Scraps Page 4
The passage of a hackney carriage in the street, in the very depth of a Paris night, when one has already been in bed for a certain length of time. Nothing like the insect (for the shock of the hooves against the pavement looses too thick a noise) and nothing even, really, like anything at all definite that one could pose as a parallel and that any sort of analogy would allow to be introduced as a term of comparison. Unless one were to summon up the diver at this point, with lead soles heavy enough to be likened to horseshoes; but one hardly imagines a diver capable of moving, once he has emerged from the depths, with such agility that his step would have the merry aspect of a trot. The passage of a hackney carriage, then, being neither insect nor diver; only a hackney carriage pulled by a long-headed quadruped whose mouth, by way of the bit, to which the reins are attached, is connected to the hands of a cabman and whose flanks are caught between two shafts, the sorts of shafts that break so often when the quadruped falls and thrashes convulsively on the pavement, a sudden scandal because it is a public explosion of tragedy, like the collapse of a person struck by epilepsy or a person whose blood, all shame obliterated in the wake of some accident, spreads out at once in a horrible excretion.
No notion, however, of violent death. The hackney cab, passing thus, is peaceful. Nice and rhythmical, it jogs quietly along. But what is it doing? And where is it going? Here things begin to go wrong, because one can’t imagine an outing in a hackney cab at such an hour. No doubt it’s going back to the stable? But that would be even more sinister. One pictures the straw, the hayrack, the weak light of the stable lamp, all this in a hovel in a poor neighborhood, within walls spotted with damp and on a floor choked with refuse. Too wretched a neighborhood for those who inhabit it to be true living beings. Creatures of another species, a species one doesn’t know, that one only sees. The fear the middle-class child has of the drunk is really a fear of the poor drunk—of the poor man, quite simply, when he lets himself go at all, rejects the seemliness imposed on him by the order of well-to-do folk, and zigzags along the sidewalk or roadway bellowing like a true savage, thus showing that in fact he belongs to another species whose reactions, when they are no longer policed and he is on the loose, can only be formidable.
The passage of a hackney cab, at a meek trot, however, neither drunk nor revolutionary, a cab that could very well be, not a cab, but a barouche, if it weren’t for that heavy step, which is not the step of a luxury horse (lighter and, as they say, more fringant [spirited]) but of a proletarian horse, a horse who has finished his day and whom his cabby, perhaps half asleep, drives without a lash of the whip and without saying a word, to or from an unknown job which, having thus by definition become a mystery, worries us.
What is it doing? Where is it going? Insect, vehicle, or anything else at all, this is the question posed by the isolé insolitement éveillé quand tout le reste est (ou paraît) endormi [isolate oddly awake when all the others are (or seem) asleep]. We know nothing about what it really is and it exists for us only through the intrusion of its noise. Indifferent to everything, totally external to us (except that it insinuates itself through our ears), its activity is pursued. Perhaps its capacity, in the right circumstances, to provoke dread depends, even more than on the fact that its nature is so mysterious, on this simple, separate persistence, formal proof that—in the same way that we can be awake when others are asleep—something can be alive without us?
Something that, because of this fact, can only be heard by us as the sound of a knell: without anything in common with our own life (since this thing, whether we call it an insect or a horse-drawn carriage, remains fundamentally impenetrable given our ignorance of what it is occupied in doing), independent of us as it is independent of the others (of all those creatures who are, in appearance, asleep while it is awake), doesn’t it express in a tangible way an imperturbable permanence which is the very permanence of the course of things, that is, one of the aspects of death the least easy to consider without trembling, namely, that our end will in all likelihood not be the end of the world but only an end limited—unjustly, it will always seem—to us?
