Things and A Man Asleep (17 page)

Sitting outside a café with a glass of beer or a coffee in front of you, you watch the street. Cars, taxis, vans, buses, motorbikes and mopeds pass by in compact clusters, separated by occasional brief lulls: distant echoes of the traffic lights that regulate the flow of vehicles. On the pavements, continuous but much more fluid, the double bands of pedestrians stream past. Two men carrying identical imitation leather document cases pass by each other, with the same weary gait; a mother and daughter, children, old ladies carrying heavy shopping bags, a soldier, a man weighed down by two heavy suitcases, and still others, with packages, newspapers, pipes, umbrellas, dogs, paunches, hats, prams, uniforms, some of them almost running, others

dragging their feet, stopping in front of the shop windows, greeting each other, bidding farewell, overtaking or simply passing each other by, old and young, men and women, happy and unhappy. Groups, continually disbanding and reforming, pile up at the bus-stops. A sandwich-man hands out advertising leaflets. A woman tries in vain to flag down a passing taxi. The siren of a fire-engine or a police car comes towards you, growing louder.

A breakdown lorry roars past on its way to some unknown emergency. You know nothing of the laws which preside over the meeting of all these people, these people who do not know each other and whom you do not know, in this street that you are visiting for the first time in your life and where you have no business to attend to, except to watch the crowds coming and going, surging forward, stopping. All these feet on the pavements, all these wheels on the road, what are they all doing here? Where are they all going? What calls them together? Why do they return? What kind of force, or mystery, makes them place first the right foot, then the left, on the pavement, with a coordination that could scarcely be more efficient? Thousands of futile actions come together in the same instant in the too-narrow field of your almost neutral vision. They extend their right hands simultaneously and give a crushing hand-shake, their mouths emit apparently meaningful messages, their speech is punctuated by expressive mimes: their hands flutter, they contort their cheeks, noses, eyebrows, lips; they get out their diaries, pass each other by, greet, berate, congratulate, jostle each other; they head towards you without seeing you, and yet you are just a few inches away, sitting on the terrace of a café, and you do not take your eyes off them.

You drift around. You imagine a classification of streets,
quartiers
, apartment blocks: the crazy
quartiers
, the dead
quartiers
, the market streets, the dormitory streets, the cemetery streets, the peeling façades, the worn façades, the rusty façades, the concealed façades.

You walk round the fenced gardens, overtaken by children clattering an iron or wooden ruler against the palings as they run past. You sit down on the benches with green slats and cast-iron lion-paw ferrules. Disabled, ageing park-keepers pass the time of day with nannies of a different generation. With the tip of your shoes you trace circles on the sparsely sandy ground, or squares, or an eye, or your initials.

You discover streets where cars never pass, in which it appears that practically nobody lives, streets with a single ghost shop, a ladies' fashion shop, its window hung with net curtains and containing a display that seems to have been there for ever: the same pale mannequin faded by the sun, the same trays of dress-buttons, the same fashion plates which, nevertheless, bear this year's date; or a mattress maker displaying his springs, his olive-wood bed-legs in the shape of a ball or a spindle, his various grades of horse-hair and ticking, or perhaps a cobbler in his little recess which serves as a workshop, and whose door consists simply of curtains made from multicoloured plastic beads threaded on lengths of nylon line.

You discover the arcades: Choiseul, Panoramas, Jouffroy, Verdeau. You discover their stores selling scale models, pipes, paste jewellery, stamps, the shoe-shine boys and hot- dog stands. You read, one after the other, the faded cards displayed in a typesetter's window: Doctor Raphaël Crubellier, Stomatologist, Graduate of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, by appointment only, 'Marcel-Emile Burnachs Ltd.
Tout pour le Tapis;
Monsieur and Madame Serge Valène, n, Rue Lagarde, 214 07 35; Collège Geoffroy

Saint-Hilaire Old Boys' Association Annual Dinner, Menu:
Les Délices de la mer sur le lit des glaciers, le Bloc du Périgord aux perles noires, la Belle argentée du lac.

