Thomas The Obscure (4 page)

VIII

I
T
WAS
IN
THIS
NEW
STATE
that, feeling herself becoming an enormous, immeasurable reality on which she fed her hopes, like a monster revealed to no one, not even to herself, she became still bolder and, keeping company with Thomas, came to attribute to more and more penetrable motives the difficulties of her relationship with him, thinking, for example, that what was abnormal was that nothing could be discovered about his life and that in every circumstance he remained anonymous and without a history. Once she had started in this direction, there was no chance of her stopping herself in time. It would have been just as well to say whatever came into one's head with no other intention than to put the words to the test. But, far from condescending to observe these precautions, she saw fit, in a language whose solemnity contrasted with her miserable condition, to rise to a height of profanation which hung on the apparent truth of her words. What she said to him took the form of direct speech. It was a cry full of pride which resounded in the sleepless night with the very character of dream.

"Yes," she said, "I would like to see you when you are alone. If ever I could be before you and completely absent from you, I would have a chance to meet you. Or rather I know that I would not meet you. The only possibility I would have to diminish the distance between us would be to remove myself to an infinite distance. But I am infinitely far away now, and can go no further. As soon as I touch you, Thomas."

Hardly out of her mouth, these words carried her away: she saw him, he was radiant. Her head thrown back, a soft noise rose from her throat which drove all memories away; there was no need, now, to cry out... her eyes closed, her spirit was intoxicated; her breathing became slow and deep, her hands came together: this should reasonably have continued forever. But, as if the silence were also an invitation to return (for it bound her to nothing), she let herself go, opened her eyes, recognized the room and, once again, everything had to be begun anew. This deception, the fact that she did not have the desired explanation, left her unmoved. She certainly could no longer think that he would reveal to her what was, to her, a sort of secret, and for him had in no way the quality of a secret. On the contrary, clinging to the idea that what she might say would endure, in spite of everything, she was determined to communicate to him the fact that, though she was not unaware of the extraordinary distance which separated them, she would obstinately maintain contact with him to the very end, for, if there was something shameless in her concern to say that what she was doing was insane, and that nevertheless she was doing it fully conscious of the situation, there was something very tempting in it as well. But could one even believe that, infantile as that might be, she could do it on her own? Speak, yes, she could start to speak, with the sense of guilt of an accomplice betraying his companion, not in admitting what he knows—he knows nothing— but in admitting what he does not know, for she did not have it within her means to say anything true or even apparently true; and nevertheless what she said, without allowing her to perceive the truth in any sense, without the compensation of throwing the slightest light on the enigma, chained her as heavily, perhaps more heavily, than if she had revealed the very heart of secrets. Far from being able to slip into the lost pathways where she would have had the hope of coming near to him, she only went astray in her travels and led forth an illusion which, even in her eyes, was only an illusion. Despite the dimming of her perspective she suspected that her project was puerile and that furthermore she was committing a great mistake with nothing to gain from it, although she also had this thought (and in fact this was just the mistake): that the moment she made a mistake because of him or relating to him, she created between them a link he would have to reckon with. But she nevertheless guessed how dangerous it was to see in him a being who had experienced events no doubt different from others, but fundamentally analogous to all the others, to plunge him into the same water which flowed over her. It was not, at any event, a small imprudence to mix time, her personal time, with that which detested time, and she knew that no good for her own childhood could emerge from the caricature—and if the image had been a perfect one it would have been worse—of childhood which would be given by one who could have no historical character. So the uneasiness rose in her, as if time had already been corrupted, as if all her past, again placed in question, had been offered up in a barren and inevitably guilty future. And she could not even console herself in the thought that, since everything she had to say was arbitrary, the risk itself was illusory. On the contrary she knew, she felt, with an anguish which seemed to threaten her very life but which was more precious than her life, that, though she might say nothing true no matter how she might speak, she was exposing herself (in retaining only one version among so many others) to the danger of rejecting seeds of truth which would be sacrificed. And she felt further, with an anxiety which threatened her purity but which brought her a new purity, that she was going to be forced (even if she tried to cut herself off behind the most arbitrary and most innocent evocation) to introduce something serious into her tale, an impenetrable and terrible reminiscence, so that, as this false figure emerged from the shadows, acquiring through a useless meticulousness a greater and greater precision and a more and more artificial one, she herself, the narrator, already condemned and delivered into the hands of the devils, would bind herself unpardonably to the true figure, of which she would know nothing.

