Aminadab 0803213131 (23 page)

would the punishment do otherwise? Nevertheless, since in a certain way you have shown yourself to be good to us, since you did not hit us when I spoke of the message, I can tell you a few small things. We are not guilty as you imagine us to be; at least we have no idea about what it could be. Who has ever fulfilled their duties more scrupulously? We worked from morn ing to night, and when night came we rehearsed in our minds everything we had done, for fear that we might have neglected some order. Perhaps it is this very zealousness that was our undoing. By concentrating so much attention on it, we gradually developed a taste for service; whereas in the beginning we performed our tasks mechanically, not even watching what we were doing, with our eyes fixed on the commandment alone, but little by little we found ourselves attracted by the beauty and brilliance of our gestures, by the value of what passed through our hands, by the dignity of those who worked alongside us. When we were in the kitchen, we never grew tired of staring at all the utensils and implements. Before pouring water into them, we would caress them; we would slowly pass our fingers over their edges as though in search of a breach that would allow us to penetrate them, and from such contemplations we could not tear ourselves away. Likewise, when the liquid had flowed into the cups, we looked at it, wet our lips with it, and satisfied our thirst, and these too had become obli gations that gave us infinite pleasure. Should we have resisted? Perhaps; but where was the harm, since it was for the sake of giving a greater per fection to the accomplishment of our tasks that we succumbed to these de lights, and since we found joy in them only because we were good servants? And what was our crime, when so many others - who were not nearly as absorbed in their work as we were -gave in to much greater excesses than this? No doubt, this enthusiasm caused us to neglect some of the functions for which we were responsible. After lavishing so much care on the ob jects entrusted to us for these purposes, we could not bear to lose sight of them, to let them deteriorate in the hands of strangers. It was also our duty to prevent their destruction. Sometimes we hid them; at other times we flatly withdrew them from the use of tenants who were crude and in sensitive. It was with deep sorrow that we poured into the clients' cups the beverage they were incapable of appreciating. We followed with mistrust these men who plodded their way through so many splendors without en joying their beauty. This forced us to live a great deal among them. After spending many hours in rooms whose air seemed sweet with perfume and 12 4

where everything one touched gave off a glow, it was difficult to climb back up to those dark regions where we could hardly breathe. We were called back downstairs. Serving has no meaning except where there are men to be served. We wanted to see how our work was changing the world, and this desire drew us into an unctuous promiscuity with that world. First, we had to renounce our noble tasks and accept the occupations of the servants that allowed us to have close relations with the tenants. These occupations are very tiring, but since they require great strength, those who go in for them are well nourished and are generally rather plump. That happened to us as well. We could no longer climb the stairs in the evening without pant ing and straining; sometimes we didn't reach the upper floors until night was over, and it was time to go back down again. What was the point of going up there? Were we not domestics in the large halls? To sleep, now that was what really tempted us, but at the time we had no way of realizing it. All we could think of was keeping close watch over our duties, all the while dreaming of tomorrow's tasks. Unfortunately, the nights downstairs were so hot that it was hardly possible to remain idle there. So we worked with out pause. Although our limbs pained us, so heavily were they weighed down with fatigue, we walked all night long. Our ponderous steps could be heard all over. We looked like guardians, and indeed we kept watch over our own sleep. Alas, what can one do against the night? To sleep, that was our dream, and we could not escape it." "You have told me nothing I did not already know," said Thomas. "Glut tons, thieves, idlers - one can see all that just by looking at you. To what hands, then, did I entrust my message?" "But you don't know anything yet," replied the employee. "We did no wrong, and there is nothing to reproach us with. Were we not domestics? Even sleeping was not a serious offense; we merely had to take precautions not to be discovered. Our misfortune came from elsewhere. When we re solved to give in to sleepiness, we felt a great joy; finally we would taste this sweet repose that had evaded us. What an illusion! It was to our own torment that we had just given in. The first night we spent in the small room just off the gaming room. Was it emotion, was it desire, or excessive fatigue? We tossed and turned in vain on a crude and ragged bed of our own making. Our eyes received from within a sort of light that woke them like the day. Our limbs snatched at shadows and trembled in a fever that only increased their fatigue without preparing the way to their rest. We 12 5

