Thomas The Obscure (6 page)

What was uncertain was where she would come forth. She was already suffocating. My God, she is well; no, she is; she is perfect from the point of view of being; she has, elevated to the highest degree, the joy of the greatest spirit discovering his most beautiful thought. She is; no, she is well, she is slipping, the thunder of sensations falls upon her, she is smothered, she cries out, she hears herself, she lives. What joy! They give her something to drink, she cries, they console her. It is still night. Yet she could not help realizing it: around her, many things were changing, and a desolate climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless protocol, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world. If she asked for the flowers she loved, they gave her artificial roses with no scent which, though they were the only beings more mortal than herself, did not reserve her the pleasure of wilting, fading and dying before her eyes. Her room became uninhabitable: given a northern exposure for the first time, with a single window which admitted only the late afternoon sun, deprived each day of another lovely object, this room gave every evidence of being secretly emptied in order to inspire in her the desire to leave it as soon as possible. The world too was devastated. They had exiled the pleasant seasons, asked the children to cry out in joy elsewhere, called into the street all the anger of cities, and it was an insurmountable wall of shattering sounds that separated her from mankind. Sometimes she opened her eyes and looked around with surprise: not only were things changing, but the beings most attached to her were changing as well. How could there be any doubt? There was a tragic lessening of tenderness for her. Henceforth her mother, plunged for hours on end in her armchair without a word, her face ashen, carefully deprived of everything which might have made her lovable, no longer revealed anything of her affection but a feeling which made her ugly, at the very moment when Anne, as never before in her life, needed young and beautiful things. What she had once loved in her mother, gaity, laughter and tears, all the expressions of childhood repeated in an adult, all had disappeared from this face which expressed only fatigue, and it was only far away from this place that she could imagine her again capable of crying, of laughing—laughing, what a wonder! no one ever laughed here—a mother to everyone but her daughter. Anne raised her voice and asked her if she had been swimming. "Be quiet," said her mother. "Don't talk, you'll tire yourself." Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive. She sighed. And yet her mother resembled her, and what is more every day added a new trait to this resemblance. Contrary to the rule, it was the mother who took her daughter's face as a model, made it old, showed what it would be like at sixty. This obese Anne, whose eyes had turned gray as well as her hair, this was surely Anne if she were foolish enough to escape death. An innocent play: Anne was not duped. In spite of everything, life did not make itself hateful; she continued to love life. She was ready to die, but she was dying still loving flowers, even artificial flowers, feeling herself horribly orphaned in her death, passionately regretting this ugly Anne, this impotent Anne she would never become. Everything that was insidiously proposed to her so that she would not perceive that she was losing a great deal in leaving the world, this complicity of moralists and doctors, the traditional swindle perpetrated by the sun and by men, offering on the last day as a last spectacle the ugliest images and faces in dark corners, where it is obvious that those who die are content to die ... all these deceptions failed. Anne intended to pass into death completely alive, evading the intermediate states of disgust with life, refusal to live. Yet, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, "We can't come tomorrow, excuse us," and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, "That's not important, don't take any trouble," thought, "How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything," faced with this sad plot to reduce her to feelings which, before dying, must degrade her and make all regrets superfluous, the time arrived when she saw herself betrayed by her discretion, her shyness, just what she retained of her habitual manner. Soon they would be saying, "She's no longer herself, it would be better if she died," and then: "What a deliverance for her if she died!" A gentle, irresistible pressure, how could one defend oneself against it? What did she have left that she could use to make it known that she had not changed? Just when she should have been throwing herself incessantly on her friends' shoulders, telling her doctor: "Save me, I don't want to die"—on that one condition they might still have considered her part of the world—she was greeting those who entered with a nod, giving them that which was most dear, a glance, a thought, pure impulses which just recently were still signs of true sympathy, but which now seemed the cold reserve of someone at odds with life at the very least. These scenes struck her and she understood that one does not ask restraint and delicacy of a person who is suffering, feelings which belong to healthy civilizations, but rather crudeness and frenzy. Since it was the law, since it was the only way to prove that she had never had so much attachment for all that surrounded her, she was seized by the desire to cry out, ready to make a move to reinforce every bond, ready to see in those near to her beings who were ever nearer. Unfortunately, it was too late: she no longer had the face or the body of her feelings, and she could no longer be gay with gaiety. Now, to all those who came, whoever they might be (that was unimportant, time was short), she expressed by her closed eyes and her pinched lips the greatest passion ever experienced. And, not having enough affection to tell everyone how much she loved them, she had recourse as well to the hardest and coldest impulses of her soul. It was true that everything in her was hardening. Until then, she still had suffering. She suffered to open her eyes, suffered to receive the gentlest words: it was her one manner of being moved, and never had there been more sensitivity than in this glance which won the simple pleasure of seeing at the cost of cruel, tearing pain. But now, she hardly suffered any more at all; her body attained the ideal of egoism which is the ideal of every body: it was hardest at the moment of becoming weakest, a body which no longer cried out beneath the blows, borrowed nothing from the world, made itself, at the price of its beauty, the equivalent of a statue. This hardness weighed terribly on Anne; she felt the absence of all feeling in her as an immense void, and anguish clutched her. Then, in the form of this primordial passion, having now only a silent and dreary soul, a heart empty and dead, she offered her absence of friendship as the truest and purest friendship; she resigned herself, in this dark region where no one touched her, to responding to the ordinary affection of those around her by this supreme doubt concerning her being, by the desperate consciousness of being nothing any longer, by her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. And thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be. To those who cried over her, cold and oblivious she returned hundredfold what they had given her, devoting to them the anticipation of her death, her death, the pure feeling, never purer, of her existence in the tortured anticipation of her nonexistence. She drew from herself not the weak emotions, sadness, regret, which were the lot of those around her, meaningless accidents with no chance of making any change in them, but the sole passion capable of threatening her very being, that which cannot be alienated and which would continue to burn when all the lights were put out. For the first time, she raised the words "give oneself" to their true meaning: she gave Anne, she gave much more than the life of Anne, she gave the ultimate gift, the death of Anne; she separated herself from her terribly strong feeling of being Anne, from the terribly anguished feeling of being Anne threatened with dying, and changed it into the yet more anguished feeling of being no longer Anne, but her mother, her mother threatened by death, the entire world on the point of annihilation. Never, within this body, this ideal of marble, monster of egoism, which had made of its unconsciousness the symbol of its estranged consciousness in a last pledge of friendship, never had there been more tenderness, and never within this poor being reduced to less than death, plundered of her most intimate treasure, her death, forced to die not personally but by the intermediary of all the others, had there been more being, more perfection of being. And so she had succeeded: her body was truly the strongest, the happiest; this existence, so impoverished and restrained that it could not even receive its opposite, nonexistence, was just what she was seeking. It was just that which permitted her to be equal, up to the very end, to all the others, in excellent form to disappear, full of strength for the last struggle. During the moments which followed, a strange fortress rose up around Anne. It did not resemble a city. There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony. There is no way to express what they were, these shapes, beings, baneful entities—for us, can something which is not the day appear in the midst of the day, something which in an atmosphere of light and clarity would represent the shudder of terror which is the source of the day? But, insidiously, they made themselves recognized on the threshold of the irremediable as the obscure laws summoned to disappear with Anne. What was the result of this revelation? One would have said that everything was destroyed, but that everything was beginning again as well. Time, coming forth from its lakes, rolled her in an immense past, and, though she could not entirely leave space where she still breathed, drew her toward bottomless valleys where the world seemed to have returned to the moment of its creation. Anne's life—and this very word sounded like a defiant challenge in this place where there was no life—participated in the first ray thrown in all of eternity through the midst of indolent notions. Life-giving forces bathed her as if they had suddenly found in her breast, consecrated to death, the vainly sought meaning of the word "life-giving". Caprice, which built up the infinite framework of its combinations to conjure up the void, seized her and if she did not lose all existence at that moment, her discomfort was all the worse, her transformation greater than if, in her tranquil human state, she had actually abandoned life, for there was no absurdity she was allowed to escape, and in the interval of a time simulated by the fusion of eternity and the idea of nothingness, she became all the monsters in which creation tried itself in vain. Suddenly —and never was anything so abrupt—the failures of chance came to an end, and that which could in no way be expected received its success from a mysterious hand. Incredible moment, in which she reappeared in her own form, but accursed instant as well, for this unique combination, perceived in a flash, dissolved in a flash and the unshakeable laws which no shipwreck had been able to submerge were broken, giving in to a limitless caprice. An event so serious that no one near her perceived it and, although the atmosphere was heavy and weirdly transformed, no one felt the strangeness. The doctor bent over her and thought that she was dying according to the laws of death, not perceiving that she had already reached that instant when, in her, the laws were dying. She made an imperceptible motion; no one understood that she was floundering in the instant when death, destroying everything, might also destroy the possibility of annihilation. Alone, she saw the moment of the miracle coming, and she received no help. Oh, stupidity of those who are torn by grief! Beside her, as she was much less than dying, as she was dead, no one thought to multiply their absurd gestures, to liberate themselves from all convention and place themselves in the condition of primal creation. No one sought out the false beings, the hypocrites, the equivocal beings, all those who jeer at the idea of reason. No one said in the silence: "Let us hurry and before she is cold let us thrust her into the unknown. Let us create a darkness about her so that the law may abandon itself disloyally to the impossible. And ourselves, let us go away, lose all hope: hope itself must be forgotten."

Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope. This moment of supreme distraction, this trap into which those who have nearly vanquished death fall, ultimate return of Eurydice, in looking one last time toward the visible, Anne had just fallen into it as well. She opened her eyes without the least curiosity, with the lassitude of someone who knows perfectly well in advance what will be offered to her sight. Yes, there is her room, there is her mother, her friend Louise, there is Thomas. My God, that was just what it was. All those she loved were there. Her death must absolutely have the character of a solemn farewell, each one must receive his squeeze of the hand, his smile. And it is true that she squeezed their hands, smiled at them, loved them. She breathed gently. She had her face turned toward them as if she wished to see them up to the very last moment. Everything that had to be done, she did it. Like every dying person, she went away observing the rituals, pardoning her enemies, loving her friends, without admitting the secret which no one admits: that all this was already insignificant. Already she had no more importance. She looked at them with an ever more modest look, a simple look, which for them, for humans, was an empty look. She squeezed their hands ever more gently, with a grip which did not leave a trace, a grip which they could not feel. She did not speak. These last moments must be without any memory. Her face, her shoulders must become invisible, as is proper for something which is fading away. Her mother whined: "Anne, do you recognize me? Answer me, squeeze my hand." Anne heard this voice: what good was it, her mother was no longer anything more than an insignificant being. She also heard Thomas; in fact, she knew now what she had to say to Thomas, she knew exactly the words she had searched for all her life in order to reach him. But she remained silent; she thought: what good is it—and this word was also the word she was seeking—Thomas is insignificant. Let us sleep.