Fever Page 3

  Roch got up and walked on again. He crossed the square slowly, keeping to the edge of the garden. Old women in summer dresses watched him go by; some of them had goitres. At the other end of the pavement there was an ice-cream vendor, shut up in a little wooden hut on which was written:

  ERNEST ICE-CREAM MERCHANT

  A board dangling above the counter read:

  Today’s flavours:

  pineapple

  lemon

  orange

  strawberry

  vanilla

  chocolate

  praline

  moka

  melon

  tutti frutti

  anisette

  The spectacled, bald-headed man in the booth watched Roch, who walked straight past. Before stepping into the road he paused at the edge of the pavement; while the cars rushed past him, raising clouds of grey dust, he lifted his head and took another look at the sun; the white ball was still in its place, very high up in the sky, battering the earth harder than ever. There was no escaping it. One could run till one was out of breath, run along the scorching street till one’s shoes, fell to bits, run on barefoot, fall down, bleed, it would be no use. The sun would still be there, shining in the air with the regularity of an electric bulb. It would light up everything, reveal everything, pitilessly. One might even try to go underground, to burrow down, to cover one’s head with dust and ashes. All in vain. It would still be there. Try to push one’s way into a damp hole, some kind of tunnel. That would be cool and dark. Perhaps. But that wouldn’t prevent the sun from being in its place in the sky, and the light would glide into the underground passage like a snake, it would follow him everywhere, without pause, for hours, days, years, until he fell to the ground, defeated. He had lost before he began. Already the thin blades of the sun’s rays were buried in his flesh, and they were slicing away his life, cell by cell. The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun.

  For it to be always night, in the towns, on the stretches of mountain; a gentle, magnificent night, a night without moon or stars, with nothing that might climb up and shine in the darkness, nothing that could thaw things out. An absolute blackness, not blue or brown, the blackness of a blind man; where all sources of light had been destroyed, even cigarette-ends and burning matches. Where all these poisonous gleams had been blown out. Luminous watches, glow-worms and the red tail-lights of cars would have been stamped out. Trampled on furiously, beaten to death, smothered beneath eiderdowns. One would have spent months like that, breaking street-lamps, tearing out cats’ eyes, demolishing all those mean little scintillations that eat into you, hurting you. One would even smash the mirrors, for fear they should catch some ray of light that had escaped and reflect it into the distance, stupidly. Then when nothing was left on earth except that black curtain, one would have covered one’s head and been at ease.

  When he had finished looking at the sun and thinking of all these fantastic ideas, Roch stepped off the kerb and crossed the street. He reached the opposite pavement and turned left into a sort of avenue which was very crowded. He walked on, keeping close to the wall, for a good five minutes, till he reached a sort of square, again with a garden in the middle. Roch knew that at one end of the garden there was a fountain. He crossed the street, nearly getting knocked down by a delivery-boy with a box-tricycle, and began to look for the fountain. He walked at random along the gravelled paths of the garden. It was like a maze: the paths seemed to have been laid out with no idea of a view—perhaps even with the malicious intention of bewildering the old women who ventured into them. Clumps of laurels and cypress hedges cut off the view in all directions and sometimes, after a succession of turnings, steps and pleached alleys, one ended up in a cul-de-sac.

  Surrounded, as it were, by a cloud of heat and noise, Roch walked about the garden at random, looking for the water. Most of the benches were occupied by old women in mourning, who were talking, knitting, reading or doing nothing, just watching him go by; but Roch did not see them. He forged ahead, tense and furious, all his senses on the alert to find the fountain. He went down one pleached alley after another, with the white light coming through the leaves and making pools on the sanded path. Birds were calling from their hiding-places round the lawns, and somewhere at the far end of the garden children screamed at intervals, as though their throats were being cut one after another. When there were none left, how peaceful it would be! Roch kept on walking through the garden, along the narrow, winding path. All at once he heard the gurgle of running water; he stopped and tried to make out the direction of the sound; it seemed to come from his right. Roch turned into another path, walking quickly. He went up a few steps and round a cypress. At this point the path went under some dark trees, and came to an end. Roch moved into the shade, sweat trickling down his forehead, and stopped short where the trees began. At the far end of the cavern of shade, a man and a woman were locked in a violent embrace. They were sitting on a bench, their bodies turned to face each other, their arms thrust into their clothing, and their heads and shoulders, their breasts, their faces, were pressed so close together that one could not tell them apart. Tensed in this position, they were scarcely moving, except that the man’s head, buried in the woman’s hair, gave an occasional shake, and their feet were scraping the ground in all directions, sometimes as though jerkily marking time, like the movements of a galvanized frog. Roch watched them for a moment from where he stood, at the end of the shady path. He did not feel the coolness of the leaves, making a roof above his head, or smell the sweet scent of the hidden flowers. He did not hear the quick breathing of the lovers, or the noise of the town, which penetrated here softly, in occasional bursts. For him, this shady path had turned into a kind of hell, a stifling, dirty cabin where everything boiled with unhealthy heat, smelt of sweat and foul breath, where a strange, monotonous note kept vibrating in the air like a siren, an intolerable din that filled his ears and took possession of his whole body, working in his organs, flooding his stomach with acid and making his heart beat wildly.

