Scraps Page 15

  The champion with a thousand resources devoted to the cause of the Good. The certified rescuer, like dogs such as the Saint Bernard and the Newfoundland. The tough workhorse who, in the severest weather, performs his task. The baritone with powerful lungs who, however, does not know what to do with himself on stage once his aria is finished. The soldier without helmet or coat of mail, arms dangling after the blows exchanged. The knight-errant with scowling face whose strong hand I feared. The one I regarded—because this was what my family did—as having high moral qualities but whom, in his heavyweight uprightness, I knew to be pitiless and whose entire being, what was more, disheartened me. No less than the prowess of his dive into the stairwell, what remains associated with him, for me, as though he were the one primarily responsible for it as well as the one who set it right, was the very simple horror of that business of the hemorrhage.

  I would be a poor loser if I tried to question the aversion inspired in me not only by the vulgarity of the appearance of this man who impressed me so terribly, but also by the very strength he possessed and his iron severity, in the presence of which we all felt like very small boys. From this distance, I am obviously led to believe that, far from functioning as an example, the almost superhuman power I attributed to him contributed, instead, to making me withdraw, in the same way that the image of an overly formidable father can incite certain children, not to emulate him, but to seek a refuge in a sort of nonexistence that excludes, for the present and the future, any idea of standing up to him. But is it still true that, faced with a cruel father, some children—the weak ones, such as I—assume for their whole lives the habit of avoiding anything reminiscent of the crash of a clay pot against an iron pot [le pot de terre contre le pot de fer: meeting more than one’s match], whereas others—those not marked by the same original defect—choose the opposite path: to harden themselves and, even if only out of hatred, endeavor with all their wills to prove their virility. It was therefore not because of that exemplary athlete with his forbidding exterior, or because of the shocking fact of knowing him to be paired with a creature as frail as was his companion (a union that might make one ask oneself if the spilling of so much blood was not due to the element of paradox implied by such a conjunction); it wasn’t anyone’s fault, nor was it a result of circumstances, that I allowed myself to glide down a slope of cowardice, first shrinking from that dizzying exercise or leap which would have demanded too much effort of me, then backing out of one thing after another and in the end shirking everything that required the involvement of my body (I’m not even saying: that required my body to confront real danger). And having gotten off to this bad start, I gradually came to be—one defeat leading to another, for cowardice only tends to spread—what I am today: someone who somehow or other succeeds in creating an illusion and to whom (at best) the less severe would perhaps be justified in conceding that he does not lack a certain facade, but someone who, very precisely, is nothing other than that facade and would be reduced to zero if life’s hazards led him to have to depend, in order to be capable of anything or even very simply to live, only on his own energy; someone for whom literature is merely a sort of railway siding (because adventures that take place on paper have no physical consequences) and whose only attempts at action assume the form of a vague ideological militantism inducing him to adopt a semblance of a position from time to time on the humanitarian problems of our era; someone whose more and more pronounced taste for the theater—whether he loves, as a fervent adept, the beautiful Italian performances of opera, or whether he takes his memories of the theater as material for reflection—corresponds to his need to find a diversion, an area where he can be enthusiastic the whole day through but where this enthusiasm remains gratuitous, when all is said and done, and where even the most tumultuous torments of passion surge forth only in effigy.

  It is therefore the austere surroundings of that gymnasium, separated by a simple courtyard from the main body of the building on one story of which the Swiss woman had bled, it is this hall with its floor covered by thick carpeting mats, furnished with various pieces of equipment and rigged all over with means of ascension such as ladders, poles, knotted ropes and smooth ropes, that I have chosen as the setting for what I am describing, today, as, in sum, my original sin. A sin that did not consist of improperly eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge but rather of shirking everything that made life something other than a Garden of Eden; a sin that was an act of disobedience also, but even more an evasion, and which is serious in the sense that, being a sin of carelessness, it is a diminution of the self, a dead loss, a failure—something that rebellion is not.

