The Book of Flights Read online

  One would have had to understand this total language, know the meaning of this quivering of the lips, this gesture of the hand, this slight limp of the left foot, this cigarette glowing in the corner of an entryway. One would have had to understand all the words that make up the story, all the fabrics, papers, combs, wallets, leathers, metals, nylons.

  this is what one would have had to do, to get a real idea of just where one was: stay there standing in the middle of this street without budging, and watch, hear, feel, just like that, avidly, the spectacle in the process of unfolding. Without a thought, without a gesture, like a signpost, silent, standing on two cast-iron legs, immobile.

  Truth was lost. Scattered, winking, skipping about, truth was exploding rapidly in the cylinder heads of engines, was perforating cardboard tickets, was a shell of hard metal with tender curves, headlights with sharply focused reflections. It was the gold frame of black-lensed sunglasses, the rasping sound of stockings rubbing their scales against each other, the shimmering of wrist-watches in their cases, electricity, gas, drops of water, the bubbles enclosed in bottles of soda water, the neon trapped inside white and pink tubes. Truth was burning away in a single pale cigarette, inside the glowing tip, and the young girl who was smoking was sitting on a bench facing the sea, suspecting nothing.

  The dress she was wearing was orange with a mauve check, her legs were crossed, and she was talking to a young man, making occasional gestures with a hand whose nails were painted pink. The cigarette smouldered between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. The girl was saying:

  ‘Yes, Léa was just coming out of Prisunic, you see, and she said to me . . .’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  ‘No, umm, two or three days ago. I was with Manu, and she came up to me just like that. What do you think of Manu?’

  ‘He seems to be on the level.’

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s true, he was absolutely marvellous to me once, once when I wanted to kill myself. That sounds idiotic now, but it’s true. I had it all worked out. I meant to get into a bathtub filled with really hot water, and drown myself.’

  ‘That must be a bit tricky – drowning oneself in a bathtub?’

  ‘Not if you’re really determined, like I was. And then, I’d have taken a whole lot of sleeping tablets just beforehand. I rather liked the idea of dying like that, all naked in a tub of really hot water.’

  She took a puff at her cigarette, swallowed her saliva.

  ‘And then Manu talked me out of it. He’s really an incredible guy, you know, he, he really knows why he’s alive. Fantastic will-power. It’s he who decides everything for me.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s bad for you. basically.’

  ‘Perhaps, yes . . .’

  ‘You go through life without any real conviction, I don’t know, you seem to be sort of – detached . . .’

  ‘It’s true. You know the impression I have, sometimes? It’s the impression that I could quite easily fly away, if my feet were cut off I’d float up into the air, right up into the clouds, and disappear as quick as a flash.’

  ‘So you need a fellow like Manu.’

  ‘Perhaps, yes, basically. But sometimes I get really mad at him, you know, because I have the impression that since I’ve known him I’m no longer myself. That I’m lying, and that everyone else is lying, too. The point is, he does everything without hesitating a second, he is happy . . .’

  ‘Do you really think he’s happy?’

  ‘No, you’re right, he’s not happy, what’s the word I want – contented. But I have the impression that he knows things, whereas I never know anything at all, and that really depresses me.’

  She lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the first one.

  ‘Sometimes, you know, I get this terrific desire to go away altogether. I’d like to be as I was before, without Manu, just forget everything that happened since. But I don’t know if I’m up to it. Perhaps it’s too late,’

  Not far away, a yellow dog with black patches was sniffing at the stale corner of a mouldy wall; a little farther away, a cigarette butt discarded on the sidewalk continued to smoulder in the breeze.

