Things and A Man Asleep (23 page)

But nothing has happened: no miracle, no explosion.

With each passing day your patience has worn thinner, the hypocrisy of your pitiful efforts has been laid bare. Time would have had to stand still, but no-one has the strength to fight against time. You may have cheated, snitching a few crumbs, a few seconds: but the bells of Saint-Roch, the changing traffic lights at the intersection between Rue des Pyramides and Rue Saint-Honoré, the predictable drip from the tap on the landing, never ceased to signal the hours, the minutes, the days and the seasons. You may have pretended to forget time, you may have spent nights walking and days sleeping. But you couldn't ever quite get away with it.

For a long time you constructed sanctuaries, and destroyed them: order or inaction, drifting or sleep, the night patrols, the neutral moments, the flight of shadows and light. Perhaps for a long time yet you could continue to lie to yourself, deadening your senses, sinking deeper and deeper into the mire. But the game is over, the great orgy, the spurious exaltation of a life in limbo. The world has not stirred and you have not changed. Indifference has not made you any different.

You are not dead. You have not gone mad.

Disasters do not exist, they are elsewhere. The tiniest catastrophe might have been enough to save you: then you would have lost everything, you would have had something to defend, words of justification to find, words to soften the hearts of your judges. But you are not ill. Your days are not numbered, neither are your nights for that matter. Your eyes can see, your hand does not shake, your pulse is regular, your heart beats. If you were ugly your ugliness might perhaps be fascinating, but you are not even ugly, neither are you a hunchback, a stammerer, an amputee, a legless cripple, you don't even limp.

There is no curse hanging over you. You may be a monster, but not a monster of the lower world. You do not need to writhe in agony, cry out in pain. There is no tribulation in store for you, no rock of Sisyphus, no-one is going to offer you a chalice only to snatch it from your lips at the last moment, there is no crow with sinister designs on your eyeballs, no vulture has been assigned the indigestible chore of tucking into your liver morning, noon, and night. You do not have to grovel before your judges, begging for mercy, imploring their pity. No-one is condemning you, and you have committed no offence. No-one looks at you and then averts their gaze in horror.

Time, which sees to everything, has provided the solution, despite yourself.

Time, that knows the answer, has continued to flow.

It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that everything starts again, that everything starts, that everything continues.

Stop talking like a man in a dream.

Look! Look at them. Posted like silent sentinels by the river, along the embankments, all over the rain-washed pavements of Place Clichy, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries, waiting for the sea-spray, for the breaking waves, for the raucous cries of the sea-birds.

No, you are not the nameless master of the world, the one on whom history had lost its hold, the one who no longer felt the rain falling, who did not see the approach of night. You are no longer the inaccessible, the limpid, the transparent one. You are afraid, you are waiting. You are waiting, on Place Clichy, for the rain to stop falling.