Friday, 3 p.m.

A little more and I would have fallen into the mirror trap.  I avoided it, but only to fall into the window trap: with nothing to do, my arms dangling, I go over to the window.  The Yard, the Fence, the Old Station - the Old Station, the Fence, the Yard.  I give such a big yawn that tears come into my eyes.  I am holding my pipe in my right hand and my packet of tobacco in my left.  I ought to fill this pipe.  But I haven't the heart to do it.  My arms dangle, I press my forehead against the windowpane.  That old woman annoys me.  She trots stubbornly along, with unseeing eyes.  Sometimes she stops with a frightened expression, as if an invisible danger had brushed against her.  Here she is under my window, the wind blows her skirts against her knees.  She stops, she straightens her shawl.  Her hands are trembling.  She goes off again: now I see her from behind.  The old woodlouse!  I suppose she's going to turn right, into the boulevard Noir.  That gives her a hundred yards to cover: at the rate she's going it will take her a good ten minutes, ten minutes during which I shall stay like this, watching her, more forehead glued to the windowpane.  She's going to stop twenty times, start again, stop again ...

      I can see the future.  It is there, stationed in the street, hardly any paler than the present.  Why does it have to be fulfilled?  What advantage will that give it?  The old woman hobbles away, she stops, she tugs at a lock of grey hair escaping from her shawl.  She walks on, she was there, now she is here ... I don't know where I am anymore: am I seeing her movements, or am I foreseeing them?  I can no longer distinguish the present from the future and yet it is lasting, it is gradually fulfilling itself; the old woman advances along the empty street; she moves her heavy mannish shoes.  This is time, naked time, it comes slowly into existence, it keeps you waiting, and when it comes you are disgusted because you realize that it's been there already for a long time.  The old woman nears the corner of the street, she's nothing more now than a little bundle of black clothes.  All right then, that's new, she wasn't there a moment ago.  But that's a tarnished, deflowered newness, which can never take you by surprise.  She is going to turn the corner of the street, she turns it - during an eternity of time.

      I tear myself away from the window and stumble across the room; I am ensnared by the mirror, I look at myself, I disgust myself: another eternity.  Finally I escape from my image and I go and throw myself on the bed.  I look at the ceiling, I should like to sleep.

      Calm.  Calm.  I can no longer feel the gliding movement, the slight touch of time.  I see pictures on the ceiling.  Rings of light at first, then crosses.  They flutter about.  And now another picture is forming; this time in the depths of my eyes.  It is a big animal on its knees.  I can see its front legs and its pack-saddle.  The rest is in a haze.  All the same I can recognize it: it's a camel I saw at Marrakesh, tethered to a rock.  It knelt down and stood up six times running; some street urchins were laughing and exciting it with their shouts.

      Two years ago, it was wonderful: I only had to close my eyes and straightaway my head would start buzzing like a beehive: I could conjure up faces, trees, houses, a Japanese girl in Kamaishi bathing naked in a barrel, a dead Russian emptied by a great gaping wound, with all his blood in a pool beside him.  I could recapture the taste of couscous, the smell of olive oil which fills the streets of Burgos at midday, the smell of fennel which floats through those of Tetuan, the piping of Greek shepherds; I was moved.  This joy was worn out a long time ago, is it going to be reborn today?

      A torrid sun glides stiffly through my head like a magic-lantern slide.  It is followed by a patch of blue sky; after a few jolts it becomes motionless, I am all gilded by it inside.  From what Moroccan (or Algerian or Syrian) day has this brilliance suddenly detached itself?  I let myself flow into the past.

      Meknès.  What was that man from the hills like who frightened us in a narrow street between the Berdaine mosque and that charming square shaded by a mulberry tree?  He bore down upon us, Anny was on my right.  Or on my left?  That sun and that blue sky were only an illusion.  This is the hundredth time I've let myself be caught.  My memories are like the coins in the devil's purse: when it was opened, nothing was found in it but dead leaves.

      Of the man from the hills, I can now see only a big dead eye, a milky-white colour.  Is even this eye really his?  The doctor at Baku who explained the principle of the state abortion-houses was also blind in one eye, and, whenever I try to remember his face, it is that same whitish globe which appears.   Like the Norns, these two men have only one eye between them which they use in turn.