  Roch felt himself invaded by inexpressible disgust; and yet he could not tear his eyes away from the two figures glued together. It was as though he were caught in glue like a fly, and the air had suddenly thickened, paralysing his limbs.

  In the end the man noticed him and straightened up on the bench; the woman turned her head towards him, opened her mouth and said something.

  They stayed like that for a second or two, without a word, and then the man got up and came towards Roch.

  ‘Find it interesting?’ he enquired.

  ‘I—’ said Roch.

  The woman got up now and took the man’s arm.

  ‘Come along, let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘Not on your life,’ said the man, and came close up to Roch.

  ‘I asked if you found it interesting,’ he said again.

  Roch tried to say something; the man jabbed him in the ribs and he reeled.

  ‘What d’you mean by coming and spying on people like that?’

  ‘Please let’s go,’ said the woman, ‘do let’s.’

  ‘Well? Didn’t you hear me?’ shouted the man. ‘Get out of here at once, or else …’

  Roch took a step backwards. But he couldn’t tear his eyes from the warm place deep in the shadows where the man and woman had just been sitting. Anger seized him all of a sudden, and a kind of madness took possession of his mind. As the man began again, shouting louder than ever:

  ‘Will you get out, or will you not?’ and while the woman held him back by his shirt-sleeve, saying:

  ‘Please, please!’

  Roch sprang forward. His hands grasped the man’s throat and tightened round it furiously; then they began hitting out with rage, at random, on the man’s face, n
eck, stomach. They both fell on the ground and struggled in the gravel. The man only put up a feeble defence, and after being hit several times on the nose he began to bleed. Roch went on hammering him savagely. Between his clenched teeth he was uttering incoherent cries: ‘Hey! Hey! There! Sick! I’m a sick man! A sick man! Hey! Understand? No right! I’m a sick man! No right! Hey! Hey!’ He could feel the woman pulling his hair and crying hysterically, ‘That’s enough! Stop! Leave him alone! Leave him alone!’ and he kicked her away. After a few seconds the fight came to an end. Roch stood up, dazed, and looked at his opponent, who was crawling on the ground; the man’s shirt was torn close to the neck, his white trousers were filthy with dust, his hair was tousled and his nose was bleeding. Roch himself was in a pitiful state. The buttons had been torn off his shirt, and on running his hand across his mouth he discovered that his lower lip had been cut open. Roch looked into the shadows for a moment longer, and then went away, without hearing the woman, who was cursing him. He walked back along the path and lost himself in the depths of the garden.

  A little further on he came to the fountain; he washed his hands and face, and then drank some water. After that he sat on a bench in the shade of a plane-tree and rested, smoking a cigarette.

  It was not until later, about four-thirty or five o’clock, that he remembered his work. He rose from the bench, went out of the garden, and turned back into the town. The heat was still intense, and the sun did not seem to have moved. In the streets the cars were moving slowly, with difficulty. Horns were sounding on all sides, and the multicoloured coachwork was shining. The drivers in their metal boxes had sweat running down their foreheads, and the thermometers must be marking something like 33° centigrade. On the café terraces people sat slumped on plastic chairs, drinking beer. There, and practically everywhere else, flies were hovering at ground level, settling on the bare toes of sandalled feet and on people’s arms. In hotel rooms people were stalking them, armed with a folded prospectus. Now and then the prospectus would be slammed down on a table or a bed, and the little volatile creature would die instantly, crushed into itself. Never again would it settle on a bald head, never again would it crawl over sweaty feet, never again would it go in quest of drops of sugary coffee, never again would it sleep upside down on a ceiling, or swing in the breeze, clinging to an electric bulb. All that was over; its fly’s life had come to an end. It had no more right to anything, not to a grave, an epitaph or even a memory. Other flies would quickly take its place, buzzing in the ears of serious people, eating on rubbish-heaps and making spiders’ eyes shine with greed.

  But they were not the only things. The road was vibrating under Roch’s feet with a strange, subterranean life. They were all jiggling about in the depths, those hidden animalculae, bacteria and microbes, parasites; it seemed as though everything were undulating desperately, in the air, in the soil, on the water; a species of confused, mysterious life, as volatile and brief as that of the flies, was swelling under the whole of the earth’s surface. Things were continually secreting boiling liquids, which flowed about. There were glands everywhere, invisible blisters bubbling in the depths of solid matter. The pavement, the walls, the sky, the skin of the passers-by were real organs, living particles, all jerking about independently, seized by the strange disease. There was plenty of death, of course, but it was never permanent death. It was only a form of desquamation, the wearing out of cells that left their waste lying about. And within this abandoned matter larvae were always being born, clusters of eggs were quietly fermenting in the heat, threatening, threatening, emerging from their inertia and resuming the conquest of the world, with infinitesimal nibblings, the confused sound of claws and mandibles, with fierce gnawings. Other people, like Roch, were strolling slowly about in a world that was busy eating; they were carrying with them, unawares, the whole fatal weight of this tiny creature, avid for life. People were grasshoppers lying in the grass while thousands of ants dragged them, a millimetre at a time, towards their nest; yes, like them, like all of them, one was inhabited, carried away, consumed to the very bone.

