Fever Page 14
Meanwhile, Paoli had emerged from the crowd of lookers-on. True, there were still a few deck-chairs and armchairs here and there, but now the promenade, generally speaking, was wide and empty again. It was a vast, flat expanse of concrete, bordered by a hand-rail painted navy-blue. It stretched ahead of Paoli, curving imperceptibly, and far off, at the end of the curve, one could see the tip of the airfield. Cars were going past very quickly, close to the kerb, looking all alike, conveying their cargo of hidden people, crouching inside the metal carapace and peering vaguely out of the windows. The noise was intense but very monotonous, and one could quite well forget about it. In that case there was nothing left, nothing except the wide, outspread scene where things slid past—it was so spacious—in a succession of microscopic movements. It was like looking down on everything from a sixth-floor balcony, watching pensively while smoking a cigarette.
Far away at the end of the promenade a plane suddenly took off with a shattering noise. Then it climbed into the sky, turning ponderously, and passed over Paoli’s head. He followed it for a moment with his eyes, in the secret hope that it would perhaps catch fire and fall into the sea. But the plane flew on and soon vanished into the atmosphere, becoming indistinguishable from the pullulations of grey and black dots that crossed Paoli’s dazzled eyes. The clouds shifted and the sun came into view again; it was low down now, and lighted Paoli almost horizontally, adding to the impression of emptiness and bewilderment.
From time to time people still appeared ahead of Paoli or walked across his path. But the whole thing had become somehow placid and indifferent. Paoli expected nothing more of them, now. His feverish emotion had gone, leaving him stripped, walking along the deserted pavement.
The few faces he still happened to notice were like photographed faces, samples held up to him briefly, not alive at all, offering no more than one flashing second of life, a second that was broken, frozen, incapable of extending itself. In this way Paoli saw the faces of several girls, all unknown to him, half concealed by shadows. Sitting on a bench overlooking the sea was a woman’s body, motionless, turned to stone, the sun surrounding it with a golden halo that mingled with the white stuff of her dress. Paoli saw the wind-blown hair, the arms folded over her breast, the broad hips, crossways, the long legs in a pattern of light and shadow. Further on a man was standing with one foot on the balustrade, smoking and looking down at the beach, where two women were getting back into their clothes; one of them was squatting down and the other balancing on one leg. Still further along, a young boy was talking to a little girl; they sat perched on the parapet, with their backs to the sea. Paoli looked at the girl’s face; as he walked he coldly detailed the tanned surface, the small nose with its delicate nostrils, the badly-shaped, half-open mouth and the deep, moist eyes that were looking at nothing. For two or three seconds he saw the whole of this human face, and he felt a strange emotion rising up within him. Never, never, would he see this again: it was a doubt, a kind of bitter-sweet doubt, a bland mixture which did not irritate him, something tranquil, personal, minute, which seemed perfectly in keeping with himself and with the scene; something in the nature of an aesthetic emotion, yes, the faded impression of some harmony discovered in a garden, in the gurgling of an artificial waterfall, the pergolas of cool roses, the flower-beds, the birds’ song, the scent of orange blossom, and even in the plaster statuette of a small, chubby, laughing cherub. And yet it was more serious than that, it was nostalgic.
Paoli went on towards the airfield; but he was already less aware of walking than of what was rising so calmly within him, what had been born from that girl’s face. He saw six or seven other people, an old man dragging a dog, two young women with a child, an old woman, and perhaps two lads pushing scooters. After that he saw nobody any more; the human faces, the lines of the houses, the whole set-up—cars, boats, clouds, hills—vanished as though by enchantment, swallowed down into an undefined internal space.
