New arc lamps were now flaring again in his eyes — three thousand degrees of heat. They’ve already forgotten the marginal happenstance that had extinguished them a moment before, they’ve honestly forgotten. He’s raised his head so high, as if looking out for that impossible yoke under which he would have been bent, his fingers with their still-boyish knuckles — these fingers adapted to dry, unwieldy, painful, and sweetly punitive embraces — unbuttoned his overcoat, tugged a bit at his vest, buttoned it up again, gave his tie and the downturned brim of his hat an imperious flick, and with a snap these fingers said “good luck!” to him who was the only person he counted on absolutely: himself.
And now it’s the snoop who is walking past the mirror; the snoop has cast a fleeting sidelong glance. . Whom does he see? An elderly child. And this disastrous kitchen boy of moral petitions says: “That one there looks after himself; when we look after ourselves we become self-confident. Look after yourself!”
He recalled the mirrors at Benedictine Mill, the mirrors in town. Did they lie? They did not. They spoke the truth: but it was the truth of betrayal, for he betrays himself. That’s how it is, he betrays himself! He’s not quite thirty-five. So is the truth that he’s ugly truer than the truth that he’s not repulsive? And in particular, what’s truer than the truth that he also has a right, a right I say, to this here? — Thirty-five, and how does he dress? Why does he dress like a man rebuffed? If he were to put some effort into it — like that other fellow. If he were to command himself to! The mimetic method of exercising one’s faith: a proven mystical practice. –
The baggy knees, and the unironed coat, and the stupid habit of cramming his pockets with so many unnecessary things. And why skimp on underwear? Like you can’t tell? Idiot! Neglect always begins where it can’t be seen! And this disgraceful fakery with the threadbare end of his necktie. . So who was the rascal who whispered to him that all of this is of no consequence? As though he didn’t know his name: his so-called soul. — Of no consequence! — And he, who had obeyed him! Who’d repudiated himself for a sanctimonious stranger who thinks of nothing but how to leave him run-down, dilapidated, wrecked, in a lurch — his own foolishly accommodating shelter! His soul! The place where it’s set its sights, this soul, his soul, what if he gets there too, he who knows this place, who is languishing and suffering? He won’t, you say? So then who’s it for? — But he’s pointing at his soul. — It’s a secure box, isn’t it? The spurned substance besides which there is no him! It’s enough to whisper sweet nothings to it: “Be on guard, don’t work for free”—and then we’ll see what the soul can do. . What it can do against two.
“Ah,” they uttered when he headed toward their table, which, feigning nearsightedness, he had recognized when he’d barely come in.
The café was skimping: the lights only went on at the signal of the girl at the register, and the exasperated girl at the register, hounded by the protests of the readers of yesterday’s newspapers, was giving the signal, as they’d really gotten into her hair. — There were seven electric switches; the manager, pivoting methodically from one to the next, was unknowingly opening seven successive heavens. He was coming in only with the messy entrance of the seventh heaven’s forgetful pathos. — Aperitifs, hardwired to the finest coils of the rheostats of the central office for the production of Paris’s “happy hour” fever, glowed slowly from red to white: the café babble flowed like the red from the electric furnaces. The esoteric sense of the furious evening palaver shimmered over the heated trickles of words. It was moseying unobtrusively to and fro, without anyone paying it particular attention: a nonchalant, spherical flash to which they’d become accustomed, and which is effusive without inflicting harm. But from thinking of the not-so-likely possibility that it might pounce after all, and of what might happen afterward, heat was radiating and kindling the room to an infectious and unfounded enthusiasm. The pathological euphoria had deformed the world into untainted beauty, into purpose and order, and to those breathing it in, it indeed seemed a world of untainted beauty, of originary purpose and order. Troubles, difficulties, jealousy, envy, worries, destitution — these went on, but amplified, ennobled, dignified. The wretched microcosms saw themselves in the collective fever’s artful mirror; they saw themselves there in heroic disproportion, and they grew as bold as notaries who’ve overindulged at funeral parties: in mourning coats, which they took for tragic togas. Flying words, sentences, proverbs, witticisms, the gossip spun a net; it was thickening into a more cogent reality than the actuality of those who, in talking, were unwittingly doing the weaving. They were getting tangled in it and growing into a familial form.
“Ah!” they uttered in chorus when they spotted him (and they spotted him immediately in the revolving doors), and they made a little room for him at the table—“ah!”—and they drew him in with their eyes, which were watching like eight examining magistrates. They surrounded him with looks, and those looks were merely the optical extension of the speech they’d only just been conducting about him.
“See who’s. .?”
This “see who’s. .?” in greeting had its own brief story. “See who’s. .?” was an incomplete sentence, which the unsaid “here” fit like Cinderella’s foot into the slipper. He noticed this “here?” What he noticed, that is, was the hand that passed just as though it were swatting a fly, and the fly it was swatting, yes, could be nothing other than a mocking “here,” with a question mark that had, however, unfortunately — or else fortunately — slipped away. Yes, it had latched into the middle of the newcomer’s head like a fishhook. He was caught on the question mark, literally, but it was an extraordinary question mark, for it was a question mark/answer, at which he blushed from his wounded brow downward. And he had been suspicious of himself for so many days already that he was, in his calculatedly chosen attire — the Boulevard Poissonnière had consequences, bad ones, according to the laws that governed them — like a crooked man in a straightening apparatus: convicted by the very thing he’d wanted to use to deceive. The question mark demonstrates to him that he isn’t actually dressed, he’s just funnily dressed up. What are you doing running into the labyrinth, you poor thing, when you can no longer afford a spool of thread?
Ordinary days, like bourgeois-starched Sundays — they constrict him like unweathered shirts.
The mocking “here” with the question mark put him at the level of a doleful subaltern bureaucrat, who, on Sunday night, puts on that cheap finery for which he’d saved up so much, and which again wasn’t helping him. Nor would it help a week later, when he brushes it off again, when he, hoping against hope, puts it on again, again, and again ad infinitum, coming back ad infinitum on Sunday evenings, again and again, each time a little more deluded, but never so hopeless — each time, then, a little funnier — that he’d manage a corrective: “Never again.”
He recognized himself, and, disgusted with himself, he exaggerated his own insignificance with furious and burning delight, until it was like the insignificance of a nameless corpse at the morgue, which not even grief notices. — And no “I’m unhappy” anywhere for him to hide behind. Now that’s fair!