Scraps Page 22
Walking with a quick step and a jerky one because of the imbalance created by my missing shoe, I turned into a long, very straight street. Despite the late hour, I encountered one or two people (blacks? whites? I have no idea) and asked them where the police station was. Protesting to a European civil servant against the vile action of another European who himself belonged to the official circles since he was in the navy appeared to me to be a duty I owed to the most rudimentary form of justice: wasn’t it disgusting that on this day of all days, which one might have hoped would be dedicated to humanitarian sentiments, a responsible military officer should have shown with such bestial cynicism that for him Africans were still untouchables?
I was still walking along that drowsy street, so deserted it seemed interminable to me, and wondering if I would ever reach the police station. What was whirling around in my head now was neither global nor fraternal reveries against a discontinuous background noise of recollected scraps of the Soviet national anthem, but the plans of a grieving moralist who arrives like a prophet of doom proclaiming the abjectness of what he has seen. The contrast between my stocking foot and my shod foot transformed the one shoe that remained into a buskin and it was like a tragic actor that I proceeded toward the distant and problematical station where I intended to loose my thunderbolts. Perhaps I was beginning to feel a little worn out: my lower lip painful, my ankles slightly bruised, and my right leg retaining the smarting memory of one of the falls I had taken on the steps? Then again, perhaps I became aware of all that only later, when my anger had died down and I was resting?
Whatever the case, it was taking me a long time to get where I was going and my only idea, now, was to get there. Noticing a house that was wide open and brightly lit, with bursts of conversations issuing from it, I decided to go inside and try one last time to get someone to point out to me where the police station was. When I appeared before the men and women making merry there—with my clothes in disorder and perhaps the look of a blinking owl—their gazes turned on me, stupefied one and all: I was in the house of the Syrian merchants I had left some time before and my two hosts from lunchtime, like the Alsacian couple and the rest of the company, all standing, it seems to me, greeted this apparition, this unseated horseman wandering home limping badly and covered with mud, with the same eye as though I had been an emanation from hell as untimely as Banquo’s ghost or the statue of the Commandant.
I briefly told the tale of my misadventure and forcefully stressed my desire to go lodge a complaint with the proper authority: that anyone should have thought I was a homosexual was something I didn’t care about in the least (and I insisted on this point somewhat hypocritically, in order to show that I was broad-minded and not to offend my two hosts, because to talk about Sodom in their presence was the same as talking about ropes in the house of a hanged man); this having been said, it was intolerable that the mere fact of not keeping one’s distance from Africans should be interpreted that way and I attached quite a different importance to this reaction, which proceeded from a scandalous state of mind, than to that business of blows unequally exchanged with someone who had hurled a term of abuse in my face.
Even though in their eyes my reasoning was probably less rigorous than in mine and they were in a better position than I to appreciate the absurdity of my appealing to a police inspector as though he were a supreme judge, my two friends decided to accompany me. Without them, I certainly would not have found the police station, which was situated elsewhere than in that street along which, wearing only one shoe, my eye cloudy, I had walked as though in a dream. A functionary with a fixed expression on his face listened to my statement and did not bat an eyelid when he heard me specify that it was not my first aggressors I was angry at but that petty officer from the navy who had grossly insulted me and struck me one more time. I probably looked crazy enough so that he did not pay much attention to the details of what I said and retained only what interested him in his job as cop—that a European had been assaulted and robbed by Africans—and I had obviously recovered only a very small portion of my reason, since I did not realize the inopportuneness of an action whose only result (if it had any) would be to bring grist to the mill of those who denigrated Africans whereas my intention had been just the opposite, to punish a racist. While I was making my statement, a sailor in a white uniform, large blue collar, and beret with a pompom on it came to complain that he too had been attacked, and displayed his hip pocket which had been torn just as mine had. Before signing my name below my statement (which a clerk had typed), I reread it carefully so as to be sure the meaning had not been distorted, but one may assume that these two complaints lodged during the same night would hardly raise the people of Dakar in the professional opinion of the inspector with the fixed expression . . .