heard words being spoken - our own. It was a terrible night. The break of day restored our hope. We could no longer believe that our torture would have no end. Alas, the second night was just like the first, and the third added its cruelty to the memory of the other two. Search as we might for favorable locations, we were only tormented all the more by the rest that eluded us precisely there where it most seduced us. We kicked ten ants out of their rooms and took over their beds; a pointless injustice, for the thought of the sleep they themselves had so often found there chased our own away and left us broken and miserable in the morning. Then it happened that the day, far from relieving our sufferings, only increased them by arousing our desire. Hardly had we emerged from the night when fatigue began to weigh us down, and the need to sleep pressed our eyes closed. We would shamelessly collapse into a corner, but here again it was only to knock against that high white wall erected between our sleep and us. What miserable wretches we were! We searched in vain for the rest that the day brought so near to us and from which the night continually chased us away. And yet these were only minor sufferings. Our true dis tress began when Simon decided to speak to the maidservant about our insomnia. This desire shows how unhinged his mind had become. For he suffered not only from lack of sleep but also from the silence he had to maintain about his long wakeful nights. They condemned him to a soli tude that, young as he is, he could only think of avoiding. He, at all costs, had to find someone on whom to unload his burden. It seemed to him that it would almost be the same as sleeping if only he could confide to another the thought of his sleepiness. Obviously I was there, and he was able to talk about it with me. But at the time, he had taken an extreme dislike to me, so that merely to lay eyes on me or to hear my voice threw him into a state of anxious confusion that only increased his discomfort. He said that with me he felt more alone than if the house were nothing but a great void. It's understandable. My face reflected all the pains that weighed on him. I could barely open my eyes, and the look he saw there was so hazy and so obscure that he thought I must have been sleeping on my feet and that I was hiding from him the consolations thus granted me. What would he have said if he could have seen himself? His entire being consisted of sleepiness. If he spoke, it was the beginning of a dream; if he listened, it was through a thick partition that made him mistake what he said for what he heard. He was as much a stranger to himself as to others, as if he had 126

withdrawn from his own body so as not to have any contact with the sleep ing thing it had become. So he would continually say: 'Nothing can stop me, soon I will tell.' Whom would he tell? I thought he had in mind some tenant or other, or perhaps, at worst, an employee. He was already long past that. From that moment on, he stalked around the maidservant, and she, with her perverted nature, did all she could to attract him." "The maidservant?" said Thomas. "Yes, the maidservant," said the employee. "Don't you know her?" "Barbe?" said Thomas. "Yes, Barbe, if you wish," said the employee. "That's one of her names. So - Barbe, far from pushing him away, as her duty would have dictated, made little friendly signs to him and spoke to him whenever he came close enough to hear what she was saying. In other circumstances, he would have scorned such things. But the state in which he found himself led him to judge differently, and this ridiculous coquetry seemed to cause him an incredible pleasure. Or rather it lulled him into mad hopes. These meet ings although they took place from afar, left him upset and anguished. ' He didn't know what to think of his dream. These distant rendezvous oc curred only rarely, and during the time in between he was full of extraordi nary thoughts nourished by his fever, thoughts whose bizarre character he had no way of discerning. One of them was that if he could only touch her dress, he would immediately fall asleep. With such fantasies, he was lost in deed. And yet a considerable amount of time passed before things became truly serious. Barbe still did not approach him, and when she shouted at him to wait for her, he could stay for hours and even days right where he was when he saw her, but he waited in vain. So he decided, since this wait ing was causing him to lose touch with his reason, to seek her out himself, and he began to wander through the corridors and the rooms, wherever he might hope to find her. Naturally she was nowhere to be found. But was she really? I believe that in his distracted state he often passed her with out recognizing her and that, since she cared nothing for him, she herself hardly noticed him and so let him go by. But one day he found her. I was with him. He ran toward her as though he were about to sacrifice her. But he stopped a few steps away, and without catching his breath, in the same breath that his running had already impaired, he told her everything that a confused mind such as his own could express about his confusion, his madness, the void that was choking him. What sense did she make of it? 127

