Things and A Man Asleep Read online

Your alarm clock goes off, you do not stir, you remain in your bed, you close your eyes again. Other alarms start ringing in adjacent rooms. You hear the sounds of running water, doors closing, steps hurrying down the stairs. Rue Saint-Honoré begins to fill up with car noises, the screeching of tyres, the crunching of gears, toots on the horn. Blinds slam open, shopkeepers raise their iron shutters.

  You do not move; you will not move. Someone else, your twin, a ghostly, conscientious double is perhaps performing in your stead, one by one, the actions you have eschewed: he gets up, washes, shaves, dresses, goes out. You let him bound down the stairs, run down the street, leap onto the moving bus, arrive on time, out of breath but triumphant, at the doors of the hall. Certificate of Advanced Study in General Sociology. First written paper.

  You get up too late. Back there in the hall, studious or bored heads are bowed pensively over their desks. The perhaps anxious glances of your friends all converge on your still-vacant seat. You will not set down on four, eight or twelve sheets of paper what you know, what you think, what you know you are supposed to think, about alienation, the workers, modernity and leisure, about white-collar workers or about automation, about our knowledge of others, about Marx as a rival of De Tocqueville, about Weber as an opponent of Lukacs. In any case, you wouldn't have said anything, because you don't know a great deal and you think nothing at all. Your seat remains vacant. You won't finish your degree, you won't begin a postgraduate thesis. You will study no more.

  You make, as you do every day, a bowl of Nescafé; you add, as you do every day, a few drops of sweetened condensed milk. You don't wash, you hardly bother to dress. In a pink plastic bowl you place three pairs of socks to soak.

  You don't go and wait for the candidates to come out of the examination hall to find out what questions were devised to test their perspicacity. Neither do you go and join your friends in the café, as custom would have demanded, like every other day, but more especially on this day of exceptional gravity. One of them, the following morning, will climb the six flights of stairs that lead to your room. You will recognise his footfall on the stairs, you will let him knock on your door, wait, knock again, a little louder, look on the lintel over the door for the key that you would often leave there if you were going out for a few minutes to fetch bread, coffee, cigarettes, a newspaper or the mail, you'll let him wait a while longer, knock gently, call your name quietly, hesitate, then stamp back down again.

  He came back, later, and slipped a note under the door.

  Then others came, the day after, the day after that, knocked, looked for the key, called your name, slipped notes under the door.

  You read the notes and crumple them into a ball. The notes are to arrange meetings which you miss. You stay lying on your narrow bench, your hands crossed behind your neck, your knees up. You look at the ceiling and you discover the cracks, the bits flaking off, the stains, the uneven contours. You do not want to see anyone, or to talk, or think, or go out, or move.

  It is on a day like this one, a little later, a little earlier, that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that, without mincing words, you don't know how to live, that you will never know.

  The sun beats down on the sheet metal of the roof. The heat in your garret is unbearable. You are sitting, wedged between the bed and the bookshelf, with a book open on your lap. You stopped reading it long ago. You are staring at a whitewood shelf, at a pink plastic bowl in which six socks are stagnating. The smoke from your cigarette, abandoned in the ashtray, rises, in an almost straight line, and then spreads out in a quivering blanket against the ceiling which is fissured by minute cracks.

  Something was going to break, something has broken. You no longer feel — how to put it? — held up: it is as if some thing which, it seemed to you, it seems to you, fortified you until then, gave warmth to your heart, something like the feeling of your existence, of your importance almost, the impression of belonging to or of being in the world, is starting to slip away from you.

