Things and A Man Asleep Page 7

  The next morning, when life once more ground away at them, when the great advertising machine in which they were tiny cogs once more started up, they would not have forgotten entirely, it seemed to them, the blurred treasures, the unveiled secrets of their fervent night-time quest. They would sit opposite people who believed in the brands, the jingles, the images that were put in front of them, people who ate the dripping from beef bought in from a knacker's yard and found its hazelnut fragrance and plant-like odour quite delicious. (But did they themselves - without knowing really why, and with an odd, almost worrisome feeling that they were not quite grasping something - did they not admire some posters, find some slogans marvellous, reckon some trailers were brilliant?) They would sit down and switch on their tape-recorders, they would say ah and hm with the right intonation, they would fake their interviews, bungle their reports, they would be dreaming, muddle-headedly, of something else.

  IX

  How could they make their fortune? They could find no solution to the problem. And yet, every day, so it seemed, there were individuals who managed to solve it for themselves. And these examples to be followed, these wise and smiling, sly and wilful faces full of health, firmness and modesty upholding to eternity the moral and intellectual resilience of the French nation, were nothing less than icons instilling patience and right feelings in the others, in the ones who lagged behind, who stood still, champed their bit, bit the dust.

  They knew all there was to know about the rise of such men kissed by Fortune - captains of industry, incorruptible, glittering prize-winners from Ecole Polytechnique, financial wizards, men of letters without a smudge, globe-trotting pioneers, packet-soup salesmen, suburban developers, crooners, playboys, gold-diggers, jugglers of Mammon. They had simple stories. They were still young and had kept their good looks, with that dull gleam of experience in their eyes, greying hair on their temples to show for their years of struggle, with frank, engaging smiles concealing sharp teeth, double-jointed fingers, seductive voices.

  They could easily imagine themselves fitting into such a role. They would have a three-acter in a bottom drawer. Their garden plot would be sitting on oil, or uranium. They would live for years in poverty, hardship, doubt. They would dream of going first-class, just once, on the metro. And then, suddenly, brutally, wildly, unexpectedly, like a thunderclap: fortune! Their play would be accepted, their mineral deposit discovered, their genius acclaimed. Contracts would rain down, and they would light their havanas with thousand-franc banknotes.

  It would be a morning like any other. Under the front door three envelopes would have been slipped: long and narrow, with impressive embossed official lettering and the address accurately typed in with perfect spacing on an IBM Executive. Their hands would shake a little as they opened them. There would be three cheques with long strings of numbers on them. Or else a letter:

  "Dear Sir

  Your uncle, Mr Palmgrease, having died intestate . .

  and they would pass their hands over their faces, not believing their eyes and thinking they were still dreaming; they would open the window wide.

  Thus did they dream, stupidly, happily, of inheritances, jackpots, winning at the races. Someone would break the bank at Monte Carlo; they would find a satchel abandoned in the luggage rack of some empty railway carriage, stuffed with wads of high-denomination notes; in a dozen oysters, enough pearls to make a string. Or a couple of Boulle armchairs bought off an illiterate peasant in Poitou.

  They would be carried away by great surges. Sometimes, for hours on end, for days at a stretch, a frenzy of desire to be rich, immediately, enormously and for ever, would seize them and hold them in its grip. It was an insane, unwholesome, oppressive desire which seemed to control their slightest movement. Fortune became their opium. It intoxicated them. They surrendered unreservedly to the delirium of their fantasies. Wherever they went they paid heed only to money. They had nightmares of millions of gems.

  They would attend the big auctions at Drouot and Galliera. They would mingle with gentlemen examining pictures, catalogue in hand. They watched Degas pastels, rare postage stamps, stupid gold coins, fragile editions of La Fontaine and Crébillon luxuriously bound by Lederer, admirable pieces of furniture bearing the mark of Claude Séné or Oehlenberg, gold or enamel snuff-boxes, being sold off. The auctioneer presented the lots in turn; some people with serious faces went to cast an eye over them; murmurs passed through the crowd. The bidding began. Prices climbed. Then the hammer fell, and it was over, the object disappeared, five or ten million francs had gone by within reach of their hands.

