Things and A Man Asleep (15 page)

Man sitting on a narrow bed, one Thursday afternoon, a book open on his knees, eyes vacant.

You are just a murky shadow, a hard kernel of indifference, a neutral gaze avoiding the gaze of others. Speechless lips, dead eyes. Henceforth you will be able to glimpse in the puddles, in the shop windows, in the gleaming bodywork of cars, the fleeting reflections of your decelerating life.

Absent-mindedly, you let your hand slip along the white- wood shelf. Water drips from the tap on the landing. Your neighbour is sleeping. The faint chugging of a stationary diesel taxi emphasises rather than breaks the silence of the street. Your memory is slowly penetrated by oblivion. Nothing has happened. Nothing will ever happen. The cracks in the ceiling trace an implausible labyrinth.

There were those empty days, the heat in your room, like a cauldron, like a furnace, and the six socks, indolent sharks, sleeping whales, in the pink plastic bowl. That alarm clock that did not ring, that does not ring, that will not ring to wake you up. You put down the open book beside you on the bed, you stretch out. The sluggish, dull, throb of torpor. You let yourself slip. You drop into sleep.

F
IRST
THERE
ARE
SOME
FAMILIAR
or obsessive images; playing cards spread out before you that you pick up and put down endlessly, without ever succeeding in ordering them in the way you would like, and the unpleasant impression of needing to finish, to succeed in this ordering, as if the revelation of some essential truth depended on it, but it is always the same card that you pick up, lay down and place in order, then pick up, lay down and place in order all over again; crowds walking up and down, coming and going; walls that surround you and in which you search for a concealed exit, the hidden button that will make the walls swing back or the ceiling lift off; forms which take shape then slip away, return then disappear, get closer then fade, flames or dancing women, shadow-play.

Later, memories that no longer quite manage to make their way through, proofs that no longer prove anything, except, perhaps, that an observatory in Aberdeen, or Inverness, has indeed succeeded in picking up signals from distant stars: was it the Andromeda Nebula, or the Göll and Burdach Constellation? Or the Corpora quadrigemina? The immediate, obvious solution to a problem that has always bothered you: the knight is never master in hearts unless the falsetto has been discarded. Disjointed words bearing a tangled meaning turn in a circle around you. What man imprisoned in a house of cards? What thread? What Law?

You must be precise, logical. Proceed methodically. There comes a point when you must, at all costs, be able to stop, reflect, really weigh up the situation. If there is a lake in the middle of your head, a possibility that is not only plausible, but quite normal, even though it may not be asserted without qualification, then it will take you a certain amount of time to reach it. There is no path, there never is a path, and, near the lakeside, you'll have to be careful of the tall grass which is always dangerous at this time of year. There won't be a rowing boat either, naturally, there hardly ever is, but you can swim across.

Subsequently, there obviously never was a lake. You remember quite distinctly that there never has been a lake. However, for quite some time now, sleep has been right in front of you, closer than it has ever been. It has its usual shape: the ball, or rather the bubble, the big, enormous bubble, transparent, of course, but not made of glass, it's more like soap in fact, but a very hard soap, not at all fatty, and only very slightly crumbly, or else, perhaps, like a very thin, very taut membrane. All of its characteristics are there. You don't even have to look for them in order to know this, it simply goes without saying, all you need do is enumerate them: at the top the bubble is turning pink, the bit in front of you is desquamating, at the side it is trying feebly to breathe; the rest belongs to the pillow around which you are wrapped, and to which you are securely lashed, thanks to the pressure that you exert without undue effort on the loop formed by the thumb and index finger of your right hand.

Now it's getting a lot more difficult. For one thing, it's becoming obvious that the bubble has cheated; it is not in the least bit spherical, but more fish-shaped, like a spindle-fish; what is more, its translucidity is of an altogether mediocre quality, scarcely superior to that of the pillow; finally, and above all, it is certainly not in the process of turning pink at the top. The only thing that was, perhaps, for certain, is this desquamation which has very quickly accelerated, and the breathing that was weak but which is now deep. But the most troublesome aspect is the temperature of the whole which has risen rapidly and will shortly reach a critical threshold — an eventuality which is doubtless heralded by these increasingly numerous desquamations.