In the Luxembourg Gardens you watch the pensioners playing bridge,
belote
or
tarot.
On a bench close by an old man stares into space for hours on end; he is mummified, perfectly still, with his heels together and his chin leaning on the knob of the walking-stick that he grips tightly with both hands. You marvel at him. You try to discover his secret, his weakness. But he appears to have no weak point. He must be as deaf as a post, half-blind and verging on the paralytic. But he doesn't even dribble, or move his lips, he hardly even blinks. The sun describes an arc about him: perhaps his vigilance consists solely in following its shadow; he must have markers placed long in advance; his madness, if he is mad, consists in believing that he is a sundial. He resembles a statue, but he has an advantage over statues in that he is capable of getting up and walking, if he so desires. He also resembles a human being, despite his head which is more birdlike than human, and his trousers hitched right up to his sternum, and his primary school teacher's butterfly-bow, but he has this ability, denied to other men, of being able to remain as motionless as a statue, for hours on end, with no apparent effort. You would like to be able to do this yourself, but - and this is probably one of the effects of your being so young and inexperienced in the art of being old - you get restless too quickly: you let your eyes wander in spite of yourself, your foot starts scuffing the sand, you are continually crossing and uncrossing your fingers.

Still you keep walking, wherever your feet take you. You get lost, you go round in circles. Sometimes you set yourself derisory goals: Daumesnil, Clignancourt, Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr or the Postal Museum. You wander into bookshops and leaf through a few books without reading them. You go to art galleries, doing a complete round, stopping conscientiously in front of every painting, leaning your head to the right, squinting, moving up close so as to be able to read the title, or the date, or the artist's name, stepping back to get a better view. On your way out, you sign the book with large illegible initials accompanied by a false address.

You sit at a table at the back of a café and read
Le
Monde
,
line by line, systematically. It is an excellent exercise. You read the headlines on the front page, the foreign reports, the short items on the back page, the classifed advertisements: situations vacant, employment wanted, sales representation, business opportunities, properties and estates, land, flats (for sale), flats (new developments), flats (wanted), offices to let, commercial property, businesses for sale, investments, partnerships, tuition, annuities, cars, lock-up garages, pets, second-hand, receptions, births, engagements, marriages, obituaries, acknowledgements, auctions at the Drouot Sales Room, lectures and meetings, university
vivas
; the crossword which you practically solve in your head ( cry, we hear, in one's cups: wine; a demonstrative in the sentence: these; you won't find this chopper in your knife-drawer!: egg-beater; a number boil wildly in your tank: Mobil; distraught armadillo loses fifty-love to the commander: admiral); the weather forecast; radio and television, theatre and cinema programmes, the stock market; the pages covering: travel, society, food, the economy, books, sport, science, the universities, theatre, medicine, women, the regions, education, religion, aeronautics, legal affairs, the unions, world affairs, foreign news, French politics, home affairs, news in brief, the in-depth specials stretching over three or four issues, supplements devoted to a country or a region or a particular product, the display advertisements.

Five hundred, a thousand pieces of information have passed in front of those eyes of yours, eyes so scrupulous and attentive that they even noticed the number of copies printed, and checked, once again, that this edition was produced by workers who are members of, and regulated by, the BVP and the OJD. But your memory has carefully avoided retaining any of this. You read with an equal lack of interest that Pont-à-Mousson was weak and that steel was losing ground whilst the New York market remained steady, that one may have complete confidence in the experience of the oldest credit bank in France and its network of specialists, that the damage caused in Florida by typhoon Barbara would cost three billion dollars to repair, that Jean-Paul and Lucas are proud to announce the arrival of their little sister Lucie: reading
Le
Monde
is simply a way of wasting, or gaining, an hour or two, of measuring once again the extent of your indifference. All hierarchies and preferences must crumble and collapse. You are still capable of being amazed by the way in which the combination, according to a few ultimately very simple rules, of thirty or so typographic signs is able to generate, every day, these thousands of messages. But why should you eagerly devour them, why should you bother deciphering them? All that matters to you is that time should pass and that nothing should get through to you: your eyes follow the lines, deliberately, one after the other.