  Aside from the heavyset individual who presided over all this, and his two acolytes (a wiry little brown-haired fellow with the awkward gait of a tumbler, who had an Italian name, and a tall blond man with a rather elegant figure, both more easygoing than our Samson, tormentor and savior of his Delilah) I recall nothing, to all intents and purposes, about those who, on the days the class was held—Sunday mornings and one weekday afternoon, I think—found themselves assembled there with me during one full hour by the clock for the performance of that ballet. There was a tall, dark boy from Algeria whose impetuosity was like that which people assign—perhaps generalizing erroneously—to the Barbary pirates; like all the gymnastics pupils he lived in our part of town. I also remember a sickly Austrian boy who must have been about my age and whose intelligent, sad, little monkey face, all white and wrinkled, was pocked with freckles. Were there girls among us? I can’t really say, even though I vaguely recall one named Yette, a robust, cheerful girl whose working outfit consisted of a sailor suit of knitted or woven cloth; one had only to look at her to know she wasn’t afraid of anything, and I would have done well to profit from her example!

  It would be useless, after having been tempted to blame my teacher, for me to search the attitudes of my fellow students or my brothers for something that, wounding me, would have tended to made me withdraw once and for all. Perhaps (as seems natural) I was mocked for my fears and my clumsiness? If this was so, it was almost certainly not malicious: assuming there was mockery, it never went in a direction such that I was hurt by it and the whole of my character might have been affected by it. At that time, anyway, I felt nothing in me bristle at the idea of losing face: the little kid I was had only a quite imperfect concern for his honor and scarcely worried about morality either. If he had any at all, it didn’t go beyond the vague principles with which his parents indoctrinated him and what he was taught at catechism. If he was able to feel touched to the quick or his vanity satisfied, it was always in connection with mere childish matters or purely superficial things: the profound humiliation I experienced—and expressed in a great scene with tears and shouts—one day when they made me try on a “quartermaster” suit that came, I think, from La Grande Maison and whose trousers, with their flap, seemed to me to resemble the sort of diaper cover one put on babies; the pride in being “Julian Lechim” the Animal Tamer appearing alongside “Siriel Piar” the Virtuoso, when we played traveling sideshow and my brother Jacques was the barker introducing us, the younger ones, as two sensational attractions: my brother Pierre, who actually intended to take up music, promoted to the rank of Hungarian violinist and myself, who didn’t know how to do anything, assigned, for some pointless reason, the role of tamer of wild beasts; the bitter mortification I felt and the devastating sense that I had behaved like a boor one day when they made me apologize to a little boy for having said to him, when we were together in the Bois and were playing, “You’re as green as a green apple” or for having shown, in some other, equally uncharitable way that his very obvious poor state of health had not escaped me.

  Instead of the desire to impress by doing better in a competition with others or the simple horror of seeing oneself outdistanced, what, almost from the beginning, I allowed to establish itself in me, then, was a strictly external vanity—that of the little boy who accepted being no good at gymnastics but could
n’t tolerate being dressed in a way he felt was unworthy of his age, that of Julian Lechim full of himself in his role as animal tamer whereas Michel-Julien did not hesitate to show, in the rue Pierre-Guérin, a ridiculous faintheartedness, that of the young boy out for a walk more ashamed that day of having been guilty of a lack of good manners than he was every week when, publicly, he behaved like a crybaby and a sissy.