  Sometimes they trailed the new owners; these happy mortals were most often only underlings, antique-dealers' buyers, private secretaries, straw men. They would be led by them to the portals of austere mansions in Voie Oswaldo-Cruz, Boulevard Beauséjour, Rue Maspéro, Rue Spontini, Villa Said, Avenue du Roule. Beyond the railings, box shrubberies, and gravelled drives, incompletely drawn curtains sometimes gave them a glimpse of large, barely-lit rooms. They could make out vaguely the shapes of the sofas and armchairs, the blurred brushstrokes of an impressionist painting. And they would beat their retreat, wistful and grumpy.

  One day they even dreamed of stealing. They imagined, at length, dressing in black and, with a tiny flashlight in one hand and a jemmy and a glass-cutter in their pocket, entering a building after nightfall, getting into the cellars, forcing the primitive lock on a dumb-waiter, reaching the kitchens. It would be a flat belonging to a diplomat on service overseas, of a shady financier with nonetheless perfect taste, of a distinguished dilettante, of an enlightened art-lover. They would know every nook and cranny. They would know where to find the little twelfth-century Madonna, the oval panel by Sebastiano del Piombo, the Fragonard wash drawing, the two small Renoirs, the little Boudin, the Atlan, the Max Ernst, the de Staels, the coins, the musical boxes, the candyboxes, the silverware, the Delft china. They would move with precision and firmness, as if they had rehearsed it all many times over. They would move unhurriedly, confidently, efficiently, imperturbably, phlegmatically: the Arsène Lupins of modern times. Not a muscle of their faces would twitch. One by one the showcases would be broken into; one by one the canvases would be taken down and removed from their frames.

  Their car would be waiting below. They would have filled the tank the day before. Their passports would be in order. They would have had preparations for departure in hand for a long while. Their trunks would be in Brussels already. They would take the Flanders road, cross the Belgian border without hindrance. Then, little by little, without undue haste, in Luxemburg, in Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, the States, South America, they would sell off their booty. They would go round the world. They would wander for years, as the whim took them. They would settle eventually in a land with a pleasant climate. They would buy, somewhere, in the Italian lakes, or at Dubrovnik, in the Balearics, or Cefalù, a large, white stone house nestling in the middle of a park.

  They didn't do anything of the sort, of course. They didn't even buy a lottery ticket. At the very most they put into their poker games — a game they discovered at that time and which was set to become the last port of call for their creaky friendships - a relentlessness which at times could look suspicious. Some weeks they played as many as three or four games, each one of which kept them up until the small hours. They played for small stakes, so small that they had only the foretaste of risk and the semblance of winnings. And yet, when, with two low pairs or, even better, with a four-card flush, they threw on the table, at one go, a hatful of chips worth at least three hundred (old) francs and scooped the pool, when they had upped the ante to six hundred francs' worth of IOU's, lost them in three calls, then won them - and more - back again in six calls, a modest smile of triumph would light their faces. They had pushed lady luck their way; their sliver of courage had borne fruit; they were not far short of feeling like heroes.

  X

  A farming survey took them all over France. They went to Lorraine, Saintonge, Pic
ardy, Beauce, Limagne. They met lawyers of ancient stock, wholesalers whose lorries covered a quarter of France, prosperous industrialists, gentlemen-farmers always escorted by a pack of big russet dogs and watchful factors.

  The silos were full of wheat. In great cobbled courtyards sparkling tractors faced the squires' black saloon cars. They passed through the workers' canteen, the vast kitchen where women toiled, the great hall with its yellowing floor — where no-one went without first replacing his shoes with felt slippers — and its massive fireplace, its television set, its wing-chairs, light oak chests, brasses, pewter, china plate. Along a narrow passage impregnated with smells they came to a door opening on to an office. It almost seemed a small room, so great was the clutter. Beside an old hand-operated telephone mounted on the wall, a year planner summed up the life of a farming business: cereals to be planted, plans, estimates, account days; a graph gave eloquent testimony to record yields. On a table piled high with receipts, payslips, memos and bumph, a black, cloth-bound ledger, open at that day's page, gave sight of long columns of figures, of flourishing finances. Framed certificates - for bulls, milking cows, prize sows - jostled with bits of land-registry charts, ordnance survey maps, portrait photographs of herds and farmyards and four-colour-printed prospectuses for tractors, threshers, grubbers and drills.