"What you are..." she said. And as she spoke these words, she seemed to dance around him and, fleeing him at the same time, to push him into an imaginary wolf-trap. "What you are. . . ."

She could not speak, and yet she was speaking. Her tongue vibrated in such a way that she seemed to express the meanings of words without the words themselves. Then, suddenly, she let herself be carried away by a rush of words which she pronounced almost beneath her breath, with varied inflections, as if she wanted only to amuse herself with sounds and bursts of syllables. She gave the impression that, speaking a language whose infantile character prevented it from being taken for a language, she was making the meaningless words seem like incomprehensible ones. She said nothing, but to say nothing was for her an all too meaningful mode of expression, beneath which she succeeded in saying still less. She withdrew indefinitely from her babbling to enter into yet another, less serious babbling, which she nevertheless rejected as too serious, preparing herself by an endless retreat beyond all seriousness for repose in absolute puerility, until her vocabulary, through its nullity, took on the appearance of a sleep which was the very voice of seriousness. Then, as if in the depths she had suddenly felt herself under the surveillance of an implacable consciousness, she leaped back, cried out, opened terribly clairvoyant eyes and, halting her tale an instant: "No," she said, "it's not that. What you really are. . ."

She herself took on a puerile and frivolous appearance. From beneath the murky look which had veiled her face for a few moments came forth expressions which made her seem distracted. She presented such a delicate appearance that, looking at her, it was impossible to fix one's attention on her features, or on the whole of her person. It was that much more difficult to remember what she said and to attach any meaning to it. It was impossible even to know about whom she was talking. One moment she seemed to be talking to Thomas, but the very fact that she was talking to him made it impossible to perceive her actual interlocutor. The next moment she was talking to no one, and, vain as her lisping was at that point, there came a moment when, brought forward by this endless wandering before a reality without reason, she stopped suddenly, emerging from the depths of her frivolity with a hideous expression. The issue was still the same. It was vain for her to search out her route at the ends of the earth and lose herself in infinite digressions—and the voyage might last her entire life; she knew that she was coming closer every minute to the instant when it would be necessary not only to stop but to abolish her path, either having found what she should not have found, or eternally unable to find it. And it was impossible for her to give up her project. For how could she be silent, she whose language was several degrees below silence? By ceasing to be there, ceasing to live? These were just more ridiculous strategies, for through her death, closing off all the exits, she would only have precipitated the eternal race in the labyrinth, from which she retained the hope of escape as long as she had the perspective of time. And she no longer saw that she was coming imperceptibly closer to Thomas. She followed him, step by step, without realizing it, or if she realized it, then, wanting to leave him, to flee him, she had to make a greater effort. Her exhaustion became so overwhelming that she contented herself with mimicking her flight and stayed glued to him, her eyes flowing with tears, begging, imploring him to put an end to this situation, still trying, leaning over this mouth, to formulate words to continue her narrative at any cost, the same narrative she would have wished to devote her last measure of strength to interrupting and stifling.

