Nausea (28 page)

"You'll have to leave now," Anny says suddenly, "I'm expecting someone."

"You're waiting for . . ."

"No, I'm waiting for a German, a painter."

She begins to laugh. This laugh rings strangely in the dim room.

"There's someone who isn't like usùnot yet. He acts, he spends himself."

I get up reluctantly.

"When shall I see you again?"

"I don't know, I'm leaving for London tomorrow evening."

"By Dieppe?"

"Yes, and I think I'll go to Egypt after that. Maybe I'll be back in Paris next winter, I'll write you."

"I'll be free all day tomorrow," I say timidly.

"Yes, but I have a lot to do," she answers dryly. "No, I can't see you. I'll write you from Egypt. Just give me your address." '"Yes."

In the shadow I scribble my address on an envelope. I have to put down Hotel Printania so they can forward my letters when I leave Bouville. Yet I know very well that she won't write. Perhaps I shall see her again in ten years. Perhaps thisis the last time I shall see her. I am not only overwhelmed at leaving her; I have a frightful fear of going back to my solitude again.

She gets up; at the door she kisses me lightly on the mouth.

"To remember your lips," she says, smiling. "I have to refresh my memories for my spiritual exercises."

I take her by the arm and draw her to me. She does not resist but she shakes her head.

"No. That doesn't interest me any more. You can't begin again. . . . And besides, for what people are worth, the first good-looking boy that comes along is worth as much as you."

"What are you going to do, then?"

"I told you, I'm going to England."

"No, I mean . . ."

"Nothing!"

I haven't let go of her arms, I tell her gently:

"Then I must leave you after finding you again."

I can see her face clearly now. Suddenly it grows pale and drawn. An old woman's face, absolutely frightful; I'm sure she didn't put that one on purposely: it is there, unknown to her, or perhaps in spite of her.

"No," she says slowly, "no. You haven't found me again."

She pulls her arms away. She opens the door. The hall is sparkling with light.

Anny begins to laugh.

"Poor boy! He never has any luck. The first time he plays his part well, he gets no thanks for it. Get out."

I hear the door close behind me.

Sunday:

This morning I consulted the Railway Guide: assuming that she hasn't lied to me, the Dieppe train will leave at 5.38. But maybe her man will be driving her. I wandered around Menil-montant all morning, then the quays in the afternoon. A few steps, a few walls separate me from her. At 5:38 our conversation of yesterday will become a memory, the opulent woman whose lips brushed against my mouth will rejoin, in the past, the slim little girl of Meknes, of London. But nothing was past yet, since she was still there, since it was still possible to see her again, to persuade her, to take her away with me forever. I did not feel alone yet.

I wanted to stop thinking about Anny, because, imagining

her body and her face so much, I had fallen into a state of extreme nervousness: my hands trembled and icy chills shook me. I began to look through the books on display at second-hand stalls, especially obscene ones because at least that occupies your mind.

When the Gare d'Orsay clock struck five I was looking at the pictures in a book entitled The Doctor with the Whif. There was little variety: in most of them, a heavy bearded man was brandishing a riding whip over monstrous naked rumps. As soon as I realized it was five o'clock, I threw the book back on the pile and jumped into a taxi which took me to the Gare Saint-Lazare.

I walked around the platform for about twenty minutes, then I saw them. She was wearing a heavy fur coat which made her look like a lady. And a short veil. The man had on a camel's-hair coat. He was tanned, still young, very big, very handsome. A foreigner, surely, but not English; possibly Egyptian. They got on the train without seeing me. They did not speak to each other. Then the man got off and bought newspapers. Anny had lowered the window of her compartment; she saw me. She looked at me for a long time, without anger, with inexpressive eyes. Then the man got back into the compartment and the train left. At that moment I clearly saw the restaurant in Piccadilly where we used to eat, before, then everything went blank. I walked. When I felt tired I came into this cafe and went to sleep. The waiter has just wakened me and I am writing this while half-asleep.

Tomorrow I shall take the noon train back to Bouville. Two days there will be enough to pack my bags and straighten out my accounts at the bank. I think the Hotel Printania will want me to pay two weeks extra because I didn't give them notice. Then I have to return all the books I borrowed from the library. In any case, I'll be back in Paris before the end of the week.

Will I gain anything by the change? It is still a city: this one happens to be cut in two by a river, the other one is by the sea, yet they look alike. One takes a piece of bare sterile earth and one rolls big hollow stones on to it. Odours are held captive in these stones, odours heavier than air. Sometimes people throw them out of the windows into the streets and they stay there until the wind breaks them apart. In clear weather, noises come in one end of the city and go out the other, after going through all the walls; at other times, the noises whirl around inside these sun-baked, ice-split stones.I am afraid of cities. But you mustn't leave them. If you go too far you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled for miles towards the cities. It is waiting. Once the city is dead, the vegetation will cover it, will climb over the stones, grip them, search them, make them burst with its long black pincers; it will blind the holes and let its green paws hang over everything. You must stay in the cities as long as they are alive, you must never penetrate alone this great mass of hair waiting at the gates; you must let it undulate and crack all by itself. In the cities, if you know how to take care of yourself, and choose the times when all the beasts are sleeping in their holes and digesting, behind the heaps of organic debris, you rarely come across anything more than minerals, the least frightening of all existants.

I am going back to Bouville. The vegetation has only surrounded three sides of it. On the fourth side there is a great hole full of black water which moves all by itself. The wind whistles between the houses. The odours stay less time there than anywhere: chased out to sea by the wind, they race along the surface of the black water like playful mists. It rains. They let plants grow between the gratings. Castrated, domesticated, so fat that they are harmless. They have enormous, whitish leaves which hang like ears. When you touch them it feels like cartilage, everything is fat and white in Bouville because of all the water that falls from the sky. I am going back to Bouville. How horrible!