Mors cars, once ranking among the fastest, their name evoking the soft and regular sound of the old electric automobiles (no engine in front, but a simple casing behind which one sees the liveried driver sitting straight up at his vertical wheel). The alphabet Morse [Morse code], which caused one to ask oneself if it hadn’t some collusion with the signals from the planet Mars. The morse [walrus], an aquatic mammal of the same order as the seal (the juggling seal shown in circuses or the seal that dives with such a great splash into the zoo pool), very closely related, but perhaps fatter? and furnished with, besides the beautiful mustache of long stiff hairs planted in his muzzle, two great teeth jutting upward in the manner of tusks. Mors, death, as one will learn it when one studies Latin, when one will have forgotten the fear caused by the “chauffeurs de la Drome” [Drome scorchers], who are not chauffeurs d’automobiles [automobile drivers] masked in their goggles but brigands chauffant [scorching] the feet of peasants to make them reveal where their money is hidden.
On the Picardy road, near Viroflay, there was also the Père l’Auto outdoor tavern: gardens and groves of trees, a gym set with rings, knotted rope, trapeze and swing, a game of tonneau [toad-in-the-hole], perhaps, but no game of loto [lotto]. At least once, I think, we drank lemonade there, unless it was a syrup of grenadine for me (a drink for which I substituted, several years later, grenadine au kirsch, a first step toward the frankly alcoholic beverages consumed by those for whom such slogans as “La phtisie se prend sur le zinc” [what you imbibe at the bar may be a case of consumption] and other prudent aphorisms have no validity). It seems to me, however, that associated with the imprecise and almost disembodied image that has remained with me of the Père l’Auto Tavern is not the unctuousness of a syrupy drink, but the fizzing of lemonade—due to the bubbles visible in the glasses and even on the wood of the table, across the meniscus of each of the little pools formed by the small amount of liquid scattered almost inevitably at the moment of uncorking—so that, if it is clearly understood that not to mention grenadine (so plausible in such a place, in such a period, and at the age I was then) would indicate a lack of circumspection and, consequently, an error with respect to the scientific spirit from which I am absolutely determined not to depart, I am, at least, justified in mentioning it only secondarily.
I don’t know if we went by way of that Picardy road, with its smell of tar, the day we visited Les Jardies, Gambetta’s mortuary house, and returned home passing, it seems to me, by way of Jouy-en-Josas. What exactly is in that Jardies house? I’ve lost all memory of it. But there is definitely, at least, a bust and perhaps also some roses (unless here I am transforming a withering of immortelles or box into living flowers). Les Jardies—with rosery or without rosery, with the great man or without the great man in effigy—is, in any case, a curious name: it resembles jardin [garden] but does not have its freshness; it is damp, flat, emaciated, a little like the Picardy road.
In fact, what it designates is an oddity: a country house changed into a museum, immobilized—it and its outdoor setting—at a given point in time as though by a fairy’s wand (so that, if there are roses in the garden, they are not present-day and natural roses but roses from the past which some artifice has endowed with perenniality); a place of habitation where a man lived and concerning which one no longer knows which of the many souvenirs one sees gathered there were things of his that surrounded him when he was alive, and which of them were only put there later, impersonal souvenirs of History and not repositories of a human memory. Gambetta roses, roses of the time of the visit to Les Jardies (which one is inclined to believe are the same and everlasting roses rather than roses seasonally renewed); and then the roses I am speaking of here, which are a memory of roses or roses I invent. The uncertainty in which I presume I was plunged as a child as to these roses blooming at the suture of two moments of duration, the prejudicial uncertainty that ca
uses me here to use the term presume to cover myself (as they say in the language of the bureaucratized) in case of a possible accusation of frivolousness or even falsehood, leads me to approach obliquely one of the main cruxes of the question: the vertigo I feel as soon as I lose the thread of duration, as soon as I hesitate, too, between recollection and invention—like the vertigo I am yielding to at present and which is reaching its highest pitch, as though the motion by which one tries to contract time and resuscitate what was once experienced (a motion that, by its very nature, arouses suspicion, since to remember is, after all, only a more down-to-earth way of imagining), as though this motion, already suspect in its essence and which I cannot envisage without vertigo, turns out to be more disturbing when I try my skill at giving an account of old vertigoes and even more disturbing in the case of a story like this one which, centering upon a doubt about time, also contains the piquancy of being doubtful in itself.
