Things and A Man Asleep (16 page)

You have hardly started living, and yet all is said, all is done. You are only twenty-five, but your path is already mapped out for you. The roles are prepared, and the labels: from the potty of your infancy to the bath-chair of your old age, all the seats are ready and waiting their turn. Your adventures have been so thoroughly described that the most violent revolt would not make anyone turn a hair. Step into the street and knock people's hats off, smear your head with filth, go bare-foot, publish manifestos, shoot at some passing usurper or other, but it won't make any difference: in the dormitory of the asylum your bed is already made up, your place is already laid at the table of the
poètes maudits
; Rimbaud's drunken boat, what a paltry wonder: Abyssinia is a fairground attraction, a package trip. Everything is arranged, everything is prepared in the minutest detail: the surges of emotion, the frosty irony, the heartbreak, the fullness, the exoticism, the great adventure, the despair. You won't sell your soul to the devil, you won't go clad in sandals to throw yourself into the crater of Mount Etna, you won't destroy the seventh wonder of the world. Everything is ready for your death: the bullet that will end your days was cast long ago, the weeping women who will follow your casket have already been appointed.

Why climb to the peak of the highest hills when you would only have to come back down again, and, when

you are down, how would you avoid spending the rest of your life telling the story of how you got up there? Why should you keep up the pretence of living? Why should you carry on? Don't you already know everything that will happen to you? Haven't you already been all that you were meant to be: the worthy son of your mother and father, the brave little boy scout, the good pupil who could have done better, the childhood friend, the distant cousin, the handsome soldier, the impoverished young man? Just a little more effort, not even a little more effort, just a few more years, and you will be the middle manager, the esteemed colleague. Good husband, good father, good citizen. War veteran. One by one, you will climb, like a frog, the rungs on the ladder of success. You'll be able to choose, from an extensive and varied range, the personality that best befits your aspirations, it will be carefully tailored to measure: will you be decorated? cultured? an epicure? a physician of body and soul? an animal lover? will you devote your spare time to massacring, on an out-of-tune piano, innocent sonatas that never did you any harm? Or will you smoke a pipe in your rocking chair, telling yourself that, all in all, life's been good to you?

No. You prefer to be the missing piece of the puzzle. You're getting out while the going's good. You're not stacking any odds in your favour or putting any eggs in any baskets. You're putting the cart before the horse, you're throwing the helve after the hatchet, you're counting your chickens before they're hatched and eating the calf in the belly of the cow, you're drinking your liquid assets, taking French leave, you are leaving and you are not looking back.

You won't listen to any more sound advice. You won't ask for any remedies. You will go your own way, you will look to the trees, the water, the stones, the sky, your face, the clouds, the ceiling, the void.

You remain near the tree. You don't even ask the rush of the wind in the leaves to become your oracle.

The rain comes. You stay indoors, you hardly set foot outside your room. You read aloud, all day long, following the lines of text with your finger, like a child or an old man, until the words lose their meaning, until the simplest phrase becomes cock-eyed and chaotic. Evening comes. You don't switch on the light and you remain motionless, sitting at the little table by the window with the book in your hands but no longer reading, listening distractedly to the sounds of the house, the creaking of the beams and the floorboards, your father's coughing, the cast-iron hotplates being fitted onto the wood-fired stove, the noise of the rain in the zinc valleys, a car passing, far away, the seven o'clock bus sounding its horn as it rounds the turning near the hill.

The summer visitors have all departed. The holiday homes are closed up. When you go into the village, the occasional dog barks at you as you walk past. Tattered posters, on the church square, by the town hall, the post-office, the laundry, are still advertising auction sales, dances, village fetes held long ago.

You still go for the odd walk. You tread the same old paths. You cross ploughed fields which leave thick layers of clay sticking to the soles of your boots. You get bogged down in the ruts in the pathways. The sky is grey. The views are obscured by blankets of mist. Smoke rises from a few chimneys. You are cold despite your lined pea-jacket, your boots, your gloves; you clumsily attempt to light a cigarette.