The situation is awkward. You were wrong to pay attention to these details that were not even true; quite clearly, they were just traps, and now you are well and truly a prisoner inside the pillow where it is so hot and dark that you are wondering, not without a degree of anxiety, how you are going to go about extricating yourself. Fortunately, it's not the first time that you've found yourself in this situation; you know that you have only to find an undulation in the landscape, on the horizon, or a faint glimmer in the darkness, a lake, or a cool place you can slip into; and it so happens that you find yourself extraordinarily well-disposed to the idea of letting yourself slip. But search as you may, there is nothing before you, no horizon, no faint glimmer, no lake, nothing, just the dark, thick, stifling pillow. This doesn't surprise you, you were half expecting it. You notice that you weren't really shut in, that, all this time, sleep, real sleep, was behind you, not in front of you, behind you and so recognisable with its long grey beaches, its frosty horizon, its black sky shot through with white or grey streaks. You notice it all of a sudden, you recognise it immediately, but it is too late to reach it, as it always is; another time perhaps. There is something else you know as well, or rather something that you should have been able to foresee: you should never turn round, or at any rate not so quickly, or everything breaks, higgledy-piggledy, your pillow falls and takes your cheek with it, your forearm, your thumb and your feet topple over on top of each other: the tiny grey window takes its place again, close by, once more the dungeon with sloping walls takes shape, and locks shut. You are sitting on your bed.

L
ATER
YOU
LEAVE
P
ARIS
; you do not set off at random, you go to your parents' house in the countryside near Auxerre. It's a rather dead little village, where your parents live in retirement. You spent a few years there as a child, and a few vacations. The ruins of a castle stand atop a hill at the foot of which the village has grown up. Apparently, a beatific hermit once lived in a nearby cave which is now open to visitors. In the square, near the church, there is a tree reputed to be several hundred years old.

You stay there for several months. At mealtimes you listen to the news and the quiz programmes on the radio. In the evenings you play
belote
with your father, who wins. You go to bed very early, before your parents, at nine o'clock. Sometimes you read all through the night. You have rediscovered in your room, in the loft, hidden away in linen cupboards, the books you read when you were fifteen, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Jack London, and the piles of detective novels that you brought with you on each of your previous visits. You re-read them carefully, without skipping a line, as if you had completely forgotten them, as if you had never really read them.

You hardly say a word to your parents, you scarcely see them outside of meal-times. In the morning you lounge around in bed. You can hear them moving about the house, going up- and downstairs, coughing, opening drawers. Your father is sawing wood. A grocery van sounds its horn near the gate. A dog barks, birds sing, the church bells

ring. Lying in your high bed with the feather quilt pulled right up to your chin, you study the ceiling joists, a tiny spider with a grey, almost white abdomen, is spinning its web in the corner of a beam.

You sit down at the kitchen table with its waxed tablecloth. Your mother pours you a bowl of white coffee, and pushes the bread, the jam and the butter towards you. You eat in silence. She talks to you about her kidney problems, your father, the neighbours, the village. Madame Thevenon has sold her farm in return for an annuity. The Moreaus' dog has died. Work on the new motorway has already begun.

You go down into the village to run a few errands for your mother, to buy tobacco for your father and cigarettes for yourself. The farmers have deserted what was once a sizeable village. Trains used to stop here, there was a solicitor, a market; only two agricultural holdings remain. Nowadays the village is inhabited by retired people and city folk who come for the weekend and a month each summer, doubling or tripling the winter population.

You walk past the restored houses: shutters repainted in apple-green, adorned with wrought-iron
fleurs-de-lys
,
antique dealers' carriage-lamps, ornamental gardens, grottoes where no deities reside, a weekenders' paradise. Lawyers, grocers and civil servants trim the hedges, rake the gravel paths, fuss over their borders and feed the goldfish. The square is dotted with clusters of mopeds and scooters belonging to the youngsters. The
café-tabac
is full of people.

