Thereupon it turned out that the darkness in which the street was drowned was merely the lights going down on the stage so that the scenery could be changed without lowering the curtain; now, with the gradual drawing of the gauze drapes, the darkness was slowly fading, and when the last of them had lifted — the bell was cut off — the street turned out to be like so many others. On the street, there commenced a rectilinear motion that curved gracefully not far from there, craving the charms of the spiral, which it actually found quite quickly as well. It commenced along the street and slowly started spinning. Everything started spinning, notably the shop, as well as the saleswoman, Tiemen, the four policemen, and Mr. Steel. But not him: the fixed center putting his hands up in the melodramatic gesture of the penitent villain who is imploring them, for the love of God, to throw the cuffs on him. The policemen grew into a quartet, like soldiers carved into a single wooden slab, and it was a quartet so intricately detailed and of such hungry life force that, whirling, it sucked down everything else. At length, it passed into an undifferentiated and rushing blue — a preponderance of uniforms — where even the tanned whiteness of the policemen’s faces came crashing down. And he was realizing what it is to get drunk on enthusiasm for one’s own wretchedness when he noticed that someone had hit the brake: the blue turning was slowing down, and from the non-difference that hampered it there emerged, one after the other — like the drowned — what was left: first of all, and before anything else, the four policemen’s faces, but faces no longer with martial mustaches, rather four lovely faces, cruel, but by no means evil, and they were the faces of people leaving, who wave gallantly and say:
“You’ll get out of this somehow. À un de ces jours.”
And they actually did say this. — “À un de ces jours” had transformed into a quite material obstacle, upon which all motion foundered because (he told himself): “à un de ces jours” is just a mockingly respectful “goodbye.”
And that “goodbye” was the impact that no fall resists, and it, too, needed to be stopped, with a jolt so harsh that a brief and nasty cramp of “non possumus” ran through his calves.
The tall and flimsy stalk, to the tip of which he had been clinging till now by God-knows-what miracle, snapped, felled, and he, dreadfully sober, on a café chair behind a small mahogany table: emptied glasses and six theater tickets, scattered like a family of refugees in that place where they had been blown by the gale of impoverished misfortune, which howls for an echo that remains adamantly quiet.
And Tiemen is here with a dolefully fuming cigarette and the smile of an ashamed good Samaritan.
“Where are they going, Tiemen? After all, I was supposed to buy tickets to the cinema.”
Tiemen was drawing in the strewn cigarette ash. “Well, you know what they’re like.”
“If I do know them. . And they,” he screamed, so that the people turned around, “and they don’t know me?”
“That is possible only from this day forward,” Tiemen said curtly; but just then he took the cigarette from his lips, leaned forward, and placed his left hand on the ashen hand of the nameless:
“Now then. .”
“Teach me, Tiemen. — Tiemen, I’ve had something knocking around my head for a long time. .”
“What’s knocking around your head?”
“So many months already I’ve been chasing myself in vain. — That I might find myself, that I’d find myself, if only I dared to. .”
“What?”
“Steal.”
Tiemen’s hand stopped him.
“Uh-uh, no, not that way. It’s not something you can teach; you have to know how.”
“To steal?”
Tiemen withdrew his friendly hand, sat sideways, and said, bitterly disappointed, “So you really are taking ‘steal’ literally? Steal! To hell with stealing. Take things easy, like a sneak thief in steerage — a sportsman-idealist. Can you do that? You can’t. So suck it up.”
The days grew so short that they weren’t enough, they overflowed with milky futility and reeked of fermentation gone bad; then, even though they had begun at four o’clock, the nights could no longer accommodate all their specters: they protruded from those nights deep into rebellious, peevishly clouded daybreaks, which arrived as though only so the infinite nights would take pity on the people who hadn’t fallen asleep, and because something has to replace the actual night. — Time’s wound had been weeping for fourteen days already, and it still hadn’t drained. The sun will come out here and there, a prefect sacrificing a scrap of stolen siesta to appease his conscience and see what the class has been up to in his illegal absence. But the sun, too, is merely rain gone wrong. It does the puddles on the embankment good, not so anyone else. But the puddles’ satisfaction is as base as slime. They creep everywhere and behind everything. The only thing they don’t venture through is the padded doors of bank directors; the puddles are also afraid of the garrulous lights of cafés, the false, cleverly arranged puzzles of small theaters, teatimes in ateliers with plank beds, and the standardized coziness of rooms in one-hour hotels. A hard-won reconciliation or a retraction as resolute as an exclamation point, which is a reconciliation divisible without remainder, is perhaps even better protection from a teary November stain. But he, having a choice between two equally unattainable things, has decided that his despicable poverty is from an insufficiency of what may once have been attainable: a room with a padded door, the encouraging chatter of café incandescents, the proxenetic dimness of chummy salles de spectacle, the literary pretexts of sex and their hurried stripping-down in discreet alcoves — he gave it up, as an ailing man gives up forbidden foods: with choked-down and renunciatory rage, which compensates not for one’s hope in recovery, but for the triumph of one’s unnecessary will, by which he recoups his damages. But the agreeable, calculating ascetic dressed with intentional slovenliness, so that he was two fingers away from hobo; he, with the greasy cap and the raggedy old shoes that the rag man didn’t want to buy off him, looked down from embankments and bridges at the turbid, helplessly indifferent river, and looking into it he read, well, maybe not so much that there’s no sure point at all, but that there’s no sure point that would mean much to him. And the bit player, who toyed boorishly with the fact that he has nothing, spent his days lying to himself, with a violence bordering on pleasure, that what he doesn’t have is just the thing that matters to him a great deal, and unhappily so. But one day, when, having caught a glimpse of his old “gang” from afar, he couldn’t pull together hot or cold, when the thought that “there they go” was accompanied by neither sorrow nor revolt, he admitted to himself, with a clairvoyance we’ll call heroic, that he had forgotten to suffer; he had even headed off the notion’s correlate, that is, that that’s why he’s on the bottom.
That’s why? On the contrary. He’s on the bottom, and that’s why he can no longer suffer. A nostalgia for misfortune, but so incidentaclass="underline" he didn’t miss it, he just knew that there was a reason to. And at the same time he noticed how excruciatingly beautiful life was then, in those times when to him, too, the world seemed depopulated for no other reason than that one single being was missing from it. . He looked, and he found that he no longer missed anyone or anything. He was astonished to find that, but in no way petrified. And it wasn’t a burning astonishment; it merely fumed. If he wanted — and he wanted this and nothing else — he found himself impressive, putrid, and swollen excuses to his heart’s content: at intersections, on corners, under street-sweepers’ brooms, next to bollards, and in church vestibules; mitigating circumstances proliferated like moldy mushrooms: in the neighborhood of Saint-Sulpice, in the window of stores selling devotional items, he spotted Him Who Was Crucified, and the blood sparkling on the tops of his feet gained a voice, and it implored: “See, you have been sold out as well.” But his bankrupt ambition didn’t abate: excuses that all you have to do is bend down for? He swept them into the gutter with his heel; the filthy mushrooms will get trampled, and the blood shouts out, “Heel!” — And all of this calmly, dispassionately, right? With an honorable prudence, he naturally refuses, because he knows that they’re offering it to him by mistake: with a nasty, though not agonizing, feeling that he’s playing without knowing with whom, cheating without knowing how, but that he’s most certainly cheating.