      As for that square at Meknès, although I used to go there every day, it's even simpler: I can't see it at all now.  All that remains is the vague feeling that it was charming, and these five words indissolubly linked together: a charming square at Meknès.  No doubt, if I close my eyes or stare vaguely at the ceiling I can reconstruct the scene: a tree in the distance, a short dark figure running towards me.  But I am inventing all that for the sake of the thing.  That Moroccan was tall and lean, besides I only saw him when he touched me.  So I still know that he was tall and lean: certain abbreviated details remain in my memory.  But I can't see anything anymore: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.

      Moreover there are many cases where even these scraps have disappeared: nothing is left but words: I could still tell the stories, tell them only too well (where anecdotes are concerned I can stand up to anybody except ships' officers and professionals), but they are only skeletons.  They tell about a fellow who does this or that, but it isn't I, I have nothing in common with him.  He travels through countries I know no more about than if I had never been in them.  Sometimes, in my story, I happen to pronounce some of those beautiful names you read in atlases, Aranjuez or Canterbury.  They engender brand-new pictures in me, like the pictures which people who have never travelled create on the basis of their reading: I dream about words, that's all.

      All the same, for a hundred dead stories there remain one or two living ones.  These I evoke cautiously, occasionally, not too often, for fear of wearing them out.  I fish one out, I see once more the setting, the characters, the attitudes.  All of a sudden I stop: I have felt a worn patch, I have seen a word poking through the web of sensations.  I sense that before long that word is going to take the place of several pictures I love.  Straightaway I stop and quickly think of something else; I don't want to tire my memories.  In vain; the next time I evoke them, a good part will have congealed.

      I make a vague movement as if to get up, and go and look for my photos of Meknès in the box I have pushed under my table.  What's the use?  These aphrodisiacs have scarcely any effect on my memory nowadays.  The other day I found a faded little photo under my blotter.  A woman was smiling, near a fountain.  I looked at this person for a moment without recognizing her.  Then on the back I read: 'Anny.  Portsmouth, 7 April 27.'

      Never have I felt as strongly as today that I was devoid of secret dimensions, limited to my body, to the airy thoughts which float up from it like bubbles.  I build my memories with my present.  I am rejected, abandoned in the present.  I try in vain to rejoin the past: I cannot escape from myself.

      There's a knock on the door.  It's the Autodidact.  I had forgotten him.  I had promised to show him the photos of my travels.  Damn him.

      He sits down on a chair; his buttocks spread out and touch the back of it while his stiff torso leans forward.  I jump off my bed and turn on the light.

      "Do we need that, Monsieur?  We were all right as we were."

      "Not for looking at photographs...."

      I relieve him of his hat which he doesn't know where to put.

      "Really, Monsieur?  You are going to show them to me?"

      "Of course."

      It is a calculated risk: I hope he will keep quiet while he looks at them.  I dive under the table, I push the box against his patent-leather shoes, I deposit an armful of postcards and photos in his lap: Spain and Spanish Morocco.

      But I can see from his frank, laughing expression that I was singularly mistaken in hoping to reduce him to silence.  He glances at a view of San Sabastian taken from Monte Igueldo, places it cautiously on the table and remains silent for a moment.  Then he sighs:

      "Ah, Monsieur.  You are lucky.  If what they say is true, travel is the best school.  Is that your opinion, Monsieur?"

      I make a vague gesture.  Luckily he hasn't finished.

      "It must be such an upheaval.  If I were to go on a voyage, I think I should like to make written notes of every aspect of my character before leaving, so that on my return I could compare what I used to be and what I have become.  I've read that there are travellers who have changed physically and mentally to such an extent that their closest relatives didn't recognize them when they came back."

      He handles a thick packet of photographs absentmindedly.  He takes one and puts it on the table without looking at it; then he stares intently at the next photo, which shows a carving of St Jerome on a pulpit in Burgos Cathedral.

