Things and A Man Asleep Page 10

  "It could all be just like it used to be," the other will answer.

  They will pack. They will sort the books, the prints, the snapshots of their friends, they will throw away huge quantities of paperwork, give away their furniture, their poorly planed planks, their twelve-hole bricks, and ship their trunks. They will count the days, the hours, the minutes.

  Their last hours in Sfax will be spent on a solemn repetition of their ritual walk. They will cross the central market, pass by the port for a bit, admire as they do every day the huge natural sponges drying in the sun, go past the Italian delicatessen, the Hôtel des Oliviers, past the City Library and then, turning back on themselves down Avenue Bourguiba, they will skirt the hideous cathedral and fork off at the Collège where for the last time they will nod, as they nod every day, to Monsieur Michri, the chief caretaker, who will be plodding up and down in front of the gates, then go along Rue Victor-Hugo, take one last look at their regular restaurant, at the Greek church. Then they will enter the Arab quarter by the Kasbah gate, take Rue Bab Djedid, then Rue du Bey, emerging by the Bab Diwan gate to reach the awnings of Avenue Hedi-Chaker, and on past the theatre, the two cinemas, the bank, before drinking their last cup of coffee at La Régence, buying their last cigarettes, their last newspaper.

  Two minutes later they will take their seats in a hired Peugeot 403 about to depart. Their cases will have been roped to the roof-rack long before. They will clutch their wallets to their chests, their boarding passes, their rail tickets, their luggage receipts.

  The car will move off slowly. At half-past five of a summer's evening, Sfax will be a truly beautiful city. Its pristine buildings will glisten in the sunlight. The towers and crenellated ramparts of the Arab quarter will rise up in pride. Boy Scouts all dressed up in red and white will march by in step. Tunisian flags, a white crescent on a red ground, and the green-and-red ensign of Algeria, will wave in the breeze.

  There will be a bit of the sea, so blue, then big building sites, interminable suburbs jammed with donkeys, children and bicycles, then the endless olive groves. And then the open road: Sakietes-Zit, El Djem and its amphitheatre, Msaken the city of brigands, Susa and its overpopulated sea-front, Enfidaville and its huge olive plantations, Bir bou Rekba and its coffee shops, fruit and ceramics, Grombalia, Potinville and its vine-covered hills, Hammam Lif, then a stretch of motorway, industrial suburbs, soap factories, cement works: Tunis.

  They will spend hours swimming at Carthage, amidst the ruins, at La Marsa; they will go all the way to Utica, to Kelibia, to Nabeul, where they will buy a gugglet, to Goletta where, late in the evening, they will eat amazing bream.

  Then one day at six in the morning they will be at the docks. Embarkation procedures will be long and tiresome; they will struggle to find a place on deck to pitch their chairs.

  The crossing will be uneventful. At Marseilles they will drink a bowl of café au lait with croissants. They will buy yesterday's Le Monde and Libération. On the train they will hear the wheels beating out the bars of songs of victory, of the Hallelujah chorus, of triumphant hymns. They will count the kilometres; they will be in raptures over the French countryside, its great wheatfields, its green forests, its pastures and gentle rolling hills.

  They will get in at eleven in the evening. All their friends will be at the station. They will be amazed at how well they look: they will be as tanned as trekkers, and wearing broad-brimmed hats of plaited straw. They will tell all about Sfax, deserts, splendid ruins, how cheaply you can live there, the sea so blue. They will be dragged off to "Harry's". They will get drunk straight away. They will be happy.

  And so they will return, and it will be even worse. Rue de Quatrefages will still be there, with its wonderful tree, and their little flat, so quaint, with its low ceiling, with its one red-curtained window and its one green-curtained window, its good old books, its heaps of newspapers, its narrow bed, its tiny kitchen, its mess.

  They will see Paris again, and it will be all that life can afford. They will saunter by the banks of the Seine, in the gardens of Palais-Royal, in the side-streets of Saint-Germain. And every night, in the brightly-lit streets, every shop window will once again be a wondrous enticement. Stalls will groan with the weight of foodstuffs. They will join in the shoving throng in department stores. They will thrust their hands into folds of silk, cup their hands around chunky phials of perfume, brush their hands over ties.

  They will try to live as they lived before. They will pick up their old contacts in the agencies. But the spells will have broken. Once again they will suffocate. They will think they are dying from things being too small, too cramped.

  They will dream of fortune. They will look in the gutters in the hope of coming across a bulging wallet, a bank note, a franc, a metro ticket.

  They will dream of getting away to the country. They will dream of Sfax.

  They won't stick it out for long.

  And so one day — had they not always known that this day would come? — they will decide to be done with it, once and for all, like everyone else. Their friends, in the know, will look out for jobs for them. A good word will be put in at several agencies. Full of hope, they will write carefully pondered curricula vitae. Their luck - but it will not be luck exactly - will be in. Their employment records, despite being irregular, will be given particular scrutiny. They will be summoned. They will manage to find the words that are needed to make a good impression.

