Aminadab 0803213131 (25 page)

could not tell whether she was too absorbed to speak to him or whether she would have refused under any circumstances to say anything more. "I will not insist," he said. "Nevertheless -but please do not take my re mark the wrong way - it saddens me a little to see how you are pushing me away; I sense that I have suddenly lost your trust and that I will not regain it. I am all the more affected by this in that this trust represented for me something very precious and even a unique benefit; for since I have been in the house, I have only had to do with people who are malevolent, scheming, and, in a word, extraordinarily deceitful . For the first time, I found myself with you as with someone to whom I could say or ask any thing. Now I can see that this is finished, and I can only excuse myself for the clumsiness that caused me to lose my last hopes. I should probably go." "Stay," said Barbe in a harsh tone, as if in losing the girl's trust Thomas had also lost the right to leave. He stayed without saying anything more. He was growing tired again and began to feel the aftereffects of his jaunt through the large hall of the infirmary. "I have some questions to ask of you as well," said Barbe. "Why does this business of the message mean so much to you?" "What a strange question," remarked Thomas. "How could it be other wise? The message was supposed to come from you, and you in turn come from regions to which it is difficult to gain access and which attract me ir resistibly. Your thoughts were the only path that could have allowed me to reach these regions. Now here I am cut off from them. Should I declare myself satisfied after all this? If I struggled clumsily, if, at the risk of dis pleasing you, I insisted on knowing what the message was, it is because its discovery was of great importance to me, and I know of no misfortune more cruel than to be deprived of it." "You are always exaggerating everything," said the girl. "This message may not have had so much importance; perhaps it was important only to me. What was it, to judge from your point of view? A recommendation, a piece of advice, or else a communication that, as a momentary impression led me to think, had to do with your person. All this was probably not neg ligible, but that is no reason to torment yourself over not finding out what it was. It would be closer to the truth to think the opposite. You have been in the house long enough to know that there is no great interest in being informed about too many things. You cannot repeat this to yourself often enough." 137

"I am very touched," said Thomas, "by your efforts to soften my disap pointment. But what kind of man would I be if you had convinced me? A piece of advice from you -MIle Barbe, do you imagine that I could easily accept being deprived of it? And perhaps it was more than advice. Did you not speak of a communication?" Barbe put down her work and looked at him with a sigh, but without appearing to be angry. "You behave like a child," she said. "You place too much meaning on cer tain words, while you completely neglect others for reasons no one can guess. I was already struck by that when I saw you for the first time, and that is what must have made me postpone my remarks. Who knows what great significance you might have seen in them! Such a fuss over a few words! At the same time, in other cases one can spell everything out, and you refuse to pay any attention." "What then have I overlooked?" asked Thomas. "Our appointment," said the girl. "Our appointment?" said Thomas. "Now that's a surprise. Was there ever any question of an appointment?" "I've caught you," she said. "It was quite useless for me to ask you to wait for me so that we might meet up again. You did not take my offer seriously." "I took your offer very seriously," said Thomas. "Not only did I wait for you, I even followed you; I watched your every step and did not want to miss a single word of your explanations, and if in the end, despite my at tentiveness, I could not keep you from disappearing, I would have had even less of a chance of finding you by standing around passively waiting for you." The girl shook her head despondently. "Under such conditions," she said, "it was impossible for you not to lose your way. It was a fatal move. What I had asked of you - and this demand had its price, but you did not want to see that-was to wait for me with out any useless exertions, without trying to search on your own for some thing you could never attain. Was that so difficult? You had only to remain in your corner. But that was probably too much for your strength. Impa tient as you are, you preferred to follow me into the rooms, at the risk of becoming absorbed in what you saw, and you let me walk away so as to pursue your path as you wished." "It wasn't such a bad path to take," said Thomas, "since it has led me once again to you." 13 8

"No," said the girl, "everything is different now. Downstairs I could still help you; I was less bound to my service; I did not have to account to any one for what I did; and you, you were another man; your healthy appear ance was attractive, as was the overflowing strength that was so great you hardly knew what to do with it and that made you overlook the danger you were in. However ignorant you may have been, one would have thought that you would stay away from the miserable exertions in which everyone here loses himself. Instead of that, you chose another way, a prideful way in which even I cannot follow you." "These are grave reproaches," said Thomas, "and they are certainly justi fied. But since I feel how terribly serious they are, without, however, being able to grasp their meaning completely, and since I now mistrust all my bad interpretations, I would be grateful to you for telling me everything you are thinking. It's true, I was wrong not to wait for you; perhaps a long patience would have been necessary; how much time would I not have given up to live with the single hope of your return! But I continue to be lieve that the damage is not irreparable; it even seems to be partly repaired. What would that ambitious path have been that would have led away from you and toward my own loss? I see but one path, the one that has allowed me to find you again." "To find me again?" said the girl. "Do you think you have found me again? That would only be an illusion. You have certainly learned a great deal since our first encounter; you have come to know many people; you have wandered this way and that. What else can I say to you? You know too much about it to listen to me; my warnings could not divert you from the slope you're sliding down." The girl wanted to take up her work again, but Thomas pushed the cloth aside - the fabric seemed rough and unpleasant to the touch - and he placed his hand on her arm. "MIle Barbe," he said to her, "I know that you have decided to remain silent; in vain would I beg you to speak; there is then nothing imperti nent in my prayers; they are not meant to change your mind but to make it known to you that you have said everything that could be said to take away my last bit of strength, without saying anything that might restore it to me. In these conditions, it would have been better to leave me to the errors from which -who knows? - I might have escaped with the courage still remaining to me. Do you realize the state you have put me in? Where 139