You venture further afield, towards other villages, across the fields and through the woods. You sit at the long wooden table of a grocery store-cum-bar where you are the only customer. You are served a cup of Bovril or an insipid coffee. Dozens of flies blacken the fly-paper that still hangs in a spiral from the enamelled lampshade. An uninterested cat is warming itself by the cast-iron stove. You study the shelves of tins, the packs of washing powder, the aprons, the exercise-books, the already out-of-date newspapers, the candy-pink postcards on which chubby soldiers give voice to the elevated sentiments inspired in them by some blonde sweetheart, the bus timetables, the racing results, the results of the Sunday football matches.

Flights of birds drift past high overhead. On the Yonne canal, a long barge with a metallic blue hull slips by, pulled by two big greys. You return on foot along the main road, in the darkness, cars roar past you in both directions, you are dazzled by their headlamps which, from the hollows of the hills, seem momentarily to be trying to light up the skies before bearing down on you.

Y
OU
RETURN
TO
P
ARIS
and the same room, the same silence. The dripping tap, the crowds, the streets, the bridges; the ceiling, the pink plastic bowl; the narrow bed. The cracked mirror in which the features that make up your face are reflected.

Your room is the centre of the world. This lair, this cupboard-like garret which never loses your smell, with its bed into which you slip alone, its shelf, its linoleum, its ceiling whose cracks and flakes, stains and contours you have counted a thousand times, the washbasin that is so tiny it resembles a piece of doll's-house furniture, the bowl, the window, the wallpaper of which you know every flower, every stem, every interlacement, details which - as you alone are able to state with absolute certainty - are never quite identical to each other, despite the virtual infallibility of printing methods; these newspapers that you read and re-read, that you will read and re-read again; this cracked mirror that has only ever reflected your face fragmented into three uneven, slightly overlapping, surface portions that habit almost allows you to ignore, forgetting the ghostly image of an eye in the middle of your forehead, or the split nose, or the perpetually twisted mouth, and retaining only a Y-shaped stripe, like the almost forgotten, partially erased mark of some old wound, a slash from a sabre or the lash of a whip; the shelved books, the ribbed radiator, the portable record-player sheathed in dark red pegamoid: thus begins and ends your kingdom, perfectly encircled by the hosts of ever-present noises - some friendly, some hostile - which are now all that keep you attached to the world: the dripping tap on the landing, the noises from your neighbour's room, his throat-clearing, the drawers which he opens and closes, his coughing fits, the whistling of his kettle, the noises of Rue Saint-Honoré, the incessant rumble of the city. From far away, the siren of a fire engine seems to be heading straight for you, then moving away, then drawing closer again. At the junction of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue des Pyramides the measured succession of car noises, braking, stopping, pulling away, accelerating, imparts a rhythm to time almost as surely as the tirelessly dripping tap or the bells of Saint-Roch.

Your alarm clock has been showing five-fifteen for a long time now. It stopped, probably when you were out, and you haven't bothered to wind it up again. Time no longer penetrates into the silence of your room, it is all around, a permanent medium, even more present and obsessive than the hands of a clock that you could choose not to look at, and yet slightly warped, out of true, somehow suspect: time passes, but you never know what time it is, the chimes of Saint-Roch do not mark the quarter- hours, or the halves, or the three-quarters, the traffic-lights at the junction of Rue Saint-Honoré and Rue des Pyramides do not change every minute, the tap does not drip every second. It is ten o'clock, or perhaps eleven, for how can you be sure that you heard correctly, it's late, it's early, the sun rises, night falls, the sounds never quite cease altogether, time never stops completely, even if it is now reduced to the merely imperceptible: a hairline crack in the wall of silence, the forgotten murmur of the drip- feed, almost indistinguishable from the beats of your heart.

Your room is the most beautiful of desert islands, and Paris is a desert that no-one has ever traversed. All you really need is your sleep, silence around you, your own silence, stillness. All you need is for days to begin and end, for time to pass, for your mouth to be shut, for the muscles in your nape, your jaws and your chin to slacken, for the rising and falling of your rib-cage, the beating of your heart to be the only evidence of your continuing and patient existence.