  All this was happening here, in this street, at this time of this day of this century. It was the testament of this moment in time, in a way, the kind of poem that no one had ever written and that spoke of all these things. A poem, or an enumeration, that belonged to no one because everyone was part of it:

  Apartment building

  stone

  tar

  plaster

  grit

  cast iron

  plaques

  gas

  water

  lamp-post

  household refuse

  white

  grey

  black

  earth

  yellow

  brown

  orange peel

  puddle

  paper

  tyre tread

  engine

  Over the street’s tarred surface, like a frozen river, the vehicles passed, and their tyres traced strange lines full of little signs and crosses. The tracks met and darted apart again, and the wheels spun frenziedly over them, pressing their rubber suckers against the ground. The poem continued its enumeration, mechanically, as though there were someone, somewhere, to whom it was accountable. It was exhausting, a maddening occupation that would almost drive a person to tear his eyes out of their sockets so as not to see any longer. There were all these minute variations, all these details that had to be seen before it was too late. For example, up there at the top of the totem-like steel pole, when the green light had gone out soundlessly, letting the yellow light come on, which in its turn went out soundlessly, to give way to the terrible red light. Or when the young woman standing outside the bar had taken a paper handkerchief out of her bag to dab at her nose or at a tear in her eye. When this man had appeared at the fourth-floor window of the yellow house, and had looked down. When this ambulance carrying a pregnant woman had careered down the middle of the street, sounding its bell. When this other woman, a redhead, had stepped on to the rubber platform at the entrance to the shop selling swimsuits, and the door had opened automatically in front of her, its two glass panels, on which bronze letters spelled out KAREN, swinging back with a sudden jerk. When the young girl wearing glasses had turned page 31 of her magazine and had started to look at here.

  Town of steel and concrete, walls of glass thrusting up endlessly into the sky, city of encrusted patterns, furrowed by identical streets, with flags, stars, red glimmers, incandescent filaments inside lamps, electricity murmuring its soothing vibration while flowing through the networks of brass wire. Humming of secret mechanisms hidden in their boxes, ticktock of watches, purring of elevators rising and descending. Gasping of mopeds, popping of spark plugs, horns, horns. They all spoke their own language, told their story of crankshafts and pistons. The engines lived a chance existence, shut away inside the hoods of automobiles, exuding their odour of oil and motor fuel. The heat hovered around the engines in a permanent halo, rose from the scorching cylinder heads, spread through the streets and blended with the heat of human bodies. Town seething with life. The trolleybuses glided along on their tyres, emitting a constant groan. A number 9 trolleybus was passing, close in to the sidewalk, and its cargo of similar faces could be seen through the windows. It overtook a cyclist, it drove on over the black roadway, the tyres’ broad treads flattened themselves against the hard surface with a squelching noise. The number 9 trolleybus drove on, carrying in its belly the clusters of faces inset with absolutely similar eyes. On its back, the two raised antennae ran along the electric wires, swinging from side to side, vibrating, squeaking. From time to time, a shower of sparks spurted and clacked from the tips of the antennae, and the air was suddenly filled with a peculiar sulphurous odour. The number 9 trolleybus stopped in front of a pylon which bore the legend:

  ROSA BONHEUR

  The brakes hissed, the doors folded back, and some
people got out from the front while others clambered in at the back. That’s how it was. Then the number 9 trolleybus was off again, skirting the sidewalk, carrying in its belly the cluster of whitish eggs, off toward the unknown destination. Off toward the always renewed terminus, the kind of deserted place with a dusty garden, where the trolleybus turned round slowly in its own space and then moved off again in the direction it had just come from.

  And there were a whole lot of other vehicles like that. Snub-nosed buses, streetcars with battered old seats, motor coaches, trucks, taxis, metal vans that crisscrossed the town in all directions.

  The town was full of these strange animals with gleaming armour, yellow eyes, and feet, hands and sexes of rubber and asbestos. They plied their particular routes, they came and went, each leading its own independent, meticulous existence. They possessed sacred territories, they confronted each other in fierce struggles, emitting nasal bellows that made the air vibrate. What did they want? What were they waiting for? Who were their gods? Inside the tightly screwed boxes, the coils and wires, the sparks, the throbbing pistons provided evidence that there was a thought process at work. Mysterious and confused thoughts that sought ceaselessly to express themselves, to modify the world. It should have been possible to know how to read the words that these movements were writing without anyone knowing that they were doing so. It would have been good to be able to guess these ideas. If one had really listened to the growling of the engines, the shrieks of the brakes, the calls of the horns, one would perhaps have heard something in the nature of a dialogue, a thought in the process of taking shape, an adventure story, a poem:

  A ladder

  resting on a balcony

  rising as high as the roof.