Consommé, which is merely the more distinguished verbal envelope in which, in a restaurant, bouillon is served. “Consommation” [drink in a café], which for me designated, at first, certain metal tokens won in mechanical games in bistros and which one could exchange for a drink (I knew nothing about these penny machines and I was also unaware that consommations were things one drank, but occasionally I would receive a little coin like that from the pocket of one of my uncles, who had no doubt won it in the café but hadn’t wanted to use it—the uncle I had hardly ever seen order anything else, if he had to have an aperitif, but innocent madère-citrons [Madeira-lemonades]). “Tout est consommé” [all is consumed] coming after the wine mixed with gall and the sponge soaked in vinegar, “consommation des siècles” [drink of the centuries] in bell bronze like the “confusion des langues” [confusion of tongues] and like the “fruit de nos entrailles” [fruit of our womb]: expressions learned at the time of my catechism and differentiated absolutely, by their too serious sound, from consommé and consommation, which are liquids that one drinks; expressions assuredly too heavy, one with the death-agony, the other with the end of the world, for me to be able, even now, to make this comparison without feeling I am yielding to a low cabaret wit by indulging in the most pernicious sort of play on words.
Yeux du bouillon [specks of fat on soup; lit., eyes of the bouillon]. Yeux quon roule en boules de loto [eyes that one rolls like lotto chips]. In contrast to these eyes in the plural are the eagle’s eye, the sparrow-hawk’s eye, the lynx’s eye, the viper’s eye. In sum, what you see are eyes but it is an eye that looks at you (or it is with that singular eye that you look). Inside, the two black chambers that we supposedly have in our heads (but it is only true viewing the thing this way from outside, because inside, we don’t experience any of it) with those two skin-thin lenses; outside, the beyond-the-grave air assumed by what is diorama, scene artificially lit and inserted in space, as by everything that seems arranged so that we may recognize in it the external projection of the true chamber within—that well-sealed cavity which is the imaginary realization of what is called the for intérieur [conscience; lit., inner tribunal]—suddenly illuminated and changed to a sort of wax museum mortuary fixedness. Mortuary chapels, then, are many of the spectacles offered to the undivided gaze in which our two eyes spring into action—this being the case when these visions are marked, either by their very nature or by circumstances, by a certain theatrical air that half disengages us from life and when their content fulfills the supremely important condition of lending itself to our becoming, when confronted with them, King Claudiuses witnessing the reconstruction of our crimes, petitioners to whom a symbolic staging reveals the arcana of the initiation, prisoners condemned to death dreaming of our punishment as we see in certain pictures (with the guillotine or gallows in one of the upper corners in the middle of a little cloud), even a person whose eye—necessarily only one—is glued to a keyhole to spy on the unfolding of an erotic act in a closed room whose walls, floor, ceiling imitate the blinkers of his mind which is almost entirely obnubilated by the view of the salacious scene.
No doubt it is in the nature of underground caves, chasms, and everything that on the earth imitates, on a gigantic scale, the concavity of a mouth to engender an apprehension that one will always have to overcome, even if this recovery of oneself takes place instantaneously and practically without effort. As is perhaps the case with the uneasiness experienced in darkness (that other sort of cavern in which we already feel swallowed up, quite apart from the many other dangers that threaten us), it is possible that such an apprehension must be associated with the childish fear we have of being eaten, the most rudimentary form of aggression among all those to which we may imagine our presence in the midst of the world exposes us, during that phase of mental life in which we are still so close to the state of the baby who scarcely emerges from his sleep except to suck on his mother’s breast or ingest food in some other way. Isn’t it possible that death, which Christian allegories represent as a skeleton with empty sockets and very conspicuous teeth, might be—with the two black holes that it uses as eyes, and its sadistic ogre’s rictus—the dark, gazeless thing that will eat us some day? It is the memory of a veritable incursion into the bowels of death (as though I had been devoured quite raw by the monster just as the initiates of many ancient cults were supposed to have been), the memory of coming into contact with the abyss or of a descent into the underworld that I have preserved from certain touristic excursions or various other circumstances that led me to visit underground caves, quarries, or, at least, to find myself confronted with what passed, in my eyes, for such.
