Nausea (6 page)

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more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates. That gesture, for instance, the red hand picking up the cards and fumbling: it is all flabby. It would have to be ripped apart and tailored inside.

Madeleine turns the crank on the phonograph. I only hope she has not made a mistake; that she hasn't put on Cavalleria Rusticana, as she did the other day. But no, this is it, I recognize the melody from the very first bars. It is an old rag-time with a vocal refrain. I heard American soldiers whistle it in 1917 in the streets of LaRochelle. It must date from before the War. But the recording is much more recent. Still, it is the oldest record in the collection, a Pathe record for sapphire needle.

The vocal chorus will be along shortly: I like that part especially and the abrupt manner in which it throws itself forward, like a cliff against the sea. For the moment, the jazz is playing; there is no melody, only notes, a myriad of tiny jolts. They know no rest, an inflexible order gives birth to them and destroys them without even giving them time to recuperate and exist for themselves. They race, they press forward, they strike me a sharp blow in passing and are obliterated. I would like to hold them back, but I know if I succeeded in stopping one it would remain between my fingers only as a raffish languishing sound. I must accept their death; I must even will it. I know few impressions stronger or more harsh.

I grow warm, I begin to feel happy. There is nothing extraordinary in this, it is a small happiness of Nausea: it spreads at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our timeùthe time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain. No sooner than born, it is already old, it seems as though I have known it for twenty years.

There is another happiness: outside there is this band of steel, the narrow duration of the music which traverses our time through and through, rejecting it, tearing at it with its dry little points; there is another time.

"Monsieur Randu plays hearts . . . and you play an

ace.

The voice dies away and disappears. Nothing bites on the ribbon of steel, neither the opening door, nor the breath of cold air flowing over my knees, nor the arrival of the veterinary surgeon and his little girl: the music transpierces these vague figures and passes through them. Barely seated, the girl has been seized

21by it: she holds herself stiffly, her eyes wide open; she listens, rubbing the table with her fist.

A few seconds more and the Negress will sing. It seems inevitable, so strong is the necessity of this music: nothing can interrupt it, nothing which comes from this time in which the world has fallen; it will stop of itself, as if by order. If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fulness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.

The last chord has died away. In the brief silence which follows I feel strongly that there it is, that something has happened.

Some of these days You'll miss me honey

What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music. Globes of fire turn in the mirrors; encircled by rings of smoke, veiling and unveiling the hard smile of light. My glass of beer has shrunk, it seems heaped up on the table, it looks dense and indispensable. I want to pick it up and feel the weight of it, I stretch out my hand . . . God! That is what has changed, my gestures. This movement of my arm has developed like a majestic theme, it has glided along the song of the Negress; I seemed to be dancing.

Adolphe's face is there, set against the chocolate-coloured wall; he seems quite close. Just at the moment when my hand closed, I saw his face; it witnessed to the necessity of a conclusion. I press my fingers against the glass, I look at Adolphe: I am happy.

òVoiW."

A voice rises from the tumult. My neighbour is speaking, the old man burns. His cheeks make a violet stain on the brown

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leather of the bench. He slaps a card down on the table. Diamonds.

But the dog-faced young man smiles. The flushed opponent, bent over the table, watches him like a cat ready to spring.

"Et voila!"

The hand of the young man rises from the shadow, glides an instant, white, indolent, then suddenly drops like a hawk and presses a card against the cloth. The great red-faced man leaps up:

"Hell! He's trumped."

The outline of the king of hearts appears between his curled fingers, then it is turned on its face and the game goes on. Mighty king, come from so far, prepared by so many combinations, by so many vanished gestures. He disappears in turn so that other combinations can be born, other gestures, attacks, counterattacks, turns of luck, a crowd of small adventures.

I am touched, I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. I have had real adventures. I can recapture no detail but I perceive the rigorous succession of circumstances. I have crossed seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into forests, always making my way towards other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and never was I able to turn back, any more than a record can be reversed. And all that led meùwhere?

At this very instant, on this bench, in this translucent bubble all humming with music.

And when you leave me

Yes, I who loved so much to sit on the banks of the Tiber at Rome, or in the evening, in Barcelona, ascend and descend the Ramblas a hundred times, I, who near Angkor, on the island of Baray Prah-Kan, saw a banyan tree knot its roots about a Naga chapel, I am here, living in the same second as these card players, I listen to a Negress sing while outside roves the feeble night.

The record stops.

Night has entered, sweetish, hesitant. No one sees it, but it is there, veiling the lamps; I breathe something opaque in the air: it is night. It is cold. One of the players pushes a disordered pack of cards towards another man who picks them up. One card has stayed behind. Don't they see it? It's the nine of hearts. Someone takes it at last, gives it to the dog-faced young man."Ah. The nine of hearts."

Enough, I'm going to leave. The purple-faced man bends over a sheet of paper and sucks his pencil. Madeleine watches him with clear, empty eyes. The young man turns and turns the nine of hearts between his fingers. God! . . .

I get up with difficulty; I see an inhuman face glide in the mirror above the veterinary's head.

In a little while I'll go to the cinema.

The air does me good: it doesn't taste like sugar, it doesn't have the winey odour of vermouth. But good God, how cold it is.

