Things and A Man Asleep (20 page)

The question could apply equally well to your feet or your thighs. In fact, the question is meaningless: the real problem revolves around contact. In theory, there are two kinds of contact: the contact of your body with the sheets, and this applies to your left thigh, your right foot, your right forearm, part of your stomach: this contact is fusion, osmosis, dilution; and the contact of your body with itself, in those places where flesh meets flesh, where your left foot rests on your right foot, where your knees meet, where your elbow comes up against your stomach: these contacts are sharp, hot or cold, or both hot and cold. One could naturally, and almost without risk, invert the whole operation and maintain that it is the other way round, the left foot under the right foot, the right thigh under the left thigh.

What emerges most clearly from all of this is obviously that you are not lying down on your right or your left side, with your legs slightly bent and your arms wrapped around the pillow, but hanging upside-down, like a hibernating bat, or, rather, an over-ripe pear on a pear-tree: this means you could fall at any moment, although you are not overly alarmed by the prospect since your head is perfectly protected by the pillow, but it is nevertheless your duty to avoid this danger, no matter how slight it may be. But if you run through in your head all the means that you know of, you soon realise that the situation is more serious than you had initially imagined, if only because the loss of horizontally is rarely conducive to sleep. So, you will have to resign yourself to falling, even though you foresee that it will not be particularly pleasant (one never knows when one wall stop falling), but above all, you do not know how to go about letting yourself fall, it's only when you are not thinking about it that you start falling, and how could you not think about it since, precisely, you are thinking about it? That is something that no-one has ever given serious thought to, but which is not without a certain importance: there should be books written about it, reliable books that would enable one to face up to these situations which occur far more often than is generally thought.

Three-quarters of your body has taken refuge in your head; your heart has taken up residence in your eyebrow where it now feels quite at home, where it is beating like a living creature, albeit, perhaps, at the very most, a little too quickly. You will have to conduct a roll-call of your body, to check that your limbs, your organs, your entrails, your mucous membranes are all intact. You would really like to clear your head of all these pieces that are cluttering it up and weighing it down, but at the same time, you congratulate yourself on having saved as much as you could, for everything else is lost, you no longer have any feet, or hands, your calf-muscle has turned to jelly.

This is all becoming increasingly complicated: what you should do first is to remove your elbow, and then, in the space that is thus created, you could place at least a portion of your tummy, and so on until you are more or less back together again. But it is terribly difficult: there are bits missing, others are duplicated, others still have grown outrageously large, and yet others are voicing utterly insane territorial claims: your elbow is more an elbow than ever, you had forgotten just how elbow-like an elbow could be, a fingernail has supplanted your whole hand. And this, naturally, is always the moment that the torturers choose to intervene. One of them stuffs a chalk-filled sponge into your mouth, another bungs up your ears with cotton wool; a few pit-sawyers have set to work in your sinus passages, a pyromaniac is on the loose in your stomach, sadistic tailors compress your feet, force your head into a hat which is too small, cram you into an overcoat that is too tight, strangle you with a necktie; a sweep and his sidekick have introduced a knotted rope into your windpipe and, despite their best efforts, are unable to withdraw it.

They come almost every time. You know them well. It is almost reassuring. If they have arrived, it means that sleep cannot be too far off. They will make you suffer a little, then they'll get bored and leave you alone. They hurt you, that goes without saying, but you have, with regard to pain, as with all the sensations you perceive, all the thoughts that cross your mind, all the impressions you feel, an attitude of complete detachment. You see yourself without astonishment being astonished, without surprise being surprised, without pain being assaulted by the torturers. You wait for them to calm down. You willingly concede to them whatever organs they want. You watch them from afar arguing over your stomach, your nose, your throat, your feet.

But often, so often, this is just the final snare. Then the worst begins. It wells up slowly, imperceptibly. At first everything is calm, too calm, normal, too normal. Everything looks as if it will never have to move again. But then you know, you begin to know, with ever more implacable certainty, that you have lost your body, or no ... it is rather that you can see it, not far away, but you will never again be able to get back to it.

