time, it’s perfectly true. I was passing the Dôme at the hour for aperitifs, and I didn’t recognize anyone. Someone called out to me, and I turned round: a skeleton was waving to me. Who was it? How does one recognize the skeleton of a friend?
In order not to give myself away, I shook the handful of bones that was held out to me. “You’re a prize fool!” By the banal vulgarity of the exclamation, I recognized Babar—a Babar who had lost his trunk, whose nasal bone was no longer a sufficient signal. He attacked me amiably: “Solitude doesn’t suit you. Your face is dirty.”
“If you could see your own as I see it…”
I had the advantage, but he didn’t know it.
“It seems that you’v
e taken up photography?”
“How do you know?”
He could only have found that out from Armande. Curiously enough, though, I didn’t feel any jealousy. To avenge myself, it was sufficient to look at him, to see his skeleton. He was dead—what did it matter what his flesh might have done? I chatted to him, as with a shade in the borderlands of the Elysian Fields, about facts and memories, the trivia of the terrestrial epoch that was being disembarrassed of all noxiousness. Had Armande deceived me with him? The matter only retained a vague anecdotal interest, affecting me no more than the infidelities of Cleopatra.
The revelation of my sentimental indifference calmed me down so much that I drank my aperitif in long draughts, like a glass of the water of Lethe. Thus, without being aware of it, I had taken a decisive step in the direction of detachment and serenity. I had raised myself above the stupidities of sentimental life. The ordeal I had undergone had had its good side; if my gaze had grown distant, by the same token, my mind had been purified. I floated far above the wretched pettiness that occupied the lives of the occupants of the terrace, whose hearts and kidneys were sounded by my gaze only to encounter nothingness. In all those cranial cavities, the brains might be racked to boiling point; nothing remained of them, and I could now reduce all those turbulences to their real structure: in a vague décor of rusty chairs, pulverized marble, beneath a tattered canvas awning, future candidates for the ossuary were frantically agitating their humeri and tibias with the incoherence of poor optical telegraphs with broken arms, and that was all…
Will my mind attain the altitude necessary to the blooming of its genius?
There was another skeleton with us who addressed me informally and accompanied me to my door; I didn’t know who it was.
This morning, my face in the mirror frightened me. I had to take a photo of myself to reassure me: I’m a little thin, and my eyes are sunken in their orbits, but no grave symptom is visible in the snapshot. In the mirror, however, what a sight! I could believe that I’m looking at a mummy. The skin is clinging to the bony structure; the hair is sticking to the temples; wrinkles are hollowing out multiple parentheses on both sides of my mouth. At frequent intervals, I interrupt my work to go look at myself. It seems to me that, from one minute to the next, my condition is getting worse. Evidently, the microbes are proliferating incessantly and my vision is not progressing in fits and starts but sliding in continuous fashion toward the future. On a familiar object, as on my face, I can follow that progression; I can see myself aging with the naked eye, as in a speeded-up film.
Horror! I can see myself not only getting older, but dying! I only understood that a moment ago. The alteration of my features is getting worse at too rapid a pace, I am certainly reaching my terminus—I mean that I am seeing myself on the very day on which, in due course, my face, passing from life to death, will undergo an accelerated cycle of transformations. Beads of sweat form on my brow. And it’s real sweat; I can feel it by touching it…
Yes, it’s my death-throes that I’m witnessing—death-throes whose spectacle is presented to me in the midst of life, in full health…
After surges of fear and a few moments of mad agitation in the studio—stupid ideas like calling someone, going to find a doctor, breaking the mirror in order not to see myself any longer, singing at the top of my voice in order to persuade myself that I’m not going to die—I calm down and become rational…
Evidently, I’m dying, but that happens to everyone, and, above all, I shall not really die until much later—if only I knew exactly how far I am in advance! And since it’s given to me to witness my own death-throes, it’s necessary not to miss such a spectacle; it’s necessary to watch it calmly.
I’ve placed my desk, with paper and a pen, in front of the wardrobe mirror. I’m sitting comfortably, my face well-lit. I have only to raise my eyes to see myself in the mirror. I can’t let myself down. I want to seize the moment in which I pass from life to death. A strange death-bed!
My waxen complexion is becoming greyer. Beneath my strangely jutting cheekbones, ashen patches are appearing, which enlarge like a charcoal shadow under the finger that blurs it. My mouth is slightly open and my lower jaw tends to drop as soon as I’m no longer holding it up. Was there ever a more lucid moribund?