It was in this state of abandonment that she allowed herself to be carried along by the feeling of duration. Gently, her fingers drew together, her steps left her and she slipped into a pure water where, from one instant to the next, crossing eternal currents, she seemed to pass from life to death, and worse, from death to life, in a tormented dream which was already absorbed in a peaceful dream. Then suddenly with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself. It was as if she were in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age, the old age, of others. First she climbed down into the depths of a day totally foreign to human days, and, full of seriousness, entering into the intimacy of pure things, then rising up toward sovereign time, drowned among the stars and the spheres, far from knowing the peace of the skies she began to tremble and to experience pain. It was during this night and this eternity that she prepared herself to become the time of men. Endlessly, she wandered along the empty corridors lit by the reflected light of a source which always hid itself and which she pursued without love, with the obstinacy of an already lost soul incapable of seizing again the sense of these metamorphoses and the goal of this silent walk. But, when she passed before a door which looked like Thomas's, recognizing that the tragic debate was still going on, she knew then that she was no longer arguing with him with words and thoughts, but with the very time she was espousing. Now, each second, each sigh—and it was herself, nothing other than herself—dumbly attacked the unconcerned life he held up to her. And in each of his reasonings, more mysterious still than his existence, he experienced the mortal presence of the adversary, of this time without which, eternally immobilized, unable to come from the depths of the future, he would have been condemned to see the light of life die out on his desolate peak, like the prophetic eagle of dreams. So he reasoned with the absolute contradictor at the heart of his argument, he thought with the enemy and the subject of all thought in the depths of his thought, his perfect antagonist, this
time
, Anne, and mysteriously receiving her within himself he found himself for the first time at grips with a serious conversation. It was in this situation that she penetrated as a vague shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything there appeared desolate and mournful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally departed sea after a magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes spirit itself. In this exploration which she had undertaken so naively, believing that she might find the last word on herself, she recognized herself passionately in search of the absence of Anne, of the most absolute nothingness of Anne. She thought she understood—oh cruel illusion—that the indifference which flowed the length of Thomas like a lonely stream came from the infiltration, in regions she should never have penetrated, of the fatal absence which had succeeded in breaking all the dams, so that, wanting now to discover this naked absence, this pure negative, the equivalent of pure light and deep desire, she had, in order to reach it, to yoke herself to severe trials. For lives on end she had to polish her thought, to relieve it of all that which made of it a miserable bric-a-brac, the mirror which admires itself, the prism with its interior sun: she needed an I without its glassy solitude, without this eye so long stricken with strabism, this eye whose supreme beauty is to be as crosseyed as possible, the eye of the eye, the thought of thought. One might have thought of her as running into the sun and at every turn of the path tossing into an ever more voracious abyss an eternally poorer and more rarified Anne. One would have confused her with this very abyss where, remaining awake in the midst of sleep, her spirit free of knowing, without light, bringing nothing to think in her meeting with thought, she prepared to go out so far in front of herself that on contact with the absolute nakedness, miraculously passing beyond, she could recognize therein her pure, her very own transparency. Gently, armed only with the name Anne which must serve her to return to the surface after the dive, she let the tide of the first and crudest absences rise—absence of sound silence, absence of being death—but after this so tepid and facile nothingness which Pascal, though already terrified, inhabited, she was seized by the diamond absences, the absence of silence, the absence of death, where she could no longer find any foothold except in ineffable notions, indefinable somethings, sphinxes of unheard rumblings, vibrations which burst the ether of the most shattering sounds, and, exceeding their energy, explode the sounds themselves. And she fell among the major circles, analogous to those of Hell, passing, a ray of pure reason, by the critical moment when for a very short instant one must remain in the absurd and, having left behind that which can still be represented, indefinitely add absence to absence and to the absence of absence and to the absence of the absence of absence and, thus, with this vacuum machine, desperately create the void. At this instant the real fall begins, the one which abolishes itself, nothingness incessantly devoured by a purer nothingness. But at this limit Anne became conscious of the madness of her undertaking. Everything she had thought she had suppressed of herself, she was certain she was finding it again, entire. At this moment of supreme absorption, she recognized at the deepest point of her thought a thought, the miserable thought that she was Anne, the living, the blonde, and, oh horror, the intelligent. Images petrified her, gave birth to her, produced her. A body was bestowed on her, a body a thousand times more beautiful than her own, a thousand times more body; she was visible, she radiated from the most unchangeable matter: at the center of nullified thought she was the superior rock, the crumbly earth, without nitrogen, that from which it would not even have been possible to create Adam; she was finally going to avenge herself by hurling herself against the incommunicable with this grossest, ugliest body, this body of mud, with this vulgar idea that she wanted to vomit, that she was vomiting, bearing to the marvelous absence her portion of excrement. It was at that moment that at the heart of the unheard a shattering noise rang out and she began to howl "Anne, Anne" in a furious voice. At the heart of indifference, she burst into flame, a complete torch with all her passion, her hate for Thomas, her love for Thomas. At the heart of nothingness, she intruded as a triumphal presence and hurled herself there, a corpse, an inassimilable nothingness, Anne, who still existed and existed no longer, a supreme mockery to the thought of Thomas.