  If I complain, today, of being someone who is nothing but a bit of facade and if, even while fearing to see that piece of wall collapse, I aspire to the dignity of the man who may not be brilliant but who can be relied upon—where the simplest human relations are concerned as well as in his main activity—the source of this lies, probably, in a twofold motion produced in me by that fault whose pitiful consequences I had to obliterate one way or another. As I sank down into a hopeless deficiency when it came to those very matters concerning the body and courage which I believe to be so very important precisely because they are so very elementary, I tended to replace the great virtue that I lacked by secondary qualities situated in more comfortable areas: a knowledge of my heart, since I lacked the essential strength that allows one quite simply to have a brave heart; the capacity for disinterest, since I didn’t have enough violence in me for anything at all to seem really desirable; a homesickness for distant places, though I am so cowardly in the presence of what touches me closely; an openness toward events whose theater is the mind, for—however bold one may be in one’s thinking—there is no occasion to grapple savagely with these events, as there is with those of the real world. As, then, I turned away from what I knew to be the solid core of things and, for me, the difficult area, I was led by a moral concern all the more fastidious because I felt myself to be fundamentally offending to avoid deception and also not to make a display of anything that was overly promising; yearning, nevertheless, to adorn with a certain prestige that body over which it would have been better to possess some mastery, I tended—despite my lack of taste for frippery—to compose for myself a figure behind which I could hide everything I felt to be contemptible in me and by means of which I could acquire for myself a little approbation; but I used this subterfuge (if indeed there was any deliberate artifice here) with a sort of honesty and fashioned this figure in such a way that I could clothe myself in it without too bad a conscience. An individual whose goal, in his vestimentary appurtenances, is to achieve taste and distinction, without anything too bourgeois or anything slovenly either; his dress must indicate that he is not an ordinary person and that he knows it but does nothing to accentuate his difference and, especially, does not sin through an excess of self-assurance; that reserved appearance which he has and which he readily makes use of (seeking to disguise as elegance his actual shyness) directly expresses his fear of seeing himself exposed and revealed for what he really is, at the same time that it points one toward the idea of a simple lack of confidence which has no basis and only shows an overly strict exigency in regard to himself; a correctness that, moreover, answers a sincere need to brace himself against his fear of knuckling under but indisputably includes an element of cheating since it gives the impression that, beyond this very neat exterior, there is perfect internal rectitude, and also suggests that a mystery—to which he alone holds the key—could well be hidden beneath this surface, too smooth not to be a sign of depth; also, something uneasy, preoccupied, and bitter in his face, which reflects the sad truth of the disturbance to which the individual is prey but just as clearly signifies the intense spiritual life of one who has nurtured not a few noble illusions and has recovered from them without, for all that, resigning himself to the fact that things are not more than what they are. A twofold movement, consequently, which on the one hand drove me to do whatever I could to throw people off the track successfully and on the other hand inspired in me (as though this were at once the counterpart and my only viable position of withdrawal) a strict probity: that of the man who, if he is never filled with an invincible ardor and self-assurance any more than he is seized by poetic fever, at least makes it a point of honor to pay to the last penny whatever he may have happened, by chance, to promise. An irremissible divergence which, literally, cuts my heart in two: my attachment to those various adornments with which I embellish my body the way a jockey does himself with his jacket or a torero with his “costume of lights” and by which—though I don’t know how to do anything with my body, as I don’t know how to dominate any creature whatsoever, human or animal—I endeavor to make an impression (without much success, for in order to manage this I would have to sport more dazzling colors); my attachment to the truth, which not only leads me to condemn myself on a number of essential points and deprives me even of the certainty that I would stand fast in my last retrenchment if I had my back to the wall, but comes along periodically to destroy the overly flattering ideas that I continuously invent for myself as to the intrinsic value and the practical efficacity of such adornments.

