Shrove Tuesday

I gave Maurice Barrès a spanking.  We were three soldiers and one of us had a hole in the middle of his face.  Maurice Barrès came up and said to us: "That's fine!"  And he gave each of us a bunch of violets.  "I don't know where to put it," said the soldier with the hole in his head.  Then Maurice Barrès said: "You must put it in the middle of the hole you've got in your head."  The soldier replied: "I'm going to stick it up your arse."  And we turned Maurice Barrès over and took off his trousers.  Under his trousers he was wearing a cardinal's red robe.  We pulled the robe up and Maurice Barrès started shouting: "Mind out, I'm wearing trousers with shoe straps."  But we spanked him until he bled, and then we drew Déroulède's head on his backside with the petals of the violets.

      For some time now I have been remembering my dreams much too often.  Besides, I must toss about a great deal in my sleep, because every morning I find my bedclothes on the floor.  Today is Shrove Tuesday, but that doesn't mean that much at Bouville; in the whole town there are scarcely a hundred people who dress up for it.

      As I was coming downstairs, the patronne called me.

      "There's a letter for you."

      A letter: the last one I got was from the curator of Rouen Library last May.  The patronne takes me into her office; she holds out a long, thick yellow envelope: Anny has written to me.  I hadn't heard from her for five years.  The letter had been sent to my old Paris address, it is postmarked the first of February.

      I go out; I hold the envelope between my fingers, I don't dare to open it; Anny hasn't changed her writing paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer's in Piccadilly.  I imagine she has also kept her hair style, her heavy blonde locks she didn't want to cut.  She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: this isn't vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, exactly as she is.  Perhaps that is what I liked best in her, that austere, steadfast loyalty to the slightest feature of her appearance.

      The firm letters of the address, written in purple ink (she hasn't changed her ink either) still shine a little.

'Monsieur Antoine Roquentin.'

      How I love to read my name on these envelopes.  In a sort of mist I have recaptured one of her smiles, I have evoked her eyes, her head to one side: when I was sitting in a chair, she used to come and plant herself in front of me, smiling.  Standing a head and shoulders higher than me, she would take me by the shoulders and shake me with outstretched arms.

      The envelope is heavy, it must contain at least six pages.  My former concierge has scrawled over this lovely writing of hers:

      'Hôtel Printania - Bouville.'

      These small letters don't shine.

      When I open the letter, my disappointment makes me six years younger.

      "I don't know how Anny manages to fill up her envelopes like this: there's never anything inside."

      I must have said that sentence a hundred times during the spring of 1924, struggling, as today, to extract a sheet of squared paper from the lining.  The lining is a marvel in dark green with gold stars; you would think it was a piece of heavy, starched cloth.  By itself it makes three-quarters of the envelope's weight.

      Anny has written in pencil:

      I am passing through Paris in a few days.  Come and see me at the Hôtel d'Espagne on 20 February.

 Please [she has added 'Please' above the line and joined it to 'see me' with a curious spiral].  I must see you.  Anny.

      At Meknès, in Tangier, when I came home in the evening, I sometimes found a note on my bed: 'I want to see you straightaway.'  I would hurry round, Anny would open the door to me, her eyebrows raised, a surprised expression on her face: she no longer had anything to say to me; she was rather cross with me for coming.  I'll go; she may refuse to see me.  Or else they may tell me at the reception desk: "Nobody of that name is staying here."  I don't think she'd do that.  Only she may write to me, a week from now, to say that she's changed her mind and to make it some other time.

      People are at work.  This promises to be a very flat Shrove Tuesday.  The rue des Mutilés smells strongly of damp wood, as it does every time it's going to rain.  I don't like these peculiar days: the cinemas put on matinees, the schoolchildren have the day off; there is a vague holiday feeling in the streets which never stops appealing for your attention but disappears as soon as you take any notice of it.