Taking me home with them, my two hosts lavished attention on me: they bandaged my right leg and the man with beautiful blue eyes mended my torn pocket like a skilled seamstress; they lent me a little money and made me a gift of a pair of lightweight, comfortable black shoes with rubberized heels that came (they told me) from the American navy. Then they took me to my hotel, the Hôtel des Gouverneurs, where I arrived at about three in the morning and had just enough time to shave and pack my bags before getting into a car to go to the airport with my mission leader and my colleague the geographer. The latter was not the sort of man to have a high opinion of my completely gratuitous attempt at fraternization in the vapors of drunkenness, for his ideas, like his character—he was a member of the Communist Party and had fought as an officer in the FTP—predisposed him toward a brotherhood that was concrete in quite another way. As for the former, he was not insensitive to the ludicrous aspect of the whole business but pointed out to me—good diplomat that he was—that I would have been better advised not to involve the police because tongues tended to wag in the colony. As for the elephant hunter—who said good-bye to us at the airport before returning to his Ivory Coast—I don’t know exactly what he thought, but I have every reason to believe that he was too experienced at taking action and too accustomed to controlling his reflexes not to regard as rather miserable a confused situation such as this whose only coherent principle, when all was said and done, was my lack of constraint.
As far as I myself was concerned—the first person singular, in other words the primary person involved, in this story of a grotesque escapade—I can see that everything happened as though some unknown administrator of justice, in order to punish me for having thus degraded myself under the pretext of fraternizing, had made use of the rapacious hands of those three blacks (probably full of scorn for the drunken white man abandoning himself so far as to claim he was the brother of men he knew nothing about except their color) and then the fists of a European military man (to whom this same drunken white man, so proud of his show of egalitarianism, was clearly not in any condition to furnish a model of humanism). Anxious to indoctrinate me, some Providence had perhaps taken advantage of my pointless night-prowling to prove to me the inanity of an effusiveness that doesn’t go beyond a few symbolic gestures: a warm handshake, a Spanish-style abrazo, all of this dressed up with handsome smiles and pretty words. However sincere the sympathy that had for so long attracted me to people of other races and other cultures—and especially toward the blacks, ordinarily treated like poor relations in the human family—there is no question but that from the very start of this affair what was motivated by an authentically heartfelt impulse had been translated into action in the facile guise of a theatrical attitude: to fraternize with the population of color was a demonstration that could satisfy my pride but remained completely exterior, whereas true brotherhood would have required that in all modesty and lucidity—making a dogged and serious effort to help it defend its interests on the most down-to-earth and daily basis—I would take up the cause of the population that I had just seen for the first time clearly revealed in the Upper Ivory Coast when the geographer and I encountered a convoy of unskilled laborers recruited to go work
for the planters in the south and when (the mask of exoticism falling from those faces, which were now merely those of tired men) that group—at first almost identical, as a crowd of people of color tend to be for a white person because of the shared difference that comes to the foreground—changed, as I looked at it, into an unhappy collection of individuals each of whom had his own nature and destiny that deserved one’s sympathy and attention.
Does the fact that I now express such appropriate thoughts mean that I have finally stopped replacing positive acts (those that imply a commitment and, in addition, work toward a practical end) by pretenses reminiscent—making all due allowance—of the desplantes in the bullfighter’s art: bravado moves intended to impress but with no effect on the fight itself and demanding less skill (even less courage) than the precision work that consists in unleashing the charge and then allowing it to take place without flinching, letting the horns pass very close before dodging them?
“No, I haven’t stopped doing that!” I must answer that specimen of myself with whom I am far from done fighting like Jacob wrestling with the angel or that horseman Nerval speaks of, who fought all night long in a forest against a stranger who was himself To do and to pantomime, to be and to appear—these are the opposing terms, the pole of value being opposed by that of prestige, as Illusion is to Truth, or Lucifer to the archangel, that archangel to whom I would be tempted to lend a sort of reality from the sole fact that I bear his name and of whom I saw, in Naples, a moving representation in the form of a picture entitled The Devil of Megellina because it is the most revered image in the little church of that neighborhood situated on the edge of the sea not far from the sanctuary of Piedigrotta which is a place of pilgrimage: in it, Saint Michael, wearing Renaissance armor, overwhelms a demon that resembles him like a brother and whose diabolical nature is indicated only by its bat’s wings, corresponding—as they curve their shallow basins under the bowed head of the vanquished—to the feathery wings of the archangel extending their double canopy into the sky.