The famous well of Padirac (where I went just once, in 1934) has at first something comical about it, outfitted as it is with a building on the facade of which one reads: “Entrée du Gouffre” [entrance to the abyss] written in big letters as though this were an attraction like some Train fantôme [ghost train] or Rivière mysterieuse [river of mystery]. Having passed through the entrance gate, one gets on an elevator and descends into a vast natural cylinder (or sort of upside-down gasometer) which, just a few meters down, includes a ledge on which a “Restaurant de la Terrasse” [terrace restaurant] has been constructed; after the elevator, a number of stairways, and a gallery that one walks along, one arrives at a dock on the bank of the underground river. Up to that point, nothing really sensational: a geological curiosity such as one might imagine, arranged very much à la Jules Verne. The amazement will come with the excursion by boat on the wrinkle-less river: lofty vaults, of course, with stalactites and, at every moment, rocks of fantastic shapes whose names the boatman unfailingly gives you, all indicative of creatures or objects that they evoke; but—and this is the surprising thing—the vault is sometimes reflected in the water, in appearance completely motionless, so perfectly that one forgets the existence of that water and can believe that the skiff is moving without support over a plane strictly median to a double vault of which one does not know, in many spots, which appears the more vertiginous, its zenith, situated at a height to which it would seem that neither ceiling nor cupola of any human construction could attain or its nadir, which is the exact replica and toward which the same walls, inverted, lead. No outdoor spectacle, I think, could impress me to the same extent as did this immensity in an airtight chamber, where earth and sky were repudiated and where infinite space, engulfed at the bottom of an enormous pocket, appeared as a content and not as an envelope.
“Ici chambres à coucher pour géants” [rooms to let for giants] was the graffito I read three years later in one of the quarries of Les Baux-de-Provence, those extraordinarily elevated and spacious recesses, half caves, half architectures, which resemble Egyptian sanctuaries carved right into the rock and remind one of the cave in which, in the last act of Aida, the young officer of the pharoah and the Ethiopian captive who became his lover were walled up, dying. In the quarry which some practical joker had imagined transformed into a caravansary for titans, a large skeleton equipped with a scythe had also been drawn and it was also at Les Baux tha
t—one of the times we went there on foot from Saint Rémy, where we had settled for the duration of the summer—my wife and I visited a Grotte aux Fées [fairy grotto], a quite ordinary cave, in truth, but from which departs, so it is said, a subterranean gallery so long that it goes all the way to Arles, where it emerges under the amphitheater. Isn’t it the case that a place like the amphitheater of Arles—where Spanish style and Provençal-style bullfights are held nowadays—adds to its glory as monument a prestige current enough for it to be one of the most important spots in a region? And furthermore, should one be surprised that in this same region, where quarries have been worked since the time of the Romans, the popular imagination should have worked on the idea of an almost magical communication between one of these ancient constructions of which Arles, Nîmes, and their environs still bear the ruins and a spot like Les Baux, so spectral with its old abandoned palaces, their gaping casements scarcely distinguishable from the elements of some necropole or dormitory for workers from Babel hollowed out of the rock by the quarrymen? It is probably difficult to escape the summons of fable as soon as there is a grotto, quarry, any sort of hole giving the impression of a vestibule—if not a domanial parcel—of the subterranean world, confused with the world of death in countries like ours where people are buried.