      I am probably going to see Anny again, but I can't say that the idea exactly fills me with joy.  I have felt at a loose end ever since I got her letter.  Luckily it is noon; I'm not hungry, but I'm going to eat to pass the time.  I go into Camille's, in the rue des Horlogers.

      It's a very quiet place; they serve sauerkraut or cassoulet all night.  People come here for supper after the theatre; the police send travellers here who arrive during the night and are hungry.  Eight marble-topped tables.  A bench upholstered in leather runs along the walls.  Two mirrors speckled with reddish stains.  The panes of the two windows and of the door are of frosted glass.  The bar is in an alcove.  There is also a room at one side.  But I have never been in it; it is reserved for couples.

      "Give me a ham omelette."

      The waitress, a huge girl with red cheeks, can never prevent herself from laughing when she talks to a man.

      "I can't.  Would you like a potato omelette?  The ham's locked up: the patron is the only one who cuts it."

      I order a cassoulet.  The patron is called Camille and he's a tough character.

      The waitress goes off.  I am alone in this dark old room.  In my wallet there is a letter from Anny.  A feeling of false shame prevents me from reading it again.  I try to remember the sentences one by one.

      'My dear Antoine'.

      I smile: it is certain, absolutely certain, that Anny didn't write 'My dear Antoine'.

      Six years ago - we had just separated by mutual agreement - I decided to leave for Tokyo.  I wrote her a brief note.  I could no longer call her 'My dear love'; in all innocence I began: 'My dear Anny'.

      'I like your nerve,' she replied.  'I have never been and I am not your dear Anny.  And I must ask you to believe that you are not my dear Antoine.  If you don't know what to call me, the best thing would be not to call me anything.'

      I take her letter out of my wallet.  She didn't write 'My dear Antoine'.  Nor was there any conventional formula at the end of the letter: 'I must see you.  Anny.'  Nothing which could give me any indication of her feelings.  I can't complain: I recognize here her love of perfection.  She always wanted to enjoy 'perfect moments'.  If the time was not convenient, she took no more interest in anything, the life went out of her eyes, and she trailed around lazily like a gawky schoolgirl at the awkward age.  Or else she would pick a quarrel with me.

      "You blow your nose solemnly like a bourgeois, and you cough into your handkerchief as if you were terribly pleased with yourself."

      The best thing was not to reply but just to wait: suddenly, at some signal which I could never recognize, she started, her beautiful languid features hardened, and she began her ant-like task.  She has a magical quality which was imperious and charming; she hummed between her teeth, looking all around her, then she straightened up with a smile, came and shook me by the shoulders, and for a few moments seemed to give orders to the objects surrounding her.  She explained to me, in a low rapid voice, what she expected of me.

      "Listen, you will make an effort, won't you?  You were so stupid last time.  You do see how beautiful this moment could be?  Look at the sky, look at the colour of the sunshine on the carpet.  And I've put my green dress on and my face isn't made up, I'm quite pale.  Go back, go and sit in the shadow; you understand what you have to do?  Oh, come now!  How stupid you are!  Speak to me."

      I could feel that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure significance which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain gestures had to be made, certain words spoken: I was bowed down under the weight of my responsibility, I opened my eyes wide and saw nothing, I struggled in the midst of rites which Anny invented on the spur of the moment and I tore them with my long arms as if they had been spiders' webs.  At those times she hated me.

      I shall certainly go and see her.  I still respect and love her with all my heart.  I hope that somebody else has had better luck and has shown greater skill in the game of perfect moments.

      "Your damned hair spoils everything," she used to say.  "What can you do with a man with red hair?"

      She would smile.  To begin with, I lost the memory of her eyes, then the memory of her long body.  I kept her smile as long as I could, and then, three years ago, I lost that too.  Just now, all of a sudden, as I was taking the letter from the hands of the patronne, it came back to me; I thought I could see Anny smiling.  I try to remember it again: I need to feel all the tenderness that Anny inspires in me; it is there, that tenderness, it is close to me, only asking to be born.  But the smile does not return: it is finished.  I remain empty and dry.