  That was where they plugged in their tape-recorders. They made grave enquiries about the changing place of agriculture in the modern world, the contradictions of the French countryside, the farmer of tomorrow, the Common Market, government rulings on wheat and beet, free-range methods and floor prices. But their minds were somewhere else. They could see themselves coming and going in the house when it had been abandoned. They would go up polished stairs, enter shuttered and musty bedrooms. Beneath dun canvas dustcovers would be venerable pieces of furniture. They would open nine-foot-high wardrobes full of lavender-scented linen, preserving jars and silverware.

  In the half-light of attics they would discover unsuspected treasure. In unending cellars they would be welcomed by tuns and hogsheads, vats full of oil and honey, barrels of preserves in brine, juniper-roast ham, kegs of rough brandy.

  They would saunter through echoing laundry rooms, through wood stores, through coal stores, through fruit storerooms where endless rows of apples and pears would be laid out on wicker trays stacked on top of each other, through dairies with their unmistakable smell, where mountains of freshly-made pats of butter would display their glorious, still dripping, maker's mark, alongside churns of milk, pancheons of fresh cream, cottage cheese, quark.

  They would go on through cowsheds, stables, workshops, forges, barns, ovens where huge lumps of dough were baking, warehouses bursting with sacks, tractor sheds.

  From the top of the water-tower, they would be able to see the whole farmhouse enclosing on all four sides the great cobbled courtyard with its two pointed-arch gateways, its backyard, piggery, kitchen garden, orchard, the avenue of plane trees marking the track that leads to the main road, and, all around, as far as the eye could see, the great striped yellowness of wheatfields, the thickets, the pasture land, the straight black lines of the roads on which, occasionally, you could see the passing glint of a car, and the wavy line of poplars all along a deeply embanked, almost invisible river, stretching to misty hills on the far horizon.

  Then, in gusts, other mirages swirled. They saw vast open markets, endlessly long arcades of shops, unbelievable restaurants. Everything man can eat, everything that could be drunk, was laid out before them. Chests, crates, baskets, trays spilling over with fat, yellow or red apples, squat pears, purple grapes. Stalls of mangoes, figs, honeydew and water melon, lemons, pomegranates, sacks of almonds, walnuts, pistachios, punnets of raisins and sultanas, dried bananas, candied fruits, yellow and transparent dried dates.

  There were charcuteries, colonnaded temples with ceilings groaning with hams and sausages, dark caverns piled high with pâtés and black puddings coiled up like ships' hawsers, barrels of sauerkraut, of purplish olives, of salted anchovies, of sweet-pickled cucumber.

  Or else, on both sides of an alley, double ranks of suckling pigs and wild boars hanging by their feet, half-sides of beef, hares, fatted geese, deer with glazed eyes.

  They would pass through delicatessens redolent with delicious smells, wondrous patisseries with hundreds of tarts in a row, magnificent kitchens with a thousand copper cauldrons.

  They would drown in plenty. They dreamed up huge market halls. Before their eyes arose Eldorados of hams, cheeses and spirits. Tables set themselves fully laden, bedecked with sparkling white tablecloths, strewn with flowers, covered with cut glass and fine plate. There were pâtés en croûte by the dozen, terrines, salmon, pike, trout, lobster, dressed legs of lamb with horn- and silver-handled decorations, hare and quail, steaming boar, cheeses the size of millstones, regiments of bottles.

  Locomotives would appear hauling freight cars loaded with fatted cattle; lorries bearing bleating ewes would draw up, baskets of crayfish would be piled up in pyramids. Millions of loaves would emerge from a thousand ovens. Tons of coffee beans would be unloaded from ships' holds.

  Then, even further on - their eyes would be half closed now - amidst forests and lawns, by river banks, at the gates of the desert or on a cliff overlooking the sea, on great squares paved with marble, they would see skyscrapers rise one hundred storeys high.