You are now nothing more than an eye. A huge staring

eye which sees everything, which sees your limp body just as it sees you, looked at and looking, as if it had turned round completely in its socket and was contemplating you in silence, you, the inside of you, the dark, empty, slime-green, frightened, impotent interior of you. It looks at you and it nails you to the spot. You will never stop seeing yourself. You can do nothing, you cannot escape yourself, you cannot escape your own gaze, you never will be able to: even if you were to fall into a sleep so deep that no shock, no shout, no burning pain could rouse you, there would still be this eye, your eye, that will never close, that will never sleep.

You see yourself, you see yourself seeing yourself, you watch yourself watching yourself. Even if you were to wake up, your vision would remain the same, immutable. Even if you managed to grow thousands, billions of extra eyelids, there would still be this eye, behind, which would see you. You are not asleep but sleep will never come again. You are not awake and you will never wake up. You are not dead and even death could never set you free.

A
S
FREE
AS
A
cow, as a mollusc, as a rat!

But rats don't spend hours trying to get to sleep. But rats don't wake up with a start, gripped by panic, bathed in sweat. But rats don't dream and what can you do to protect yourself against your dreams?

But rats don't bite their nails, especially not methodically, for hours on end, until the tips of their claws are little more than a large open sore. You tear off half of the nail, bruising the spots where it is attached to the flesh; you tear away the cuticle nearly all the way back to the top joint until beads of blood start to appear, until your fingers are so painful that, for hours, the slightest contact is so unbearable that you can no longer pick things up and you have to go and immerse your hands in scalding hot water.

But rats, as far as you know, do not play pinball. You hug the machines for hours on end, for nights on end, feverishly, angrily. You cling, grunting, to the machines, accompanying the erratic rebounds of the steel ball with exaggerated thrusts of your hips. You wage relentless warfare on the springs, the lights, the figures, the channels.

Painted ladies who give an electronic wink, who lower their fans. You can't fight against a tilt. You can play or not play. You can't start up a conversation, you can't make it say what it will never be able to say to you. It is no use snuggling up close to it, panting over it, the tilt remains insensitive to the friendship you feel, to the love which you seek, to the desire which torments you. Six thousand points, when four thousand four hundred are enough for a replay, will only add to your bruises, will only beat you down a little further.

You drift around the streets, you enter a cinema; you drift around the streets, you enter a bar; you drift around the streets, you look at the Seine, the butchers' shops, the trains, the posters, people. You drift around the streets, you enter a cinema where you see a film which resembles the one you've just seen, the same inane story, full of sweetness and music, told by a gentleman who is too intelligent to be real, then the intermission, commercials that you've seen ten, twenty times, a documentary about sardines, or the sun, about Hawaii or the
Bibliothèque Nationale
, a trailer for a film you've already seen and will see again, the film that you've just watched starting all over again, with its fragmented title-sequence, the beach at Etretat, sea, sea-gulls, children playing in the sand.

You walk out, you drift around the over-lit streets. You go back to your room, you undress, you slip between the sheets, you turn out the light, you close your eyes. Now is the time when dream-women, too quickly undressed, crowd in around you, the time when you reread
ad nauseam
books you've read a hundred times before, when you toss and turn for hours without getting to sleep. This is the hour when, your eyes wide open in the darkness, your hand groping towards the foot of the narrow bed in search of an ashtray, matches, a last cigarette, you calmly measure the sticky extent of your unhappiness.

Now you get up in the night. You wander the streets, you go and perch on bar-stools at the Rosebud, at Harry's Bar, or take a seat at the Franco-Suisse in Rue Saint-Honoré, almost directly across the street from your room, or you install yourself at a café table in Les Halles, and there you stay, for hours, until closing-time, with a beer in front of you or a black coffee or a glass of red wine. You watch the others come and go, the butcher's boys, the florists, the newspaper vendors, the crowds of merry revellers, the lonely boozers, the tarts.

You are alone and drifting. You walk along the desolate avenues, past the stunted trees, the peeling façades, the dark porches. You penetrate the bottomless ugliness of Les Batignolles, and Pantin. Your only chance encounters are with Wallace fountains which long since ran dry, tacky churches, gutted building sites, pale walls. The parks whose railings imprison you, the festering swamps near the sewer outlets, the monstrous factory gates. Steam locomotives pump out clouds of white smoke under the metallic walkways of the area around Gare Saint-Lazare. On Boulevard Barbès or Place Clichy, impatient crowds raise their eyes to the heavens.

