Then after the meal you return to your preoccupation: reviewing the objects. Of course there is a coffer bursting with the treasures of ancient America, tufts of quetzal feathers, bronze ear ornaments, gold diadems, jade necklaces. And a dove killed with a single knife slash: you look at the wound upon the white breast, the bloodstains on the feathers. A hammer, a chisel, a hyssop, an ancient bellows, rusty chains, a jasper monstrance, an ancient marine compass.
But you receive the greatest pleasure from the maps. A faded navigational chart, an authentic medieval portolano: the outlines of the Mediterranean, the limits, the Pillars of Hercules, Cape Finisterre, Ultima Thule, the ancient names of places lovingly retained on this chart: Gebel-Tarik, Gades, Corduba, Carthago Nova, Toletum, Magerit, in Spain; Lutetia, Massilia, Burdigala, Lugdunum, in France; Genua, Mediolanum, Neapolis, in Italy; the flat earth, the unknown ocean, the universal cataract. You compare this map of Mare Nostrum with the map of the virgin jungle, the mask of green, garnet, blue, and yellow feathers with a black field of dead spiders in the center, the nervature dividing the zones of feathers, the darts that protrude from the cloth.
But the most mysterious of your maps is that of the waters, the Phoenician chart so ancient you scarcely dare touch it, so brittle it seems to wish to be immediately converted into dust and to disappear along with the mysteries it describes: the secret communication of all waters, sub-aquatic tunnels, the passageways beneath the earth where flow all the liquid channels of the world, nourishing one another, seeking a common level, rushing headlong from high mountains, bursting from deep wells, whether their origin be swamp or volcano, whether they spring from the desert or the valley, born of ice or fire: the liquid corridors from the Seine to the Cantabria, from the Nile to the Orinoco, from the Cabo de los Desastres to the Usumacinta, from the Liffey to Lake Ontario, from a deep sacrificial pool in Yucatan to the Dead Sea in Palestine: atl, the root of water, Atlas, Atlantis, Atlantic, Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent that returns along the routes of the great waters, the esoteric highways from the Tiber to the Jordan, from the Euphrates to the Schelde, from the Amazon to the Niger. Esoteric: esoterikos: I cause to enter. Maps of initiation; charts of the initiated. There is a banal inscription written in the left-hand margin of this map, in Spanish: “The nature of waters is always to communicate with one another and to reach a common level. And this is their mystery.” An amphora filled with sand.
You have not opened your windows since summer. You drew the heavy drapes. You live with your lights turned on, night and day. You could no longer tolerate the smoke, the stench of burned flesh and fingernails and hair. The suffocating perfume from the chestnut and the plane trees. The smoke from the towers of Saint-Sulpice. You used to be able to see the towers from your window on the seventh floor of the hotel. You could not tolerate the rows of flagellants and penitents marching every day through the rue Montalembert toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain, or the clamor of proliferating life, new arrivals, thronging along the rue du Bac toward the Quai Voltaire and the Seine: the river boiled, the transparent Louvre exhibited itself shamelessly, spaces seemed to expand, the Gioconda was not alone, the wild ass’s skin shrank in the feverish hand of Raphaël de Valentin, Violetta Gautier lay dying in her bed of camellias, singing softly:
Sola, abbandonata
In questo popoloso deserto
Ch’appellano Parigi …
A line of barefoot men, obscured by the smoke, entered the frightful stench and rigorously programmed death of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Javert pursued Valjean through labyrinthine black waters.
You locked yourself in your apartment. You had sufficient money. The coffer overflowing with ancient Aztec, Maya, Totonac, Zapotec jewels. They told you you could use them while in exile to organize the resistance and aid those who had been banished. Guardian of the coffer, yes, but it was also your subsistence. You, too, are an exile. You read the last newspaper and flushed it down the toilet, torn into little pieces. You watched shocking headlines and judicious commentaries swirl away in a whirlpool of uselessly chlorinated water. The facts were true. But they were too true, too immediate, or too remote, compared to the real truth. That has always, you suppose, been the contemptible fascination of the news: it is its immediacy today that makes it obsolete tomorrow. Fact: the microbic world acquired immunity faster than science could neutralize each new outburst of bacterial independence: chlorine, antibiotics, all vaccines, were useless. But why, instead of taking the minimal steps for safety, did the human world feel itself so attracted, one might almost say mesmerized, by the victory of the microbic world? The ordinary justification, the commonplace, was that once all sanitary programs were abandoned, it was left to nature herself to resolve the problem of overpopulation: the five billion inhabitants of an exhausted planet that was, nonetheless, incapable of ridding itself of its acquired habits: greater opulence for a few, greater hunger for the great majority. Mountains of paper, glass, rubber, plastic, spoiled meat, wilted flowers, inflammable matter neutralized by non-inflammable matter, cigarette butts, junked automobiles, the minimum and the maximum, condoms and sanitary napkins, printing presses, tin cans and bathtubs: Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Hamburg, Teheran, New York, Zurich: museums of garbage. Epidemics furnished the desired effect. The plagues of the Middle Ages had not distinguished between man or woman, young or old, rich or poor. The modern plague was programmed: in new sterilized cities safe beneath plastic bells, a few millionaires, many bureaucrats, a handful of technicians and scientists, and the few women needed to satisfy the elect, were saved. Other cities stimulated death by offering solutions in harmony with what had formerly been called, without the least trace of irony, the national character. Mexico resorted to human sacrifice, religiously consecrated, politically justified, and offered as a sports event on television spectaculars; the spectator had a choice: certain programs were dedicated to reenactments of the War of the Flowers. In Rio de Janeiro, a military edict imposed perpetual carnival, with no time limits, until the population died of pure joy: dance, alcohol, masquerades, sex. In Buenos Aires a suburban machismo was fomented, a tightly woven intrigue of jealousy, insult, and personal drama, instigated by tangos and gauchoesque poems: the knives of vengeance gleamed, millions committed suicide. Moscow was both more subtle and more direct: millions of copies of Trotsky’s works were distributed, and then any person found reading them was ordered to be shot. No one knows what happened in China. The inhabitants of Benares and Addis Ababa, La Paz, Jakarta, Kinshasa, and Kabul simply perished of hunger.
At first, Paris accepted the recommendations of the world council on depopulation. Insofar as it was possible, the obligatory deaths would be naturaclass="underline" hunger and epidemic, though it would be left to each nation to find its own specific and idiosyncratic solutions. But Paris, the fountain of all wisdom, where a persuasive Devil inculcated into some few wise men a perverse intelligence, opted for a different course. Just this spring you watched the debates on television. All possible theories were expounded and criticized with Cartesian subtlety. After everyone had spoken, an aged Rumanian playwright, a member of the Académie, with the aspect of a gnome, or perhaps more exactly, and using the lingua franca of the century, of a leprechaun of the verdant bosques of Ireland: this elf, with tufts of white hair ringing his bald head, and an extraordinary gaze of candor and astuteness, proposed that they merely give equal opportunity to both life and death.