  Facade, adornment: was it anything else that drew me when, toward the end of the 1914-18 war, I was vaguely tempted to enter the American Red Cross because of the khaki uniform, because of the ease with which one could provision oneself there with whiskey as well as cigarettes, and because of the girls one met there, who looked at once tightly buttoned up and rakish, women-soldiers who had nothing in common with the nurses, and who were fraternal rather than maternal, unlike that Vivandière in hussar-style dolman who sings in the famous comic opera, “Come with us, honey!” At that time, when the United States, having entered the war, was now more highly esteemed than England, organizations such as the YMCA or the Knights of Columbus also enjoyed a great prestige among many young people of my circle because the privileged individuals who belonged to them had a right to handsome uniforms without, for all that, being soldiers prepared to play at La Tour d’Auvergne for lack of being of an age, yet, for the Bara drums. Facade, adornment: it was this inclination, much more than any inclination for sports, that caused me, along with a thousand others, to join the Racing-Club de France, where I at first had the pretension of training myself for the footrace, then—toward the beginning of the period immediately following the war—tried my skill a little at rugby and played the forward second line for a season, on a team of juniors (I got winded quickly and, what was worse, I was skittish: every time I chanced to have the ball in my hands I hastened to pass it to someone else, impatient to be rid of it in order not to be “tackled”; I played, in other words, at being someone who played rugby in the same way that the year before I had wanted to play at being a footracer, this on the level of the pantomime or the gesture of pure show that one makes without really compromising oneself, remaining still on the edge of the true act, at a stage that—at best—does not go beyond that of random impulse). And, too, it was definitely not an excess of energy—such that I wouldn’t have been able to feel comfortable with any spectacle unless it involved violence and bloodshed—that made me, later, a fan of bullfighting. What I liked so much about the character of the torero was unquestionably his courage or (to be more precise) the quite particular form this courage assumed in him: to expose himself in all his beauty, to risk darkening with his blood the figures of a geometry that was more Arab than Euclidian. The death of the bull and the man’s confrontation with the horns—all in accordance with a specific protocol and specific canons—was in my eyes a tragedy, the only valid kind since it was true, unlike those proposed by the theater or any one of the other art forms. But there, too, I was cheating, contenting myself with remaining on the edge: for the spectator—even the one who, sitting in the first row, can easily imagine he is not at all separated from the action—the corrida is as unreal as any sort of aesthetic manifestation, because it’s not a tragedy one lives through but simply a tragic spectacle one observes from outside, without confronting the slightest danger, the only risk assumed by the aficionado being to travel long distances time and time again and to leave relatively large sums of money at railway station ticket offices and in the hands of bull
ring managers and hotel proprietors for a series of mediocre or faked events before having the chance to be present at a great day.

  Since I have for so long accorded the corrida the value of an example (somewhat as I used to do the steeplechase) I can’t possibly, now, join its detractors, who don’t see bullfighting as anything but a histrionic sort of cruelty, whereas its ultimate signification is the imposition of a majestic order on primitive material, as one might expect where an authentically great art is concerned. What I find repugnant now is not the thing itself (with its undeniable substratum of barbarity beneath its seductive appearance) but my own attitude toward this thing: to enjoy as a dilettante a spectacle based on death and courage when I myself am so uneasy about death and so lacking in courage; to participate mentally in these herculean labors and feel myself borne along by a wind of heroism, not innocently, as in the theater (where it is understood that no one’s life is at stake) but with the fierce exigency of someone who, being a lover of strong sensations and having paid for this, feels he has been swindled if the episodes of the drama he is witnessing—though he can, at the very most, only imagine the anguish exuding from the pores of the torero—do not allow him to pose as a superman by proxy.

  Among other passionate enthusiasms that have colored my life over the years, I have, therefore, finally eliminated my love for the corrida, as I am now in the process of eliminating my love for Verdi’s operas, astonishing lyrical edifices (both musically and poetically), no longer clinging with the same blindness to these all-too-easy means of intoxication and having little else but suspicion concerning magic potions thanks to which—without moving an inch—we believe ourselves to be demigods trifling with death or men with hearts so swollen with desires that whole crowds can hear them beating. The famous names of Luis-Miguel Dominguin, Manolete (whom I’ve never seen), and, in earlier times, Belmonte and Joselito—who succeeded the two stars of my childhood, Machaquito and Bombita with their strange nicknames—have lost, for me, the emotional charge that made them comparable, for the zealous churchgoer, to the name of some great saint, or, for the romantic lover, the name of a certain woman, and if, hungering for moments of splendor, I still enjoy mingling with the public, whose rustling transforms into a living organ the vessel of an opera hall, whatever my delectation there is no longer anything in it I can feed on: the paradox of art is that, being valuable as an allusion to something that goes beyond its closed world, the highest art turns out to be that which excites us too deeply for us not to experience as powerless to satisfy us precisely this art which has made us more demanding and given us the desire for something beyond art.