The Bark Tree (34 page)

“Oh, thank you, Dad.”

Clovis, Clovis, the future is yours, as they say. You are serious-minded, hard-working, not too intelligent, but quite intelligent enough, though. Your father has earned enough money to be able to pay for the very highest type of education for you. You will be an engineer, an eminently respectable profession, where your ingenuity will make you outstanding. Perhaps you will even become an inventor, Clovis, and your father and mother will be proud of you. You will regularly describe this splendid trajectory, Clovis, and nothing can prevent you. (Unless he strikes out on the way, but there’s no point in telling him that, he’s got such a timid nature he’d get in a panic.)

But do not forget one thing, Clovis, which is, when you are being honored on all sides, when you have arrived, when you are privileged to wear a beautiful engineer’s uniform, when you are privileged to marry the boss’s daughter, then, at that moment, do not despise your relations, your uncle the concierge, your aunt the midwife, and your father and mother who made so many sacrifices to bring you up. Those are horrible sentiments which reveal contemptible instincts. But Clovis is possesssed only of nobility and honor; we could even make this his crest. Nobility and honor. No, he will not blush for his Uncle Saturnin, even though he is a bit crazy, nor for his father, nor for his mother. Though be become an engineer, an industrialist, a capitalist, a deputy, the president of the Senate, or even the president of the public whatsit (the most glorious uniform to which one may ever aspire), never will he deny his family. Never, never! They will always find some leftovers in the kitchen. One last question.

“So it’s true then, Dad. You really have bought a brothel?”

“Yes, Clovis. I signed the contract today, and I’ve sold this café.”

“Which one did you buy, the one in Rouen or the one in Epinal?”

“The one in Epinal.”

“I think you were right. The navy, there’s nothing much doing there at the moment, whereas the troops, they always keep going.”

“Yes, but when there aren’t any more soldiers?”

“When’ll that be, Dad?”

“Howshd I know?”

“Don’t worry, Dad, you’ll be rich by then. And when do we leave Blagny?”

“In a month, at the beginning of October.”

“And who’s going to take Ernestine’s place, as assistant madame?”

“Camélia, of course.”

“I’d have thought she was very young, Dad, for that job. She won’t have enough authority.”

“She’s the same age as Ernestine.”

“I thought Ernestine was very young, too.”

“That’ll do, Clovis. Don’t bother your head about that. Forget about brothels and get on with your maths.”

—oooooo—oooooo—

Philosophy, you understand, has made two great mistakes; there are two great omissions in it; in the first place it’s omitted to study the different ways of being, primo; and that’s no slight omission. But thass still nothing, in comparison; it’s also omitted the most important thing—the different ways of not-being. A lump of butter, frinstance—I’m taking the first thing that comes into my noodle—a lump of butter, frixample, it’s neither a caravansery, nor a fork nor a cliff, nor a eider down. Because, you see, this way of not
-
being is precisely its way of being. I’ll come back to that. There’s still another way of not-being; frixample, the lump of butter that isn’t on the table, isn’t. That’s taking it a step farther. Between the two, there’s the isn’t-any-longer, and the isn’t-yet. In this way each thing is responsible for determining heaps of nonbeings. The lump of butter isn’t everything it isn’t; it isn’t everywhere where it isn’t, it stops everything else being where it is, it hasn’t always been and won’t always be, ekcetera, ekcetera. And similarly, a fairly infinite infinity of nonbeing. So that we can say that this lump of butter is up to its eyes in an infinity of nonbeing, and finally, the thing that seems to be the most important isn’t being, but nonbeing. And you can make a distinction: there’s what can’t be because it’s contradictory—the lump of butter is a kettle of fish, And there’s what isn’t, though it doesn’t seem to be contradictory—the lump of butter isn’t on this table (whereas in fact it is on it). The strange thing is that what is expressed by a phrase like this: the lump of butter is a kettle of fish—belongs to the category of nonbeing, and yet to a certain extent it is, since you can express it. And so, in one way nonbeing is, and in another way being isn’t. And what’s more, being is determined by nonbeing; it hasn’t got an existence of its own, it emerges from nonbeing and then re
-
merges with it. When the lump of butter wasn’t, it wasn’t; when it isn’t any longer, it won’t be any longer. It’s as simple as Hello. What is, is what isn’t; but it’s what is that isn’t. The point is that nonbeing isn’t on one side and being on the other. There’s nonbeing, and that’s all, seeing that being isn’t. That’s where I was trying to get. Things exist, not because they are positively determined—in that case they don’t exist—but because they are negatively determined in an infinite multitude of ways. And in this case, they aren’t. Which means, and I’ll say it once again, that being isn’t, but non
-
being is.