As she listened, she waved her hands in my direction and greeted me in the most pleasant way. From that moment, so it seems to me, I was the one she was determined to have, I who was older, more reasonable, more difficult to lose - or rather, alas, easier to corrupt. Simon didn't notice any of this, and in any case he would have put up with anything. When he finished his little speech, she smiled at him, called him her sweetheart, and promised to come see him. When she left him, she waved to me again. The strange thing is that a few moments later, while my poor companion had not yet recovered from the agitation these few words had caused him and seemed to be spinning in circles and wrapped in a haze, she came back and led him away. I didn't see him until a few hours later. He seemed even more dis traught and miserable, but in answer to my questions, he claimed that he had slept. How could that be? He had the look of a man who had wandered through the woods a whole night long without finding a way out; he was still looking, but now he had no idea what he was looking for; he began his work, and his activity was more alarming than his torpor, for he seemed to have forgotten who he was, and the enthusiasm he showed only testified to his complete absence of mind. He had other meetings with the maid servant. Sometimes he would come back with a transformed and radiant face, a superb youthfulness; at other times he was ravaged and almost on the point of death; and yet it was his youthful appearance that startled me; one would have thought that he bore the mark of his condemnation and that he was no longer of this world. One day he told me that Barbe wished to see me. I went to meet her in one of the rooms on the first underground floor where she often goes. Hardly had I closed the door when she threw herself around my neck with a kiss and sat me down on the bed. Then she told me she had been waiting for me to come to her for a long time, that I had certainly taken my time in catching on, that she had noticed, how ever, that I had a weakness for her, but that I was no doubt annoyed by her conversations with Simon. How did I respond to her? I could hardly make out her words; I looked at the room we were in and did not recognize it; it seemed to me that I had been there once before but in very different cir cumstances, with a heart as light as it was heavy now, and with senses that reached out to things I could no longer touch. But she laughed at my re sponse and said that seeing me from close up, she found me very young, that my age was a question of distance, that if one tried to think of me, it was impossible to form in one's mind a face so obscured by time, but that 128

from now on she would run to me with her eyes closed, waiting to open them until she could see the delicate texture of my skin and the length of my eyelashes. What did it all mean? Alas, what did anything mean to me? This conversation today seems to have taken place in a world I never actu ally saw, although scarcely a day has passed between now and then. In the end, she asked me to give her a keepsake. 'I don't have anything,' I told her. She didn't believe me and reached into my pockets. 'That's what I want,' she said. It was my employee's badge, a little notebook whose pages had been taken out to pad my dossier. I tried to get it back from her, but she placed it on her knees and contemplated it in silence with a serious look on her face. I looked at it too but made no more effort to take her property from her; it was no longer mine. I said to myself: 'It is done.' I had the im pression that I was losing everything but also that I was rid of everything, and for the first time I thought with pleasure of this conversation that up to then had brought me only discomfort, anguish, and distress. She stood up, patted my hand with affection, and gently led me from the room. You can guess what happened after that. She must have said something against me, and I was turned over to the tenants." Thomas nodded his head, as if in approval. "Where is Barbe?" he asked. The old employee looked at him sadly. "Do you want to question her?" he said. "It isn't easy to question her. She often refuses to answer, and when she does, it isn't always clear whether what she says bears any relation to what you have asked her. And if you ask her questions about us, there's no telling what she might say. Does she even know our names? Does she remember such insignificant incidents as these? Does she not have a completely different understanding of what happened? There's no way to know what she thinks." "Are her occupations really so absorbing," asked Thomas, "that she doesn't remember events from one day to the next? She has some influence here, no?" "Why are you trying to tempt me?" said the old man in a whining voice. "Of course she plays an important role. Any statement to the contrary would be a lie. But who isn't important in the house? I too had a position and wielded influence. Perhaps," he added, after reflecting a moment, "I still do." "Well, then," said Thomas, "I have influence because I can punish you, if I want." 129