From minute to minute, the swollen dullness of my eyes becomes ever blacker. The sides of the nose become pinched. The skin of my cheeks wrinkles like an elephant’s trunk and takes on the same color. By contrast, my exceedingly blanched lips describe a kind of halo around my mouth, which opens like a flaccid buttonhole; I can’t see the drool, but I divine it. According to these symptoms, what sort of death might I be undergoing? I wonder, and the spectacle is so distressing that I’m perspiring like a fountain. I can’t see the drops of sweat, but I can hear them falling on to the paper, where, although they remain invisible to me, they nevertheless dissolve my ink here and there, which I see suddenly spreading out. What a struggle! Oh, dying isn’t pretty.
No pity tempers the morbid curiosity with which my gaze fixes itself upon the spectacle that I am granting myself. On the contrary, I have to stop myself laughing. Will death—my death—be like that? No majesty; I find myself as vile as a piece of meat beginning to decompose. The swollen veins of the temples are a dark violet, one might take them for leeches. The greying eyebrows are agglutinated, like gross dirty paintbrushes that would like to be dipped in the hollow tumblers of the eyes. An occasional frisson passes over the skin of the forehead, so thin and tender that I almost expect to see it crack. It’s still struggling, my old visage!
Five minutes have just gone by. Life is resistant.
A mute drama, a tragic pantomime of flesh at war with itself. I read on my face, as if on a musical score, the unfolding of a theme of which I can hear nothing—which is to say that I cannot sense within my flesh the pain which must be accompanying it. I see the grimaces and nothing more; it’s necessary to interpret them. One might believe that a mosquito were tickling my skin here and there—but it’s death’s dart that’s teasing me. I’m dying, and I’m making jokes!
The denouement must be getting close. Death takes too long, even speeded up. If I’m not dead in five minutes, I’ll light a cigarette blindly, to kill time…
Are you giving up the ghost, you old beast?
No, I’m still defending myself. I don’t want to spend the entire afternoon watching myself die though! Me, who has always had a horror of all the tedious ceremonial buffoonery that surrounds death! Fortunately, I’m spared the vision of the funereal apparatus. No candles, no priest, no final hand-holding on the bedclothes. Only my mug. A musical composition reduced to the essential, to a soloist.
What will I be thinking when I really have the face that I can see?
Will I recognize, as I feel them internally, the little spasmodic shivers that I can see being born near my temples, descending through the old skin of my jowls to the tucked-up lips which reveal glimpses of my gums and yellow stumps of teeth? Will I recognize myself at the final moment? Will I be able to say to myself: “It’s the end” in spite of the assurances of “You’re getting better” and “You’ll be on your feet in a week” that people will not fail to lavish upon me? Here, at least, I’m dying calmly, without affectation, without commentary, in silence and perfect peace. I strip the spectacle of all its spiritual resonances, only providing myself with the sight of myself.
It can’t go on much longer now. I grow impatient over the duration of my dying, as if it were a matter of an ordinary death. For two pins, I’d go back to painting while I wait for it to be over—but I don’t want to miss my last breath.
Suddenly, a real anguish grips me. My hand trembles, to the point at which I can’t carry on writing—what if, once I’m dead, I can no longer see anything? The dead are plunged into eternal darkness. In a moment, since I shall be dead, I might go blind. An atrocious prospect! Having reached the end of my tether, doubtless more rapidly for not having anticipated it, but having reach
ed it all the same, I must, logically, enter into darkness. I’m arriving at the end of the film that was granted to me…
Autosuggestion? It seems to me that a shadow is already forming around me. In a moment, I shall be dead, these are my last glances, my last moments of light…
Look, quickly, look at the sky and the Sun, the light, transparent atmosphere…
No, it’s necessary that my final gaze should be reserved for myself.
Oh, I can no longer contemplate myself with mocking detachment. The anguish that the mask shows in the glass, I feel as my own now, in every fiber of my being. It torments my mind. My sight is going to slip away, flee the time of people and things. My eyes, my poor eyes! Something vitreous appears in their orbs. Their fixity scares me. It’s the end; I sense it. I see my own gaze become glaucous, seek itself, flee. I’d like to capture that light, the image of myself that is sinking behind the plane of the mirror. I plunge feverishly in pursuit of the gaze that is drawing further away, whose brightness is fading like a star at sunrise. Sun of death, halt! I want to catch hold of myself on the brink of the gulf. My gaze is sinking, like a plumb-line. Will my eyes plunge as rapidly as that fleeting ray which is becoming extinct? My eyelids are no longer fluttering. The pupil dilates, dilates, opening on abyssal depths. My taut features relax. As abrupt as a blade, a veil falls before my eyes. I’m dying…I’m dead…
O joy! I can still see!
I’m dead, but I can see! The mirror sends back my cadaverous face, my eyes fixed and vitreous, my complexion frightful, my features still marked by the struggles of the final agony. I see myself dead; never was a spectacle so dear to my heart, for if I can see myself, I can see, and I still have the light…
I weep invisible tears of joy.
The Eye of Purgatory Page 19