I wake up with a start. It is midnight. Anny left Paris six hours ago. The boat is already at sea. She is sleeping in a cabin and, up on deck, the handsome bronze man is smoking cigarettes.

Tuesday, in Bouville:

Is that what freedom is? Below me, the gardens go limply down towards the city, and a house rises up from each garden. I see the ocean, heavy, motionless, I see Bouville. It is a lovely day.

I am free: there is absolutely no more reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can't imagine any more of them. I am still fairly young, I still have enough strength to start again. But do I have to start again? How much, in the strongest of my terrors, my disgusts, I had counted on Anny to save me I realized only now. My past is dead. The Marquis de Rollebon is dead, Anny came back only to take all hope away.

I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.

Today my life is ending. By tomorrow I will have left this town which spreads out at my feet, where I have lived so long. It will be nothing more than a name, squat, bourgeois, quite French, a name in my memory, not as rich as the names of Florence or Bagdad. A time will come when I shall wonder: whatever could I have done all day long when I was in Bouville? Nothing will be left of this sunlight, this afternoon, not even a memory.

My whole life is behind me. I see it completely, I see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far. There is little to say about it: a lost game, that's all. Three years ago I came solemnly to Bouville. I had lost the first round. I wanted to play the second and I lost again: I lost the whole game. At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win. Now I am going to be like Anny, I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar.

The Nausea has given me a short breathing spell. But I know it will come back again: it is my normal state. Only today my body is too exhausted to stand it. Invalids also have happy moments of weakness which take away the consciousness of their illness for a few hours. I am bored, that's all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of. I do not neglect myself, quite the contrary: this morning I took a bath and shaved. Only when I think back over those careful little actions, I cannot understand how I was able to make them: they are so vain. Habit, no doubt, made them for me. They aren't dead, they keep on busying themselves, gently, insidiously weaving their webs, they wash me, dry me, dress me, like nurses. Did they also lead me to this hill? I can't remember how I came any more. Probably up the Escalier Dautry: did I really climb up its hundred and ten steps one by one? What is perhaps more difficult to imagine is that I am soon going to climb down again. Yet I know I am: in a moment I shall find myself at the bottom of the Coteau Vert, if I raise my head, see in the distance the lighting windows of these houses which are so close now. In the distance. Above my head; above my head; and this instant which I cannot leave, which locks me in andlimits me on every side, this instant I am made of will be no more than a confused dream.

I watch the grey shimmerings of Bouville at my feet. In the sun they look like heaps of shells, scales, splinters of bone, and gravel. Lost in the midst of this debris, tiny glimmers of glass or mica intermittently throw off light flames. In an hour the ripples, trenches, and thin furrows which run between these shells will be streets, I shall walk in these streets, between these walls. These little black men I can just make out in the Rue Boulibetùin an hour I shall be one of them.

I feel so far away from them, on the top of this hill. It seems as though I belong to another species. They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and the squares with satisfaction, they think it is their city, a good, solid, bourgeois city. They aren't afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. They scarcely doll it up a bit on Sundays. Idiots. It is repugnant to me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces. They make laws, they write popular novels, they get married, they are fools enough to have children. And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves. It doesn't move, it stays quietly and they are full of it inside, they breathe it, and they don't see it, they imagine it to be outside, twenty miles from the city. I see it, I see this nature ... I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow.

What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps

right now: the omens are present. For example, the father of a family might go out for a walk, and, across the street, he'll see something like a red rag, blown towards him by the wind. And when the rag has gotten close to him he'll see that it is a side of rotten meat, grimy with dust, dragging itself along by crawling, skipping, a piece of writhing flesh rolling in the gutter, spasmodically shooting out spurts of blood. Or a mother might look at her child's cheek and ask him: "What's thatùa pimple?" and see the flesh puff out a little, split, open, and at the bottom of the split an eye, a laughing eye might appear. Or they might feel things gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses of reeds to swimmers in a river. And they will realize that their clothing has become living things. And someone else might feel something scratching in his mouth. He goes to the mirror, opens his mouth: and his tongue is an enormous, live centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He'd like to spit it out, but the centipede is a part of him and he will have to tear it out with his own hands. And a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to find new namesùstone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toe-crutch, spider-jaw. And someone might be sleeping in his comfortable bed, in his quiet, warm room, and wake up naked on a bluish earth, in a forest of rustling birch trees, rising red and white towards the sky like the smokestacks of Jouxtebouville, with big bumps half-way out of the ground, hairy and bulbous like onions. And birds will fly around these birch trees and pick at them with their beaks and make them bleed. Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mixed with blood, warm and glassy with little bubbles. Or else nothing like that will happen, there will be no appreciable change, but one morning people will open their blinds and be surprised by a sort of frightful sixth sense, brooding heavily over things and seeming to pause. Nothing more than that: but for the little time it lasts, there will be hundreds of suicides. Yes! Let it change just a little, just to see, I don't ask for anything better. Then you will see other people, suddenly plunged into solitude. Men all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, pass heavily in front of me, their eyes staring, fleeing their ills yet carrying them with them, open-mouthed, with their insect-tongue flapping its wings. Then I'll burst out laughing even though my body may be covered with filthy, infected scabs which blossom into flowers of flesh, violets, buttercups. I'll lean against a wall and when they go byI'll shout: "What's the matter with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity?" I will not be afraidùor at least no more than now. Will it not still be existence, variations on existence? All these eyes which will slowly devour a faceùthey will undoubtedly be too much, but no more so than the first two, Existence is what I am afraid of.