Things and A Man Asleep Page 8

  They thought it was happiness they were inventing in their dreams. They thought their imagination was unshackled, splendid and, with each successive wave, permeated the whole world. They thought that all they had to do was to walk for their stride to be a felicity. But what they were, when they came down to it, was alone, stationary and a bit hollow. A grey and icy flatland, infertile tundra. There was no palace at the desert gate, no esplanade for their horizon.

  And from that desperate kind of quest, from that magical feeling of having for an instant almost been able to make it out, albeit dimly, from that extraordinary voyage, from that huge, stationary conquest, from those new-found vistas and those pleasures foretold, from all that was not perhaps impossible beneath their imperfect dream and their admittedly awkward and hobbled impetus which was nonetheless charged (perhaps to the point of inexpressibility) with new emotions and new needs, from all this, nothing remained. They were opening their eyes, hearing the sound of their own voices again, with the muddled mumbling of the man they were interviewing and the hum of the tape-recorder. They could see beside a gun-rack stacked with the shiny butts and gleaming barrels of five sporting rifles, right in front of them, the multicoloured jigsaw puzzle of a land registry chart, and at its centre they could pick out, almost without any astonishment, the nearly complete rectangle of the farmhouse buildings, the grey edging on the track, the quincunx dots marking the plane trees, the heavier lines indicating the main road.

  Later on, they were themselves on the grey track lined with plane trees. They were themselves the little passing glint on the long black road. They were a tiny blot of poverty on the great sea of plenty. They looked around at the great yellow fields with their little red splashes of poppies. And they felt crushed.

  PART TWO

  I

  They tried to run away.

  You cannot live in a frenzy for very long. In a world which promised so much and delivered nothing, the tension was too great. They ran out of patience. They realised, one day, or so they thought, that they had to have a place to escape to.

  Their lives in Paris were treading water. They had stopped advancing. And on occasions they could see themselves - outdoing each other in the abundance of mistaken details characteristic of all their dreams — as forty-year-old petits-bourgeois, with Jérôme running a team of hawkers (Family Protection, Soap for the Blind, Students in Need) and Sylvie keeping house, in a tidy little flat, with a small car, the same little family hotel where they would spend every holiday, and their television set. Or else, at the other extreme, which was far worse, as ageing Bohemians in polo-necks and cord trousers, sitting every evening on the same café terrace in Saint-Germain or Montparnasse, scraping a living from occasional bargains and deals, misers to the tips of their dirty fingernails.

  They dreamed of living in the countryside, out of temptation's way. They would lead a calm and frugal life. They would have a white stone house, on the edge of a village, warm elephant-cord trousers, heavy shoes, anoraks, metal-tipped walking sticks and hats, and every day they would go for long walks in the forest. Then they would come back home, would make tea and toast, like the English do, put big logs on the hearth; they would play a quartet on the gramophone, which they would never tire of hearing, would read the great novels they had never had time to read, would have their friends to stay.

  Such flights of rural fancy were frequent but rarely got to the point of being actual plans. On two or three occasions, to be fair, they did wonder what kinds of livelihood they might find in the country: there were none. The idea of becoming primary school teachers did occur to them once, but they found it immediately unappealing as they thought of crammed classrooms and days full of stress. They talked vaguely of becoming travelling booksellers, or of going off to an abandoned Provençal mas to make rustic pottery. Then they indulged in imagining that they would live in Paris for just three days a week, earning enough to live on comfortably for the rest of their time, which they would spend in the Department of Yonne or Loiret. But these embryonic departures never went very far. They never considered what was really possible, or rather, really impossible, about them.

  They dreamed of giving up their jobs, letting go of everything, casting off on a new adventure. They dreamed of starting up again from scratch, of having another go, differently. They were dreaming of a clean break, of saying farewell.