  There,

  leaning against the television aerial

  (smoking a Reyno cigarette),

  there is nothing.

  It is as though the sky were rusting

  and men’s footsteps

  were counting the tiles.

  The iron chimney

  is smoking.

  It’s nothing.

  The house has taken shape.

  Look at the mauve streets

  that the ladder’s summons illustrates.

  Personally I deduce from this

  that nothing is going to rise

  from this balcony

  from this exhausted population

  or from these airs.

  No matter:

  I

  smash to smithereens.

  EVERYTHING BEGINS ON the day that he notices the prison. He looks around him, and sees the walls that confine him, the vertical wall surfaces that prevent him leaving. The house is a prison. The room in which he is standing is a prison. All sorts of things have been hung on the walls: pictures, plates, curios, arrows flighted with parrots’ feathers, terracotta masks. But now, that’s all useless. He knows why these walls are here, he has understood at last. So that he shall not escape.

  Everywhere in the room, on the floor, the ceiling, there are hideous objects which are shackles. Their iron links have chains that hang down as far as the wrists, as far as the ears. All this has been devised (but by whom, precisely?) to ensure that he remembers nothing, to make him secure, to persuade him that he cannot go away. Insidiously, just like that, almost as though unintentionally, he has been made a prisoner in the centre of a room. When he entered the house he suspected nothing. He did not see what the walls and ceiling were really for. He was unobservant. He did not notice that it looked like a prison cell. There were already so many things, so many masks on the walls. He thought he could leave when he liked, without being accountable to anyone. And then the other things started arriving, the bits of canvas daubed with colours, the fragments of glass, the fabrics, the wooden and rattan furniture. He got into the habit of sitting in the chairs: certainly, it was more comfortable than sitting on the ground. The thick walls were pierced by hideous, narrow openings. Ugly, hypocritical holes which looked like nothing on earth. ‘Windows, such big windows,’ he had been assured. ‘Look what a marvellous view they give. See, there’s a tree, a short stretch of street, vehicles, the sky, clouds. And by leaning right out, it’s possible to catch a glimpse of the sea. And the sun shines straight in, around two in the afternoon.’ Lousy rat-trap doors! They were only there to mask the thickness of the walls, to divert attention from this solitary confinement. Now, he knows. But it is probably too late. The doors and windowpanes have been inserted to dissuade him from leaving. And the transparent pellicle where the flies will put an end to their lives! Someone or other dared make this membrane!

  There are so many things to disguise the cell. Paper has been stuck on the walls, they have been given a coat of paint. The grey cement and opaque plaster have been concealed, and there, too, a membrane has been set. A pale yellow leucoma, speckled with undistinguishable blooms in an irritatingly uniform brown design! So that each day he may lose himself a little more in counting vainly the thousands of identical little spirals that are the world’s ocelli. Above his head, now, he sees for the first time the white platform suspended there, so low that by stretching an arm up he could touch it: cold, hard, slightly friable when scraped by a fingernail. That’s not the sky. That can’t be the sky. It is a terrible lid of plaster and beams that has been clapped down on the walls, and the soaring flight of will and desire shatters against it.

  Words have been projected, commonplace gestures, a language bereft of magic or hunger. A voice has said:

  ‘More coffee? A cigarette? Here’s an ashtray . . . What’s the time, I wonder? What are you doing? A penny for your thoughts. You know what I’d like? A poster, yes, a big poster, there, above the divan. That would be nice, don’t you think? Che Guevara, perhaps: you know, the photo where he’s dead, with his mouth open and you can see his teeth gleaming. On second thoughts, no, everyone has that one. But you see what I mean, a big poster would look fine there. Cassius Clay, Mao, Baudelaire, I don’t know . . .’