Every afternoon you go for a walk. You stick to the road at first, and then, beyond a disused quarry, you plunge into the forest. You pick up a branch that you roughly strip of its twigs. You walk beside fields of ripe wheat. You lop the heads off weeds with great clumsy swipes of

your stick. You do not know the names of the trees, nor of the flowers, the plants, the clouds. You sit down on top of a hill from where you can survey the whole village: your parents' house, somewhat on the outskirts, with its three roofs of different colours, the castle on about the same level as your eyes, the viaduct that used to carry the railway line, the laundry, the post office. On the white road far below, a huge lorry moves away like a galleon leaving port. A solitary peasant, in the middle of his field, guides a plough pulled by a dappled horse.

Bird-song rings out: chirps, roulades, raucous cries. The great trees tremble. Nature is there and it beckons you lovingly. You chew on blades of grass that you quickly spit out: you are not really inspired by the landscape, or moved by the tranquillity of the fields, you are neither irritated nor soothed by the silence of the countryside. You are only occasionally fascinated by an insect, a stone, a fallen leaf, a tree: sometimes you spend hours contemplating a tree, describing it, dissecting it: the roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, every leaf, every rib of every leaf, every branch again, and the unending play of the indifferent shapes that your eager gaze solicits or conjures up: a face, a town, a maze or a path, coats of arms and cavalcades. As your perception gets sharper, more patient and more versatile, the tree shatters and then reforms, a thousand shades of green, a thousand leaves, identical and yet all different. You think that you could spend your whole life in front of a tree, never exhausting it and never understanding it, because there is nothing for you to understand, just something to look at: when all is said and done, all you can say about this tree is that it is a tree; all this tree can say to you is that it is a tree, a root, then a trunk, then branches, then leaves. You can't expect to extract any other truth from it. The tree has no moral to offer you, no message to impart.

Its strength, its majesty, its life - if you still hope to draw some meaning, some courage, from these outworn metaphors - are only ever images, neat illustrations, as useless as the tranquillity of the fields, as the still waters which, reputedly, run deep, or the courage of the little paths that don't climb very high but do so all alone, or the smiling hillsides upon which bunches of grapes ripen in the sun.

And that is why the tree fascinates you, or astounds you, or calms you: because of the unsuspected and unimpeachable obviousness of the bark, the branches and the leaves. That is why, perhaps, you never go walking with a dog, because the dog looks at you, pleads with you, speaks to you. Its eyes brimming with tears of gratitude, its servile expression, its canine frolicking, constantly force you to confer on it the ignoble status of pet. You cannot remain neutral in the company of a dog any more than in the company of a man. But you will never hold a conversation with a tree. You cannot live in the company of a dog, because the dog is constantly calling upon you to make it live, to feed it, to stroke it, to be a man for it, to be its master, to be the god roaring the name - dog - that will make it instantly grovel on the ground. But the tree asks nothing of you. You can be the God of the dogs, God of the cats, God of the poor, all you need is a leash, a little tenderness, a little money, but you will never be master of the tree. All you can ever wish for is to become a tree in your turn.

It is not that you hate men, why would you hate them? Why would you hate yourself? If only membership of the human race were not accompanied by this insufferable din, if only these few pathetic steps taken into the animal kingdom did not have to be bought at the cost of this perpetual, nauseous dyspepsia of words, projects, great departures! But it is too high a price to pay for opposable

thumbs, an erect stature, the incomplete rotation of the head on the shoulders: this cauldron, this furnace, this grill which is life, these thousands of summonses, incitements, warnings, thrills, depressions, this enveloping atmosphere of obligations, this eternal machine for producing, crushing, swallowing up, overcoming obstacles, starting afresh and without respite, this insidious terror which seeks to control every day, every hour of your meagre existence!