Nothing remained, for J. F. Paoli, but the road along which he was walking and the eternal sunshine raining down on his face. He had no doubt reached the precise, mysterious point where action can complete itself, without a struggle, smoothly and without necessity, where the entire being slips out of itself, all barriers, all personal desires overthrown, forgotten, the point of supreme incoherence where reality is on the verge of toppling, the real reunion with matter, where sensations no longer have to be interpreted, where the world no longer appears, but where everything is and oneself is everything, indissolubly, inexpressibly. He walked on, no longer hurried, his eyes dark behind the screen of his sun-glasses, his breathing reduced to a minimum, to a thread of air scarcely as thick as a hair, which twisted round in his mouth, in his throat, and spiralled down to his lungs. Every step he took was like an organic pulsation, the ground abruptly dilating and striking sharply against the sole of his foot; the concrete pavement had become a living heart, a sort of gut burning with fever which was throbbing all the time beneath his shoe-soles, pushing him back tirelessly like a heavy, powerful jet of blood. He was really linked to things, now, he was part of them, without feeling them, without understanding. And yet he had not ceased to be a living creature, he was still a man, J. F. Paoli, born somewhere or other, taking regular meals, even sometimes perpetuating his species. To tell the truth, if one had dug down to the very bottom of his brain one would no doubt have come across something compromising, some kind of thought, some association of ideas and images which had not succeeded in dying away. And if one had felt his pulse one would have discovered that his heart was still beating, feebly, indeed, but it was beating. The rough shudders in the core of his body were still driving the thick liquid to the four corners of his organs, and the waves were still travelling over the network of his nerves, with electrical crawlings, with furtive galvanic jerks; he was still the same, in substance, J. F. Paoli, the man, and he was by no means dead.
But then, what was it? Simply this: J. F. Paoli, almost without knowing it, had become little by little, on this promenade where so many idle people were strolling safe and sound, a walking man. The path lay clear ahead of him, life had changed into motion, perpetual motion, ineffable motion, infinite ribbons of whitish asphalt, the dull thud of heels on the ground, the pressure of big toes, the swaying and yielding of the calves, the nervous up-spring of the thighs, the sliding of the kneecaps, the oscillation of the spine, forwards, backwards, and the automatic restoration of symmetry, of the great symmetry of bipeds: left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right, one must keep to the axis, left, right, keep to the axis, keep to the middle line, and go ahead, go forward, overcome the inertia of the air and of obstacles, push on, thrust through barriers, make a hole in the wall of the atmosphere, break through, become a tunnel, a very long, very pure corridor which will lead out one day into elysian realms.
Paoli went past the airfield. Before him there was still the magnificent shaft of road, white and luminous, where the sun reigned in perpetuity. The cars were passing very close to him now, brushing past him and sounding their horns. But Paoli heard nothing, saw nothing, except the royal, brilliant carpet which was being unrolled before his feet. All at once he thought he heard explosions somewhere at the back of his head; it was coming out slowly and falling regularly, with alternating bass and treble notes. At this, joy flooded through Paoli, and with feverish enthusiasm he began to shout, just for himself, for no one but himself:
‘It’s the rhythm! It’s the rhythm! I’ve got back the rhythm!’
For this was the rhythm of the early morning, the mathematical sound of the water striking the upturned basin back at home in his one-roomed flat, and now he had got it back, on the road. With growing happiness he began to walk in time with the drops, along the immaculate, sparkling, absolutely deserted corridor. The cars slowed down to avoid him, while he went on, alone in the middle of the road; but the hooting and the curses avoided him too, as though they had merely belonged to the universal, never contemptible reality, to the gigantic c
oncert of sounds and colours, to the eternally calm, eternally living symphony of the truth laid down flat upon the world; as though they had been only a moving fragment, like himself, like other people, only a minute speck of dust floating within the infinitely exquisite, infinitely divine body of matter.
