Yet if you put your work, your ordinary activities, your everyday agitation, on hold, and devote yourself solely to thinking, things go very differently. Soon things start rising up, in heavy, dark waves. At night, your dreams fall apart, unfurl, and proliferate, and when you wake they leave a fine, bitter film at the back of your mind, which takes a long time to dissolve. Don’t misunderstand me: I am not talking about remorse, or about guilt. These too exist, no doubt, I don’t want to deny it, but I think things are far more complex than that. Even a man who has never gone to war, who has never had to kill, will experience what I’m talking about. All the meanness, the cowardice, the lies, the pettiness that afflict everyone will come back to haunt him. No wonder men have invented work, alcohol, meaningless chatter. No wonder televisions sell so well. I quickly cut short my leave of absence, it was better that way. I had plenty of time left to scribble, at lunchtime or in the evening after the secretaries had gone home.
A brief interruption while I go and vomit, then I’ll continue. That’s another one of my numerous little afflictions: from time to time my meals come back up, sometimes right away, sometimes later on, for no reason, just like that. It’s an old problem, I’ve had it since the war, since the fall of 1941, to be precise, it started in the Ukraine, in Kiev I think, or maybe Zhitomir. I’ll talk about that too probably. In any case, I have long since gotten used to it: I brush my teeth, down a little shot of alcohol, and continue what I was doing. Let’s get back to my memories. I bought myself a stack of copybooks, the large ones, quadrille-ruled, which I keep in a locked drawer at my office. Before, I used to jot my notes down on index cards, also quadrille-ruled; now I’ve decided to start all over and forge ahead. I’m not really sure why. Certainly not for the edification of my progeny. If at this very moment I were suddenly to keel over, from a heart attack, say, or a stroke, and my secretaries were to take the key and open this drawer, they’d have a shock, the poor things, and my wife too: the index cards alone would be more than enough. They’d have to burn every last scrap quickly to avoid a scandal. It would be all the same to me, I’d be dead. And in the end, even though I’m addressing you, it’s not for you that I am writing.
My office is a pleasant place to write, airy, sober, peaceful. White, almost bare walls, a glass cabinet for samples; and across from my desk a long bay window that looks out onto the factory floor. Despite the double-glazed glass, the incessant clatter of the Leavers looms resonates through the room. When I want to think, I leave my work table and go stand in front of the window; I gaze down at the looms lined up below, at the sure, precise movements of the workers, and let myself be lulled. Sometimes I go down and stroll among the machinery. The room is dark, the filthy windows are tinted blue, since lace is fragile and sensitive to light, and this bluish light soothes my mind. I like to lose myself for a while in the monotonous, syncopated clanking that fills the space, a metallic, obsessive two-step beat. The looms always impress me. They are made of cast iron, were once painted green, and each one weighs ten tons. Some of them are very old, they stopped being made a long time ago; I have the spare parts made to order; after the war, electricity replaced steam power, but the looms themselves haven’t been touched. I never go near them, to keep from getting dirty: all these moving parts have to be constantly lubricated, but oil, of course, would ruin the lace, so we use graphite, a fine black powder dusted over the moving parts of the mechanism with an old sock, swung like a censer. It turns the lace black and coats the walls, as well as the floor, the machinery, and the men who supervise it. Even though I don’t often get my hands dirty, I know these great machines well. The first looms were British and a jealously guarded secret; a few were smuggled into France just after the Napoleonic Wars by workers fleeing the excise duties. They were modified to produce lace by a man from Lyon, Jacquard, who added a series of perforated strips to them to determine the pattern. Cylinders down below feed the thread upward; in the heart of the loom, five thousand bobbins, the soul, are slotted into a carriage; then a catch-bar (the English term has been carried over into French) grips and sets this carriage swinging front to back, with a loud hypnotic clapping. The threads are guided laterally, according to a complex choreography encoded within some five or six hundred Jacquard strips, by copper combs sealed onto lead, and are thus woven into knots; a swan’s neck carries the rake up; finally the lace appears, gossamer-like, disturbingly beautiful under its coat of graphite, slowly rolled onto a drum, fixed at the top of the Leavers.
Work in the factory runs according to a strict principle of sexual segregation: the men design the patterns, punch the strips, set up the chains, supervise the looms, and manage the supply racks surrounding them; their wives and daughters, even today, remain bobbin threaders, bleachers, menders, taperers, and folders. Tradition runs strong. Our tulle makers, up here, are something of a proletarian aristocracy. Apprenticeship is lengthy, the work delicate; a century ago, the weavers of Calais came to work in buggies, wearing top hats, and called the boss by his first name. Times have changed. The war ruined the industry, despite a few looms kept working for Germany. Everything had to be started again from scratch; whereas before the war four thousand looms used to operate, today, in the North, only about three hundred are left. Still, during the postwar boom, tulle makers were able to buy themselves cars before many a banker did. But my workers don’t call me by my first name. I don’t think my workers like me. That’s all right, I’m not asking them to like me. And I don’t like them either. We work together, that’s all. When an employee is conscientious and hardworking, when the lace that comes out of his loom doesn’t need much mending, I give him a bonus at the end of the year; if someone comes to work late, or drunk, I punish him. On that basis we understand each other.