To want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep. To let yourself be carried along by the crowds, and the streets. To follow the gutters, the fences, the water's edge. To walk the length of the embankments, to hug the walls. To waste your time. To have no projects, to feel no impatience. To be without desire, or resentment, or revolt.

In the course of time your life will be there in front of you: a life without motion, without crisis and without disorder, a life with no rough edges and no imbalance. Minute by minute, hour after hour, day after day, season after season, something is going to start that will be without end: your vegetal existence, your cancelled life.

N
OW
YOU
LEARN
HOW
TO
LAST
. At times, you are the master of time itself, the master of the world, a watchful little spider at the hub of your web, reigning over Paris: you command the North by Avenue de l'Opéra, the South by the Louvre colonnade, the East and West by Rue Saint- Honoré.

At times, you attempt to solve the puzzle of a face which emerges, perhaps, from the complex play of shadows and blisters in a portion of the ceiling: eyes and nose, nose and mouth, a forehead uninterrupted by any hairline, or else it is the precise outline of the helix of an ear, the beginings of a shoulder and a neck.

There are a thousand ways to kill time and no two are the same, but each is as good as the next, a thousand ways of waiting for nothing, a thousand games that you can invent and then drop straightaway.

You have everything still to learn, everything that cannot be learnt: solitude, indifference, patience, silence. You must become unused to everything: you must lose the habit of going to meet those with whom you rubbed shoulders for so long, of taking your meals and your cups of coffee every day at the place that others have kept, sometimes defended, for you, of languishing in the insipid complicity of friendships that linger on but just won't die, in the opportunist and cowardly rancour of affairs that are coming apart at the seams.

You are alone, and because you are alone you must never look to see what time it is, never count the minutes. You must never again eagerly tear open your mail, never again be disappointed when all you find is advertising bumph inviting you to acquire, for the modest sum of seventy- seven francs, a cake set engraved with your monogram, or the treasures of Western art.

You must forget hope, enterprise, success, perseverance.

You are letting yourself go, and it comes almost easily to you. You avoid the paths which you followed for too long. You allow passing time to erase the memory of the faces, the telephone numbers and the addresses, the smiles and the voices.

You forget that you learnt how to forget, that, one day, you forced yourself to forget. Now you wander up and down Boulevard Saint-Michel without recognising anything, not seeing the shop windows, not seen by the streams of students who pass you by. You no longer enter the cafés, checking all the tables with a worried expression on your face, going into the back rooms in search of you no longer know whom. You no longer look for anyone in the queues which form every two hours outside the seven cinemas in Rue Champollion. No longer do you wander like a lost soul in the great courtyard of the Sorbonne, or pace up and down the long corridors waiting for the lecture-rooms to empty, or go off to solicit greetings, smiles or signs of recognition in the library.

You are alone. You learn to walk like a man alone, to stroll, to dawdle, to see without looking, to look without seeing. You learn the art of transparency, immobility, inexistence. You learn how to be a shadow and how to look at men as if they were stones. You learn how to remain seated, or supine, or erect. You learn how to chew every mouthful of food, how to rediscover the same inert

taste in every piece of food you raise to your mouth. You learn how to look at paintings in art galleries as if they were bits of wall or ceiling, and how to look at the walls and ceiling as if they were paintings whose tens and thousands of paths you follow untiringly, endlessly retracing your steps, as if they were merciless labyrinths, or a text that no-one will ever decipher, or decaying faces.

You plunge into Ile Saint-Louis, you take Rue Vaugirard and head towards Péreire, towards Château-Landon. You walk slowly, and return the way you came, sticking close to the shop fronts: the window-displays of hardware stores, electrical shops, haberdashers', second-hand furniture dealers. You go and sit on the parapet of Pont Louis- Philippe and you watch an eddy forming and disintegrating under the arches, the funnel-shaped depression perpetually deepening and then filling up, in front of the cutwaters. Further out, horse-drawn and motorised barges pass by, eventually shattering the play of water against the piers. Motionless anglers sit, the length of the embankment, their eyes following the inexorable drift of their floats.