Fever Page 9

  ‘I … I don’t see what I can do for you. I’m sorry. Goodbye.’

  And the other man hung up. Beaumont wasn’t hurt or even perturbed by his breaking off. Almost without moving, he composed another number: 88.88.88. Far away, over miles of telephone wire, a record began spinning, repeating the same phrase over and over: ‘There is no subscriber at the number you dialled.

  There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the number you dialled. There is no subscriber at the numb …’

  Beaumont rang off. Then he added up another lot of figures, 8+0+1+0+3+3 =

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello! Could I talk to you?’

  ‘Yes, er … Who’s speaking?’

  Perhaps Beaumont was mistaken, but it was a quite fresh, quite new voice, the voice of a very young girl, fifteen or sixteen no doubt, which came through the plastic shell in pure notes, modulated towards the treble, with sometimes a soft, low-pitched hissing sound in the pronunciation of the occlusives, especially the dental consonants. Beaumont listened while the voice repeated its question, and a sort of calm sadness came over his face, mingling gently with his column of pain. He drew a deep breath.

  ‘My name is Beaumont,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you, I rang you at random, absolutely at random. I dialled a number, just like that, and it was you who answered. I don’t even remember what number I dialled, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter because in any case it will all be over in a moment. Are you willing to listen to me, do you mind listening to me to the very end?’

  ‘I don’t understand, I …’

  ‘If you won’t, then never mind, ring off. You only need to hang up, and I’ll try another number.’

  ‘All right, I don’t mind, but why are you doing it?’

  ‘Why am I telephoning like this, at random?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t explain exactly, no I can’t. Because I don’t exactly know, myself. I mean, yes, there are things I know … I’m alone, and I’m in pain, and I’m scared, you understand, I’m completely alone, I feel completely alone, and I’m scared.’

  ‘And you …’

  ‘Yes, that’s it, you know, it seems ridiculous to say all this, like that, but I can’t afford, I can’t any longer afford to be afraid of seeming ridiculous. In any case you don’t know me, you’ve never set eyes on me, and in a few minutes it’ll be over, forgotten. You understand? I don’t know how to put it, but I’m in pain. I’m really in great pain, I can hardly speak. It began yesterday evening, no, not evening—during the night, about four in the morning. I woke up with this toothache, and it began to swell and swell. I don’t know where I’ve got to, I … I tried to ring up a girl I know, I wanted her to come round and see me, because I couldn’t stand being all alone, like that, with my toothache. But she … but she wouldn’t come, she said she couldn’t, because it was four o’clock in the morning and all that. So then I can’t remember what I did, but it was terrible. I drank a whole bottle of plum brandy, but it made no difference. I spent the night like that, sitting on a bed, doing nothing. If only she’d come, if only she’d been willing to come. It was necessary, you understand, it was really necessary. This had never happened to me before. It was the only time, yes really, it was truly the only time in my life that I needed her. Now it’s different. I don’t need anybody any longer, you understand. Now, when I choose, I can go to the dentist and he’ll put me right. He’ll take an X-ray and he’ll say, “You have an abscess under that wisdom-tooth, or under that devitalized molar, or something like that. An abscess. Only an abscess. And you’re such a coward. Worse than a woman.” And he’ll never understand. He won’t know what it was like, last night, in my room. If I told him he wouldn’t believe it. He’d laugh. “That’s all it was, old man, an abscess, just an abscess. That tooth must come out. I’ll have to give you an injection, I hope you can stand an injection, eh?” The truth, the truth is something horrible. Once you begin with it there’s no stopping. And one can stay like that for hours, doing nothing else, sitting on the edge of the bed. That’s why, that’s why I’m talking to you. At first, in spite of everything, in spite of all this emptiness, I still thought one could do something. I thought one could stop this machine, this sort of machine, by talking, moving about, drinking spirits, telephoning or doing things like that. But now I’ve got there, I’ve understood. There’s a state one should never go beyond, and I’ve gone beyond it. I can’t go back now. I need my pain now, I’d be nothing any more, without it. And I’m fond of it. There are things one shouldn’t know, and now I know them. Last night. You know …’

  ‘But why, why do you say that?’