      "Have you seen that Christ made of animal skin at Burgos?  There's a very curious book, Monsieur, about those statues made of animal skin and even human skin.  And the Black Virgin?  She isn't at Burgos, but at Saragossa, isn't she?  But perhaps there's one at Burgos?  The pilgrims kiss her, don't they?  The one at Saragossa, I mean.  And isn't there a print of her foot on a flagstone?  A flagstone in a hole, where mothers push their children?"

      He stiffly pushes an imaginary child with both hands.  You would think he was refusing the gifts of Artaxerxes.

      "Ah, customs, Monsieur, they are ... they are curious."

      A little out of breath, he juts his great ass's jawbone towards me.  He smells of tobacco and stagnant water.  His beautiful wild eyes shine like globes of fire and his spare hair rings his skull with a halo of mist.  Under this skull, Samoyeds, Nyam-Nyams, Madagascans, and Fuegians are celebrating the strangest solemnities, eating their aged fathers and their children, spinning to the sound of tom-toms until they faint, giving themselves up to the frenzy of the amuck, burning their dead, exposing them on the rooftops, abandoning them to the river current in a boat lighted by a torch, copulating at random, mother with son, father with daughter, distending their lips with plates and having monstrous animals carved on their backs.

      "Can on say, with Pascal, that custom is second nature?"

      He has fixed his dark eyes on mine, he is begging for an answer.

      "That depends," I say.

      He draws a deep breath.

      "That's just what I told myself, Monsieur.  But I distrust myself so much; one ought to have read everything."

      But at the next photograph he goes quite mad.  He utters a cry of joy.

      "Segovia!  Segovia!  But I've read a book about Segovia!"

      He adds with a certain dignity:

      "Monsieur, I can't remember the author's name anymore.  I sometimes have these lapses of memory.  N ...  No ...  Nod ..."

      "Impossible," I tell him quickly, "you've only got up to Lavergne...."

      I immediately regret my words: after all, he has never spoken to me about this reading method of his, it must be a secret madness.  Sure enough, his face falls and thick lips jut out as if he were going to cry.  Then he lowers his head and looks at a dozen postcards without a word.

      But after half a minute I can see that he is swelling with a powerful enthusiasm and that he will burst if he doesn't speak.

      "When I've finished my education (I'm allowing myself another six years for that), I shall, if I'm allowed, join the students and professors who go on an annual cruise to the Middle East.  I should like to extend my knowledge on certain points," he says unctuously, "and I should also like something unexpected, something new to happen to me - adventures in fact."

      He has lowered his voice and assumed a roguish expression.

      "What sort of adventures?" I ask him in surprise.

      "Why, all sorts, Monsieur.  Getting on the wrong train.  Stopping in an unknown town.  Losing your wallet, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison.  Monsieur, it seems to me that you could define adventure as an event which is out of the ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.  People talk of the magic of adventures.  Does that expression strike you as accurate?  I should like to ask you a question, Monsieur."

      "What is it?"

      He blushes and smiles.

      "Perhaps it's indiscreet...."

      "Ask me anyway."

      He leans towards me, his eyes half-closed, and asks:

      "Have you had many adventures, Monsieur?"

      "A few," I reply automatically, drawing back to avoid his foul breath.  Yes.  I said that automatically, without thinking.  Usually, in fact, I am rather proud of having had so many adventures.  But today, I have no sooner uttered those words than I am filled with indignation against myself: it seems to me that I am lying, that I have never had the slightest adventure in the whole of my life, or rather that I don't even know what the word means anymore.  At the same time my shoulders feel weighed down by the same discouragement which affected me in Hanoi nearly four years ago when Mercier was urging me to join him and I was staring at a Khmer statuette without answering.  And the IDEA is there, that big white mass which so disgusted me then: I hadn't seen it again for four years.

      "Might I ask you ..." says the Autodidact.

      Good God!  To tell him the story of one of those famous adventures.  But I refuse to say another word on the subject.

      "There," I say, bending over his narrow shoulders and putting my finger on a photo, "there, that's Santillana, the prettiest village in Spain."

      "The Santillana of Gil Blas?  I didn't think it existed.  Ah, Monsieur, how instructive your conversation is.  Anybody can see you have travelled."