      A man has come in, shivering.

      "Evening everybody."

      He sits down without taking off his greenish overcoat.  He rubs his long hands together, clasping and unclasping his fingers.

      "What are you going to have?"

      He gives a start, a worried look in his eyes:

      "Eh?  Give me a Byrrh and water."

      The waitress doesn't move.  In the mirror her face looks as if it were sleeping.  In fact her eyes are open, but they are merely slits.  She's like that, she's never in a hurry to serve customers, she always takes a moment to ponder over their orders.  She must be thinking about the bottle she's going to take from above the bar, the white label with the red letters, the thick black syrup she's going to pour out: it's rather as if she were drinking it herself.

      I slip Anny's letter into my wallet: it has given me all it could; I can't go back to the woman who took it in her hands, folded it, and put it in its envelope.  Is it even possible to think of somebody in the past?  As long as we were in love with each other we didn't allow the tiniest of our moments, the smallest of our sorrows to be detached from us and left behind.  Sounds, smells, degrees of light, even the thoughts we had not told each other - we took all this with us and it all remained alive: we never stopped enjoying it and suffering from it in the present.  Not a single memory; an implacable, torrid love, without a shadow, without a withdrawal, without an evasion.  Three years present at one and the same time.  That is why we separated: we no longer had enough strength to bear the burden.  And then, when Anny left me, all at once, all together, the three years collapsed into the past.  I didn't even suffer, I felt empty.  Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.  Then, in Saigon, when I decided to come back to France, all that was still left - foreign faces, squares, quays beside long rivers - all that was wiped out.  And now my past is nothing but a huge hole.  My present: this waitress in the black blouse dreaming near the bar, this little fellow.  It seems to me as if everything I know about life I have learnt from books.  The palaces of Banares, the terrace of the Leper King, the temples of Java with their great broken staircases, have been reflected for a moment in my eyes, but they have remained yonder, on the spot.  The tram which passes the Hôtel Printania in the evening doesn't take away the reflection of the neon sign in its window panes; it flares up for a moment and moves away with dark windows.

      That man doesn't take his eyes off me: he annoys me.  He gives himself airs for a fellow of his size.  The waitress finally makes up her mind to serve him.  She lazily raises her long black arm, takes hold of the bottle and brings it to him with a glass.

      "Here you are, Monsieur."

      "Monsieur Achille," he says urbanely.

      She pours without answering; all of a sudden he swiftly removes his finger from his nose and places both hands flat on the table.  He has thrown his head back and his eyes are shining.  He says in a

cold voice:

      "Poor girl."

      The waitress gives a start and I start too: he has an indefinable expression on his face, of astonishment perhaps, as if it had been somebody else who had just spoken.  All three of us feel embarrassed.

      The fat waitress is the first to recover: she has no imagination.  She looks Monsieur Achille up and down in a dignified way: she knows perfectly well that she could jerk him out of his seat and throw him out with one hand.

      "And what makes you think I'm a poor girl?"

      He hesitates.  He looks at her, rather taken aback, then he laughs.  His face creases up into a thousand wrinkles, he makes vague gestures with his wrist:

      "That's annoyed her: it's the sort of thing you say without thinking.  You say: poor girl.  It doesn't mean anything."

      But she turns her back on him and goes off behind the counter: she is really offended.  He laughs again:

      "Ha, ha!  It just slipped out, you know.  Are you cross?  She's cross," he says, speaking vaguely to me.

      I turn my head away.  He raises his glass a little, but he isn't thinking about drinking: he blinks his eyes, looking surprised and intimidated; you would think he was trying to remember something.  The waitress has sat down at the cash desk; she picks up some sewing.  Everything has returned to silence, but it isn't the same silence.  The rain Has started: it's tapping lightly against the frosted glass panes; if there are still any children in fancy dress in the streets, it's going to spoil their cardboard masks and make the colour run.