  The idea, all the same, was working away and taking root inside them. By mid-September 1962, on their return from a gloomy holiday spoiled by rain and running short of money, they seemed to have made up their minds. An advertisement in Le Monde in the first days of October offered teaching jobs in Tunisia. It was not the ideal opportunity - they had dreamed of India, America, Mexico. It was an unglittering, down-to-earth offer, promising neither great fortune nor great adventure. They felt untempted. But they had a few friends in Tunis, old friends from school and college, and then there was the sun, the blue Mediterranean Sea, the promise of a different life, of a real departure, of a different kind of work. They agreed to apply. They were accepted.

  Real departures are prepared long in advance. This one was messy. It was more like running away. They spent a fortnight rushing from office to office for medical certificates, for passports, for visas, for tickets, for luggage. Then four days before they were due to leave they learned that Sylvie, who had completed two years of her degree course, had been appointed to the Technical College at Sfax, one hundred and seventy miles from Tunis, whereas Jérôme, who had only a first-year pass by way of qualification, had been given a primary-school job at Mahares, twenty-three miles in the other direction.

  It was bad news. They wanted to back out. Tunis, where accommodation had been booked for them, where they were expected, was where they had wanted to go, where they thought they were going. But it was too late. They had sub-let their flat, booked their seats, given their farewell party. They had been getting ready to go for a long time. And then Sfax, of which they had barely heard the name before, was at the end of the world, a desert, and, with their pronounced inclination for extremes, they even began to take pleasure in thinking that they were going to be cut off from everything, remote from everything, isolated as they never had been before. However, they agreed that a primary school post was, if not too much of a slide, at least too heavy a burden: Jérôme succeeded in having his contract cancelled: one salary would be enough to live on until he could find some sort of work on the spot.

  And so they left. They were seen to the station, and, on the morning of 23 October, with four trunks full of books and a camp bed, they boarded the Commandant-Crubellier at Marseilles, bound for Tunis. The crossing was bad and the dinner was not good. They were sea-sick, took pills and slept soundly. In the morning Tunisia was in sight. It was a fine day. They smiled to each other. They saw an island which they were told was called Île Plane, then great long and narrow beaches, and, after they had passed La Goulette and entered the Lake of Tunis, flocks of migrating birds.

  They were happy to have left. They felt they were emerging from a hell of crowded metro carriages, insufficient sleep, aching teeth and uncertainty. Their minds were clouded. Their life had been only a kind of endless tightrope walk leading nowhere: empty appetite, naked desire without bounds or props. They felt exhausted. They had left to go to ground, to forget, to wind down.

  The sun shone. The boat moved slowly, silently, along the narrow channel. On the road quite close to them, people stood in open-topped cars and waved vigorously at them. In the sky there were little white clouds standing still. It was already hot. The panels beneath the handrail were warm to the touch. On the deck below them, sailors were stacking up deckchairs, rolling up the long tarpaulins which covered the holds. Queues lined up at the gangways for disembarkation.

  They got to Sfax two days later, towards two in the afternoon, after a seven-hour train journey. The heat was overpowering. Opposite the tiny white and pink station building there lay an endless avenue grey with dust, lined with ugly palms
and new-built blocks. A few minutes after the train had come in, after the sparse cars and bicycles had left, the town returned to a state of total silence.

  They left their cases in left luggage. They went down the avenue, which was called Avenue Bourguiba. After about three hundred yards they came upon a restaurant. A sizable wall-mounted adjustable ventilator hummed jerkily. On greasy tables with oil-cloth tablecloths a few dozen flies had congregated; a stubble-chinned waiter nonchalantly flicked them away with a napkin. For two hundred francs they had a meal of tuna salad and veal cutlet.

  Then they looked for a hotel, booked a room, had their cases brought over. They washed their hands and faces, lay down for a moment, changed, and went back down. Sylvie went to the Technical College, Jérôme waited outside on a bench. Towards four o'clock, Sfax began slowly to reawaken. Hundreds of children appeared, then veiled women, policemen dressed in grey poplin, beggars, carts, donkeys, spotless bourgeois.

  Sylvie emerged with her timetable in her hand. They carried on walking. They drank a can of beer and ate olives and salted almonds. Barkers were selling the day before yesterday's Figaro. They had arrived.