The clamor rising from the Auteuil racecourse over a disputed finish. The shouts of “To the guilloti’! To the guilloti’!” coming, among other cries, from a little boy who was running in all directions from one end to the other of the school yard one day when we were acting out the revolutionary days of 1793 at the coeducational boarding school. The scattered din in Naples during the festival of Piedigrotta, certain people carrying on the ends of fishing poles immense decorated paper hats which they tried to set down on your head by surprise, almost everyone tickling you in the face with long, comical feather dusters made of paper ribbons, and many children in paper costumes dressed up as fairies, princes, or other characters while loudspeakers broadcast songs that were to be the year’s novelties. Bravo! Bravi! Brava! hurled in thanks to the singers in the Italian opera houses. A modulation with the power of the ole! shouted at the moment the matador transforms the nerves of the spectators into violin strings, at every level of the plaza. The loud noise of the Parade for Peace on December 13, 1952, in Vienna, when the Sunday crowd passed before the members of the congress of all shades of skin color and almost every country, placards and plywood doves standing out white against the cloudy sky and then floating in the light from the headlights, among the torches we were given so that we could have a turn holding them, all the while shaking our hands over the barriers strained to the point of cracking. The slogans chanted by countless lips all along the procession during the mass demonstration this past July 14, which the Paris police were not ashamed to stain with blood, attacking workers from North Africa who were milling about with other workers.
At the opposite extreme from these shouts all mixed in together and jostling one another, a woman’s piercing cry—tragically isolated—which I heard when I was little in La Chapelle one evening when we were coming home from a family dinner: “C’est une batterie” [it’s a fight], my father explained, meaning that a brawl was going on and using this word—present in “batterie de canons” [battery of guns] and “batterie d’accumulateurs” [battery of accumulators]—to express the action of two people who se battre [hit each other], just as the action of mentir [lying] can be called a “menterie” [fib], an analogy I was to discover later and which would make the terrible word “batterie” (through a sort of inner unburdening to which I would like to subject many other things that frighten me) seem airier than at the time when those people who were called “gars de batterie” [battery guys] seemed to me to be designated by this name because they were agricultural workers supposedly quick to quarrel and not because of their various jobs to do with battage [threshing wheat]. A man on leave squealing like a stuck pig one evening toward the end of the 1914-18 war (“I’m buggering him, Lieutenant! Lieutenant, I’m buggering him!”) and dressed in horizon blue—field-service tunic, trousers, forage cap—and great black leather gaiters, a drunk of thirty-five to forty clinging to a streetlight on Avenue Mozart as though fiercely determined not to leave, as though no one in the world would be able to tear him off. Solitary cries that rise in my memory as death-throe ululations and can’t be stifled by the great chorales of passion, enthusiasm, or harmony in which my own voice has managed, from time to time, to participate.
