What am I afraid of? Of confronting what? Exactly what is so frightening about this task that has been assigned to me? It would be tempting once again I suppose to compare my situation to that of those authors who sit down at their desk all a-tremble and then swallow their erasers. So permit me to state here that my fears are completely unrelated to that tomfoolery and in fact, if you’d like my opinion, it’s not the writer who’s afraid of the blank page, it’s the lousy painter he has repressed who thinks he is being called upon, good lord! he has made no progress, he will never dare show himself. Let’s drop it. As long as the pages are white, I will be there to blacken them. As for penetrating the cave and assuming my duties, that’s another story. I knew it would not be easy from day one, when Professor Glatt handed me the clef. Had he given me a simple clé, I would perhaps have got down to work already, in the middle of my business at the heart of my tale, married no doubt, probably a family man, but the weight of this clef, dotted with rust, that allows one to enter the cave made me tremble as soon as the professor put it in my hand, then its hardness of a thing that cannot be twisted, bent, or broken by human strength alone and that seems to expect the same rigor, the same inflexibility from us — this bayonet was hanging from my feebly extended arm unaccustomed to authoritative and decisive gestures, broken wrist; it seemed harder and harder to me, colder and colder, longer and longer, ever surer of itself as I grew weaker and collapsed; it asserted itself against me, it became more and more clef, heavier and heavier, it fell on my foot. It’s only a clef, I hung it on a nail at home in the living room, next to the map of the cave, which is fixed to the wall with four thumbtacks, three yellow and one red; the red one bothers me, it’s all you can see there in the upper right, it will have to be replaced.
THIS NAVY blue uniform is multivalent, thus perfectly adapted to my dual role as guardian and guide. I will not need to change uniforms in order to switch from one to the other; I am believable as guardian dressed like this, a sort of gendarme or stationmaster, and no less believable as guide, a kind of ship or airline captain, sole master after God (who will not be eternal). Moreover, I shall not switch from one to the other, from my role as guardian to my role as guide and back again, I shall perform the duties of guardian and guide simultaneously. I shall never guide but with one eye, I shall remain guardian as I lead visitors through the cave. Still, I shall be an active guide only for a few hours a day. Thus we discover the real glamour of this uniform, so disparaged earlier, and not without good cause, but wearing which I shall meet head-on and to my advantage the most varied situations resulting from my roles as guardian and guide. Let’s face facts: if it had been a uniform specifically for a guardian, what authority would it confer on me to lead tours? And likewise, but on the contrary, if it were specifically a guide’s uniform, how would I look going about my nightly rounds?
I dare not imagine what my life would become were I to own two distinct uniforms, a guardian’s and a guide’s, which I in all conscience would incessantly and swiftly have to interchange, often putting one on top of the other, or else wearing the jacket of the one with the trousers of the other, every infelicitous combination being possible thereafter, depending on the circumstances, commensurate with the urgency, the caps alternating on my head as if they were simply crossing my mind, one after the other, the cap of the guardian, the cap of the guide; I would risk losing all specificity and before long would be neither one nor the other, neither guardian nor guide, bringing to mind rather some Nero at a costume ball, a toga party, who drapes himself in a plaid travel blanket but is unable to resist donning — such an opportunity will never arise again — his lovely Mexican sombrero (he had been there and, so as to cut short the boring tale of his stay in the Sierra Madre, I see no way out except to greet with a shriek right now the historically incongruous, but nonetheless opportune, nearly naked marathon runner who bursts on the scene). With two uniforms, I too would risk ridicule, guardian above the belt and guide below, a mythical, unimaginable being who hides in his guardian arms the head of a guide, or carries around on his guardian legs the belly of a guide; those who catch sight of him cannot believe their eyes, their testimony is unreliable, they must be drunk, how implausible, and yet new tales come to feed the rumor mill; he has been seen this time in a guide uniform, twisting onto his head a guardian cap. The experts consulted challenge this information: a monster of this sort would not be viable. We know in fact that caves are conducive to hallucinations — angels would be better off in them than bears — we definitely have here a phenomenon of this sort: the witnesses are sincere but fooled by their senses, it’s the only possible explanation. Unless of course we are dealing with the latest manifestation of that mythical creature who has been haunting our imaginations since time immemoriaclass="underline" half god half man, or half man half animal, or half animal half god, who will in all probability eventually spring forth from a test tube in one form or another, but to claim that the miracle has already occurred in some secret laboratory, that the first cross between a guardian and a guide has been pulled off without the one rejecting the other, that henceforward they form one indivisible entity boasting the characteristics of both, and that this achievement now affords the human race the opportunity of infinite progress because a complete man is at last conceivable, one who will contain within himself every aptitude, no, no, it’s nothing like that: the bizarre character glimpsed was especially noteworthy for his bewilderment and ungainliness, decked out as he was with the disparate vestments of his double garb.
’Twas not I. Dressed once and for all in my navy blue uniform, I am at least free of all sartorial concerns. I realize, however, that the solution of a single uniform is but compromise, subterfuge, and that if it indiscriminately clothes both guide and guardian, this uniform actually suits neither a guide who would be only a guide nor a guardian who would be only a guardian. I am being pressured to defend a twofold imposture, I understood that from the start, and my prevarications, my recoiling, the totally useless repetitions that I am nonetheless prepared to justify if necessary with great bad faith but without getting flustered, stating for example that the nearby cave is sending this tale back to us as an echo, once, twice, thrice, and the only way to remedy this would be to distance myself from it, the stalling tactics I have been prolonging well beyond my intention, pushing almost to the extreme the mad enterprise of a total inventory that no one until now has dared attempt, as if all the beings and things of this world were separated only by commas and as if there did not exist between them these layers of indifference or mystery that make them individuals, cut off from one another, but also passing remarks of this sort, reflections somewhat reflective, theories I spin with passion and conviction that could just as well support their opposite, all this dithering in the end is simply a testimony to my scruples: am I not wrongfully assuming the title and characteristics of guardian, dressed in this uniform, and the title and characteristics of guide? This scruple indeed does me credit. I take no pride in it. I had to put forward these moral justifications so that my present behavior, or the behavior of my narrative, would not be unjustly blamed on my laziness. In any case, I am not lazy. In any case, laziness and the routine of work get along quite well. In any case, I’m going to get started.
MY WORK here consists on the one hand of greeting the inquisitive, distributing entrance tickets, leading and commenting on the guided tour, collecting money for the postcards, albums, plaster or resin casts, and photographic reproductions that make up the shop’s inventory (a jammed turnstile, a rickety display case); and on the other of watching over the cave, not only when it is open to the public, when the enemy is within, but after closing time as well, when the enemy has withdrawn; day and night, in other words. Not to mention the upkeep of the site: sweeping with a small hand brush the pebbles, dirt, and seeds carried in on visitors’ shoes, papers fallen from their pockets or tossed carelessly on the ground: contemporary man litters the land with paper, it is the mark of his passing and the sole memento he will leave behind, as if along the way he were crumpling one by one the pages of his own adventure story poorly printed on bus and movie tickets, restaurant checks, empty envelopes, advertising flyers, parish newsletters, strips of cellophane, empty cigarette packs, paper hankies, playing cards, now and then a bit of confetti (there was a party), and, because every boat leaves pretty much the same spume in its wake, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idea of an endless variety of destinies is a storybook notion that does not pan out in reality, and barely in the novel; the facts are there for all to see, there aren’t that many possibilities, I too was breast-fed, first the left then the right, me too.