Things and A Man Asleep (19 page)

—
      
the usual and a glass of red

—
      
a beer

—
      
a toothbrush

—
      
a notebook

You pay, you pocket the change, you sit down, you eat. You take a copy of
Le
Monde
from the top of its pile and place two twenty-centime coins in the vendor's dish. You never say please, hello, thank you, goodbye. You never say sorry. You do not ask your way.

You wander around, and around, and around. You walk. All moments are equivalent, all spaces are alike. You are never in a hurry, never lost. You do not look to see the time on the clocktowers. You are not sleepy. You are not hungry. You never yawn. You never burst into laughter.

You don't even stroll any more, since the only people who can stroll are those who snatch the time to do so, those who contrive to fiddle a few precious moments off their schedules. In the beginning you used to choose where you would go, you set goals for yourself, you devised complex itineraries, which, despite yourself, began to resemble the voyages of Ulysses. Like so many others before, you went on a pilgrimage to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, you walked round and round near the entrance to the Catacombs, you went and stood beneath the Eiffel Tower, you went up a few monuments, you crossed all the bridges, walked along all the embankments, visited all the museums, Guimet, Cernuschi, Carnavalet, Bourdelle, Delacroix, Nissim de Camondo, the Palais de la Découverte and the Aquarium du Trocadéro, you saw the rose gardens of Bagatelle, Montmartre by night, les Halles at first light, Saint-Lazare station in the rush-hour, Concorde at midday on August 15. But the fact that a given goal was trippery or cultural, disappointing or badly chosen, or even provocative (Rue de la Pompe, Rue des Saussaies, Place Beauvau, Quai des Orfèvres) did not stop it from being a goal, that is to say, a tension, an act of will, an emotion. Your tourism, even when it was disenchanted or derisory, and despite the distant memory of the Surrealists, was still a source of vigilance, a tabling of time, a measuring of space.

Just as you no longer choose your films, entering indiscriminately the first cinema you come to at around eight, nine or ten in the evening, the merest shadow of a spectator in the darkened auditorium, the shadow of a shadow watching as various combinations of shadow and light, form and dissolve on a rectangular oblong, ceaselessly sketching the same adventure: music, enchantment, suspense; just as you no longer choose your meals, as you no longer bother to vary them, to work your way right through the three hundred or so combinations that your five one-franc coins

could procure for you at the counter of the Petite Source, those five one-franc coins which represent one third of your daily allowance, chinking in your pocket; just as you no longer choose when to sleep, or what to read, or what to wear . . .

You let yourself go, you allow yourself to be carried along: all it takes is for the crowd to be going up or going down the Champs Elysées, all it takes is for a grey back a few yards in front of you to turn off suddenly down a grey street; or else a light or an absence of light, a noise or an absence of noise, a wall, a group of people, a tree, some water, a porch, a fence, advertising posters, paving stones, a pedestrian crossing, a shopfront, a luminous stop/go sign, the name plate of a street, the red sign outside a tobacconist's, a haberdasher's stall, a flight of steps, a traffic island . . .

You walk or you do not walk. You sleep or you do not sleep. You walk down your six flights of stairs, you climb back up again. You buy
Le
Monde
or you do not buy it. You eat or you do not eat. You sit down, you stretch out, you remain standing, you slip into the darkened auditorium of a cinema. You light a cigarette. You cross the street, you cross the Seine, you stop, you start again. You play pinball or you don't.

Sometimes, you stay in your room for three, four, five days at a time, you couldn't say for sure. You sleep almost uninterruptedly, you wash your socks, your two shirts. You reread a detective novel that you've already read, and forgotten, twenty times. You do the crossword in an old copy of
Le
Monde
that you find lying around. You deal out on your bed four columns of thirteen cards, you remove the aces, you place the seven of hearts below the six of hearts, the two of spades in its space, the king of spades

below the queen of spades, the jack of hearts below the ten of hearts.

You eat jam on bread, for as long as the bread lasts, then you spread it on crackers, if you have any, then you eat it straight from the jar on a spoon.