  And yet you are not one of those people who spend their waking hours wondering if they exist, and why, where they came from, what they are, where they are going. You have never seriously agonised over the chicken and the egg. Metaphysical torments have not significantly ravaged your noble countenance. But nothing remains of that arrow-like trajectory, of that forward movement in which, for as long as you can remember, you have been led to recognise your life, that is to say its meaning, its truth, its tension: a past rich in fruitful experiences, lessons well learned, joyous childhood memories, sun-bathed country idylls, bracing sea breezes, a dense present, compact and taut, like a coiled spring, a productive, verdant, airy future. Your past, your present and your future merge into one: they are now just the heaviness of your limbs, your nagging migraine, your lassitude, the heat, the bitterness of the lukewarm Nescafé. And, if your life needed a setting, it would not be the majestic esplanade (by and large a spectacular trick of perspective) where the chubby-cheeked children of triumphant humanity fly past and frolic, but rather, irrespective of any effort you may make or any illusions you may still harbour, this converted cubbyhole that passes for your bedroom, this garret two metres ninety-two long by one metre sixty-three wide, that is to say, a little over five square metres, this attic from which you have not stirred for several hours, several days: you are sitting on a bed which is too short for you to be able to lie on it, full length, at night, and too narrow for you to be able to turn over on it, without extreme care. You are staring, almost fascinated now, at a pink plastic bowl which contains no fewer than six socks.

  You stay in your room, without eating, without reading, almost without moving. You stare at the bowl, the shelf, your knees, your own gaze in the cracked mirror, the coffee-bowl, the light-switch. You listen to the sounds of the street, the dripping tap on the landing, the noises that your neighbour makes, clearing his throat, opening and closing drawers, coughing fits, the whistle of his kettle, you follow across the ceiling the sinuous lines of a thin crack, the futile meandering of a fly, the progress - which it is almost possible to plot - of the shadows.

  This is your life. This is yours. You can establish an exact inventory of your meagre fortune, the precise balance sheet of your first quarter-century. You are twenty-five years old, you have twenty-nine teeth, three shirts and eight socks, a few books you no longer read, a few records you no longer play. You do not want to remember anything else, be it your family or your studies, your friends and lovers, or your holidays and plans. You travelled and you brought nothing back from your travels. Here you sit, and you want only to wait, just to wait until there is nothing left to wait for: for night to fall and the passing hours to chime, for the days to slip away and the memories to fade.

  You do not see your friends again. You do not open your door. You do not go down to fetch your mail. You do not take back the books you borrowed from the Library of the Institute of Education. You do not write to your parents.

  You only go out after nightfall, like the rats, the cats and the monsters. You drift around the streets, you slip into the grubby little cinemas on the Grands Boulevards. Sometimes you walk all night, sometimes you sleep all day.

  You are a man of leisure, a sleepwalker, a mollusc. The definitions vary according to the hour of the day, or the day of the week, but the meaning remains clear enough: you do not really feel cut out for living, for doing, for making; you want only to go on, to go on waiting, and to forget.

  Such an outlook on life is generally not much appreciated in modern times: all around you, all your life, you have seen the esteem in which action is held, and grand designs, and enthusiasm: man straining forward, man with his gaze fixed on the horizon, man looking straight ahead. A clear gaze, a purposeful chin, a confident swagger, stomach held in. Staying power, initiative, strokes of brilliance, success: all of these things map out the too transparent path of a too exemplary existence, constitute the sacrosanct images of the struggle for life. The white lies, the comforting illu
sions of all those who are running on the spot, sinking deeper into the mire, the lost illusions of the thousands left on society's scrap heap, those who arrived too late, those who put their suitcase down on the pavement and sat on it to wipe their brow. But you no longer need excuses, regrets, nostalgia. You reject nothing, you refuse nothing. You have ceased going forward, but that is because you weren't going forward anyway, you're not setting off again, you have arrived, you can see no reason to go any further: all it took, practically, on a day in May when it was too hot, was the untimely conjunction of a text of which you'd lost the thread, a bowl of Nescafé that suddenly tasted too bitter, and a pink plastic bowl filled with blackish water in which six socks were floating, this was all it took for something to snap, to turn bad, to come undone, and for the truth to appear in the bright light of day - but the light of day is never bright in the garret on Rue Saint-Honoré - this disappointing truth, as sad and ridiculous as a dunce's cap, as heavy as a Latin dictionary: you have no desire to carry on, no desire to defend yourself, no desire to attack.

