French Decadent Tales (Oxford World's Classics) (17 page)

‘In this way I might have just gone on, and come to the peaceful end of a very happy life—unless I had been destined to fall victim to the universal disaster from which I have, God be thanked, saved humanity and the world! But some very strange and disturbing signs started to manifest themselves in the winter of this present year, enough to set anyone with a modicum of intelligence pondering. From the fifteenth of January onwards—as I am certain you will recall—a sun appeared, burning more hotly even than is customary in July, a sun that would have maddened a brain less stable than my own, and it dried up the fields and the paths, drank up the rivers, forced the trees into leaf and the roses into flower. Long islands of sand, like the yellow backs of beasts, emerged from the shrunken waters, and one day I saw the apple tree in the courtyard covered in a thousand pink-and-white flowerlets! No doubt about it, nothing like it had ever been seen in Saint-Rémy-sur-Oise, nor in any country of the world: this was a complete inversion of the seasons! I could only agree with my wife when, looking through the window at the sky from which not a snowflake nor a raindrop had fallen for a month, she suddenly said: “Of course, there must be something awry in the world.”

‘Her remark came as no surprise, but I was singularly affected by it.

‘And since, at that very moment, my headless shadow was projected against the wall, I repeated, almost in a whisper, between my trembling lips: “Yes, there is something awry. There is something awry in the world.”

‘I would be lying, my dear Sir, if I said to you that from that moment on I fully and wholly perceived there might be a connection, that there really was a connection (as I came later on to recognize!) between the prodigious summer-in-winter we were living through, and my own truncated image. No, initially the connection between
them did not strike me at all—and the relation of cause and effect between the two anomalies even less. But just as one can scarcely make out the tendrils of creeper stretched from one side of the track to the other, in the growing light of dawn, it seemed to me that there were links, albeit light, tenuous, vague, more guessed at than averred, which connected the two phenomena. Yes, I felt that I was not a stranger to the strange thing that was happening, and that the transgression of one of nature’s laws, in me, corresponded in some mysterious way with the transgression of another of nature’s laws…

‘Nevertheless, the suspicion—which remained in any case very vague, uncertain, scarcely hinted at—that the headlessness of my shadow was not unrelated to the anomaly of a winter so burningly summerlike, soon faded as the season, in accordance with unalterable law, cooled down to its seasonal norm; and I think that the suspicion which troubled my mind would have vanished for good, had it not been for the fact that, quite a while later, at the beginning of April, the papers carried reports, often recounted in great detail, of the sudden and appalling cataclysm which had overwhelmed the island of Java, nearly wiping it off the map.
*

‘The few survivors of this prolonged disaster gave descriptions of what seems to have been more than a week of unparalleled horror. To the backdrop of a terrifying and ceaseless barrage of thunder, and an enveloping darkness on which the sun rose no more, lit only by lightning flashes, mountains crashed into abysms that were suddenly opened at their foot, cascades of rock and molten metal surged up through lakes or from the plains; what had been mountains were swallowed up in an instant, and a vast, thinly spread, torrential surface, not of water but of lava, roared over the whole island, like some gigantic scythe, and cut down everything—hills, forests, houses—on its path, and left nothing but heaps of ruins behind it. The whole thing represented a formidable inversion of the laws that govern matter: huge rocks were seen flying off, carried by a wind that did not come from the sky. Meanwhile, mysteriously weighted, swarms of doves and swans were seen plunging down in rockfalls. Contrariety triumphed in the great hullaballoo of the end of the world! True, it was a limited world—not even a continent—but a world nonetheless. And the inhabitants of this whole globe of ours—without ever interpreting it as a sign—were dumbfounded by this upheaval, and trembled.

‘But
I
understood: it was a sign, a warning. I understood that the Destroyer—who was originally the Creator—had announced, by this concentrated ruin, the universal ruin to come; that the partial annihilation of an island was a trial run for the total catastrophe of the galaxies.

‘But why should the sign have been given precisely when it was? Why should it be my own epoch that witnessed the imminent reversal of all the laws of matter which had hitherto governed the Creator’s handiwork of six days? Why should the end of the world be nigh, during my lifetime?

‘It was then that the vague suspicion which had nagged at me during our strange sultry winter returned, but more pressing, more precise, and with a terrible urgency. And so it was that, after a time of long and painful meditation, I acquired this certainty: “The world is going to end, because my shadow has no head.”

‘As I write now, the truth of this proposition appears to me so irrefutable, my dear Sir, that I feel it would be an insult to the subtlety of your intelligence were I to rehearse at any length the arguments that convinced me; a learned man like you will understand instantly what it took a simpleton like me so long to grasp.

‘Everything in nature is interconnected. Nothing can become disordered, that does not shake the whole. Everything that exists may be considered like a castle made of cards; the almost infinite length of its existence persuades us of its solidity—the fond illusion of the guests on this ephemeral dwelling-place; remove a single card, and the whole edifice collapses and scatters. To speak more bluntly, a single process that is turned aside from its normal completion, a single supporting strut withdrawn from the unique and multiple balance, a single law in the universal order transgressed, can involve—what am I saying!—must of necessity involve the breakdown of the whole enormous edifice. And my head, without its shadow, meant the collapse of everything into nothing.