You stretch out on the narrow bed, hands crossed behind your neck, knees up. You close your eyes, you open them. Twisted filaments drift slowly down the surface of your cornea.

You count and organise the cracks, the flakes of paint and the flaws in the ceiling. You look at your face in the cracked mirror.

You don't talk to yourself, yet. You don't scream, especially not that.

Indifference has neither beginning nor end: it is an immutable state, a dead weight, an unshakeable inertia. Doubtless, messages from the outside world still make it through to your nerve centres, but no organised response involving the totality of the organism appears to be able to develop. All that remains are elementary reflexes: when the light is red you do not cross the road, you shelter from the wind in order to light a cigarette, you wrap up warmer on winter mornings, you change your sports shirt, your socks, your underpants and your vest about once a week, and your bed linen roughly every fortnight.

Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs. You are patient and you are not waiting, you are free and you do not choose, you are available and nothing arouses your enthusiasm. You ask for nothing. You demand nothing, you make no impositions. You hear without ever listening, you see without ever looking: the cracks in the ceilings, in the floorboards, the patterns in the tiling, the lines around your eyes, the trees, the water, the stones, the cars passing in the street, the clouds that form . . . cloud shapes in the sky.

Now, your existence is boundless. Each day is made up of silence and noise, of light and blackness, layers, expectations, shivers. It is just a question of getting lost once again, for ever, more each time, of ceaseless wandering, of finding sleep, a certain physical calm: abandon, lassitude, drowsiness, drifting-off. You slide, you let yourself slip and go under: searching for emptiness, running from it. Walk, stop, sit down, take a table, lean on it, stretch out on your bed.

Robotic actions: get up, wash, shave, dress. A cork on the water: drift with the current, follow the crowd, trail about: in the heavy silence of summer, closed shutters, deserted streets, sticky asphalt, deathly-still leaves of a green that verges on black; in the cold light of the shop- fronts, the streetlights, the little clouds of condensing breath at café doors, the black stumps of the dead winter trees.

You frequent scruffy down-at-heel cafés, bistrots, back- street bars selling only wine by the glass, gloomy
Vins et Charbons
stinking of vinegar and accumulated filth. Out towards Charles Michels square or Château-Landon you walk down slimy alleyways, past hoardings disfigured by tattered posters. You sit on the benches in public gardens and parks, like a pensioner, an old man, but you are only twenty-five. You go and loiter in hotel lobbies, sitting on an imitation leather settee, you watch the people come and go, you read the brochures, catalogues, notices, you read the tourist leaflets. Paris by night, Cruise to the Indies, the glossy magazines that are lying around, the
Echo
de l'Hôtellerie française
, the
Revue
du
Touring-Club
de
France
;

you go and read the newspapers displayed on boards outside printing works or editorial offices:
Le
Monde
, Le
Figaro
, Le
Capital
, La Vie française.
You while away your time in public libraries, you fill out a form, you read history books, scholarly works, memoirs of statesmen, or mountaineers, or parish priests.

You walk the streets, looking in the gutters or in the space of variable width which separates the parked cars from the kerbside. You discover marbles, little springs, rings, coins, gloves, and on one occasion a wallet which contained a little money, identity papers, letters, and some photographs which almost made you cry.

You watch the card-players in the Luxembourg Gardens, the great ornamental lakes of the Palais de Chaillot, on Sundays you go to the Louvre, walking straight through all the rooms and finally stationing yourself in front of a single painting or a single object: the unbelievably energetic portrait of a Renaissance man with a tiny scar above his upper lip, on the left, that is to say to his left, your right, or perhaps a stone engraving, or else a small Egyptian spoon in front of which you stand for an hour, or two hours, before leaving without looking back.

It is one ceaseless and untiring circumambulation. You walk like someone carrying invisible suitcases, like someone following his own shadow. A blind man, a sleepwalker. You proceed with a mechanical tread, never- endingly, to the point where you even forget that you are walking.