  Your friends got tired of knocking on your door. Now, you rarely ever frequent the streets where you might run into them. You avoid the questions and the eyes of strangers whom chance occasionally places in your path, you refuse the beer or the coffee they offer you. Only the night and your room protect you: the narrow bed where you lie stretched out, the ceiling that you discover anew at every moment; the night in which, alone amidst the crowds on the Grands Boulevards, you occasionally feel almost happy with the noise and the lights, the bustle and the forgetting. You have no need to speak, to desire. You follow the tide as it ebbs and flows, from Place de la République to Place de la Madeleine, from Place de la Madeleine to Place de la République.

  You are not in the habit of making diagnoses, and you don't want to start now. What is worrying you, what is disturbing you, what is frightening you, but which now and then gives you a thrill, is not the suddenness of your metamorphosis, but precisely the opposite: the vague and heavy feeling that it isn't a metamorphosis at all, that nothing has changed, that you've always been like this, even though you only now realize it fully: that thing, in the cracked mirror, is not your new face, it is just that the masks have slipped, the heat in your room has melted them, your torpor has soaked them off. The masks of unswerving conviction, of the straight and narrow. Did you never have an inkling, not once in twenty-five years, of that which, today, has already become inexorable? Did you never see any cracks in what, for you, takes the place of a history? Times when nothing was happening, times when you were simply ticking over in neutral. The fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude. An amnesiac wandering through the Land of the Blind: wide, empty streets, cold lights, faces without mouths that you would look at without seeing. They would never get to you.

  It is as if, beneath the surface of your calm and reassuring history (the good little boy, the model pupil, the dependable pal), as if, running beneath the obvious, too obvious, signs of growth and maturity - scribbled graffiti on toilet doors, certificates, long trousers, the first cigarette, the sting of the first shave, alcohol, the key left under the mat for your Saturday night outings, losing your virginity, the baptism of air, the baptism of fire — as if another thread had always been running, ever present but always held at bay, and which is now weaving the familiar fabric of your rediscovered existence, the bare backdrop of your abandoned life, memories which suddenly resurface, veiled images of this revealed truth, of this resignation so long deferred, of this appeal for calm - hazy and lifeless images, over-exposed snapshots, almost white, almost dead, almost already fossilised: a street in a sleepy provincial town, closed shutters, dull shadows, the buzzing of flies in an army post, a lounge draped in grey dustsheets, particles suspended in a ray of sunlight, bare countryside, cemeteries on a Sunday, outings in a car.

  Man sitting on a narrow bed, one Thursday afternoon, a book open on his knees, eyes vacant.

  You are just a murky shadow, a hard kernel of indifference, a neutral gaze avoiding the gaze of others. Speechless lips, dead eyes. Henceforth you will be able to glimpse in the puddles, in the shop windows, in the gleaming bodywork of cars, the fleeting reflections of your decelerating life.

  Absent-mindedly, you let your hand slip along the white-wood shelf. Water drips from the tap on the landing. Your neighbour is sleeping. The faint chugging of a stationary diesel taxi emphasises rather than breaks the silence of the street. Your memory is slowly penetrated by oblivion. Nothing has happened. Nothing will ever happen. The cracks in the ceiling trace an implausible labyrinth.

  There were those empty days, the heat in your room, like a cauldron, like a furnace, and the six socks, indolent sharks, sleeping whales, in the pink plastic bowl. That alarm clock that did not ring, that does not ring, that will not ring to wake you up. You put down the open book beside you on the bed, you stretch out. The sluggish, dull, throb of torpor. You let yourself slip. You drop into sleep.

  FIRST THERE ARE SOME FAMILIAR or obsessive images; playing cards spread out before you that you pick up and put down endlessly, without ever succeeding in ordering them in the way you would like, and the unpleasant impression of needing to finish, to succeed in this ordering, as if the revelation of some essential truth depended on it, but it is always the same card that you pick up, lay down and place in order, then pick up, lay down and place in order all over again; crowds walking up and down, coming and going; walls that surround you and in which you search for a concealed exit, the hidden button that will make the walls swing back or the ceiling lift off; forms which take shape then slip away, return then disappear, get closer then fade, flames or dancing women, shadow-play.