There. Don’t worry, we can go a long way with that. Because nothing exists. There is nothing. I myself, I don’t exist. You can look at this quantitatively to some extent. Do you understand the word quantitatively? Yes, course you do, you’re educated, you are. Well, this is how it is. I can say: I’m this, I’m this, I’m this, ekcetera. But that won’t get us very far. On the other hand, I can say to myself: I’m not this, and then this this is the whole universe, present, past and future, it’s all I could have done but haven’t done, it’s all I could have been but haven’t been, it’s all I won’t have been able to do or be, and of course haven’t done or been. Faced with all this, what am I? Nothing. I am not. But then, insofar as I’m not, I am. Takes your breath away, donit? Isn’t it amazing? Hang on, I haven’t finished yet. I’d like you to understand me properly: being, insofar as it is limited, isn’t. And on the yuther hand, it’s difficult not to agree that what isn’t, to some extent, is. Natch, you have to go beyond logic to discover all this. And yet, and yet—what is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t. But there, I’ll tell you the truth: the truth lies in the totality of things, not just in a formula. Even the totality of these formulas, which I’ll just go over again so that you can really get them into your noodle:

Being is, nonbeing isn’t,

Being isn’t, nonbeing is,

Being is, nonbeing is,

Being isn’t, nonbeing isn’t,

all of which reveal one aspect of the truth; even taken all together, though, all four don’t reveal its totality, because if we were to admit that there were only four possible formulas, that would be admitting, primo, a limitation, and secondo, the legitimacy of the principle of contradiction which we have just precisely said isn’t legitimate when sa question of totality. Which means that the truth is still somewhere else.

“Oh look here,” said Narcense, yawning, “you aren’t going to start going on about God, are you?”

“I’m not the sort of man that takes a lace cap for a Homburg hat, am I
!”
replied Saturnin.

N
ARCENCE
was trailing along the grands boulevards, not wanting anything, not hoping for anything. He was well and truly fed up. The day before the day before, he had already exhausted the ninety-one possibilities of disposing of the blue door, and the ninety-first had turned out to be just as totally illusory as all the previous ones. For a whole day, with Saturnin, he had tried to find the way out, and had found nothing; this took place at the house of Sophie Isis, at Ça-Hisse-sur-Seine. She looked like a high-class whore, this Sophie. She was always half naked, as you might say; but they didn’t pay any attention to her, they were so absorbed in their work. And when they’d finished, when there was no longer any doubt about their defeat, they were so disgusted that they walked right by her naked breasts, without touching them. Yet another strange day. They took the door back to the concierge’s lodge. Then Saturnin took an ax and made it into firewood, because it was beginning to get cold. On one piece, and by pure chance, he managed to make out, written one on top of the other, the names of Gérard Taupe and a woman; and then a date. They made this into a little parcel which they sent to the junk dealer. That was the end. Narcense was trailing along the grands boulevards. He had fifty francs in his pocket, which he’s been lent by Saturnin; they were probably the last, for the concierge was by now pretty hard up. The sort of research he’d been going in for, it came rather expensive. No point in thinking any more about it. Then Narcense perceived very closely, in his memory, a naked breast. It bowled him over.

He looked around him, and saw nothing but women. When they were coming toward him, he caught their eyes; when he was walking behind them, he admired their buttocks, when appropriate. Two or three times, he vaguely thought of following one of these bodies. He walked up and down between the Opéra and the rue du faubourg Montmartre. He stopped outside a movie house and contemplated the photos of a star he admired. On café terraces, women with crossed legs were sitting at tables on which were beers that they were not drinking. The charcoal braziers had been lit; the end of October, it looked as if it was going to be a hard winter, and Narcense saw the legs through a smell of damp charcoal.