  The next day Sylvie made the acquaintance of some of her new colleagues, who helped them find a flat. It consisted of three huge rooms with high ceilings and was absolutely bare: a long passageway led to a small square room from which five doors opened, three of them to the bedrooms, one to a bathroom and one to a vast kitchen. Two balconies looked out onto a small fishing harbour, south channel A dock, which offered some resemblance to Saint-Tropez, and onto a foul-smelling lagoon. They took their first steps in the Arab quarter, bought a metal bedstead, a horse-hair mattress, two cane chairs, four rope stools, two tables, a thick yellow raffia mat with sparse decorations in red.

  Then Sylvie began teaching. Day by day they settled in. Their trunks, which had been shipped as freight, arrived. They unpacked books, records, the record-player, the trinkets. With large sheets of red, grey and green blotting paper they made lampshades. They bought long planks of barely planed wood and twelve-hole bricks, and they covered two-thirds of the walls with bookshelves. On all the walls they stuck dozens of reproductions and on a prominently-positioned wallboard they pinned photographs of all their friends.

  It was a cold and dismal dwelling. With its too-high walls painted with a brownish sort of yellow distemper which kept flaking off in large pieces, with its large, uniform, colourless tiles on all the floors, with its unusable volume, the flat was altogether too big and too bare for them to be able to live in it. There would have had to be five or six of them, a group of good friends drinking, eating, talking. But they were on their own, and lost. The living room, containing the camp bed on which they had put a small mattress and a colourful bedspread, the thick raffia mat strewn with a few cushions, and, above all, the books (the row of collected works in the Pléiade editions, the run of periodicals, the four Tisné volumes), the trinkets, the records, the large mariner's chart, The Great Parade, all the things which not so long ago had constituted the decor of their other life, all the things which took them back from this universe of sand and stone to Rue de Quatrefages, to the tree that stayed green for so long, to the little gardens - the living room, at least, still exuded a little warmth. Lying flat on the mat, with a tiny cup of Turkish coffee at their sides, they would listen to the Kreutzer Sonata, the Archduke, Death and the Maiden, and it was as though the music (which in this large and sparsely furnished room, almost as large as a hall, acquired stunning acoustics) came to inhabit it, and all of a sudden transformed it: like a guest, a very dear friend who had been lost sight of and found again by chance, coming to share their meal, talking to them of Paris. On a cool November evening, in this foreign city where nothing was theirs, where they were ill at ease, music took them backwards, allowed them to recover an almost forgotten feeling of complicity and shared living, as if, inside a tiny island - within the boundaries of the mat, the two sets of shelving, the record-player, the circle of light confined by the cylindrical lampshade - they had managed to establish and to preserve a protected area which time and space could not touch. But outside, all around, was exile and the unknown: the long passageway where footsteps echoed too loudly, the vast, icy, hostile bedroom with only a wide, too-hard bed smelling of straw for furniture and an unstable lamp on an old tea-chest which did as a bedside table, a wicker trunk full of dirty washing, a stool littered with clothes; and the third room, not used, where they never went. Then the stone staircase, the main foyer perpetually threatened by the sand; the street: three two-storey blocks of flats, a shed where sponges were dried, a plot of waste ground; the town around.

  In Sfax they spent what were probably the queerest eight months of their lives.

  The port and the European quarter of Sfax had been destroyed during the war, and the city now consisted of about thirty streets set at right angles to each other. The two main streets were Avenue Bourguiba, running from the station to the Central Market, near where they lived, and Avenue Hedi-Chaker, which ran from the port to the Arab quarter. The city centre was the intersection of these two streets: that was where the town hall was to be found, with two of its ground-floor rooms containing a few ancient ceramics and half a dozen mosaics, as well as the statue and tomb of Hedi Chaker, murdered by the Main Rouge terrorists shortly before independence, the Café de Tunis, frequented by Arabs and the Café de la Régence, frequented by Europeans, a little flowerbed, a news-stand and a tobacconist's.