  The voice faltered, seeming to be constructing and destroying simultaneously; then it continued:

  ‘Why? Why are you telling me this? What are you going to do, now?’

  Without the slightest emotion, breathing with perfect regularity between his phrases, Beaumont replied:

  ‘I don’t know yet. Frankly, I don’t know at all. I just told you, it’s different now, I don’t need anybody any more. Now I’m alone, I’m really alone, quite alone. I’m still in pain, of course, but I don’t know. Perhaps the pain is a bit less, perhaps it’s still the same. But I’ve forgotten it already, almost forgotten it. I have a kind of peace, you know, a sort of little sad, silent calm. In order to really suffer, one has to love somebody. And I don’t know anybody in the world any longer, everything seems to me now to be smooth and indifferent. I’m alone, and at the same time I’m everywhere, already. Yes, everywhere. Wherever there are people, sunshine, people going to and fro. Work and suffering. I’m everything that’s happening on earth, all the horrors and all the pleasures. Everything people are saying and everything they’re wanting. I assure you, everything. Because I’m empty, empty, empty. So that everything can come into me. You understand. Like a tape-recorder, exactly like that. Or like a telephone. The sounds of human voices are running through me, for miles. You understand? Other people’s voices will pass through me, and I myself shall be cold and silent, all the time. I shan’t know anything any more. I shan’t say anything any more. A sheet of white, very white paper. I’ll leave you that. You’ll be able to write whatever you like on it. My name, for instance, Beaumont, Beaumont. Or a garden, with pebbles and grass. And me buried in it, under a little marble slab, and wreaths, and imitation orchids. Or perhaps a window, you know, an open window looking on to anything you like, a snowy countryside, a grey street with the dustbin men going by. Sunshine, rain, the mistral, people coming home from the cinema in the evening, and a bus pulling out. You hear?’

  ‘Your name’s Beaumont?’ said the girl.

  ‘My name was Beaumont, yes,’ said Beaumont calmly.

  ‘Well, Beaumont. I … I’ll think of you.’

  ‘When I die,’ said Beaumont.

  ‘That’s it, when you die,’ she said.

  As there was nothing more to do, or to say, and it was really morning by now, Beaumont rang off. Then he went back to his room, that place of rumpled sheets, blankets smudged with cigarette ash, and the smell of brandy, like a chemist’s shop. He walked round and round his table for a few minutes, his legs thick and heavy with fatigue and his eyes scorching. At last he sat down again on the chair, as he had done four or five hours before, when the pain began. Morning was something that really existed; it had noises of motor cycles starting up, hoots from motor-car horns, men’s voices shouting, whitish, washed-out lights, and the smell of smoke all making their way through the closed windows. A shroud, yes, a kind of shroud. On a visiting-card on which was written:

  PIERRE-PAUL BRACCO

  All right, Wednesday, same time

  P.S.—Ciné-club, tomorrow
evening at 9.

  ‘L’ Etang tragique, Jean Renoir

  he drew a series of little spirals and scribbled a few words, thus:

  I’m glad to have

  known these things

  now I’ve got

  fond of them.

  See you soon.

  Beaumont.

  And he withdrew inside his gum.

  His heart-beats, deep down in his chest, were carrying him away at a regular pace, through his arteries. Each dull thud that struck in the furthest depths of his body set a broad wave of thick blood in motion, and the wave drove him further back into himself; towards an unknown point, a little speck on the edge of his jaw, which bore practically all the signs of life. Beaumont was becoming tiny, like a glove gradually disappearing as it is being turned inside-out. His feet and hands went into the tooth and drifted towards the bottom, as though drawn down by rubber suckers. Then his legs, arms and trunk vanished in their turn. His shoulders and neck followed, slowly and methodically. His eyes melted, his ears flattened and were erased as though by an india rubber; his tousled hair, and his forehead, and his nose, and his mouth with its thick lips, his cheekbones, his cheeks with their streaks of beard, his whole face faded away. This flesh and these bones were being digested by a kind of ungainly serpent, a real, twenty-foot boa constrictor, a live intestine that lived concealed in his jaw; his face had become a mere shapeless, mobile paste which was running downwards, towards the opening, like soapsuds gurgling away through the plug-hole of a washbasin.