From the grandstand of the Auteuil racecourse (where I sat only once when I was about ten, to see the Grand Steeple won by the English horse Jerry M. ridden by the jockey Driscoll) I moved on, after a long interregnum, to the shadowy gates of the bullfights, then turned to tribunes [grandstands] of a completely different sort, as it became intolerable to me never to be more than a spectator (even if in close contact with thousands of others) and as I ceased to look upon all things with eyes thirsting for sensation more than anything else and came to discover that, from the point of view of positive action, the hero, the genius, and the saint are far from being the only types of men whose existences are justified: the sort of tribune [gallery] in which those who have been invited to be part of the presidium take their places at the start of a meeting and the tribune [rostrum] in the strict sense (and at the same time substantially narrower sense) from which one speaks on one’s feet—like a conductor at his stand or a lookout in his watch tower—without succeeding (if I am the one who is thus on the spot) in transforming the human voice into a living link with the listeners. Too well aware of my shortcomings, I have never trod the wood of these platforms, upon which one steps up not in order to see but in order to expose oneself to view, without feeling guilty of a twofold imposture: that I am only there in the manner of a decorative figure even though these days I claim to be rejecting the values of facade; and that I am allowing myself to be treated as a “personality,” as though I had the prestige that went with a famous talent or the authority of someone who has given proof of an exemplary citizenship. But from this new point of view, the fact that there should be such a great gap between the hero, genius, or saint that I am not, to my humiliation, and the man of some goodwill that I actually am can’t matter very much: I recognized long ago that lending effective help was an almost laudable ambition, and there is no question that the world needs people prepared to exert themselves to their utmost as well as champions or those seeking high achievement. That I have until now avoided the three essential experiences—voluntarily risking mortal danger, killing, and bringing into the world (that is, staking one’s own life, annihilating that of someone else as one does in war or insurrection, and causing a new life to come into being)—experiences to which may be added certain trials peculiar to our times—making a parachute jump, for instance, or submitting to tortures of which the “Chinese torture” of my childhood gives only a very distant idea!—is certainly a serious deficiency, but it has no significance except to me; if I manage to contribute something, however little, to help humanity reject its old tutelary relationships in favor of more fraternal arrangements, to come of age in some sense, what can it matter to others that my destiny—considered on its own terms, as though it were a work of art—may not be a masterpiece?
/> Everything would be played and would veer in this direction if it weren’t for a straw in the system: resigned to a destiny that will not provide the material for any golden legend and convinced henceforth that, if this remains inconsequential to anyone else, what is dictated by the sporting spirit or appetite for difficulty does not weigh more in the universal scale than what one does out of pure love of art, I at least prize a destiny that in retrospect makes me worthy of being loved; now, is any favoritism granted, in any field whatsoever, to someone who quite simply is able to prove himself a steady sort of person? And if the most important thing is to have one’s horse win and if working in a useful manner is worth more than consuming oneself in regrets for the ace one will never be, doesn’t the example of sports teach us that efficiency unaccompanied by a beautiful style is rarely appreciated? No doubt I would not react with the same pleasure or the same foolish pride I once did to hanging about in the dubious quarters of foreign cities, such as Whitechapel in London and Limehouse, so disappointing a Chinatown, or the Barrio Chino in Barcelona with its queer transvestite nightclubs and shops offering contraceptives of all varieties (with points, with ribs, shaped like clown heads or Napoleon hats) sold after being tested on a bellows apparatus with a red light that went on when the device had resisted sufficiently, or even—in areas both calmer and more remote—the outlying districts of Port-au-Prince of which certain corners occupied by rickety hovels, with porches held up by thin poles and as though mounted on stilts, evoked, when glimpsed in the night, the den of the hired ruffian Sparafucile in the last act of Rigoletto; no doubt I would no longer believe I was something of a “tough guy” or adventurer just because I walked around in ports like Le Havre, Marseille, Antwerp, or Rotterdam, which I visited when I was a child and which provided me with my first romantic vision of a maritime city. But if I have also gone beyond the period at which I was happy to find myself in a boat on a rather heavy sea (probably because then I had, cheaply bought, an illusion of mastery) and if the time is past when I imagined that, staying in an unfamiliar town, my contact with people and things was more real if I visited not only the parts of town where the monuments were but also the working-class districts, all these elements of decor or details of production retain a great power over me as though unadorned reality were incapable of uplifting me and as though a certain dose, infinitesimal if need be, of gratuitousness or fantasy were indispensable for me to take part in that match, with its heavy stakes, that is won or lost outside. Thus, in Vienna last winter, before I had altogether made up my mind to participate in that great human game in which one never hears the call “no more bets,” I was moved and confirmed in my desire for action by two things coming together: the multicolored waltz of skaters frolicking near the hall of the Congress of Peace (as though to offer an image of the precious graces that war annihilates) and, the color of a midsummer’s sky, the completely sensual sweetness of a beautiful gaze resting—with the dreamy rapture one can read in the eyes of bovine deities, water nymphs, and dryads—on those insouciant skaters.