You are a meticulous stroller, an accomplished nightowl, a blob of ectoplasm, which, with the addition of a billowing sheet, could be mistaken for a ghost incapable of scaring even tiny children.

You are a tireless walker: every evening you emerge from the black hole of your room, from your rotting staircase, your silent courtyard, to criss-cross Paris; beyond the great pools of noise and light: Opéra, the Boulevards, the Champs Elysées, Saint-Germain, Montparnasse, you head out towards the dead city, towards Péreire or Saint- Antoine, towards Rue de Longchamp, Boulevard de l'Hôpital, Rue Oberkampf, Rue Vercingétorix.

All-night cafés. You remain standing, almost motionless, with one elbow resting on the glass counter - a thick, translucent sheet with rounded edges, fixed to its concrete base by means of copper bolts - half-turned towards a pinball machine into which three sailors shovel endless coins. You drink red wine or percolated coffee.

It is a life without surprises. You are safe. You sleep, you walk, you continue to live, like a laboratory rat abandoned in its maze by some absent-minded scientist, and which, morning and night, unerringly, unhesitatingly, follows the path to its food dispenser, turning left, turning right, pressing down twice on a pedal ringed in red in order to receive its portion of homogenised feed.

There is no hierarchy, no preference. Your indifference is motionless, becalmed: a grey man for whom grey has no connotation of dullness. Not insensitive but neutral. You are attracted by water, but also by stone; by darkness, but also by light; by warmth, but also by cold. All that exists is your walking, and your gaze, which lingers and slides, oblivious to beauty, to ugliness, to the familiar, the surprising, only ever retaining combinations of shapes and lights, which form and dissolve continuously, all around you, in your eyes, on the ceilings, at your feet, in the sky, in your cracked mirror, in the water, in the stone, in the crowds. Squares, avenues, parks and boulevards, trees and railings, men and women, children and dogs, queues, crushes, vehicles and shop windows, buildings, façades, columns and capitals, pavements, gutters, sandstone paving flags glistening grey in the drizzle, or almost red, or almost white, or almost black, or almost blue. Silences, rows, rackets, crowds at the stations, in the shops, on the boulevards, teeming streets, packed platforms, deserted Sunday streets in August, mornings, evenings, nights, dawns and dusks.

Now you are the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history has lost its hold, the one who no longer feels the rain falling, who does not see the approach of night.

All you are is all you know: your life that continues, your breathing, your step, your ageing. You see the people coming and going, crowds and objects taking shape and dissolving. Your eye is suddenly caught by a curtain rail in the tiny window of a haberdasher's: you continue on your way: you are inaccessible.

A
MOUNTAIN
is
ENGENDERED
by the meeting of your eye and the pillow, a fairly gentle slope, a segment, or rather the arc of a circle which stands out in the foreground, darker than the rest of the space. This mountain is not worth bothering with; it is quite unexceptional. For the moment, your mind is preoccupied with a task that you somehow feel you should accomplish but which you are unable to define precisely; a task of little importance in itself but which is, perhaps, merely the pretext, the opportunity, to check whether you know the code; you suppose, for example, and this is immediately confirmed, that the task consists in drawing your thumb, or the whole of your hand, up over the pillow: but is it really your job to do this? Should you not be exempted from this tedious chore by virtue of your position in the hierarchy and your years of service? This problem is clearly a lot more important than the task itself, and you have no means of solving it, since you never dreamt that after so long you would still be called to account in this manner. And what is more, when you come to think about it, the problem is even more complicated: it is not a question of knowing whether or not you should move your thumb in accordance with your function, your grade, your seniority, but rather this: you will have to move your thumb sooner or later in any case, but you will lift it
over
the pillow if you are senior enough, and slide it
under
the pillow if you are not, and naturally you have no idea as to how many years of service you have, except that you feel you have a considerable number, though perhaps not considerable enough. Perhaps they even chose this moment to pose the question precisely because it is the very moment when nobody, not even the most honest and upstanding judge, would be able to declare with certainty that you are, or are not, sufficiently senior?