6. Martin
DURING the years subsequent to his birth, the Torjmanns had devoted all their efforts and a great deal of money to making their son into a kind of genius. By now, in spite of everything, Martin Torjmann, at the age of twelve, was a pretty fine specimen of the hydrocephalic type. But there were certainly other things to be said in this connection. Many events of various kinds which had combined more or less harmoniously, which had ripened in this hollow where the town was situated. In particular, a profound heat, a terrible heat, which had reigned in this locality for a long time—long enough, so the old people said, to change the internal aspect of human beings and animals. A certain slowness, a certain gentleness had gradually replaced the former dryness; the girls nowadays had placid faces with wide cheekbones and strange, swarthy skins, not at all transparent, which felt rather clammy to the touch. The children had something indefinably fierce and yet docile about them, and the grown men systematically refused to gamble. This was said to be the result of the insidious grafting of some foreign stock, some Italian or North African clan. But it seemed more likely to be a change of climate, a metamorphosis of nature itself. It rained sometimes, it was hot. When the wind blew it was a south-west wind, a gentle displacement of miles of air, like that, all in one piece, a species of calm tempest.
There it was: the block of council flats curved in a semicircle on the fringe of the town, in the middle of a stretch of cement traversed from time to time by little clouds of grey, dirty dust. The sun fell uniformly on the south front of the building, and the concrete walls shone with something pallid and greasy, resembling sweat. This wall, lit up by the afternoon sun, was pierced at regular intervals by innumerable open windows; and every window was giving out a succession of sounds which zigzagged away to mingle with the noise from the neighbouring motorway. To anyone standing in the middle of the empty courtyard these noises would have seemed like a kind of big star, shooting out rigid, monotonous rays in all directions. Nothing would have moved, nothing would have altered. The whole thing would have constituted a motionless explosion, a centre of gravity round which everything was built up.
The accordion music from the transistor radios, the smells of garlic and frying, the sparkling and the fascination would all have met together there, in the sphere of conservation, the centre, the upright point on the naked ground of the courtyard, and one might have died of it, crushed, struck through the skull, as it were, by the vertiginous method of sunstroke. Alternatively, everything might have ended with a sort of great cry, a single, terrible cry, coming straight out of an open mouth and echoing indefinitely along the corridors, knocking into the walls, shooting from top to bottom of the refuse-chutes and lift-shafts, spreading over the balconies and roofs, crawling, getting in everywhere, enclosed in the plumbing and the drains, until it reached the heart of the masses of reinforced concrete, the organ of resonant matter, the vitals, all vibrant and dry, and became silence.
Martin lived there, seated motionless in a wicker armchair facing the window; he sat enthroned. To either side of him his father, wearing a pair of royal-blue linen trousers and a shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows, and his mother, an imposing figure in a grey apron. Martin’s father was standing up, smoking, looking round from time to time to address a few words to his wife, who sat a little further back. Of the trio, only Martin had his eyes fixed on the window, beyond the window. Without moving or speaking, he was looking at the space of empty sky with the sun blazing in it. Drops of sweat were running slowly down his neck and the sides of his vast forehead. The noises of the transistors were emerging from every cell in the human hive and coming together somewhere close to him, inside him perhaps, to form a painful, palpitating knot. If one had contemplated Martin from the front, without disgust, in spite of his flabby white face, his thin, pinched nose, his thick, shiny black hair combed back and the pebble-glasses perched in front of his myopic eyes like some indefinable, hypocritical zone of protection, one might perhaps have sensed the full tragedy of the noisy spot buried in the middle of his head, one might perhaps have noticed the way his pupils dilated slightly at every beat of the concentrated music. The wealth of the treble notes, the slow undulation of the bass, and the rhythm, crazy, carnal, arithmetical—all this passion which had come from without and enclosed itself there, not to be released by tears or anger. Martin’s eyes, as bulgy as one could wish for, bloodshot in the vicinity of the lacrimal glands, were surely alive behind the opaque lenses; distended, round with suffering, and totally empty, almost inert beneath the accumulated blows of the sunshine and the pulsating music.
‘Marthe,’ said the elder Torjmann, ‘we ought to postpone it all. We ought to postpone Martin’s lecture. I think that would be better for him, for us and for everybody. What do you say, Marthe?’