Indifference to the world is neither ignorance nor hostility. You do not propose to rediscover the robust joys of illiteracy, but rather, in reading, not to grant a privileged status to any one thing you read. You do not propose to go naked, but to be clad, without this implying either elegance or neglect; you do not propose to let yourself starve to death, but simply to feed yourself. It is not exactly that you seek to accomplish these actions in total innocence, for innocence is such a loaded term: but merely, simply (if this 'simply' can still mean anything) to relegate these actions to some neutral, self-contained territory, a space cleansed of all value-judgements, but not, especially not, a functional space: the functional is the worst, the most insidious, the most compromising of all values. No, let this space be self-evident, factual, irreducible. Let there be nothing else to say except: you read, you are clothed, you eat, you sleep, you walk, let these be actions or gestures, but not proofs, not some kind of symbolic currency: your dress, your food, your reading matter will not speak in your stead, you have had enough of trying to outsmart them. Never again will you entrust to them the exhausting, impossible, mortal burden of representing you.

From now on, when you eat standing up at the counter of La Petite Source or La Bière or Roger La Frite, it is rather like what psychophysiologists call "nutritional intake": you ingest, once or twice a day, rarely more, a fairly precisely calculable compound of proteins and glucosides, in the form of a piece of grilled beef, strips of potato quick-fried in boiling oil, and a glass of red wine. In other words it's a steak, sometimes called a minute steak, or even a rump steak, but it is definitely not a tournedos, and chips that no-one would dignify with the name French fries, and a glass of red wine of uncertain, not to say dubious, origin, and entirely unguaranteed quality. But your stomach can no longer tell the difference, if it ever could, and neither can your palate. Language has proved more resistant: it took a while for your meat to stop being thin, tough, stringy, for your chips to stop being greasy and soft, and the wine sticky or vinegary. It took a while for these eminently pejorative adjectives, which at first evoke the sad fare of the poorhouse, food for tramps, soup-kitchens, suburban fun-fairs, gradually to lose their substance, and for the sadness, the misery, the poverty, the need, the shame that had become inexorably attached to them - this fat-become-chip, this hardness-become-meat, this bitterness-become-wine-to stop hitting you, to stop leaving their mark on you. Similarly, it took a while for you to stop being convinced by the signs which are their exact opposite, the noble signs of abundance, feasting and merry-making: the bloody, succulent thickness of the 'sides' of Charolais or the 'slabs' of beef, of the finest fillet or porterhouse steaks, the golden crispness of straw potatoes, or match-stick potatoes, or soufflé potatoes, or
gratin dauphinois
, the bouquet of the fine wine in its wicker basket. Never again will your plate play host to any hallowed energy, and no divine nectar will sparkle in your glass. No exclamation marks punctuate your meals. You eat meat and chips and you drink wine. The immeasurable distance between a lavish Côte de boeuf de La Villette and the full-course menu that you order every day, as soon as you enter, from the counter at La Petite Source, no longer has any power over you.

C
OME
RAIN
OR
SHINE
, come fair weather or foul, whether the wind gusts or nary a leaf stirs on the trees, still you keep walking; whether dawn switches out the streetlamps or dusk turns them on again, whether you are swamped by the crowds or alone in a deserted square, still you keep walking, drifting.

You devise complicated itineraries, bristling with rules which oblige you to make long detours. You go and see the monuments. You count the churches, the equestrian statues, the public urinals, the Russian restaurants. You go and look at the major building works on the banks of the river, at the gates of the city, and the gutted streets that resemble ploughed fields, the pipe-laying, the blocks of flats being razed to the ground.

You go back to your room and collapse onto your too- narrow bed. You sleep, like a simpleton, with your eyes wide open. You count and you organise the cracks in the ceiling. The conjunction of shadows and stains, and the variations of adjustment and orientation of your gaze, produce effortlessly, slowly, dozens of nascent shapes, fragile coalitions that you are able to grasp only for a fleeting second, fixing them on a name: vine, virus, town, village, face, before they disintegrate and everything starts all over again: the sudden appearance of a gesture or movement, of an outline or the merest suggestion of an empty sign which you allow to develop, a chance meeting which grows into a firm acquaintance: an eye staring back at you, a man asleep, an eddy-pool, the gentle rocking of sail-boats, the tip of a tree, a branch shattered, preserved, recovered, and from which emerges with growing precision the beginnings of another face, hardly different from the last one, perhaps a little more grim or more attentive, a face in abeyance, in which you search in vain for the eyes, the neck, the forehead. But all that you are able to retain, or find, only to let slip again immediately, is the impression of an ambiguous smile, the shadow of a nostril, prolonged, perhaps, by the trace - ignominious or glorious, who can say? — of a scar.