  Later, memories that no longer quite manage to make their way through, proofs that no longer prove anything, except, perhaps, that an observatory in Aberdeen, or Inverness, has indeed succeeded in picking up signals from distant stars: was it the Andromeda Nebula, or the Göll and Burdach Constellation? Or the Corpora quadrigemina? The immediate, obvious solution to a problem that has always bothered you: the knight is never master in hearts unless the falsetto has been discarded. Disjointed words bearing a tangled meaning turn in a circle around you. What man imprisoned in a house of cards? What thread? What Law?

  You must be precise, logical. Proceed methodically. There comes a point when you must, at all costs, be able to stop, reflect, really weigh up the situation. If there is a lake in the middle of your head, a possibility that is not only plausible, but quite normal, even though it may not be asserted without qualification, then it will take you a certain amount of time to reach it. There is no path, there never is a path, and, near the lakeside, you'll have to be careful of the tall grass which is always dangerous at this time of year. There won't be a rowing boat either, naturally, there hardly ever is, but you can swim across.

  Subsequently, there obviously never was a lake. You remember quite distinctly that there never has been a lake. However, for quite some time now, sleep has been right in front of you, closer than it has ever been. It has its usual shape: the ball, or rather the bubble, the big, enormous bubble, transparent, of course, but not made of glass, it's more like soap in fact, but a very hard soap, not at all fatty, and only very slightly crumbly, or else, perhaps, like a very thin, very taut membrane. All of its characteristics are there. You don't even have to look for them in order to know this, it simply goes without saying, all you need do is enumerate them: at the top the bubble is turning pink, the bit in front of you is desquamating, at the side it is trying feebly to breathe; the rest belongs to the pillow around which you are wrapped, and to which you are securely lashed, thanks to the pressure that you exert without undue effort on the loop formed by the thumb and index finger of your right hand.

  Now it's getting a lot more difficult. For one thing, it's becoming obvious that the bubble has cheated; it is not in the least bit spherical, but more fish-shaped, like a spindle-fish; wha
t is more, its translucidity is of an altogether mediocre quality, scarcely superior to that of the pillow; finally, and above all, it is certainly not in the process of turning pink at the top. The only thing that was, perhaps, for certain, is this desquamation which has very quickly accelerated, and the breathing that was weak but which is now deep. But the most troublesome aspect is the temperature of the whole which has risen rapidly and will shortly reach a critical threshold — an eventuality which is doubtless heralded by these increasingly numerous desquamations.

  The situation is awkward. You were wrong to pay attention to these details that were not even true; quite clearly, they were just traps, and now you are well and truly a prisoner inside the pillow where it is so hot and dark that you are wondering, not without a degree of anxiety, how you are going to go about extricating yourself. Fortunately, it's not the first time that you've found yourself in this situation; you know that you have only to find an undulation in the landscape, on the horizon, or a faint glimmer in the darkness, a lake, or a cool place you can slip into; and it so happens that you find yourself extraordinarily well-disposed to the idea of letting yourself slip. But search as you may, there is nothing before you, no horizon, no faint glimmer, no lake, nothing, just the dark, thick, stifling pillow. This doesn't surprise you, you were half expecting it. You notice that you weren't really shut in, that, all this time, sleep, real sleep, was behind you, not in front of you, behind you and so recognisable with its long grey beaches, its frosty horizon, its black sky shot through with white or grey streaks. You notice it all of a sudden, you recognise it immediately, but it is too late to reach it, as it always is; another time perhaps. There is something else you know as well, or rather something that you should have been able to foresee: you should never turn round, or at any rate not so quickly, or everything breaks, higgledy-piggledy, your pillow falls and takes your cheek with it, your forearm, your thumb and your feet topple over on top of each other: the tiny grey window takes its place again, close by, once more the dungeon with sloping walls takes shape, and locks shut. You are sitting on your bed.