“The roads had to be built.”
Since the last shots, Gisors had resolved to play the justifier no longer.
“If not by you, then by someone else. It’s as if a general were to say: ‘with my soldiers I can shoot the town.' But if he were capable of shooting it, he would not be a general. … For that matter, men are perhaps indifferent to power. What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it’s the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn’t it? But man has no urge to govern: he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man’s fate, I was saying. Not powerfuclass="underline" all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head: every man dreams of being god.”
What Gisors was saying disturbed Ferral, but his mind was not prepared to welcome it. If the old man did not justify him, he ceased to free him from his obsession:
“In your opinion, why do the gods possess mortal women only in human or bestial forms?”
As if he had seen it, Gisors felt a shadow settling next to them; Ferral had got up.
“You need to involve what is most essential in yourself in order to feel its existence more violently,” said Gisors without looking at him. n8
Ferral did not guess that Gisors’ penetration had its source in the fact that he recognized elements of his o^n personality in those he spoke to, and that one could have made the most subtle portrait of by piecing together his examples of perspicacity.
“A god can possess,” the old man went on with a knowing smile, “but he cannot conquer. The ideal of a god, I believe, is to become a man while knowing that he can recover his power; and the dream of man, to become god without losing his personality. ”
Ferral absolutely had to have a woman. He left.
“A curious case of elaborate self-deception,” Gisors was thinking: “It’s as if he were looking at himself through the eyes of a romantic petty bourgeois.” When, shortly after the war, Gisors had come into contact with the economic powers of Shanghai, he had been not a little astonished to discover that the idea he had always had of a capitalist corresponded to nothing. Almost aU those whom he met at that time had regulated their love- life according to one pattern or another-and almost always the pattern was marriage: the obsession which makes the great business-man, unless he is just another heir, can rarely adjust itself to the dispersion of irregular sexual experiences. “Modern capitalism,” he would explain to his students, “is much more a will to organization than to power. ”
Ferral, in the car, was thinking that his relations with women were always the same, and always absurd. Perhaps he had loved, once. Once. What dead-drunk psychologist had had the idea of giving the name of love to the feeling which now poisoned his life? Love is an exalted obsession; his women obsessed him, yes-like a desire of vengeance. He went to women to be judged, he who countenanced no judgment. The woman who would have admired him in the giving of herself, whom he would not have had to fight, would not have existed in his eyes. Condemned to coquettes or to whores. There were their bodies. Fortunately. Otherwise … “You will die, dear, without having suspected that a woman is a human being. …” To her, perhaps; not to him. A woman, a human being! She is relaxation, a voyage, an enemy. .
He picked up a courtesan on the way in one of the houses on Nanking Road: a girl with a gentle, pleasing face. Beside him in the car, with her hands resting modestly on her zither, she looked like a T’ang statuette. They arrived at his place at last. He strode up the steps ahead of her, his usual long step now falling heavily. “Let’s go and sleep,” he was thinking. Sleep was peace. He had lived, fought, created; beneath all those appearances, deep down, he found this to be the only reality, the joy of abandoning himself, of leaving upon the shore, like the body of a drowned companion, that creature, himself, whose life it was necessary each day to invent anew. “To sleep is the only thing I have always really wanted, for so many years. ”
What better could he expect than a soporific from the young woman whose slippers resounded sharply at each step behind him on the sta^way? They entered the smoking-room: a small room with divans covered with Mongolian rugs, more suggestive of sensuality than of revery. On the walls, a great wash-drawing of Kama’s first period, a Thibetan banner. The woman placed her zither on a divan. On the tray, the ancient instruments with jade handles, ornamental and impractical, were clearly not in use. She put out her hand towards them: he stopped her with a gesture. A distant shot shook the needles on the tray.
“Do you want me to sing?”
“Not now.”
He looked at her body, both suggested and hidden by the sheath of mauve silk. He knew she was stupefied: it is not the custom to embrace a courtesan before she has sung, chatted, served food, or prepared pipes. Otherwise, why not choose a prostitute?
“Don’t you want to smoke either?”
“No. Get undressed.”
He denied her dignity, and he knew it. He had an urge to demand that she take off all her clothes, to make her stand completely naked, but she would have refused. He had left only the night-lamp turned on. “Lust,” he thought, “is the humiliation of oneself or of the other person, perhaps of both. An idea, obviously. ” She was, for that matter, more exciting as she was, with her clinging Chinese chemise; but he was barely aroused, or perhaps he was aroused only by the submi^ion of this body that was awaiting him, while he did not move. He derived his pleasure from putting himself in the place of the other, that was clear: of the other, compelled; compelled by ^m. In reality he never went to bed with anyone but himself, but he could do this only if he were not alone. He understood now what Gisors had only suspected: yes, his to power never achieved its object, lived only by renewing it; but if he had never in his life possessed a single woman, he had possessed, he would possess through this Chinese woman who was awaiting him, the only thing he was eager for: himself. He needed the eyes of others to see himself, the senses of another to feel himself. He looked at the Thibetan painting, placed there without his quite knowing why: on a discolored
world over which travelers were wandering, two exacdy s^imilar skeletons were embracing each other in a trance. He went toward the woman.
Half past ten at night
“If only the car doesn’t delay much longer,” thought Ch’en. In the complete darkness he would not be so sure of his act, and the last street-lights would soon go out. The desolate night of the China of rice-fields and marshes had reached the almost deserted avenue. Dim in the mist, the lights that passed between the slits of the p^ardy open shutters, went out one by one; the last reflections clung to the wet rails, to the telegraph insulators; they gradually grew fainter; soon Ch’en could see them only on the vertical sign-boards covered with gilt characters. This misty night was his last night, and he was satisfied. He would blow up with the machine, in a blinding flash that would illuminate this hideous avenue for a second and cover a wall with a sheaf of blood. The oldest Chinese legend came to his mind: men are the vermin of the earth. It was necessary that terrorism become a mystic cult. Solitude, first of alclass="underline" let the terrorist decide alone, execute alone; the police derive their whole strength from informers; the murderer who operates alone does not risk giving himself away. The ultimate solitude, for it is difficult for one who lives isolated from the everyday world not to seek others like himself.
Ch’en knew the objections that are made to terrorism: police repression of the workers, the appeal to fascism. But the repression could not be more violent than it was already, nor fascism more obvious. And perhaps Kyo and he were not thinking of the same men. The problem was not to maintain the best elements among the oppressed masses in their class in order to liberate it, but to give a meaning to their very oppression: let each one assume a responsibility and appoint himself the judge of an oppressor’s life. Give an immediate meaning to the individual without hope and multiply the attempts, not by an organization, but by an idea: revive the martyrs. Pei, writing, would be listened to because he, Ch’en, was going to die: he knew how much weight an idea acquires through the blood that is shed in its name.