In the immediate outskirts of Saint Rémy, not far from the place called the Plateau des Antiques [plateau of the antiquities], there are quarries; and we discovered it by chance, without knowing at the time what we were seeing: old Roman mines abandoned today. Having been determined, the very evening we arrived, to take a look at the little triumphal arch and the mausoleum that constitute the “antiquities,” we saw nearby the beginnings of a path and, wanting to prolong our before-dinner walk a little, also curious to know where this path led, we started off on it, even though by that time, at the end of the day, and on such a path, bordered on both sides by shrubbery and underbrush, it was already very dark. After a few bends and a brief descent, I found myself all at once face to face with an immense screen of blackness: total darkness looming up all of a piece and perfectly impenetrable; in all probability the opening of a vast cave, but appearing in such a sudden manner and so closed to one’s gaze that it was much more like a portal leading to nothingness. If I was frightened by it, the feeling was much less like the fear caused by a wall, a precipice, or any other obstacle that had abruptly revealed itself and forced us to stop in our tracks with the sensation of avoiding a collision or a fall than it was as though really I were a few yards away from the threshold one crosses when—to use the hallowed expression—one passes “de vie à trépas” [from life to death]. A fear less sharp than the fear that may be aroused by the imminence of an actual danger; a fear that, nonetheless, was perhaps the more profound, for its object occurred in a pure state, as it were, removed from any atmosphere of violence and without there being present, to obliterate in me the quite naked dread of death, the idea of a specific possibility of catastrophe toward which my entire being would strain, actually forgetting what would be the unavoidable consequence of such a brutal accident. When—the very next day—I saw the place again in the full light of day, I realized that in fact what the path led to was not a cave. Not a cave, but a sort of hall, obviously carved by human hands in the rocky wall from which it opened out, and the first of a long series, of which I walked through the less dark ones, somewhat disgusted by the large, reddish bats that fluttered about in them. In one of these excavations, I found several two-wheeled carts, their shafts resting on the ground, which had been stored there as though part of an encampment abandoned for a longer or shorter time by creatures belonging to one of those epochs independent of all chronology evoked by certain rustic implements related to thatched roofs and flocks of sheep; so that I liked to believe that here—two steps away from the Alpilles, that strange chain of miniature mountains, scarcely higher than the Russian mountains in an amusement park and arranged, sometimes, like a public garden where simulacra of ascents have been planned for the strollers—there had once been an old lair of smugglers or brigands like the cave spoken of in Mémoires d’un âne [the memoirs of a donkey] in the chapter where one sees the astute Cadichon alert the guards with his braying and thus bring about the capture of the band of highwaymen who had kidnapped him and taken him to their hovel. Once back in town, I learned that I had been walking in ancient quarries long since abandoned. The idea came to me of exploring them in depth; but when I went to the town hall to obtain the necessary authorization, the official I saw kept trying to dissuade me from it: the passageways went very far in; to explore their labyrinth, I would need to equip myself seriously where light was concerned because of the holes and shafts I would perhaps encounter; in short, it would be a real expedition. I therefore gave up on it, in the end; but I returned several times to those quarries, and each time with the same emotion. It was no longer the anguish of my first visit at nightfall facing the curtain of absolute black beyond which I would have been blinded; it was a much more mixed feeling: that of a child who, playing at certain games, confronts dangers he knows very well are merely semblances of real dangers; that of a child, too, who finds himself in church, not necessarily in front of a crèche with rocks of papier-mâché but, at least, within that other world reduced to proportions still imposing but habitable and purged of all mystery too poisonous by the ABC of its emblems and its imagery; the emotion, too, that one may feel in the wings of a theater where ropes, frameworks of flats, practicable doors together with what one divines of the trapdoors and the below-stages give the impression of a voyage into the infernal regions or of a masonic trial one must undergo without flinching, braving the risk of getting lost, coming up against an unexpected obstacle, committing a blunder that would lead one to fall suddenly in the visual field of mirthful spectators or suffer an ignominious exclusion after the collapse or puncture of a stage set. Much more than when touring the ruins of Eleusis, for example, I was able to imagine—as I visited the old Roman quarries of Saint Rémy after having stumbled upon their shadows—that I had penetrated into the cavern of mysteries and had emerged from it quite alive.