  And that is how after a few years of errant living, weary of not having enough money, weary of counting the pennies and of resenting the counting, Jérôme and Sylvie will accept — perhaps with thanks - twin executive posts accompanied by salaries which could just about pass for a golden hello which some big shot will offer them in advertising.

  They will go to Bordeaux to take over an agency. They will prepare their departure with care. They will sort out their flat, have it repainted, get rid of the piles of books, the bundles of linen, the stacks of crockery that had always cluttered it up and beneath which they had often felt they were suffocating. They will walk around their almost unrecognisable two-roomed apartment which they had always said it was impossible to do anything in, especially to walk round. They will see it for the first time the way they had always wanted to see it, at last repainted, sparkling white and clean, without a speck of dust, unstained, without a crack in the plaster or a tear in the wallpaper, with its low ceiling, its rustic courtyard, its admirable tree over which, very soon, just as they had in the past, the new owners will fall into raptures.

  They will sell their books to dealers and their old rags to second-hand clothes shops. They will do the round of tailor, dressmaker, shirtmaker. They will pack their trunks.

  They will not really earn a fortune. They will not be chairmen or managing directors. The only millions they will manipulate will belong to other people. They will get some of the crumbs, for appearances, for silk shirts, for pigskin gloves. They will be presentable. They will be well housed, well fed, well dressed. They will not be wanting.

  They will have their chesterfield settee, their armchairs in soft natural leather as stylish as seats in Italian racing cars, their rustic tables, their lecterns, and their fitted carpets, silk rugs, and light oak bookcases.

  They will have huge and empty rooms full of light; plenty of clearance, glass panels, magnificent outlook. They will have china, silver cutlery, lace napkins, sumptuous red leather bindings.

  They will not yet be thirty. They will have their whole lives ahead of them.

  They will leave Paris early one September. They will be in an almost empty first-class carriage. The train will pick up speed almost straight away. The aluminium carriage will sway comfortingly.

  They will leave. They will leave everything behind them. They will run. Nothing could have held them.

  "Do you remember?" Jérôme will say. And they will muse on time past, dark days, youth, their first friendships, their first surveys, the tree in the courtyard in Rue de Quatrefages, the f
riends they had lost, the comradely dinner parties. They will recall how they would cross Paris to look for cigarettes, and stop in front of antique dealers. They will summon up memories of their days in Sfax, their slow death, their almost triumphant return.

  "So here we are," Sylvie will say. And it will seem to them to be almost a matter of course.

  They will feel at ease in their lightweight clothes. They will spread themselves out in the deserted carriage. The French countryside will march past. They will look in silence on the great fields of ripe wheat, the burnt rigging of the high-tension pylons. They will see glassworks, almost spanking new factories, large holiday camps, dams, small houses all alone in clearings. Children will be running along a white road.

  The journey will be pleasant for a long while. Towards noon they will wander nonchalantly down to the dining car. They will sit by a window, facing each other. They will order two whiskies. They will look at each other one last time with a smile of complicity. The starched table linen, the solid cutlery engraved with the arms of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, the weighty, emblazoned crockery will seem like a prelude to a sumptuous feast. But the meal they will be served will be quite simply tasteless . . .

  The means is as much part of the truth as the result. The quest for truth must itself be true, the true quest is the unfurling of a truth whose different parts combine in the result.

  - KARL MARX

  A MAN ASLEEP

  Translated from the French by Andrew Leak

  for Paulette

  In memoriam J.P.

  There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can't do otherwise, in raptures it will writhe before you.

  FRANZ KAFKA (Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Way)

