What does the woman Lena have to do with this story? Is she here to disprove me? To cast a spell on some obscure book? To give way to dawn? On rue Lucinge, smiling and weeping at the same time, Lena led me to her home. Once there, she had me go upstairs, to no purpose. I spoke to her of Bruno and of the Ash Wednesday Supper. “The poor man,” she said, oblivious to his fiery end. She told me the sad, uneventful story of her life. I listened to her as she spoke and whimpered like a child. As I got up, she asked me, “So do you want to?” “No,” I said, “it’s not worth our while.” “Too bad,” she replied. As I left her home, she uttered the following sentence, which might have been prompted by her state of fatigue or intoxication: “Night is the graveyard of names.”
Two days later in a Lausanne bookstore, I came across a volume devoted to the Orphics. I read the following words, which are rather different from those of Hesiod, which I have never forgotten:
Black-winged Night was seduced by the Wind and in the Darkness she produced a silver egg. From this egg sprang Eros—whom some call Phanes—who set the Universe in motion.
10
Aseroë
THERE WAS THIS MAN—the simple truth of the matter is that I was in his way and he wished me no harm. I had bumped into him, and he swore at me and shoved me against the wall of the Jardin de l’Arquebuse in Dijon. That’s the way it was; I would have done the same if he had been the one blocking my way. He shouldn’t have stared at me. Stared at me is perhaps too strong a phrase, since he was looking at the wall. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t exist. The look he cast at me was without any concern or disdain for me; it was simply indifferent, and for the first time in my life I found this intolerable. In fact, it felt like torture. It’s not that I’m oversensitive: had he thrown himself in my arms, I would not have tolerated it; even too insistent a look on his part would have annoyed me. But I felt my privacy had been violated by the very mindlessness of his gaze.
A frank indifference seems to me the best policy when encountering a passerby, but something had changed on that December evening. It had nothing to do with either of us; it was a product of the changing times, of which I was only dimly aware. A major event had taken place without my so much as noticing it—unless the nature of this event was such that the horror of its occurrence had insidiously disappeared, once one’s attention had been diverted from it.
I’ve sometimes run into a friend after a long absence and not recognized him. The passage of time tends to erase people’s earlier features, but this is not what frightens me. What I am attempting to describe is perhaps so heinous and so harmful that I would be better off not mentioning it at all. The delivery of certain looks and certain words that involves intricate acts that are sucked up by the cold or buried by the grave. Are such acts a way of carrying death within oneself, before it actually arrives? Are they based on ignorance of the fact that death will occur come what may and in its own good time? What does it mean “to carry death within oneself”? Have all distinctions collapsed? Do death and life no longer differ? Have they become interchangeable?
That December evening, near the Jardin de l’Arquebuse, the following sentence had taken shape in my head. I repeated it over and over without understanding it: it was neither a proverb nor a sudden insight, nor was it one of those arresting thoughts that come to mind while one is just strolling around:
Many are those who give life without an ounce of tenderness.
And then nothing more. I was talking to myself. I saw a man running and he shoved me against the wall, swearing aloud. I wouldn’t mention this insignificant fact if the man hadn’t turned, if I hadn’t noticed his face near mine, if I hadn’t immediately feared that the worst was being called down upon me. Death is less frightening than the ill will of some ordinary man, but here I was finding myself face-to-face—in the course of a single interminable moment—not with death or with a random stranger, but with a creature who struck me as absolutely inhuman.
Why this sudden aversion? His manner, his features seemed amiable enough, and on some other occasion I might have found this passerby pleasant enough. His face was almost handsome, and seemed unmarked by any trace of suffering or illness. I like most faces, as long as they are not looking at me askance. I have, of course, had occasion to encounter faces burned out by lies or by the lust for power; and I have met with other faces corrupted by hatred. But this was not the face presented by this stranger. He cast me a look that was foreign to this world. In fact, he cast me the absence of any look—and it is the memory of this that turns my blood cold. And yet this look seemed almost familiar to me. It was as if over a period of many years I had become inured to this level of horror.
It was difficult to admit, but I had just bumped into someone utterly repulsive, a creature lacking any humanity. This idea disturbs me, for when I was young I used to clip newspaper photos of murderers, of torturers, or of notorious tyrants, which I then mixed with photos of scholars and artists. I noticed then that, when taken out of context, the names attached to these various faces could be interchanged without their features thereby needing to be modified. Having just written that this man was “a creature lacking any humanity,” let me admit that I am sure of nothing of the sort. He could have just as well been an angel as a devil.
It is both the fear of the unknown and the sway of common prejudices that causes us to abandon our curiosity and to see only grimacing ghosts instead of human beings possessed of no other magic than their strange appearance. Would this account for our hallucinated visions of the war-painted faces of rival tribes, of the maws of carnivores, or of the plague-stricken unfortunates who wander from one town to the next with their walking sticks, their bells, and their masks of crows? Organic transformations can prove to be just as fearsome: serpents sloughing off their skins, the mating rituals of insects, or scenes of birth whenever witnessed at close hand—the infant with his eyes glued shut, his hair stuck to his deformed forehead, his mouth contorted and then shrieking out at life, more grotesque than a death mask.
The bestiaries of old and the chronicles of the first explorers communicate to us the panic experienced when one is confronted by some unknown species. Pliny the Elder says that the catoblepas, located at the sources of the Nile, is a midsize beast whose gait is lazy and whose head is so heavy that it cannot carry it on high—the head simply droops earthward and drags in the sand. The author adds that this particular infirmity is a boon for humans; otherwise, they would succumb to its murderous gaze. It’s possible Pliny was libeling a mere South African gnu, but what am I doing with my poor stranger? Am I treating him like another catoblepas? Or like some humanoid or mutant? How does the repulsion he inspires in me differ from the most common garden variety of xenophobia?
Over the course of my life, I have seen faces ravaged by fire, others by the butterfly rash of lupus. I shall never forget the pocked faces of the lepers I saw in northern Bamako, near the river Niger. I wouldn’t use the word repulsive to describe a single one of them. If my stranger were to cross my path again, I would not dub him “a creature lacking any humanity.” This spiteful observation, which haunted me that December evening and in the months that followed, now makes me feel ashamed. Because I know that this face could have been my own.