Following an attractive walk, he went down a passageway; but, suddenly abandoning the woman he was following, he went into a post card shop and looked at length, not at the New Year’s cards, nor at those of politicians, nor at those of boxers, but at the “nudes” and “dishabillés.” There was quite a crowd, anyway, in the back of the shop. About ten men of varying ages were flocking around these photos, their throats dry and their hands trembling. Every so often, one would plunge his head into a little movie theater designated by a red lamp as being for the attention of the dilettanti. In an extremely congested little cubbyhole, the proprietress, a dried
-
up, asexual lady, was keeping her eye on the clientele; some daring ones went so far as to ask to see the special collections, and went out with a naïve smile. All this left Narcense cold, and reciprocal indifference was
de rigueur
among these solitaries. So he carefully examined the various series of “nudes” and “dishabillés,” those at eighty-five centimes, those at one franc, and those at two francs. Then he went out into the passageway, turned left at the bottom into a deserted alley and accosted the first woman who appeared. She was a twenty
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franc whore, with pretty eyes, a raucous voice and pretensions to vice, pretensions which were in any case unjustified, as the man was shortly afterward able to ascertain, with disappointment. As devoid of intelligence as she was of imagination, she became touching when she asked: What a shittery
...
And when she talked about her kid in the country. Narcense surrendered a packet of cigarettes into the hands of this idiot and went and had a sandwich at the Haussman slot machine.

Then he found himself in the street again and saw, once more, the unique woman whose manifold image appeared to him in the most various guises, which were nevertheless always identical (naturally enough). But this image had lost its power to exalt. One does not make love with impunity; very simply, he was tired. With his last francs, he spent some time in the movies. He didn’t understand anything that came yelling in the dark from the screen. Usually, of course, he did understand. But that evening, it wasn’t the same. That evening—poverty, and his absurd love. That evening, his scrotum hurt and his head hurt, at one and the same time. And the ghosts shouting themselves hoarse on the taut sheet held not the slightest interest for him.

When he came out, it was around 7. He didn’t have a bean left. Just enough to take the metro. At the best time, the time when you keep your elbows tucked in and where you also keep warm. He felt sick when he came out of the tunnel, and shivered in the night.

He passed the lodge without a word, but Saturnin called him back.

“Take a look at this.”

He was showing him a parcel, Old Taupe’s parcel. Written on it was: Addressee deceased. Return to sender. Narcense shrugged his shoulders. What did he care, no but what
did
he care.

Then Saturnin said:

“Have you seen the paper this evening?”

No. He’d heard the newsmen yelling in the street. What was it?

Talk of war.

What
did
he care, no but
what
did he care?

—oooooo—oooooo—

Etienne got up at 6:30; so did Alberte; likewise Théo. Bébé Toutout, though, stayed in bed until about 10. They hurriedly swallowed a cup of coffee, and hurried to the train; the father went to the Audit Bank, the mother to her office, and the son to the lycée. So the dwarf had the run of the house all day. They came home in extended order. Théo arrived first; then Alberte; then Etienne, and it was at the evening meal that the whole family was reunited. And thus the days passed.

And thus the nights passed: they all slept. They usually dreamed very little; Bébé Toutout, on the other hand, had frightful nightmares that tortured him in the middle of the night. He sat up in bed, yelled oo oo oo, and the sweat irrigated his beard. This scared the living daylights out of Théo, thus rudely awakened. Then the dwarf would accuse him of being gutless, pacifier-sucking and lily-livered; Théo, with beating heart, would pull the sheet up over his head. Bébé Toutout would wipe his beard, and calm would reign again until dawn; then that death’s-head, the alarm clock, would start chattering at the teeth. With a blow on the occiput, Etienne would stun it; then, his hair standing on end, he’d get out of bed, and so on and so on.

This awakening, the dwarf, as a rule, didn’t hear; if he did hear it, he started complaining, and sometimes insisted on their bringing him some coffee and bread and butter in bed; he gulped this down voraciously, and then disappeared under the bedclothes again, while the hard-working family braved the horrible chill of the dawn.