can I go now? What can I do? If I listen to you, there is nothing left but to disappear." "For heaven's sake," said the girl, "if only you were really at the end of your strength and my words were able to discourage you and turn you away from everything you have in mind. I could wish nothing better for you. But you still have all too much courage. What I fear in your case is not despair-when it comes, if it ever does, it will be too late - but an un bridled and unlimited hope. What good would my advice do for you? Are you at all inclined to follow it? Have you even decided really to listen to it? Have you not already had enough of this discussion that is keeping you from your plans?" "This time you are going too far," said Thomas. "I must ask you to recon sider the negative opinion you have formed of me; I don't know what your reasons are. Please think of my situation. Why would I want to abandon the only support I could count on, even though now, despite my supplica tions, I sense that it too will no longer be there for me? To whom could I turn? Do you know of any other protection I may have? Is there by chance someone watching over me?" "That way too will lead you astray," said the girl. "It would be better for you to keep silent." Thomas obeyed the order and said nothing in response; besides, he was tired of talking; each word was diminishing his strength, as if in speaking it, he had to overcome the impression that it would be useless. So he re mained there quietly, after taking his hand away from her arm, where he had rested it this whole time, and without even looking up to see if she had begun her work again. It seemed to him that she was much too dis tant from him and that trying to look at her had no more sense than trying to make her understand him. The girl, after a few moments, tugged at his gown to get his attention; she stared at him with her gray expressionless eyes; then she turned away and said to him: "Where do you think you are right now?" Thomas wanted to answer: in the infirmary, but he said that he did not know. "I too," she said, "often have the feeling of not knowing. When I see you sitting there quietly, with no idea of the place where you happen to be, I ask myself if I am not the one who is in error and if we are not together in a peaceful country house amidst the fields, in a foreign land, in one of those 140

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distant countries whose memory has faded away. These," she added, "are the dangerous reveries your ignorance drives me to. How could you resist it yourself?" "So we are not on the floor for the sick?" asked Thomas. "Please," she said, "don't speak of them to me. Let me enjoy some other thoughts for a moment. What frightens me when I look at you is your conviction that you have traveled a long road and have already arrived somewhere. Even if you were not foolish enough to believe that you were approaching the goal, you still think that the goal has at least come closer. 'How far I have come,' you murmur in silence to yourself, 'since I first met her in the basement!' An error, a tragic error. How can you imagine that you have left your room, how can you think that the decision from above could have been abolished by the mere fact that you have eluded it, how can you attach more importance to appearances than to the ineluctable will of those on whom you depend? Do you have even the vaguest sense of your aberration? On what do you base your hopes? The testimony of your poor, tired senses? The assurance of your perverted and confused mem ory? You have been reduced to that. Don't say anything: I see on your lips what you want to say, and there is no reason to be proud of it. What are you thinking? Tnat, despite your desire to believe me, you cannot reject as a sad illusion the path that has brought you here. Naturally; who has said anything to the contrary? Don't ascribe such ridiculous ideas to me. But all your walking, your inquiries, your behavior, however real they may be and they are incontestably real; no one, unfortunately for you, will deny them - all your little personal comings and goings have no importance. You could work your way up and down for years on end and pass through the house from top to bottom a thousand times, and the truth would not be affected in the least. Who would be troubled by any of this? The worse thing that can happen would be if you managed, by some mad turn of fate, to reach those inaccessible regions ofwhich you have spoken with such in credible levity. What would happen then? I have no way of knowing. But one thing cannot be doubted: anyone who saw you there would perceive you in reality to be where you ought to be, where you really are -in your basement room, with the clothes, the countenance, and the thoughts that are associated with that abode and that will follow you wherever you go. That is the truth. You can struggle as much as you like, turn to unreason able ruses, do only as you see fit, but you will not escape the classification

that follows from this truth. No matter what you happen to accomplish, the only result of your exertions will be to exhaust your strength in vain, to debilitate yourself in a morose state of reverie, until the moment when you no longer have even enough force to hold yourself in the last place left to you. You are in danger of meeting with such an end." Was she finished? Thomas wondered. He still heard the room vibrate from this flow of speech, and it was difficult for him to distinguish, in these words that struck his ear, what belonged to the past and what was still present. To interrupt this whirl of words that was wearing him down, he made an effort to speak: "It is not always clear to me," he said, "whether your remarks are meant to reveal to me the fate that awaits me or to help me turn away from it." Then he added in a low voice: "May I ask you to speak more slowly? It's not always easy for me to follow you." The girl did not answer, or at least Thomas did not hear her. She had placed the large cloth on her knees and was now busily sewing it; it seemed that suddenly the long neglected task could no longer be delayed. "So what was I saying?" she said suddenly. "Perhaps I have been too hasty. Things do not always happen as I have explained them to you. There are almost as many different cases as there are people in this house. We who see things from a certain distance, we do not place much emphasis on the details, and to us everything seems to be lost in the same unifor mity. But for those who attend more closely to their efforts, and especially for those who really want them to succeed, things are completely different; they are convinced that an abyss separates some people from others, and this conviction shows in their often completely opposite way of interpret ing events. This fragmentary and disordered view of things comes from the fever with which they try to seize hold of everything, whereas they can hardly see a few steps in front of them. Who could ever encompass the en tire house from within and contemplate it from its heights to its depths in a single glance? Neither you nor probably anyone else." Thomas watched her anxiously as she continued her sewing work in a rhythm that grew steadily faster; the needle easily pierced the material; the black thread made outlines in beautiful geometric patterns on the fab ric. This spectacle both frightened Thomas and reassured him. By staying there and doing nothing, it seemed to him that he was falling under a per nicious influence, exhausting all his courage and making it impossible for him ever to get up and leave; but he also enjoyed a certain mild, pleasant feeling, and he began to have more hope. 1 42