It is seven-thirty, I'm not hungry and the cinema doesn't start until nine o'clock; what am I going to do? I have to walk quickly to keep warm. I pause: behind me the boulevard leads to the heart of the city, to the great fiery jewels of central streets, to the Palais Paramount, the Imperial, the Grands Magasins Jahan. It doesn't tempt me at all: it is aperitif time. For the time being I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of all flabby masses which move spontaneously.

I turn left, I'm going to crawl into that hole down there, at the end of the row of gaslights: I am going to follow the Boulevard Noir as far as the Avenue Galvani. An icy wind blows from the hole: down there is nothing but stones and earth. Stones are hard and do not move.

There is a tedious little stretch of street: on the pavement at the right a gaseous mass, grey with streams of smoke, makes a noise like rattling shells: the old railway station. Its presence has fertilized the first hundred yards of the Boulevard Noirùfrom the Boulevard de la Redoute to the Rue Paradisùhas given birth there to a dozen streetlights and, side by side, four cafes, the "Railwaymen's Rendezvous" and three others which languish all through the day but which light up in the evening and cast luminous rectangles on the street.

I take three more baths of yellow light, see an old woman come out of the epicerie-mercerie Rabache, drawing her shawl over her head and starting to run: now it's finished. I am on the kerb of the Rue Paradis, beside the last lamp-post. The asphalt ribbon breaks off sharply. Darkness and mud are on the other side of the street. I cross the Rue Paradis. I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is soaked through; my walk begins.

No one lives in this section of the Boulevard Noir. The climate is too harsh there, the soil too barren for life to be established there and grow. The three Scieries des Freres Soleil (the

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Freres Soleil furnished the panelled arch of the Eglise Saint-Cecile de la Mer, which cost a hundred thousand francs) open on the West with all their doors and windows, on the quiet Rue Jeanne-Berthe-Coeuroy which they fill with purring sounds. They turn their backs of triple adjoining walls on the Boulevard Victor-Noir. These buildings border the left-hand pavement for 400 yards: without the smallest window, not even a skylight.

This time I walked with both feet in the gutter. I cross the street: on the opposite sidewalk, a single gaslight, like a beacon at the extreme end of the earth, lights up a dilapidated fence, broken down in places.

Bits of old posters still clung to the boards. A fine face full of hatred, grimacing against a green background torn into the shape of a star; just below the nose someone had pencilled in a curling moustache. On another strip I could still decipher the word "puratre" from which red drops fall, drops of blood perhaps. The face and the word might have been part of the same poster. Now the poster is lacerated, the simple, necessary lines which united them have disappeared, but another unity has established itself between the twisted mouth, the drops of blood, the white letters, and the termination "atre": as though a restless and criminal passion were seeking to express itself by these mysterious signs. I can see the lights from the railroad shining between the boards. A long wall follows the fence. A wall without opening, without doors, without windows, a well which stops 200 yards further on, against a house. I have passed out of range of the lamp-post; I enter the black hole. Seeing the shadow at my feet lose itself in the darkness, I have the impression of plunging into icy water. Before me, at the very end, through the layers of black, I can make out a pinkish pallor: it is the Avenue Galvani. I turn back; behind the gaslamp, very far, there is a hint of light: that is the station with the four cafes. Behind me, in front of me, are people drinking and playing cards in pubs. Here there is nothing but blackness. Intermittently, the wind carries a solitary, faraway ringing to my ears. Familiar sounds, the rumble of motor cars, shouts, and the barking of dogs which hardly venture from the lighted streets, they stay within the warmth. But the ringing pierces the shadows and comes thus far: it is harder, less human than the other noises.

I stop to listen. I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all red. But I no longer feel myself; I am won over by the purity surrounding me; nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straightlines flee in the night. The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets, offering their regrets to the passers-by. No one has bothered to adorn it: it is simply the reverse side. The reverse side of the Rue Jeanne-Berthe Coeuroy, of the Avenue Galvani. Around the station, the people of Bouville still look after it a little; they clean it from time to time because of the travellers. But, immediately after that, they abandon it and it rushes straight ahead, blindly, bumping finally into the Avenue Galvani. The town has forgotten it. Sometimes a great mud-coloured truck thunders across it at top speed. No one even commits any murders there; want of assassins and victims. The Boulevard Noir is inhuman. Like a mineral. Like a triangle. It's lucky there's a boulevard like that in Bouville. Ordinarily you find them only in capitals, in Berlin, near Neukoln or Friedrichshainùin London, behind Greenwich. Straight, dirty corridors, full of drafts, with wide, treeless sidewalk. They are almost always outside the town in these strange sections where cities are manufactured near freight stations, car-barns, abattoirs, gas tanks. Two days after a rainstorm, when the whole city is moist beneath the sun and radiates damp heat, they are still cold, they keep their mud and puddles. They even have puddles which never dry upù except one month out of the year, August.

The Nausea has stayed down there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this night so pure: am I myself not a wave of icy air? With neither blood, nor lymph, nor flesh. Flowing down this long canal towards the pallor down there. To be nothing but coldness.

Here are some people. Two shadows. What did they need to come here for?

It is a short woman pulling a man by his sleeve. She speaks in a thin, rapid voice. Because of the wind I understand nothing of what she says.

"You're going to shut your trap now, aren't you?" the man says.