“After all, my good fellow,” he said to the Clappique in the mirror, “why run away? How long is all this going to last? You’ve had a wife: let’s forget it, oh! let’s forget it! Mistresses, money; you can always think of them when you need phantoms to make an ass of you. Not a word! You have gifts, as they say, a sense of humor, all the qualities needed to make a parasite: you can always be a valet at Ferral’s when age has brought you to perfection. There is also the profession of gen- tleman-beggar, the police and suicide. A pimp? The delusion of grandeur again. Which leaves suicide, I tell you. But you don’t want to die. You don’t want to die, you little bastard! And yet look at yourself-a fine face to use for a dead man. ”
He drew still nearer, his nose almost touching the glass; he twisted his face, mouth open, into a gargoyle’s grimace; and, as if the mask had answered him:
“Everyone can’t be dead? Obviously: it takes a little of everything to make a world. Pshaw! When you’re dead you’ll go to Paradise. And what a companion God will be for a fellow of your sort. ”
He made a different face, mouth shut and drawn towards the chin, eyes half-opened, like a carnival samurai. And immediately, as if he had found a way of expressing directly in all its intensity the torment which words were not adequate to translate, he began to make faces, transforming himself into a monkey, an idiot, a terrified person, an apoplectic, into all the grotesques that a human face can express. This no longer sufficed: he used his fingers, drawing out the corners of his eyes, enlarging his mouth for the toad face of the man-who- laughs, flattening his nose, pulling out his ears. Each of these faces spoke to him, revealed to him a part of himself hidden by life; this debauchery of the grotesque in the solitary room, with the night mist piled against the window, was assuming the atrocious and terrifying humor of madness. He heard his own laughter-a single note, the same as his mother’s; and, suddenly perceiving
his face, he withdrew with horror and sat down, panting. There was a pad of paper and a pencil on the arm-chair. If he went on in this way he would really go mad. To protect himself from the frightful mirror he began writing to himself:
You would end up as a king, my old Toto. King: good and warm in a cozy insane-asylum, thanks to delirium tremens, your only friend, if you keep on drinking. But at this moment, are you drunk or sober? … You who imagine so many things, what are you waiting for to imagine yourself happy? Do you think.
Someone knocked.
He tumbled down to earth. Rescued but dumbfounded. The knocking was repeated.
“Come in.”
A wool cloak, a black felt hat, a head of white hair: old Gisors.
“But I … I …” Clappique spluttered.
“Kyo has just been arrested,” said Gisors. “You know KOnig, don’t you?”
“I … But I’ve got nothing to do with it. ” Gisors studied him carefully. “If only he isn't too drunk,” he thought.
“You know KOnig,” he repeated.
“Yes, I, I … know him. I have. done him a service. Great service.”
“Can you ask him to return it?”
“Why not? But what?”
“As the chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police he can have Kyo released. Or, at least, prevent his being shot: you understand it’s most urgent. ”
“Y-yes. … All right.”
He had so little confidence in KOnig’s gratitude, however, that he had considered it useless and perhaps imprudent to go and see him, even after Shpilevski’s warning. He sat down on the bed, his nose pointed straight down to the floor. He did not dare to speak. The tone of Gisors' voice convinced him that the latter did not suspect that he was responsible for Kyo’s arrest: Gisors saw in him the friend who had come to warn Kyo that afternoon, not the man who was gambling at the hour of his appointment. But Clappique could not convince himself of this. He did not dare to look at him and could not calm himself. Gisors was wondering from what drama or what extravagance he was emerging, not guessing that his presence was one of the causes of his panting breath. It seemed to Clappique that Gisors was accusing him:
“You know, old man, that I'm not. anyway that I’m not as mad as all that; I, I. ”
He could not stop stammering; it seemed to him at times that Gisors was the only man who understood him; and at times that he took him for a buffoon. The old man was looking at him without speaking.
“I. What do you think of me?”
Gisors was more inclined to take him by the shoulders and lead him to Konig’s than to talk to him; but beneath what he took to be his intoxication he discerned such a turmoil that he did not dare to refuse to enter into the game.
“There are those who need to write, those who need to dream, those who need to talk. It’s all the same thing. The theater is not serious, but the bull-fight is; novels aren’t serious, but mythomania is.”
Clappique got up.
“Have you hurt your arm?” asked Gisors.
“A twist. Not a word. ”
Clappique had awkwardly turned his arm to hide his wristwatch as if this watch which had shown him the time in the gambling-hall would have betrayed him. He perceived by Gisors’ question that this was idiotic.
“When will you go and see KOnig?”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Why not now? The police are awake tonight,” said Gisors with bitterness, “and anything might happen. ”
Clappique was only too glad. Not through remorse (had he been at the game again he would have stayed again), but by way of compensation.
“Let’s run, old dear. ”
The change which he had noticed in the room upon entering again made him uneasy. He looked carefully, was stupefied at not having seen it before: one of his Taoist paintings-“to make one dream”-and his two finest statues had disappeared. On the table, a letter: Shpilevski’s handwriting. He guessed. But he did not dare to read the letter. Shpilevski had warned him that Kyo was in danger: if he were to let himself go to the point of talking about him, he would be unable to avoid telling everything. He took the letter and put it in his
As soon as they were outside they encountered armored cars and trucks loaded with soldiers.
Clappique had almost recovered his calm; to hide the anxiety from which he could not yet free himself, he played the fool, as usuaclass="underline"
“I would like to be a wizard, to send the caliph a uni- corn-a sun-colored unicorn, I tell you-which would appear in the palace, shouting: ‘Know, Caliph, that the first sultana is unfaithful to you!’ Not a word! I would be grand as a unicorn myself, with my nose! And of course, it wouldn’t be true. Apparently nobody realizes how voluptuous it is to live in another person’s eyes an altogether different life from his own. Especially a woman’s. ”
“What woman has not invented a life-history for at least one of the men who have accosted her on the street?”
“You. think everyone is a mythomaniac?” Clappique’s eyelids flickered nervously; he walked more slowly.
“No, listen,” he said, “tell me franldy: why do you think they aren’t?”
He now felt an urge, curiously foreign to himself but very strong, to ask Gisors what he thought of gambling; and yet, if he spoke of gambling he would surely confess everything. Was he going to speak? Silence would have forced him to; luckily Gisors answered: “Perhaps I’m the person least capable of answering you. Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.” “Suffering, yes. And. fear.”