      The waitress turns on the lights: it is barely two o'clock, but the sky is black, she no longer has enough light to sew by.  A soft glow; people are in their houses, they have probably turned on their lights too.  They read, they look out of the window at the sky.  For them ... it's different.  They have grown older in another way.  They live in the midst of legacies and presents, and each piece of furniture is a souvenir.  Clocks, medallions, portraits, shells, paperweights, screens, shawls.  They have cupboards full of bottles, material, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything.  The past is a property-owner's luxury.

      Where should I keep mine?  You can't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house in which to store it.  I possess nothing but my body; a man on his own, with nothing but his body, can't stop memories; they pass through him.  I shouldn't complain: all I have ever wanted was to be free.

      The little man stirs and sighs.  He has huddled up in his overcoat, but now and then he straightens up and takes on a human appearance.  He has no past either.  If you looked hard, you would probably find, in the house of some cousins of his who no longer have anything to do with him, a photograph showing him at a wedding, with a wing-collar, a stiff shirt, and a young man's prickly moustache.  I don't think that even that much remains of me.

      Here he is looking at me again.  This time he's going to speak to me, I feel all stiff.  It isn't a feeling of instinctive attraction which exists between us: we are alike, that's all.  He is alone like me, but sunk deeper than I am in solitude.  He must be waiting for his Nausea or something of that sort.   So now there are people who recognize me, who after looking hard at me think: "He's one of us."  Well?  What does he want?  He must know that we can't do anything for one another.  The families are in their houses, in the midst of their memories.  And here we are, two pieces of flotsam, neither of us with a memory.  If he suddenly stood up and spoke to me, I should jump into the air.

      The door opens noisily: it is Doctor Rogé.

      'Afternoon everybody.'

      He comes in, grim-faced and suspicious, swaying slightly on his long legs which can barely carry his torso.  I often see him on Sundays in the Brasserie Vézelize, but he doesn't know me.  He is built like the old gym instructors at Joinville: arms like thighs, a chest measuring forty-three inches, and all this unsteady on its pins.

      "Jeanne, my little Jeanne."

      He trots over to the coat rack to hang his wide-brimmed felt hat on the peg.  The waitress has put her sewing on one side and comes across unhurriedly, almost sleepwalking, to help the doctor out of his raincoat.

      "What will you have, Doctor?"

      He studies her gravely.  That's what I call a handsome face.  Worn and furrowed by life and passions.  But the doctor has understood life, mastered his passions.

      "I really don't know what I want," he says in a deep voice.

      He has dropped onto the bench opposite me; he mops his forehead.  As soon as he has taken his weight off his feet he feels at ease.  His big eyes, black and imperious, are intimidating.

      "I'll have ... I'll have, I'll have - an old calva, my dear."

      The waitress, without moving a muscle, studied that huge furrowed face.  She is pensive.  The little fellow has raised his head with a smile of relief.  And it is true: this colossus has freed us.  There was something horrible here which was going to take hold of us.  I heave a sigh: we are among men now.

      "Well, is that calvados coming?"

      The waitress gives a start and goes off.  He has stretched out his stout arms and grasped the table at both ends.  Monsieur Achille is in high spirits; he would like to attract the doctor's attention.  But he swings his legs and jumps about on the bench in vain, he is so tiny that he makes no noise.

      The waitress brings the calvados.  With a nod of her head she points out the little man to the doctor.  Doctor Rogé slowly pivots his head and shoulders: he can't move his neck.

      "Well, so it's you, you old swine," he exclaims.  "So you aren't dead yet?"

      He addresses the waitress:

      "You let a fellow like that in here?"

      He looks at the little man with his fierce eyes.  A direct gaze which puts everything in its place.  He explains:

      "He's an old crackpot, that's what he is."