  Almost without realizing it, Roch turned into a wide boulevard. This was lined on both sides with tall, regular houses, full of balconies and carriage entrances. The houses followed one another in two straight lines leading into the heart of the town, where a volcano-shaped mountain rose up. Roch walked for a few minutes on the left-hand pavement, in the sun; then he crossed to the shady side. When he reached No. 66, he halted under a plane-tree. On the far side of the street, between a bookshop and an antique-shop, there was this big, bright

  shop with huge windows, above which was written, in neon tubing:

  TRANSTOURISM

  At the back of the windows, coloured posters had been pinned up in a row—‘Come to Portugal’, ‘Ardent, mystical Spain’, ‘Mexico, the Land of the Gods’, ‘Scandinavia—a young country’, and that kind of thing. The door stood wide open, and a model aeroplane could be seen on a pedestal in the hall. In the main room there were desks arranged in a half-circle, and men and women were bustling about, without looking out of doors. Roch, half hidden behind his plane-tree, stood watching the shop for a long time. He looked at the posters, one by one, the marvellous little seaside or mountain views that one could step into whenever one liked, so as to forget the world. He wandered about like that on a white beach edged with blue sea, where a pretty brown-skinned blonde in a bikini made the same gesture with her arm the whole time, as though waving goodbye to someone who was out of sight. Then he walked round a mediaeval castle, perched on the crest of a hill clothed in black fir-trees; there was white mist trailing round the sinister battlements, and snowy mountain peaks stood motionless along the horizon, like a grey and pink wall. Black letters hovered in the sky: Werfen (Salzburg), Osterreich. In another place there was a tiny village, drying in the sun at the bottom of a creek; Roch walked along a path that followed a serrated coastline. He lay down on a carpet of pine-needles and gazed at the jagged rocks that rose, black, out of the purple sea. This might be in Greece, Turkey, or perhaps Yugoslavia.

  Roch went into all the pictures like this. He walked by the sea-shore, he climbed the flights of steps in sun-drenched villages in Capri and Sardinia. He went down through mountain passes, walked along deep lanes in Guernsey, and crossed the Libyan desert by jeep. In Constantinople he looked at the Bosphorus, and in Teneriffe at the volcano. Then, when he’d had enough of all that, of the Giant’s Causeways and Temples of the Sun, he went aboard the model ships and planes, in the front of the window. He wound up with a trip in the miniature Boeing displayed in the hall.

  People were continually going in and out of the shop—scarlet-faced women in loud-patterned dresses, men carrying cameras. Inside, behind the row of desks, there was never a pause in the work. Typewriters were clicking, footsteps went to and fro. Every now and then a telephone began to ring, the bell filling the whole place. It would be repeated five or six times, then a hand would pick up the instrument and nasal voices would be heard. An electric fan hung from the ceiling, its broad blades stirring the air without a sound, cutting through the spirals of cigarette smoke. All this was work, it was useless, idiotic bustle, the kind of mournful hum of comedy played out in casemates. People lived there, sunk into themselves, caught up in noises and rustlings, without a thought in their heads. They forgot about details. They didn’t see the dust or the flies, they paid no attention to the faint disturbances that rose up softly, from the furthest depths within them, to remind them who they were. They had forgotten him, Roch, as well; his usual seat in the information office was empty today, but that didn’t matter. They went on working, moving their lips, turning the pages of year-books and account-books, thinking of nothing, suspecting nothing; unaware that time was going by quickly, very quickly, second after second, and that they were drawing imperceptibly closer to nothingness, to death. A few hundred more days, that was all, and every one of them would collapse into himself, on his old, stained bed, and begin to breathe his la
st. All of them without exception, Grangier, Michel, Vanoni, Butterworth, Honier, Arnassian, Berg, Dufour. Nothing would save them, not their horn-rimmed spectacles, not the scent they used on their hair, not the fat on their bellies. They would soon slip down into the depths of impotence, without having understood a thing. They would try to cling to scraps, but at the appointed hour everything would fail them. Their one hold would be on gangrene, and their fingers would only be able to clutch morsels of death.

  That was what that shop had become—a kind of mortuary full of noise and movement, a stifling cellar, a stew of corruption. Roch felt hatred surging within him again. Wrapped in his cloud of pain, he thought up insults and curses for every inch of the shop. He wanted to cry out, but his dry throat could only produce, with difficulty, a spasmodic rattle. Then he bent down towards the pavement, propped himself against the trunk of the plane-tree, and picked up a big stone that was lying among its roots; he held this in his hand for a moment, let two cars go by, and then stood up straight, facing the shop. Again he tried to speak, but in vain. He glared at the glass of the shop window, thought to himself ‘sick, sick, sick,’ and hurled the stone with all his strength. When the glass shattered into smithereens and there was nothing left above the posters except TRANSTOU ISM, Roch ran away down the boulevard.