  Once he was settled inside his tooth, in the middle of a pulpy surface full of sleep and sorrow, Beaumont felt he had been extricated from his trouble; he was remote and fluctuating, a prisoner in a little ivory cage, and eager to be a sufferer within suffering. This was the harmony he had lost the day he was born, now suddenly regained, without desire, without anxiety, as though he had been sentenced by a jury of men and animals: a sort of winter, white and melancholy, but where all was infinite, elegant, majestic. The high-pitched chanting no longer filled his ears; he had no ears now, and he himself was song. He was proud of his new body, his in-the-tooth body; he amused himself by moving in all directions, just for the pleasure of discovering his capacities; he kept going off into the most varied styles, from comic opera to Negro spirituals; he was the muted trumpet, the clarinet, the alto-sax, or the sharp crack of a breaking finger-nail. Very tall and mechanical, like Albinoni, or rather wiry and compact, like Shelly Manne. Gong-notes, trampling roughly right across flat surfaces, pipe-sounds, or snores, gurgles, hiccoughs. Just one shrill chirrup, in the style of a cricket all alone in the dark. The soft-hard rhythm of the double-bass, chopping the silence into dual sounds, Charlie Mingus, constantly taken over one from another, moving, constructing scales, a barrage, then a snatch of waltz-time, and a shower of notes descending simultaneously on two different chords, and the puff, puff of the lungs expanding to the point of union, the junction, point A, where darkly, harshly, very harshly, painfully, the coupled growls dried up at one go, with a funny miaowing that sprayed out like a shower-bath. These cries and tumults, which he had chosen, were in the nature of a queer happiness; something infinite, yet desperate, of which he had only grudging mastery.

  Beaumont, sitting in his tooth, nice and warm, nice and uncomfortable, both legs wedged into the grooves of the roots, was swept away by another movement; that of the memory of the sun, for instance, or of being short of time. In the centre of his multiform song there was a kind of special animal, an undying worm with feet. He kept with him the world of sound and lights, the noises and the dust, the wind-swept streets, the cold, the overflowing drains. And the cohorts of the first morning men, marching to their offices, tightly belted into raincoats.

  Beaumont left his chair, his bed, his ashtrays and his room; he walked for a moment along the roof of the house, which he had managed to reach by way of the attic window on the top landing. He kept close to the eaves and reached the spot which was touched by the rays of the rising sun. It must be something like eight o’clock, or half past eight. The wind, which was rather cold, was blowing straight towards him, flattening his raincoat and his striped pyjamas against his body. Beaumont saw the street, down below, and the house opposite; nearly all the shutters were still closed. A little girl on the pavement, outside the chemist’s shop, raised her head and looked in his direction. Beaumont flattened himself against the sloping roof, so as not to be seen. Then, prompted by fatigue, he sat down on his heels, holding on with his right hand to the groove in a tile, to keep from falling. He stayed like that for quite a long time, in the sunshine, sitting on the roof amid the bird-droppings.

  3. It seems to me the boat is heading for the island

  THE other day I felt cold in my flat, and I went down into the street for a bit of a walk. I’m not all that fond of walking for its own sake, no; in fact I must admit I find the vertical position slightly ridiculous. I can’t manage to swing my arms by my sides in a natural way, each moving with the opposite leg. But since it has to be done, I do it as best I can, trying hard to resemble some species of big equatorial bird emerging from a lake with all its feathers flattened against its skin, making footprints to be fossilized for future epochs.