      He doesn't even take the trouble to show that he's joking.  He knows that the old crackpot won't take offence, that he's going to smile.  And sure enough, the other man smiles humbly.  An old crackpot: he relaxes, he feels protected against himself; nothing will happen to him today.  The queer thing is that I feel reassured too.  An old crackpot: so that was it, that was all.

      The doctor laughs, he darts an engaging, conspiratorial glance at me: because of my size, I suppose - and besides, I'm wearing a clean shirt - he is willing to let me in on his joke.

      I don't laugh, I don't respond to his advances: so, without stopping laughing, he tries the terrible fire of his eyes on me.  We consider each other in silence for a few seconds; he looks me up and down with half-closed eyes, he classifies me.  In the crackpot category?  Or in the scoundrel category?

      All the same, he is the one who turns his head away: a tiny defeat at the hands of a fellow on his own, with no social importance, isn't worth talking about - it's the sort of thing you can forget straightaway.  He rolls a cigarette and lights it, then he stays motionless with his eyes hard and staring like an old man's.

      He has all the best wrinkles: horizontal bars across the forehead, crow's feet, bitter creases at both corners of the mouth, not to mention the yellow cords hanging under his chin.  There's a lucky man for you: as soon as you see him, you say to yourself that he must have suffered, that he is a man who has lived.  Moreover, he deserves his face, for never, not even for a moment, has he misjudged the way to keep and use his past: he has quite simply stuffed it, he has turned it into experience to be used on women and young men.

      Monsieur Achille is probably happier than he has been for a long time.  He is agape with admiration; he drinks his Byrrh in little sips, puffing out his cheeks.  The doctor certainly knew how to tackle him!  The doctor isn't the man to let himself be fascinated by an old crackpot on the verge of having an attack; a good tongue-lashing, a few brusque, cutting words, that's what they need.  The doctor has experience: doctors, priests, magistrates, and officers know men as thoroughly as if they had made them.

      I feel ashamed for Monsieur Achille.  We are of the same sort, we ought to make common cause against them.  But he has left me, he has gone over to their side: he honestly believes in Experience.  Not in his, nor in mine.  In Doctor Rogé's.  A little while ago Monsieur Achille felt peculiar, he had the impression of being all alone; now he knows that there have been others like him, a great many others: Doctor Rogé has met them, he could tell Monsieur Achille the story of each one of them and say how in ended.  Monsieur Achille is simply a case, and a case which allows itself to be easily reduced to a few commonplace ideas.

      How I should like to tell him that he's being duped, that he's playing into the hands of self-important people.  Professionals in experience?  They have dragged out their lives in stupor and somnolence, they have married in a hurry, out of impatience, and they have made children at random.   They have met other men in cafés, at weddings, at funerals.  Now and then, caught in a current, they have struggled without understanding what was happening to them.  Everything that has happened around them has begun and ended out of their sight; long obscure shapes, events from afar, have brushed rapidly past them, and when they have tried to look at them, everything was already over.  And then, about forty, they baptize their stubborn little ideas and a few proverbs with the name of Experience, they begin to imitate slot machines; put a coin in the slot on the left and out come anecdotes wrapped in silver paper; put a coin in the slot on the right and you get precious pieces of advice which stick to your teeth like soft caramels.  At this rate, I could get myself invited to people's houses and they would tell one another that I was a great traveller in the sight of Eternity.  Yes: the Moslems squat to pass water; instead of ergotine, Hindu midwives use ground glass in cow dung; in Borneo, when a girl has a period, she spends three days and nights on the roof of her house.  I have seen burials in gondolas in Venice, the Holy Week festivities in Seville, the Passion play at Oberammergau.  Naturally, that's just a tiny sample of my experience: I could lean back in a chair and begin with a smile:

      "Do you know Jihlava, Madame?  It's a curious little town in Moravia where I stayed in 1924 ..."

      And the magistrate who has seen so many cases would add at the end of my story:

      "How true that is, Monsieur, how human.  I had a similar case at the beginning of my career.  It was in 1902.  I was deputy magistrate at Limoges ..."