You will not break the magic circle of solitude. You are alone and you know no-one; you know no-one and you are alone. You see the others bunch together, huddle together, hug and protect one other. But you, lifeless gaze, transparent wraith, leper blending with the walls, you are a silhouette already returned to dust, an occupied space that no-one approaches. You force yourself to hope for unlikely encounters. But it is not for you that leather, brass and wood start suddenly to shine, that lights are lowered and noises gently muffled. You are alone despite the thickening cigarette smoke, despite Lester Young or Coltrane, alone in the snug heat of the bars, in the empty streets which echo to your tread, in the drowsy complicity of the last bars to remain open.

There are some enemies that you will face up to only once, just long enough to know, to recognise, the icy hiss of the snake which would turn you to stone, just long enough to beat a timely retreat, chilled with loneliness and impatience, done for, betrayed by your own eyes, by the ever sharper and ever more futile perception of the tiniest details: a curl of hair, the shadow of a glass, the shifting outline of a discarded cigarette, the final tremor of a closing double-door. You miss nothing, but neither do you grasp anything, or if you do it is too late, always too late: shadows, reflections, cracks, sidesteps, smiles, yawns, tiredness or abandon.

Unhappiness did not swoop down on you, this was no surprise attack: more of a gradual infiltration, it insinuated itself almost ingratiatingly. It meticulously impregnated your life, your movements, the hours you keep, your room, like a long-obscured truth, or something that was staring you in the face but which you refused to recognise; tenacious and patient, subtle and unremitting, it took possession of the cracks in the ceiling, of the lines in your face in the cracked mirror, of the pack of cards; it slipped furtively into the dripping tap on the landing, it echoed in sympathy with the chimes of each quarter-hour from the bells of Saint-Roch.

The snare was that feeling which, on occasion, came close to exhilaration, that arrogance, that sort of exaltation; you thought that the city was all you needed, its stones and its streets, the crowds which carried you along, a tiny space on the counter at the Petite Source, a front of stalls in some local cinema; you thought you needed only your room, your lair, your cage, your burrow, to which you return each day, from which you set out again each day, this almost magical place which no longer contains anything to occupy your patience, not even a crack in the ceiling, not even a feature of the grain in the wood of your shelf, not even a flower in the patterned wallpaper. Once again you deal out the fifty-two cards on your narrow bed; once again you search for the unlikely exit from a shapeless labyrinth.

Your powers have deserted you. You no longer know how to follow the lazy drift of the bubbles and twigs over the surface of your cornea. You are no longer able to summon up a face, a triumphal cavalcade or a distant city out of the cracks and the shadows.

The snare: the dangerous illusion of being - what is the word? - impenetrable, of offering no purchase to the outside world, of silently sliding, inaccessible, just two open eyes looking forward, perceiving everything, the tiniest details, retaining nothing. Like a sleepwalker who is wide awake, or a blindman who can see. A being without memory, without alarm.

But there is no exit, no miracle, no truth. Shells, protective armour. Ever since that stifling day when it all started, when everything stopped. You hug the filthy walls of the black streets, your right hand knocking against the porch-steps, the bricks of the façades. Sitting for hours above the Seine, your legs dangling, you contemplate the scarcely perceptible eddy caused by the arch of a bridge. You withdraw the four aces from your fifty-two cards. How many times have you repeated the same amputated gestures, the same journeys which lead nowhere? All you have left to fall back on are your tuppeny-halfpenny bolt- holes, your idiotic patience, the thousand and one detours that always lead you back unfailingly to your starting point. From park to museum, from café to cinema, from embankment to garden, the station waiting-rooms, the lobbies of the grand hotels, the supermarkets, the bookshops, the art galleries, the corridors of the metro. Trees, stones, water, clouds, sand, brick, light, wind, rain: all that counts is your solitude: whatever you do, wherever you go, nothing that you see has any importance, nothing that you seek is real, everything that you do, you do in vain. Inviting or calamitous, solitude alone exists, this solitude with which, sooner or later, every time, you are confronted; every time, you face it alone and defenceless, raging or distraught, in despair or impatient.