Things and A Man Asleep (10 page)

They would wander by their walls of steel, tropical wood, glass and marble. In the central foyer, all along a cut-glass partition beaming millions of rainbows throughout the building, a waterfall would spout from the fifth- floor level, encircled by the dizzy spiral of twin aluminium stairwells.

Lifts bore them upwards. They went down curving corridors, walked up crystal steps, through luminous galleries where statues and flowers stood in lines as far as the eye could see, where limpid brooks flowed on beds of polychrome pebbles.

Doors opened in front of them. They came upon open- air swimming pools, patios, reading rooms, quiet rooms, theatres, aviaries, gardens, aquariums, tiny museums for their sole use where, on the four canted sides of a small room with cut-off corners, four Flemish portraits were hung. Some rooms were all rock, others all jungle; in others, the sea broke in waves; and in others, peacocks paraded. From the ceiling of a circular room hung thousands of oriflammes. Inexhaustible mazes echoed with sweet music; one room with an outlandish shape served no other purpose, it seemed, than to set off unending echoes. The floor of another room represented at different times of the day the different stages in a very complicated game.

In the enormous basement, as far as the eye could see, docile machinery worked away.

They would drift from marvel to marvel, from surprise to surprise. All they had to do was to live, to be there, for the world to offer itself to them whole. Their ships, their trains, their rockets crisscrossed the planet. The world was in their arms, with its wheat-covered counties, its fish-full seas, its peaks and its deserts, its flowery landscapes, beaches, islands, trees and treasures, with its huge and long-abandoned factories buried underground making the finest woollen cloths and the brightest silks for them alone.

They knew countless joys. They let themselves be swept along by galloping wild horses, through the long grass of great storm-tossed pampas. They climbed the highest mountains. Wearing skis, they swept down steep slopes dotted with enormous pine trees. They swam in glassy lakes. They marched in the driving rain, breathing in the smell of wet grass. They lay out in the sun. From an outcrop they saw hillocks covered in the flowers of the field. They walked through unsignposted forests. They made love in rooms thick with shade, thickly carpeted, on deep settees.

Then they dreamed of exquisite porcelain decorated with tropical birds, of leather-bound books printed in elzevier on hand-made Japanese vellum, with wide white margins and rough edges on which the eye could rest, of mahogany tables, of supple, comfortable, colourful silk or linen clothing, of bright and spacious rooms, of armfuls of flowers, of Bokhara rugs, of bouncing Dobermanns.

Their bodies, their movements were of infinite beauty, their eyes were serene, their hearts transparent, their smiles unruffled.

And in a short-lived apotheosis they saw gigantic palaces built from scratch. On levelled terrain thousands of bonfires were lit, millions of men came to sing
The Messiah.
On vast scaffolds, ten thousand brasses played Verdi's
Requiem
. Poems were picked out on mountainsides. Gardens sprang up in the desert. Whole towns were nothing but frescoes.

But these glittering visions, all these visions which came surging and rushing towards them, which flowed in unstoppable bursts, these vertiginous images of speed, light and triumph, seemed to them at first to be connected to each other in a surprisingly necessary sequence, in an unbounded harmony.lt was as if before their bedazzled eyes a finished landscape had suddenly risen up, a total picture of the world, a coherent structure which they could at last grasp and decipher. At first it felt as if their sensations were multiplied by ten, as if their faculties of sight and sense had been amplified to infinite powers, as if a magical bliss accompanied their smallest gesture, kept in time with their steps, suffused their lives: the world was coming towards them, they were going towards the world, they would go on and on discovering it. Their lives were love and ecstasy. Their passion knew no bounds; their freedom was without constraint.

But they were choking under the mass of detail. The visions blurred, became jumbles; they could retain only a few vague and muddled bits, tenuous, persistent, brainless, impoverished wisps. It was not a serene unity, but a brittle fragmentation, as if these visions had only ever been very distant and incalculably darkened reflections, illusory and allusive glimmerings fading away almost as soon as they were born, mere specks of dust: just the banal projection of their clumsiest desires, an almost insubstantial haze of paltry splendours, scraps of dreams they would never be able to grasp.

They thought it was happiness they were inventing in their dreams. They thought their imagination was unshackled, splendid and, with each successive wave, permeated the whole world. They thought that all they had to do was to walk for their stride to be a felicity. But what they were, when they came down to it, was alone, stationary and a bit hollow. A grey and icy flatland, infertile tundra. There was no palace at the desert gate, no esplanade for their horizon.

And from that desperate kind of quest, from that magical feeling of having for an instant almost been able to make it out, albeit dimly, from that extraordinary voyage, from that huge, stationary conquest, from those new-found vistas and those pleasures foretold, from all that was not perhaps impossible beneath their imperfect dream and their admittedly awkward and hobbled impetus which was nonetheless charged (perhaps to the point of inexpressibility) with new emotions and new needs, from all this, nothing remained. They were opening their eyes, hearing the sound of their own voices again, with the muddled mumbling of the man they were interviewing and the hum of the tape-recorder. They could see beside a gun-rack stacked with the shiny butts and gleaming barrels of five sporting rifles, right in front of them, the multicoloured jigsaw puzzle of a land registry chart, and at its centre they could pick out, almost without any astonishment, the nearly complete rectangle of the farmhouse buildings, the grey edging on the track, the quincunx dots marking the plane trees, the heavier lines indicating the main road.

Later on, they were themselves on the grey track lined with plane trees. They were themselves the little passing glint on the long black road. They were a tiny blot of poverty on the great sea of plenty. They looked around at the great yellow fields with their little red splashes of poppies. And they felt crushed.

PART TWO

I

They tried to run away.

You cannot live in a frenzy for very long. In a world which promised so much and delivered nothing, the tension was too great. They ran out of patience. They realised, one day, or so they thought, that they had to have a place to escape to.

Their lives in Paris were treading water. They had stopped advancing. And on occasions they could see themselves - outdoing each other in the abundance of mistaken details characteristic of all their dreams — as forty-year-old
petits-bourgeois
, with Jérôme running a team of hawkers (Family Protection, Soap for the Blind, Students in Need) and Sylvie keeping house, in a tidy little flat, with a small car, the same little family hotel where they would spend every holiday, and their television set. Or else, at the other extreme, which was far worse, as ageing Bohemians in polo-necks and cord trousers, sitting every evening on the same café terrace in Saint-Germain or Montparnasse, scraping a living from occasional bargains and deals, misers to the tips of their dirty fingernails.

They dreamed of living in the countryside, out of temptation's way. They would lead a calm and frugal life. They would have a white stone house, on the edge of a village, warm elephant-cord trousers, heavy shoes, anoraks, metal-tipped walking sticks and hats, and every day they would go for long walks in the forest. Then they would come back home, would make tea and toast, like the English do, put big logs on the hearth; they would play a quartet on the gramophone, which they would never tire of hearing, would read the great novels they had never had time to read, would have their friends to stay.

Such flights of rural fancy were frequent but rarely got to the point of being actual plans. On two or three occasions, to be fair, they did wonder what kinds of livelihood they might find in the country: there were none. The idea of becoming primary school teachers did occur to them once, but they found it immediately unappealing as they thought of crammed classrooms and days full of stress. They talked vaguely of becoming travelling booksellers, or of going off to an abandoned Provençal
mas
to make rustic pottery. Then they indulged in imagining that they would live in Paris for just three days a week, earning enough to live on comfortably for the rest of their time, which they would spend in the Department of Yonne or Loiret. But these embryonic departures never went very far. They never considered what was really possible, or rather, really impossible, about them.

They dreamed of giving up their jobs, letting go of everything, casting off on a new adventure. They dreamed of starting up again from scratch, of having another go, differently. They were dreaming of a clean break, of saying farewell.

The idea, all the same, was working away and taking root inside them. By mid-September 1962, on their return from a gloomy holiday spoiled by rain and running short of money, they seemed to have made up their minds. An advertisement in
Le
Monde
in the first days of October offered teaching jobs in Tunisia. It was not the ideal opportunity - they had dreamed of India, America, Mexico. It was an unglittering, down-to-earth offer, promising neither great fortune nor great adventure. They felt un- tempted. But they had a few friends in Tunis, old friends from school and college, and then there was the sun, the blue Mediterranean Sea, the promise of a different life, of a real departure, of a different kind of work. They agreed to apply. They were accepted.

Real departures are prepared long in advance. This one was messy. It was more like running away. They spent a fortnight rushing from office to office for medical certificates, for passports, for visas, for tickets, for luggage. Then four days before they were due to leave they learned that Sylvie, who had completed two years of her degree course, had been appointed to the Technical College at Sfax, one hundred and seventy miles from Tunis, whereas Jérôme, who had only a first-year pass by way of qualification, had been given a primary-school job at Mahares, twenty-three miles in the other direction.

It was bad news. They wanted to back out. Tunis, where accommodation had been booked for them, where they were expected, was where they had wanted to go, where they thought they were going. But it was too late. They had sub-let their flat, booked their seats, given their farewell party. They had been getting ready to go for a long time. And then Sfax, of which they had barely heard the name before, was at the end of the world, a desert, and, with their pronounced inclination for extremes, they even began to take pleasure in thinking that they were going to be cut off from everything, remote from everything, isolated as they never had been before. However, they agreed that a primary school post was, if not too much of a slide, at least too heavy a burden: Jérôme succeeded in having his contract cancelled: one salary would be enough to live on until he could find some sort of work on the spot.

And so they left. They were seen to the station, and, on the morning of 23 October, with four trunks full of books and a camp bed, they boarded the
Commandant-Crubellier
at Marseilles, bound for Tunis. The crossing was bad and the dinner was not good. They were sea-sick, took pills and slept soundly. In the morning Tunisia was in sight. It was a fine day. They smiled to each other. They saw an island which they were told was called
lie Plane
, then great long and narrow beaches, and, after they had passed La Goulette and entered the Lake of Tunis, flocks of migrating birds.

They were happy to have left. They felt they were emerging from a hell of crowded metro carriages, insufficient sleep, aching teeth and uncertainty. Their minds were clouded. Their life had been only a kind of endless tightrope walk leading nowhere: empty appetite, naked desire without bounds or props. They felt exhausted. They had left to go to ground, to forget, to wind down.

The sun shone. The boat moved slowly, silently, along the narrow channel. On the road quite close to them, people stood in open-topped cars and waved vigorously at them. In the sky there were little white clouds standing still. It was already hot. The panels beneath the handrail were warm to the touch. On the deck below them, sailors were stacking up deckchairs, rolling up the long tarpaulins which covered the holds. Queues lined up at the gangways for disembarkation.

They got to Sfax two days later, towards two in the afternoon, after a seven-hour train journey. The heat was overpowering. Opposite the tiny white and pink station building there lay an endless avenue grey with dust, lined with ugly palms and new-built blocks. A few minutes after the train had come in, after the sparse cars and bicycles had left, the town returned to a state of total silence.

They left their cases in left luggage. They went down the avenue, which was called Avenue Bourguiba. After

about three hundred yards they came upon a restaurant. A sizable wall-mounted adjustable ventilator hummed jerkily. On greasy tables with oil-cloth tablecloths a few dozen flies had congregated; a stubble-chinned waiter nonchalantly flicked them away with a napkin. For two hundred francs they had a meal of tuna salad and veal cutlet.

Then they looked for a hotel, booked a room, had their cases brought over. They washed their hands and faces, lay down for a moment, changed, and went back down. Sylvie went to the Technical College, Jérôme waited outside on a bench. Towards four o'clock, Sfax began slowly to reawaken. Hundreds of children appeared, then veiled women, policemen dressed in grey poplin, beggars, carts, donkeys, spotless
bourgeois
.