Tuesday at Bouville

Is this what freedom is?  Below me, the gardens slope gently towards the town, and in each garden there stands a house.  I see the sea, heavy, motionless, I see Bouville.  It is a fine day.

      I am free: I haven't a single reason for living left, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can't imagine any more.  I am still quite young, I still have enough strength to start again.  But what must I start again?  Only now do I realize how much, in the midst of my greatest terror and nausea, I had counted on Anny to save me.  My past is dead, Monsieur de Rollebon is dead, Anny came back only to take all hope away from me.  I am alone in this white street lined with gardens.  Alone and free.  But this freedom is rather like death.

      Today my life comes to an end.  Tomorrow I shall have left the town which stretches out at my feet, where I have lived so long.  It will no longer be anything but a name, stolid, bourgeois, very French, a name in my memory which is not as rich as the names of Florence or Baghdad.  A time will come when I shall wonder: 'Whatever did I find to do all day long when I was at Bouville?'  And of this sunshine, of this afternoon, nothing will remain, not even a memory.

      My whole life is behind me.  I can see it all, I can see its shape and the slow movements which have brought me this far.  There is very little to say about it: it's a lost game, that's all.  Three years ago I came to Bouville with a certain solemnity.  I had lost the first round.  I decided to play the second round and I lost again: I lost the whole game.  At the same time, I learnt that you always lose.  Only the bastards think they win.  Now I'm going to do like Anny, I'm going to outlive myself.  Eat, sleep.  Sleep, eat.  Exist slowly, gently, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red seat in the tram.

      The Nausea is giving me a brief respite.  But I know that it will come back: it is my normal condition.  Only, today my body is too exhausted to stand it.  Sick people, too, have happy weaknesses which relieve them for a few hours of the consciousness of their suffering.  Now and then I give such a big yawn that tears roll down my cheeks.  It is a deep, deep boredom, the deep heart of existence, the very matter I am made of.  I don't let myself go, far from it: this morning I took a bath, I shaved.  Only, when I think back over all those careful little actions, I can't understand how I could bring myself to perform them.  They are so futile.  It was my habits, probably, which performed them for me.  They aren't dead, my habits, they go on bustling about, gently, insidiously, weaving their webs, they wash me, dry me, dress me, like nursemaids.  Was it they, too, who brought me up on this hill?  I can't remember now how I came here.  Up the escalier Dautry I suppose: did I really climb its one hundred and ten steps one by one?  What is perhaps even more difficult to imagine, is that in a little while I'm going to go down them again.  Yet I know that I am: before long I shall find myself at the bottom of the Coteau Vert, and if I raise my head I shall be able to see the windows of these houses, which are so close to me now, light up.  In the distance.  Above my head; and this moment now, from which I cannot emerge, which shuts me in and hems me in on every side, this moment of which I am made will be nothing more than a confused dream.

      I look at the grey shimmering of Bouville at my feet.  In the sun it looks like a heap of shells, of splinters of bone, of gravel.  Lost in the midst of that debris, tiny fragments of glass or micra give little flashes from time to time.  An hour from now, the trickles, the trenches, the thin furrows running between the shells will be streets, I shall be walking in those streets, between walls.  Those little black dots which I can make out on the rue Boulibet - an hour from now I shall be one of them.