      The trouble is that I had too much of all that when I was young.  I didn't belong to a family of professionals, but there are amateurs too.  These are the secretaries, the office workers, the shopkeepers, the people who listen to others in cafes: about the age of forty they feel swollen with an experience which they can't get rid of.  Luckily they've made children and they force them to swallow it on the spot.  They would like to make us believe that their past isn't wasted, that their memories have been condensed and gently transformed into Wisdom.  Convenient past!  Pocket-size past, little gilt-edged book full of fine maxims.  "Believe me, I'm talking from experience, I've learnt everything I know from life."  Are we to understand that Life has undertaken to think for them?  They explain the new by the old - and the old they have explained by the older still, like those historians who describe Lenin as a Russian Robespierre and Robespierre as a French Cromwell: when all is said and done, they have never understood anything at all ... behind their self-importance you can distinguish a morose laziness: they see a process of semblances pass by, they yawn, they think that there's nothing new under the sun.  "An old crackpot" - and Doctor Rogé thought vaguely of other old crackpots, without being able to remember any one of them clearly.  Now nothing Monsieur Achille can do will surprise us: because he's an old crackpot!

      He isn't an old crackpot: he is frightened.  What is he frightened of?  When you want to understand something, you stand in front of it, all by yourself, without any help; all the past history of the world is of no use to you.  And then it disappears and what you have understood disappears with it.

      General ideas are more flattering.  Besides, the professionals and even the amateurs always end up by being right.  Their wisdom recommends you to make as little noise as possible, to allow yourself to be forgotten.  Their best stories are about headstrong characters and eccentrics who have been punished.  Why yes, that's how it happens and nobody will say anything to the contrary.  Perhaps Monsieur Achille's conscience is a trifle uneasy.  Perhaps he is telling himself that he wouldn't be like he is if he had listened to his father's advice or his elder sister's.  The doctor is entitled to speak: he hasn't made a failure of his life: he has known how to make himself useful.  He rises calm and powerful above this piece of flotsam; he is a rock.

      Doctor Rogé has finished his calvados.  His great body relaxes and his eyelids droop heavily.  For the first time I see his face without the eyes: you might take it for a cardboard mask, like those they're selling in the shops today.  His cheeks are a horrible pink colour.... The truth suddenly dawns upon me: this man is going to die before long.  He must know it; he has only to look in a mirror: every day he looks a little more like the corpse he is going to become.  That's what their experience amounts to, that's why I have told myself so often that it smells of death: it is their last defence.  The doctor would like to believe in it, he would like to shut his eyes to the unbearable reality: that he is alone, without any attainments, without any past, with a mind which is growing duller, a body which is disintegrating.  So he has carefully constructed, carefully furnished, and carefully padded his little compensatory fantasy: he tells himself that he is making progress.  He has gaps in his thinking, moments when his head seems quite empty?  That's because his judgement is no longer as impulsive as it was in his youth.  He no longer understands what he reads in books?  That's because he has left books so far behind.  He can't make love anymore?  But he has made love in the past.  To have made love is much better than to go on making it: looking back, you can judge, compare, and reflect.  And to be able to bear the sight of this terrible corpse's face in mirrors, he tries to convince himself that the lessons of experience are engraved on it.

      The doctor turns his head a little.  His eyelids open slightly and he looks at me with eyes pink with sleep.  I smile at him.  I should like this smile to reveal to him all that he is trying to conceal from himself.  That would wake him up, if he could say to himself: "There's somebody who knows I'm going to die!"  But his eyelids droop again: he falls asleep.  I go off, leaving Monsieur Achille to watch over his slumber.

      The rain has stopped, the air is mild, the sky is slowly rolling along beautiful black pictures: this is more than enough to make a frame for a perfect moment; to reflect these pictures, Anny would cause dark little tides to be born in our hearts.  But I don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity:  I wander along at random, calm and empty, under this wasted sky.