  AS SOON AS YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES, the adventure of sleep begins. The familiar half-light of the bedroom, a dark volume broken by details, where your memory can easily identify the paths your eyes have followed a thousand times (retracing them from the opaque square of the window, eliciting the washbasin from a shaft of reflected light and the shelving from the slightly less dark shadow of a book, distinguishing the blacker mass of the hanging clothes), gives way, after a while, to a two-dimensional space, something like a board of indefinite extension set at a very shallow angle to the plane of your eyes, as if it were propped not quite vertically on the bridge of your nose; the board might at first seem evenly grey, or rather, neutral, that is to say shapeless and colourless, but probably quite quickly turns out to possess at least two properties: the first is that it becomes more or less dark depending on how tightly, or loosely, you screw up your eyes, as if, more precisely, the force brought to bear on your eyebrows when you close your eyes had the effect of altering the angle of the plane in relation to your body, as if it were hinged to your eyebrows, and, consequently, although the only proof of this consequence is the evidence of your own eyes, had the effect also of altering the density, or the quality, of the darkness you perceive; the second property is that the surface of this space is not at all regular, or, more precisely, that the distribution, the allocation, of the areas of darkness is not homogeneous: the upper area is manifestly darker, whereas the lower area, which, to you, appears nearer (although, of course, the notions of proximity and distance, above and below, in front and behind, have already ceased to be altogether precise) is, on the one hand, much greyer, not, that is to say, much more neutral as you initially believe, but actually much whiter, and, on the other hand, contains, or supports, one, two, or several bag-like objects, or capsules, a little how you imagine, for example, a tear gland to be, with thin, ciliated edges, and within which, quivering, twitching, writhing, are some intensely white flashes, some of them extremely thin, like infinitely fine stripes, others much thicker, almost fat, like maggots. These flashes, although 'flashes' is a quite inappropriate term, have a curious quality: they cannot be looked at. As soon as your attention lingers on them too long, and it is virtually impossible to avoid this, since, after all, they are dancing in front of you and all the rest scarcely exists, indeed, all that is really perceptible is the hinge of your eyebrows and the very vague, more or less perceptible two-dimensional space in which the darkness stretches away unevenly, but as soon as you look at them, although this word, of course, no longer means anything, as soon as you attempt, let us say, to satisfy yourself a little as to their form, or their substance, or a detail, you can be sure to find yourself back again, your eyes open, across from the window, itself an opaque rectangle becoming a square again, in spite of the fact that these little bags bear no resemblance to it whatsoever. However, they reappear almost as soon as you close your eyes again, and with them the more or less sloping space hinged to your eyebrows, and, in all likelihood, they haven't changed since the last time. But you cannot be absolutely sure on this last point, for, after an interval of time which it is difficult to estimate, and although nothing enables you to affirm that they have actually disappeared, you are able to note that they have grown considerably paler. Now you are dealing with a kind of streaky grey drizzle, still part of this same space which is an extension more or less of your eyebrows, but distorted, apparently, to the point where it is constantly veering to the left; you can look at it, explore it, without shattering the whole, without causing yourself to wake up immediately, but this is not in the least bit interesting. It is on the right that something is taking place, a plank as it happens, somewhat behind, somewhat above, somewhat to the right. You can't see the plank, obviously. All you know is that it is hard, although you are not on it, since, precisely, you are on something that is very soft, and that something is your body. Then suddenly a truly amazing phenomenon occurs: first, there are three spaces which it is quite impossible to confuse, your body-bed which is soft, horizontal and white, then the bar of your eyebrows which controls a grey, mediocre, slanting space, and finally the plank, which is immobile and very hard on top, parallel to you, and perhaps within reach. Indeed, it is clear — even if by now this is the only thing that is - that if you clamber up on to the plank, you will sleep, that the plank is sleep itself. The principle of the operation is simplicity itself, even though you have every reason to believe that it will take you quite some time to accomplish: you would have to reduce the bed and the body to a single point, a marble, or perhaps, which amounts to the same thing, boil down the flaccidity of the body, concentrating it into a single spot, into one of the lumbar vertebrae, for example. But now the body no longer exhibits the fine unity that it possessed a moment ago: in fact it is spreading out in every direction. You try to draw in a toe towards the centre, or your thumb, or your thigh, but each time there is a rule you are forgetting, and this is that you must never lose sight of the hardness of the plank, that you should proceed with stealth, drawing in your body without it suspecting anything, without even knowing it yourself for certain, but it is too late, every time it is too late, and has been for a very long time, and, a strange consequence this, the bar of your eyebrows breaks in two, and in the middle, right between your eyes, as if this hinge had held everything else together, and as if all the force of the hinge were focused on this one spot, a precise and unmistakably conscious pain suddenly starts up, a pain which you recognise immediately as being nothing more extraordinary than a headache.

  YOU ARE SITTING, naked from the waist up, wearing only pyjama bottoms, in your garret, on the narrow bench that serves as your bed, with a book, Raymond Aron's Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society, resting on your knees, open at page one hundred and twelve.

  At first it's just a sort of lassitude or tiredness, as if you suddenly became aware that for a long time, for several hours, you have been succumbing to an insidious, numbing discomfort, not exactly painful but nonetheless intolerable, succumbing to the sickly-sweet and stifling sensation of being without muscles or bones, of being a sack of potatoes surrounded by oth
er sacks of potatoes.

  The sun beats down on the zinc flashings on the roof. In front of you, at eye-level, on a whitewood shelf, there is a half-empty, rather grubby bowl of Nescafé, an almost empty bag of sugar, a cigarette burning down in a whitish mock opaline ashtray bearing an advertiser's logo.

  Someone is moving around in the next room, coughing, dragging his feet, moving furniture, opening drawers. Drops of water are continually forming on the drinking-water tap on the landing. Noises drift up from Rue Saint-Honoré far below.

  The bells of Saint-Roch chime two. You look up, you stop reading, but you had already stopped long ago. You put the open book down beside you on the bed. You reach out your hand, you stub out the cigarette which is smoking in the ashtray, you finish your bowl of Nescafé: it is barely lukewarm, too sweet, on the bitter side.

  You are soaked in sweat. You get up, you go over to the window and close it. You turn on the tap in the tiny washbasin, you pass a damp flannel over your forehead, the back of your neck, your shoulders. You curl up sideways on the narrow bench. You close your eyes. Your head is heavy, your legs numb.

  Later, the day of your exam comes and you do not get up. It's not a premeditated action, or rather it's not an action at all, but an absence of action, an action you do not perform, actions that you avoid performing. You went to bed early, you slept peacefully, you had set the alarm clock, you heard it go off, you waited for it to go off, for several minutes at least, already woken by the heat, or by the light, or by the noise of the milkmen, the dustmen, or by the expectation itself.