      How far away from them I feel, up on this hill.  It seems to me that I belong to another species.  They come out of their offices after the day's work, they look at the houses and the squares with a satisfied expression, they think that it is their town.  A 'good solid town'.  They aren't afraid, they feel at home.  They have never seen anything but the tamed water which flows out of the taps, the light which pours from the bulbs when they turn the switch, the half-breed, bastard trees which are held up with crutches.  They are given proof, a hundred times a day, that everything is done mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws.  Bodies released in a vacuum all fall at the same speed, the municipal park is closed every day at four p.m. in winter, at six p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335°c., the last tram leaves the Town Hall at 11.05 p.m.  They are peaceable, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, in other words simply about another today; towns have only one day at their disposal which comes back exactly the same every morning.  They barely tidy it up a little on Sundays.  The idiots.  It horrifies me to think that I am going to see their thick, self-satisfied faces again.  They make laws, they write Populist novels, they get married, the commit the supreme folly of having children.  And meanwhile, vast, vague Nature has slipped into their town, it has infiltrated everywhere, into their houses, into their offices, into themselves.  It doesn't move, it lies low, and they are right inside it, they breathe it, and they don't see it, they imagine that it is outside, fifty miles away.  I see it ... I know that its submissiveness is laziness, I know that it has no laws, that what they consider its constancy doesn't exist.  It has nothing but habits and it may change those tomorrow.

      What if something were to happen?  What if all of a sudden it started palpitating?  Then they would notice that it was there and they would think that their hearts were going to burst.  What use would their dykes and ramparts and powerhouses and furnaces and piledrivers be to them then?  That may happen at any time, straightaway perhaps: the omens are there.  For example, the father of a family may go for a walk, and he will see a red flag coming towards him across the street, as if the wind were blowing it.  And when the rag gets close to him, he will see that it is a quarter of rotten meat, covered with dust, crawling and hopping along, a piece of tortured flesh rolling in the gutters and spasmodically shooting out jets of blood.  Or else a mother may look at her child's cheek and ask him: "What's that - a pimple?"  And she will see the flesh puff up slightly, crack and split open, and at the bottom of the split a third eye, a laughing eye, will appear.  Or else they will feel something gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses weeds give swimmers in a river.  And they will realize that their clothes have becoming living things.  And somebody else will feel something scratching inside his mouth.  And he will go to a mirror, open his mouth: and his tongue will have become a huge living centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate.  He will try to spit it out, but the centipede will be part of himself and he will have to tear it out with his hands.  And hosts of things will appear for which people will have to find new names - a stone-eye, a big three-cornered arm, a toe-crutch, a spider-jaw, and somebody who has gone to sleep in his comfortable bed, in is quiet, warm bedroom, will wake up naked on a bluish patch of earth, in a forest of rustling pricks, rising all red and white towards the sky like the chimneys of Jouxtebouville, with big testicles half-way out of the ground, hairy and bulbous, like onions.  And birds will flutter around these pricks and peck at them with their beaks and make them bleed.  Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mingled with blood, warm and vitreous with little bubbles.  Or else nothing like that will happen, no appreciable change will take place, but one morning when people open their blinds they will be surprised by a sort of horrible feeling brooding heavily over things and giving the impression of waiting.  Just that: but if it last a little while, there will be hundreds of suicides.  Well, yes, let things change a little, just to see, I ask for nothing better.  Then we shall see other people suddenly plunged into solitude.  Men all alone, entirely alone, with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, will go clumsily past me, their eyes staring, fleeing from their ills and carrying them with them, open-mouthed, with their tongue-insect beating its wings.  Then I shall burst out laughing, even if my own body is covered with filthy, suspicious-looking scabs blossoming into fleshy flowers, violets and buttercups.  I shall lean against a wall and as they go by I shall shout to them: "What have you done with your science?  What have you done with your humanism? What is your dignity as a thinking reed?"  I shan't be afraid - or at least no more than I am now.  Won't it still be existence, variations on existence?  All those eyes which will slowly eat up a face - no doubt they will be superfluous, but no more superfluous than the first two.  Existence is what I am afraid of.

      Dusk is falling, the first lights are going on in the town.  Good Lord, how natural the town looks in spite of all its geometric patterns, how crushed by the evening it seems.  It's so ... so obvious from here; is it possible that I should be the only one to see it?  Is there nowhere another Cassandra on the top of a hill, looking down on a town engulfed in the depths of Nature?  But what does it matter to me?  What could I possibly tell her?

      My body turns very gently towards the east, wobbles slightly and starts walking.