He had put the question without even looking round at his wife, for he was absorbed by the position he had chosen for himself a few minutes earlier, when he got up from the table: one leg tensed, carrying the weight of his body, the other stretched backwards, his head and shoulders bent forward, one arm resting on the back of Martin’s chair, the other raised so as to keep the smouldering butt of his cigarette permanently level with his mouth. His wife had heard the question, but she made no reply. Torjmann had to go on:
‘Martin’s not well just now,’ he said: ‘he’s had a lot to do for the last few months. It would be better to postpone the whole thing. Then Martin could have a few days’ rest.’
‘But it’s not possible, you know it isn’t,’ said Martin’s mother.
‘And why not? Why isn’t it possible? Eh? Because the television’s to be there, and the radio, and the reporter from Life? Is that why you say it isn’t possible?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you really think all this tiring business can’t be postponed?’
‘How can it be? You know perfectly well that Martin’s leaving for the United States in a fortnight’s time and that he’s to stay there for two months. And what kind of reception do you suppose he’ll get over there if there’s been no lecture?’
‘I know, I know,’ said his father, ‘but do you want him to kill himself with this sort of thing? You can see he’s tired, at present. He’s got thinner, he’s eating nothing, and when he gets through his lectures he scarcely says a word to us. He doesn’t talk, he sits in his corner, staring into space, for hours on end. He’s not in his normal state, I know that.’
Martin’s mother gave a kind of shrug; she looked at her husband, her big eyes heavy with fatigue and age.
‘That’s true,’ she began, ‘Martin is tired. And do you suppose I like the sort of life he leads? But it’s his life, his own, the life he’s chosen. What he doesn’t do today he’ll have to do later …’
‘Listen, Marthe,’ the father broke in, ‘I think we should try to get this lecture postponed for a week. We’ll go away for a few days to the country with Martin, and when we get back he’ll be rested, he’ll be able to take up his series of lectures again and leave for the United States in good form. Eh? What do you say to that?’
‘He won’t agree,’ said Martin’s mother.
‘Why not?’ said Torjmann; ‘I assure you I’m right, all the same—’ He left his position beside the armchair and came across to his wife. On the way he put out his cigarette-end and dropped it into the dustbin under the sink. ‘I’m sure it’s the best plan. Martin will get a rest, and so shall we. You need one badly too, by the way. And then Martin will never be able to give another lecture like the one he gave on May 10, in the state he’s in now. Professor Hertz told me that only yesterday. When he saw that Martin didn’t answer, you know, when he asked him those questions about Pascal, and that Martin sat in his cor
ner without a word, except to ask for a glass of water every five minutes. He told me it would be better to drop the whole thing for a while. And I think he’s right, Marthe.’
‘You know what Professor Hertz thinks about Martin’s experiments?’
‘Yes, I know, but that’s not the point. For once he’s right.’
‘Hertz would like Martin to go and stay in a children’s holiday camp! He’s said I don’t know how many times that in his opinion Martin’s only an impostor, a—’
‘Yes, I know, I know! But here, as regards rest, I believe he’s right.’
‘He’s been so strange just lately, our boy,’ sighed the mother.
‘It’s because he’s not well,’ said Torjmann; ‘after all, three programmes a week, one of them on television, lectures, debates, interviews, in all languages, and then sermons, signing books, discussions with Professor Hertz, with Maisonneuve, with Dr. Mercier, with Stephen Schaeffer, Manzoni, Tillois. Not to mention his regular daily work, his Chinese lessons, his meditations on Ruysbroek, his analysis of the Bible and the Mundaka Upanishad, and his spiritual exercises—it’s all tired him terribly. He needs some peace and quiet.’
Martin’s mother seemed to reflect. Finally she said:
‘He won’t agree. I’m sure he won’t. And—do you believe he can—do you believe he can really remain quiet?’