      I got rid of the Autodidact after stuffing his pockets with postcards, prints, and photos.  He went off enchanted and I switched off the light.  Now I am alone.  Not quite alone.  There is still that idea, waiting in front of me.  It has rolled itself into a ball, it remains there like a big cat; it explains nothing, it doesn't move, it simply says no.  No, I haven't had any adventures.

      I fill my pipe, I light it, I stretch out on my bed, putting a coat over my legs.  What astonishes me is to feel so sad and weary.  Even if it were true that I had never had any adventures, what difference would that make to me?  To begin with, it seems to me that it is simply a matter of words.  That business at Meknès, for example, that I was thinking about a little while ago: a Moroccan jumped on me and tried to stab me with a big knife.  But I lashed out at him and hit him just below the temple....Then he started shouting in Arabic and a swarm of verminous characters appeared and chased us all the way to the Attarin souk.  Well, you can call that whatever you like, but in any case it was an event which happened to ME.

      It is completely dark and I'm not sure if my pipe is lit.  A tram goes past: a red flash on the ceiling.  Then a heavy lorry which makes the house tremble.  It must be six o'clock.

      I haven't had any adventures.  Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like.  But not adventures.  It isn't a matter of words; I am beginning to understand.  There is something I longed for more than all the rest - without realizing it properly.  It wasn't love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth.  It was ... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.  There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little order.  There is nothing very splendid about my life at present: but now and then, for example when they played music in the cafés, I would look back and say to myself: in the old days, in London, Meknès, Tokyo, I have known wonderful moments, I have had adventures.  It is that which has been taken away from me now.  I have just learnt, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years.  Adventures are in books.  And naturally, everything they tell you about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way.  It was to this way of happening that I attached so much importance.

      First of all the beginning would have to be real beginnings.  Alas!  Now I can see so clearly what I wanted.  Real beginnings, appearing like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first note of a jazz tune, abruptly, cutting boredom short, strengthening duration; evenings among those evenings of which you later say: "I was out walking, it was an evening in May."  You are walking along, the moon has just risen, you feel idle, vacant, a little empty.  And then all of a sudden you think: "Something has happened."  It might be anything: a slight crackling sound in the shadows, a fleeting silhouette crossing the street.  But this slight event isn't like the others: straightaway you see that it is the predecessor of a great form whose outlines are lost in the mist and you tell yourself too: "Something is beginning."

      Something begins in order to end: an adventure doesn't let itself be extended; it achieves significance only through its death.  To each moment I cling with all my heart: I know that it is unique, irreplaceable - and yet I would not lift a finger to prevent it from being annihilated.  This last minute I am spending - in Berlin, in London - in the arms of this woman whom I met two days ago - a minute I love passionately, a woman I am close to loving - it is going to come to an end, I know that.  In a little while I shall leave for another country.  I shall never find this woman again or this night.  I study each second, I try to suck it dry; nothing passes which I do not seize, which I do not fix forever within me, nothing, neither the ephemeral tenderness of those lovely eyes, nor the noise in the street, nor the false light of dawn: and yet the minute goes by and I do not hold it back, I am glad to see it pass.

      And then all of a sudden something breaks off sharply.  The adventure is over, times resumes its everyday slackness.  I turn round; behind me, that beautiful melodious form plunges completely into the past.  It grows smaller, shrinking as it sinks, and now the end is simply one with the beginning.  Following that golden spot with my eyes, I think that I would agree - even if I had nearly died, lost a fortune, a friend - to live it all over again, in the same circumstances, from beginning to end.  But an adventure never begins again, is never prolonged.

      Yes, it's what I wanted - alas!  What I still want.  I am so happy when a Negress sings: what summits would I not reach if my own life were the subject of the melody.

      The Idea is still there, the unnameable Idea.  It is waiting, peacefully.  At the moment it seems to be saying:

      "Yes?  Is that what you wanted?  Well, that's exactly what you've never had (remember that you fooled yourself with words, you called the tinsel of travel, love affairs with whores, brawls, and trinkets adventure) and that is what you will never have - nor anyone but yourself."

      But why?  WHY?