  Just over fifteen minutes was enough to go right round the European quarter. From the building they lived in, the Technical College was three minutes' walk away, the market was two minutes away, the restaurant where they ate all their meals was five minutes away and the Café de la Régence took six minutes to reach, as did the bank, the municipal library and six of the city's seven cinemas. The post office, the station and the hire point for cars to Tunis and Gabès were less than ten minutes' walk and constituted the outer limits of sufficient knowledge for living in Sfax.

  The Arab quarter, an ancient, beautiful, fortified city, displayed grey-brown walls and gates which were justifiably considered admirable. They often entered the Arab quarter, made it almost the only goal of all their walks, but because they were indeed only walking through, they remained for ever strangers in it. They did not understand its basic mechanisms, all they could see was a labyrinth of alleys. Raising their eyes, they might admire a wrought-iron balcony, a painted beam-end, the pure ogive arch of a window, the subtle play of light and shade, an extremely narrow staircase - but their walks had no aim. They turned around on themselves, always afraid of getting lost, tiring easily. In the end there was nothing to attract them in this sequence of poverty-stricken stalls, of almost identical shops, of cramped bazaars, in this incomprehensible alternation of crowded and deserted streets, in this throng which did not seem to be going anywhere at all.

  Such feelings of foreignness grew all the more marked, became almost oppressive when, faced with long empty afternoons and desperate Sundays, they crossed right through the Arab quarter and, beyond Bab Djebli, got as far as the endless suburbs of Sfax. Stretching out for miles were tiny garden plots, hedges of prickly pear, wattle-and-daub houses, huts made of corrugated iron and cardboard boxes; and then huge abandoned and rotting pools, and, far away, at the vanishing point of the horizon, the first olive groves. They would loiter for hours on end; they would wander past barracks, cross waste ground and derelict quagmires.

  And when they returned to the European quarter, when they passed in front of the Hillal or the Nour cinema, when they sat down at the Régence and clapped their hands to call the waiter, ordered a Coca-Cola or a can of beer, bought the latest issue of Le Monde, whistled for the hawker, dressed as always in his long, dirty, white smock and his canvas skullcap, to buy a few twists of peanuts, grilled almonds, pistachios and pine-nuts, only then did they know that melancholy feeling that this was their home.

  They would walk beside palm trees grey with dust; they
would pass along in front of the neo-Moorish façades of Avenue Bourguiba; they would cast vague glances at hideous window-displays: flimsy furniture, wrought-iron standard lamps, electric blankets, school exercise books, evening dress, ladies' shoes, bottled gas canisters. It was the only world they had, their real world. They dragged their feet on the way back; Jérôme would make coffee in zazouas made in Czechoslovakia; Sylvie corrected a pile of homework.

  To begin with Jérôme had tried to find work. He went to Tunis several times and, thanks to some letters of introduction he had had written before leaving France and to the contacts of his Tunisian friends, he met some functionaries at the Ministry of Information, in broadcasting, in tourism and in the Education Service. It was a waste of time. Market research did not exist in Tunisia, nor did part-time jobs, and the few sinecures that existed were fully occupied. He had no qualifications. He was neither an engineer, nor an accountant, nor a draughtsman, nor a doctor. He was again offered a teaching job; he wasn't keen; very soon he gave up all hope. Sylvie's salary allowed them to live modestly; in Sfax that was the commonest kind of living.

  Sylvie wore herself out trying to instill, as the syllabus required, the hidden beauties of Malherbe and Racine in pupils who were older than she was and didn't know how to write. Jérôme wasted his time. He started off on various projects - taking a diploma in sociology, sorting out his ideas about film - which he couldn't keep up. He wandered around the streets in his Weston shoes, strolled up and down the port, sauntered through the market. He went to the museum, exchanged a few words with the duty guard, spent a few minutes looking at an ancient amphora, a funeral inscription or a mosaic: Daniel in the Lions' Den, Amphitrite astride a dolphin. He went to watch a tennis match on the courts laid out beneath the ramparts, he walked through the Arab quarter, loitered in the bazaars, weighing up fabrics, copperware, saddles. He bought all the newspapers, did the crosswords, borrowed books from the library, wrote rather dismal letters to his friends, who often did not reply.