‘No sooner had this conviction taken hold of my mind than I became a prey to a terrible and unceasing melancholy. Not because I mourned for my own life, soon to be pitched headlong into the general disaster; nor for my wife and children, doomed to the most dreadful end. Although I had some kindness to myself, and for them I had all the tenderness that the heart of a husband and a father can hold, I was importuned by a wider, more encompassingly human, anxiety.
Concern for my own welfare was the least of the things that caused me grief. I was filled with compassion for the whole beautiful earth, and for all the happy beings that dwell therein. What! Could it be true, could it be certain, that dawn would no longer smile upon the calm blue sea, or on the green and flowery meadow? There would be no more sun, because there would be no more sky? There would be no more stars, for night itself would no longer be? Oh my God, to think that after that terrible hour no birds will sing in the withered trees, and nowhere, nowhere at all, would roses flower. And all the men and women who love each other will love each other no more. The highest and most glorious aspirations will be worthless in the decomposition attendant upon the funeral. The day before the universal catastrophe, engaged couples, he twenty, she sixteen years of age, will still exchange their vows…

‘An immense pity for all things and for all living beings wrung my heart repeatedly; as my lashes were continually wet with tears, people around me surmised that I must have developed some weakness of the lachrymal glands, and this was the cause of the great, slow tears that swelled and trembled… Not a bit of it! I was weeping because the end of the world was nigh! I also felt a certain amount of remorse. It was certainly not my fault that the terrifying cataclysm was so near at hand! But it was still in my own person, however guiltless I may be, that the first sign was made manifest, announcing the cause, and the final disaster.

‘A remedy? Was there some remedy against the imminent evil? My pity convinced me that there must be a remedy…

‘The world was going to its perdition because the law that governed it had been broken in me—because my shadow had no head! I began to wonder if there were not a way I could furnish my head with a shadow. If only I could obtain this result, then all things, necessarily, would return to their old order—and the universes would continue to live. I cannot begin to tell you, kind Sir (and I am somewhat confused on the matter), how much time I devoted to inventing some ruse whereby I might correct my abnormal shadow on the wall. I recall only that, more than once, I experimented with wearing masks, with several wide and very dark masks, in fact, hoping that increased darkness, greater opacity, would infringe upon the light. Alas! The masks covering my face had no more shadow than my own face…

‘Then it was that God, who has shown pity on his worlds and on his peoples, sent me inspiration… for which I thank him on my knees!

‘So that the danger should be averted, for the present at least, and that everything should be restored to the state demanded by natural law, it was not necessary (why did I not think ot it before?) that my head appear on the wall; it was enough that my shadow correspond to my person. So, if I ceased to have a head, if, somehow or other, I no longer had a head, my shadow would no longer be in disharmony with my form, the universal law would no longer be transgressed
*
—and the eternal stream of life, naturally, would pursue its course!

‘I can promise you that, when the idea came to me, I let out a cry of joy. Humanity was saved! I didn’t waste a second, I seized my razor and standing there, before the narrow mirror, by the window—without for a moment thinking of my wife and children, in grief behind the funeral car—I set about cutting my own neck… But no, the separation of the head from the trunk could not be completed, when attempted by a hand that trembled, inevitably, and the ensuing pain would weaken its resolve. I could only be beheaded usefully—by which I mean entirely—I could only become an identical match to my shadow with the steady, methodical, even mechanical aid of someone acting without passion and without grief. Only the executioner could render me identical to my image on the wall or on the path, only the executioner could accord me the joy of rescuing from nothingness, universal life!… Oh, the sweet hope! My corpse, if it were raised, would be in conformity with its shadow.

‘But only the most hideous murderers are guillotined…

‘Ah! Kind Sir, I loved my children so much; especially my daughter—I loved her so tenderly and with such pride. She was very pretty. When we walked out together, the looks we drew swelled my heart with pride. She was blonde, with a little fringe. For a long time I had hesitated to let her marry, because I was so happy to have her around the house. Nevertheless, the following month, her wedding was due to take place. She loved her young man. They had promised me that they would come often to see me, and they promised not to put the children they would have out to a wet-nurse in the country. The little ones were to remain at Saint-Rémy-sur-Oise. I was to go to my son-in-law’s every morning, to see how they were getting on, and
bring them rattles, and in time, toys. And my wife, who teased me a little, but kind-heartedly, was pleased at the arrangement. We said to each other: “Well, we shan’t be all alone in our old age. The boys will come down from Paris, marry, and settle down nearby. We’ll have a large and happy family about us. In the evenings, the sitting room on the first floor will hardly be large enough to hold everybody, there’ll be such laughter, such amusements and story-telling, and all of us, all of us, shall be happy…”

‘Ah, Reverend Sir, I do not repent of my own excessive barbarism; it is, however, dreadful that I had to kill my family in such an atrocious way as to be sure that they would not send me to prison, but rather to the guillotine, so that my neck be cleanly cut, that my shadow be correct at last, that the world should not end, and that for a long, long time to come there should be roses, and loving couples to be wed…

‘S
O
what may I do for you, Sir?’

The person addressed by the printer was absolutely unexceptional, as insignificant and vacant as it is possible to be, one of those men that seems to exist in the
plural
, so utterly do they belong to the collective and to the indivisible. He might have said
We
, like the Pope, and resembled an encyclical.

His face, turned out by the shovelful, belonged to that numberless category, the thick-set Southerner, that no breeding can ever refine, and about whom everything is false, even the grossness…

He was unable to reply immediately, for he was in a state, and trying hard, at that moment, to be a somebody. His large, vacant eyes rolled in their sockets, like those games of chance in which the marble seems to hesitate, before falling into the numbered hole that decides the destiny of an imbecile.