  A name has been given to everything, to each link of the chain: ‘The jade statue.’ ‘The Lacandon bow.’ ‘The Khmer head.’ ‘The Guatemalan tapestry.’ ‘The moonfish.’ ‘The Chinese screen.’ ‘The Huichol picture.’ ‘The map of Europe.’ ‘The sunfish.’ ‘The Ibo mask.’ Just so many words to smother the cry, the genuine deep cry that longed to escape from his throat:

  ‘Air! Air! Air! Air! Air!’

  He no longer sees either the sun or the moon. The electric bulb hangs from the centre of the white platform, at the end of a braided cord, shining with its evil light. When the rain starts falling, he no longer feels the water splashing on his skin, he can no longer look up into the sky with his mouth wide open and drink. He hears the drumming of the raindrops, far away, outside, around him. But he can no longer drink. Thirst grips his throat and coats his mouth. In a corner of the wall, low down, quite near the floor, is a black pipe, and at the end of this pipe is a rusted tap. The very sources are prisoners!

  Even the ground beneath his feet is no longer ground. The ground has disappeared. It has been buried beneath cinders, layers of cement, slats of glazed wood, checkered linoleums, stuffy moquettes exuding the smell of dust.

  He moves forward, stumbling into pieces of furniture. Stupid cubes of wood, ugly, useless, beacons of impotence! Cages which deform and arch the body. Eternal strangers which expel you and at the same moment trip you up. Benches, chairs, stools, cushions, armchairs. Sofas. They come along one by one and shove their apathetic promontories under a person’s buttocks, ram his backbone against their buffers! Tables on which the meals that are served are repellent, indigestible, nauseating. Tables over which the head bends, tables for writing, high plateaux cluttered with fetishes. Buttressed on their four legs without calves, legs that never bend. Tables? They are additional ceilings.

  And beds, abominable beds, soft eminences which half swallow you, then half regurgitate you, treacherous quicksands, treacherous reefs! Beds determined to stop one sleeping on the hard, gentl
e ground, viscous couches, eiderdowns, heaps of dead feathers, sacks of old yellow wools like the bellies of manatees! In the evening, when the hour comes (and it does not come from outside, but from within), he gives his body to this dead female, but now he knows that it is not sleep. He knows that it is this prison, as narrow as a bathtub, the hole formed by this mattress and these sheets, which keep him raised above the ground so that the current cannot carry him away. He goes to bed without hope of awakening elsewhere, without ever being able to extinguish the blinding light of his desire. And the bed keeps him level on his soft back, like a beast of burden that never ceases to be a slave, and never ceases to enslave.

  It was as though a night or a great blanket of smoke had descended upon the earth and hidden the truth from his eyes. He would never see the light again. He would no longer know the meaning of the free, infinite space that stretched away outside.

  Who had done that? Who had dared? Had he ever known the joy of living an uninhibited, haphazard existence? It was the hands of others, the eyes of others that had organized these labyrinths. Women’s gentle hands, perhaps, and moist eyes set inside the black design of mascara-painted lashes had reigned here well before his time, and he had had no inkling of the fact. This is how, gradually, surreptitiously, the bouquets of purple flowers, the decorated vases, the lace tablecloths, the hand-painted plates had all been chosen. One by one, the objects had come from outside, they had taken possession of the place. The lampshade of plaited straw, then the chandelier with imitation crystal pendants, the silver fruit-stand, the green and blue photos, the rag dolls. He had never asked for anything. Things came in, or perhaps originated on the spot, without his having to bother his head about them. His thoughts about all this were limited to a series of awkward exclamations such as:

  ‘The footstool, oh?’

  ‘The porcelain statue, ah, oh!’