  They would wander by their walls of steel, tropical wood, glass and marble. In the central foyer, all along a cut-glass partition beaming millions of rainbows throughout the building, a waterfall would spout from the fifth-floor level, encircled by the dizzy spiral of twin aluminium stairwells.

  Lifts bore them upwards. They went down curving corridors, walked up crystal steps, through luminous galleries where statues and flowers stood in lines as far as the eye could see, where limpid brooks flowed on beds of polychrome pebbles.

  Doors opened in front of them. They came upon open-air swimming pools, patios, reading rooms, quiet rooms, theatres, aviaries, gardens, aquariums, tiny museums for their sole use where, on the four canted sides of a small room with cut-off corners, four Flemish portraits were hung. Some rooms were all rock, others all jungle; in others, the sea broke in waves; and in others, peacocks paraded. From the ceiling of a circular room hung thousands of oriflammes. Inexhaustible mazes echoed with sweet music; one room with an outlandish shape served no other purpose, it seemed, than to set off unending echoes. The floor of another room represented at different times of the day the different stages in a very complicated game.

  In the enormous basement, as far as the eye could see, docile machinery worked away.

  They would drift from marvel to marvel, from surprise to surprise. All they had to do was to live, to be there, for the world to offer itself to them whole. Their ships, their trains, their rockets crisscrossed the planet. The world was in their arms, with its wheat-covered counties, its fish-full seas, its peaks and its deserts, its flowery landscapes, beaches, islands, trees and treasures, with its huge and long-abandoned factories buried underground making the finest woollen cloths and the brightest silks for them alone.

  They knew countless joys. They let themselves be swept along by galloping wild horses, through the long grass of great storm-tossed pampas. They climbed the highest mountains. Wearing skis, they swept down steep slopes dotted with enormous pine trees. They swam in glassy lakes. They marched in the driving rain, breathing in the smell of wet grass. They lay out in the sun. From an outcrop they saw hillocks covered in the flowers of the field. They walked through unsignposted forests. They made love in rooms thick with shade, thickly carpeted, on deep settees.

  Then they dreamed of exquisite porcelain decorated with tropical birds, of leather-bound books printed in elzevier on hand-made Japanese vellum, with wide white margins and rough edges on which the eye could rest, of mahogany tables, of supple, comfortable, colourful silk or linen clothing, of bright and spacious rooms, of armfuls of flowers, of Bokhara rugs, of bouncing Dober
manns.

  Their bodies, their movements were of infinite beauty, their eyes were serene, their hearts transparent, their smiles unruffled.

  And in a short-lived apotheosis they saw gigantic palaces built from scratch. On levelled terrain thousands of bonfires were lit, millions of men came to sing The Messiah. On vast scaffolds, ten thousand brasses played Verdi's Requiem. Poems were picked out on mountainsides. Gardens sprang up in the desert. Whole towns were nothing but frescoes.

  But these glittering visions, all these visions which came surging and rushing towards them, which flowed in unstoppable bursts, these vertiginous images of speed, light and triumph, seemed to them at first to be connected to each other in a surprisingly necessary sequence, in an unbounded harmony. It was as if before their bedazzled eyes a finished landscape had suddenly risen up, a total picture of the world, a coherent structure which they could at last grasp and decipher. At first it felt as if their sensations were multiplied by ten, as if their faculties of sight and sense had been amplified to infinite powers, as if a magical bliss accompanied their smallest gesture, kept in time with their steps, suffused their lives: the world was coming towards them, they were going towards the world, they would go on and on discovering it. Their lives were love and ecstasy. Their passion knew no bounds; their freedom was without constraint.

  But they were choking under the mass of detail. The visions blurred, became jumbles; they could retain only a few vague and muddled bits, tenuous, persistent, brainless, impoverished wisps. It was not a serene unity, but a brittle fragmentation, as if these visions had only ever been very distant and incalculably darkened reflections, illusory and allusive glimmerings fading away almost as soon as they were born, mere specks of dust: just the banal projection of their clumsiest desires, an almost insubstantial haze of paltry splendours, scraps of dreams they would never be able to grasp.