  The street where I live leads to a poor district, and I turned down that way quite spontaneously, for no apparent reason. But I didn’t go straight there, because I never want to arrive too suddenly in a place I like, without being prepared. My dream would be to live in the suburbs of the town, on one of those hills covered with gardens and flights of steps. Like that I should have a couple of miles to walk before getting to the middle of the town, and I’d have time to adjust myself as I went along. At first I should meet nobody and there would be scarcely any houses. Only rough fields, old crumbling walls, and rubbish-heaps here and there, on the bank by the roadside. I should see all that, and sniff up all the smells, which would still be separate. If necessary I’d stop from time to time and kick a heap of empty tins. Then I’d walk past a deserted cemetery, possibly meeting one or two old women in black, or even a postman. And I’d keep going on, down the hill. I’d take short cuts through fields, passing between villas where there wasn’t a sound to be heard. Further on I should start some dogs barking.

  Then I’d go down a long flight of steps strewn with dead roses, and between hedges of pepper-trees and mimosa. At about the 223rd step I should meet an emigrating column of black ants. And I should be puzzled to know what had made them leave the left-hand villa and betake themselves to the right-hand villa, whether it was starvation or insecticide. In the gutter, too, there would be a piece of crumpled paper, with writing in a schoolboy hand:

  On July 12, 1588 Drake was playing bowls

  at Plymouth with some of his officers.

  The Channel lies between France and England.

  It seems to me the boat is heading for the island.

  Have you heard about the accident?

  English cars usually have the steering-wheel on the right.

  Napoleon was unable to land in England because the French fleet

  had been destroyed at Trafalgar.

  and several cigarette-ends. At the bottom of the steps I should see some children playing, and some cars parked. The sun would be shining very low down, close to the sea, ready to go out. But at the last moment, the bell for eight o’clock mass, the children coming out of school, or some such thing, it would slope off to the right and vanish beyond the airfield. As I went lower and lower, there would be more men and women, the villas would be closer and closer together, until they formed a single block of houses, storeys, rows of windows and balconies, lift-shafts, roofs so high up that one couldn’t make out whether they were tiles or concrete, garages, pavements, crossroads, gully-holes, a park full of women and prams, several alley-cats, all more and more close-packed, more and more town, until, imperceptibly, I’d stopped walking on earth and begun to walk on tar and sand.

  Down at the bottom I stopped on the edge of the pavement and watc
hed the cars moving. There were a lot of them, going in all directions. It was a funny kind of cross-roads, without the smallest island of green in the centre, and with at least half a dozen traffic lights lighting up turn by turn. At one moment a German car ran into a small van; the owners got out and looked at their bumpers for a few seconds without saying anything. Then they were about to start an argument, but the drivers behind them began hooting, so they had to split up and pull into the kerb further along. Then I lit a cigarette—I didn’t say anything, either—and waited to see what would happen next. It was rather as though I’d been at a window, about noon, looking out into a street. There was movement, a lot of movement, in all directions, and yet everything looked very calm. It was perhaps a certain rhythm, or the contrary of rhythm. The ground was perfectly smooth, without the smallest roughness on which the eye could have paused, or where a knee could have been scraped and started to bleed. A little like glazed cardboard, with letters printed under the glaze. The cars were driving over it noiselessly, without a jolt, almost without moving. Then they disappeared into the different streets, with a gentle motion that made one think of raindrops on a window-pane. The pedestrians were going past very quickly too, but in their case one thought rather of a looking-glass that wasn’t reflecting anything. It was all fluid. Things were lying one on top of another, quite flat, and the whole thing was harmonious. But it was far from perfect; there was something about it all that made me feel uncomfortable, vaguely uneasy. It was, what was I doing here, what on earth was the sense of my coming here, amidst all these things, in this business?

  And what’s more, it was cold. I finished my cigarette and threw it into the street, right under the front wheel of a passing lorry. I turned up the collar of my jacket and strode off down the street. I looked at the shop windows, one after another. Outside one shop there was a counter of shoes and, for something to say, I asked the girl in charge: