Thomas The Obscure (2 page)

IV

T
HOMAS
STAYED
in his room to read. He was sitting with his hands joined over his brow, his thumbs pressing against his hairline, so deep in concentration that he did not make a move when anyone opened the door. Those who came in thought he was pretending to read, seeing that the book was always open to the same page. He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention. In relation to every symbol, he was in the position of the male praying mantis about to be devoured by the female. They looked at each other. The words, coming forth from the book which was taking on the power of life and death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which played over them. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, admitted the excessively keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so Thomas slipped toward these corridors, approaching them defenselessly until the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word. Even this was not fearful, but rather an almost pleasant moment he would have wished to prolong. The reader contemplated this little spark of life joyfully, not doubting that he had awakened it. It was with pleasure that he saw himself in this eye looking at him. The pleasure in fact became very great. It became so great, so pitiless that he bore it with a sort of terror, and in the intolerable moment when he had stood forward without receiving from his interlocutor any sign of complicity, he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute. Rather than withdraw from a text whose defenses were so strong, he pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obstinately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking himself a profound reader, even when the words were already taking hold of him and beginning to read him. He was seized, kneaded by intelligible hands, bitten by a vital tooth; he entered with his living body into the anonymous shapes of words, giving his substance to them, establishing their relationships, offering his being to the word "be". For hours he remained motionless, with, from time to time, the word "eyes" in place of his eyes: he was inert, captivated and unveiled. And even later when, having abandoned himself and, contemplating his book, he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word
He
and the word
I
were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply.

The first time he perceived this presence, it was night. By a light which came down through the shutters and divided the bed in two, he saw that the room was totally empty, so incapable of containing a single object that it was painful to the eye. The book was rotting on the table. There was no one walking in the room. His solitude was complete. And yet, sure as he was that there was no one in the room and even in the world, he was just as sure that someone was there, occupying his slumber, approaching him intimately, all around him and within him. On a naive impulse he sat up and sought to penetrate the night, trying with his hand to make light. But he was like a blind man who, hearing a noise, might run to light his lamp: nothing could make it possible for him to seize this presence in any shape or form. He was locked in combat with something inaccessible, foreign, something of which he could say: 'That doesn't exist'... and which nevertheless filled him with terror as he sensed it wandering about in the region of his solitude. Having stayed up all night and all day with this being, as he tried to rest he was suddenly made aware that a second had replaced the first, just as inaccessible and just as obscure, and yet different. It was a modulation of that which did not exist, a different mode of being absent, another void in which he was coming to life. Now it was definitely true, someone was coming near him, standing not nowhere and everywhere, but a few feet away, invisible and certain. By an impulse which nothing might stop, and which nothing might quicken, a power with which he could not accept contact was coming to meet him. He wanted to flee. He threw himself into the corridor. Gasping and almost beside himself, he had taken only a few steps when he recognized the inevitable progress of the being coming toward him. He went back into the room. He barricaded the door. He waited, his back to the wall. But neither minutes nor hours put an end to his waiting. He felt ever closer to an ever more monstrous absence which took an infinite time to meet. He felt it closer to him every instant and kept ahead of it by an infinitely small but irreducible splinter of duration. He saw it, a horrifying being which was already pressing against him in space and, existing outside time, remained infinitely distant. Such unbearable waiting and anguish that they separated him from himself. A sort of Thomas left his body and went before the lurking threat. His eyes tried to look not in space but in duration, and in a point in time which did not yet exist. His hands sought to touch an impalpable and unreal body. It was such a painful effort that this thing which was moving away from him and trying to draw him along as it went seemed the same to him as that which was approaching unspeakably. He fell to the ground. He felt he was covered with impurities. Each part of his body endured an agony. His head was forced to touch the evil, his lungs to breathe it in. There he was on the floor, writhing, reentering himself and then leaving again. He crawled sluggishly, hardly different from the serpent he would have wished to become in order to believe in the venom he felt in his mouth. He stuck his head under the bed, in a corner full of dust, resting among the rejectamenta as if in a refreshing place where he felt he belonged more properly than in himself. It was in this state that he felt himself bitten or struck, he could not tell which, by what seemed to him to be a word, but resembled rather a giant rat, an all-powerful beast with piercing eyes and pure teeth. Seeing it a few inches from his face, he could not escape the desire to devour it, to bring it into the deepest possible intimacy with himself. He threw himself on it and digging his fingernails into its entrails, sought to make it his own. The end of the night came. The light which shone through the shutters went out. But the struggle with the horrible beast, which had ultimately shown itself possessed of incomparable dignity and splendor, continued for an immeasurable time.
This
struggle was terrible for the being lying on the ground grinding his teeth, twisting his face, tearing out his eyes to force the beast inside; he would have seemed a madman, had he resembled a man at all. It was almost beautiful for this dark angel covered with red hair, whose eyes sparkled. One moment, the one thought he had triumphed and, with uncontainable nausea, saw the word "innocence", which soiled him, slipping down inside him. The next moment, the other was devouring him in turn, dragging him out of the hole he had come from, then tossing him back, a hard, emptied body. Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infinite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impression of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.

V

T
OWARD
THE
MIDDLE
of the second night, Thomas got up and went silently downstairs. No one noticed him with the exception of a nearly blind cat who, seeing the night change shape, ran after this new night which he did not see. After slipping into a tunnel where he did not recognize a single smell, this cat began to meow, forcing out from deep in his chest the raucous cry by which cats make it understood that they are sacred animals. He filled his lungs and howled. He drew from the idol he was becoming the incomprehensible voice which addressed itself to the night and spoke.

"What is happening?" said this voice. "The spirits with which I am usually in communication, the spirit that tugs at my tail when the bowl is full, the spirit that gets me up in the morning and puts me to bed in a soft comforter, and the most beautiful spirit of all, the one that meows and purrs and resembles me so closely that it is like my own spirit: they have all disappeared. Where am I now? If I feel gently with my paw, I find nothing. There's nothing anywhere. I'm at the very end of a gutter from which I can only fall. And that wouldn't scare me, falling. But the truth is that I can't even fall; no fall is possible; I am surrounded by a special void which repels me and which I wouldn't know how to cross over. Where am I then? Poor me. Once, by suddenly becoming a beast which might be cast into the fire with impunity, I used to penetrate secrets of the first order. By the flash of light which divided me, by the stroke of my claw, I knew lies and crimes before they were committed. And now I am a dull-eyed creature. I hear a monstrous voice by means of which I say what I say without knowing a single word of it all. I think, and my thoughts are as useless to me as hair standing on end or touching ears would be to the alien species I depend upon. Horror alone penetrates me. I turn round and round crying the cry of a terrible beast. I have a hideous affliction: my face feels as large as a spirit's face, with a smooth, insipid tongue, a blind man's tongue, a deformed nose incapable of prophecy, enormous eyes without that straight flame which permits us to see things in ourselves. My coat is splitting. That is doubtless the final operation. As soon as it is no longer possible even in this night, to draw a supernatural light from me by stroking my hair, it will be the end. I am already darker than the shadows. I am the night of night. Through the shadows from which I am distinguished because I am their shadow, I go to meet the over- cat. There is no fear in me now. My body, which is just like the body of a man, the body of the blessed, has kept its dimensions, but my head is enormous. There is a sound, a sound I have never heard before. A glow which seems to come from my body, though it is damp and lifeless, makes a circle around me which is like another body which I cannot leave. I begin to see a landscape. As the darkness becomes more oppressive, a great pallid figure rises before me. I say me,' guided by a blind instinct, for ever since I lost the good, straight tail which was my rudder in this world, I am manifestly no longer myself. This head which will not stop growing, and rather than a head seems nothing but a glance, just what is it? I can't look at it without uneasiness. It's moving. It's coming closer. It is turned directly toward me and, pure glance though it is, it gives me the terrible impression that it doesn't see me. This feeling is unbearable. If I still had any hair, I would feel it standing up all over my body. But in my condition I no longer have even the means to experience the fear I feel. I am dead, dead. This head, my head, no longer even sees me, because I am annihilated. For it is I looking at myself and not perceiving myself. Oh over-cat whom I have become for an instant to establish the fact of my decease, I shall now disappear for good. First of all, I cease being a man. I again become a cold, uninhabitable little cat stretched out on the earth. I howl one more time. I take a last look at this vale which is about to be closed up, and where I see a man, himself an over-cat as well. I hear him scratching the ground, probably with his claws. What is called the beyond is finished for me."

On his knees, his back bent, Thomas was digging in the earth. Around him extended several ditches on the edges of which the day was packed down. For the seventh time, leaving the mark of his hands in the soil, he was slowly preparing a great hole, which he was enlarging to his size. And while he was digging it, the hole, as if it had been filled by dozens of hands, then by arms and finally by the whole body, offered a resistance to his work which soon became insurmountable. The tomb was full of a being whose absence it absorbed. An immovable corpse was lodged there, finding in this absence of shape the perfect shape of its presence. It was a drama the horror of which was felt by the village folk in their sleep. As soon as the grave was finished, when Thomas threw himself into it with a huge stone tied around his neck, he crashed into a body a thousand times harder than the soil, the very body of the gravedigger who had already entered the grave to dig it. This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body. There was, then, henceforth, in all the sepulchers where he might have been able to take his place, in all the feelings which are also tombs for the dead, in this annihilation through which he was dying without permitting himself to be thought dead, there was another dead person who was there first, and who, identical with himself, drove the ambiguity of Thomas's life and death to the extreme limit. In this subterranean night into which he had descended with cats and the dreams of cats, a double wrapped in bands, its senses sealed with the seven seals, its spirit absent, occupied his place, and this double was the unique one with which no compromise was possible, since it was the same as himself, realized in the absolute void. He leaned over this glacial tomb. Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave, even so Thomas felt himself, at the moment he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death. Neither his body, which left in the depths of himself that coldness which comes from contact with a corpse and which is not coldness but absence of contact, nor the darkness, which seeped from all his pores and even when he was visible made it impossible to use any sense, intuition or thought to see him, nor the fact that by no right could he pass for living, sufficed to make him pass for dead. And it was not a misunderstanding. He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death. In death itself, he was deprived of death, a horribly destroyed man, stopped in the midst of nothingness by his own image, by this Thomas running before him, bearer of extinguished torches, who was like the existence of the very last death. Already, as he still leaned over this void where he saw his image in the total absence of images, seized by the most violent vertigo possible, a vertigo which did not make him fall but prevented him from falling and rendered impossible the fall it rendered inevitable, already the earth was shrinking around him and night, a night which no longer responded to anything, which he did not see and whose reality he sensed only because it was less real than himself, surrounded him. In every way, he was invaded by the feeling of being at the heart of things. Even on the surface of this earth which he could not penetrate, he was within this earth, whose insides touched him on all sides. On all sides, night closed him in. He saw, he heard the core of an infinity where he was bound by the very absence of limits. He felt as an oppressive existence the nonexistence of this valley of death. Little by little the emanations of an acrid and damp leaf-mold reached him. Like a man waking up alive in his coffin, terrified, he saw the impalpable earth where he floated transformed into an air without air, filled with smells of the earth, of rotten wood, of damp cloth. Now truly buried, he discovered himself, beneath accumulated layers of a material resembling plaster, in a hole where he was smothering. He was soaked in an icy medium among objects which were crushing him. If he still existed, it was to recognize the impossibility of living again, here in this room full of funereal flowers and spectral light. Suffocating, he managed to breathe again. He again discovered the possibility of walking, of seeing, of crying out, deep within a prison where he was confined in impenetrable silence and darkness. What a strange horror was his, as, passing the last barriers, he appeared at the narrow gate of his sepulcher, not risen but dead, and with the certainty of being snatched at once from death and from life. He walked, a painted mummy; he looked at the sun which was making an effort to put a smiling, lively expression on its indifferent face. He walked, the only true Lazarus, whose very death was resurrected. He went forward, passing beyond the last shadows of night without losing any of his glory, covered with grass and earth, walking at an even pace beneath the falling stars, the same pace which, for those men who are not wrapped in a winding-sheet, marks the ascent toward the most precious point in life.