Aminadab 0803213131 (17 page)

cess? Anyone who leaves this room will be punished, and this punishment will exclude him henceforth from all communal work." But these threats and exhortations -while they made them afraid of losing the hope that spurred them on so ferociously- only managed to increase their anger, and they set out to execute their hateful plan. Then, already beaten, we began to implore them, trying to convince them of their error and their foolishness; we too were beside ourselves and were reduced to invoking the prohibition in the contract; we described to them the terrible dangers that tradition associated with these unknown places. Ridiculous memories. We had done all we could to destroy these legends and to render these super stitions innocuous. They answered us with mockery, and our behavior, so full of weakness and incoherence, shook our partisans and unsettled even ourselves. Soon the threshold was crossed. For a moment we wanted to follow them and to hold them back from any excesses, but whether it was fear that mounted within us, or whether our concern for our work out stripped every other thought, we decided to abandon them, and the door closed behind them. Alas, what we had foreseen was far surpassed in hor ror and malediction by what actually happened. First, the tum ult of their departure was followed by an extraordinary silence. We had not left the room, and we forced ourselves to continue working as usual- as though our work still had any sense. But already our minds condemned what our hands were doing. At the first noise we heard, we all stopped, silent and pale, casting glances toward the place from which the noise seemed to call to us. It's a strange fact, but the noise seemed to come from below, from the basement or from a place even more hidden away. One would have thought that somewhere in the foundations of the house there rose a voice that, without anger but with a terrible and righteous gravity, proclaimed our misfortune to all. But we hardly had the time to look around to see what each of us was thinking. From above there came cracking sounds, noises that were sometimes muffled, sometimes sharp, a grinding together of beams and planks. Well, what was this? Were they going to bring it down on our heads? And yet above us there were only the rooms of the first floor, a place that seemed untouched by any mystery. What was this unexpected danger? With what tragic and unpredictable effects would we all pay for our blindness and for the madness of a few? A new silence fell over our un certain thoughts. We did not have the courage to speak to one another; we remained motionless, as if a gesture, a shout would have been enough to

bring down upon us the fate that our obedience was still holding in place. At times, overcome with fear, we imagined hearing the crashing noise of a collapse, and our eyes saw the walls shaking and the drapery trembling. Absurd terrors that were only the first signs of a reality that was infinitely more terrible. We were abruptly shaken from our imaginary fright by a shock that rumbled through the entire house. Then we heard inhuman cries that could only be coming from a horrifying anguish. The light went out. Even more grave and powerful tremors reverberated in the upper spaces. We began to hear calls, but in truth they were so separated from us, and so distant, that they seemed not to be calling for us but saying farewell. And yet these cries awakened us, and we rushed to the door. Hardly had we opened it when a veritable quake shook the edifice, and in the middle of a deafening tumult, part of the ceiling of the large hall collapsed, bury ing our friends, our leaders, and the best part of our work. Today such moments seem incredible. Those of us who were not wounded were even more to be pitied than the dying. While those in their death throes, struck down at the high point of their dreams, believed they saw shining through the shadows the work for whose sake they had succumbed, the rest of us saw only the punishment, a punishment that was all the more unbearable in that we did not know how it had fallen upon us and could only attribute it to obscure powers, to invisible masters, to the law that had punished us because we had trespassed it. And yet what we believed to be the height of our misfortune was only the beginning. Soon we saw some of our unhappy companions returning. They were ragged and bloody. They collapsed at our feet; but others came in turn, trembling more than if they had wit nessed their own death, and childish tears coursed down their cheeks at the sight of us. These, however, were peaceful men, inhabitants of the first floor who had always refused to take part in our enterprise and who lived very retired lives. Why had they too been drawn into this madness at the last minute? For a long time we were unable to learn anything about it. We were all dead and alive, lying inanimately in the night. From time to time a few of the poor wretches returned, but if reason, in taking leave of them, had left the least trace on their countenance, we were unable to see it. It was only gradually that we returned to life, if one can call life the curse with which we were stricken. A man lying next to me was invaded by a wave of words. What he said to me was almost incomprehensible, but did I myself still possess the strength to understand? Have I ever re88

gained it? The words were as foreign to me as if they had been cast out at random by a formless mouth. I heard nothing; I saw nothing; the words echoed in me with a painful sonority and put me in touch with a truth I tried to push away. And yet it is this story that has remained for me the only real explanation of this great drama. Later, I collected other calmer accounts, and I have been able to connect some of the facts. What is this version worth? Does it have more value than the inexpressible confession of that unfortunate man of the night? How could I ever know? Who will ever distinguish the light among these shadows? What had happened was in a sense the result of a very simple confusion. When they left our room, blinded by their own temerity, struggling in vain against the terrors we had reawakened in them, prisoners, perhaps, of the law that inspired their derangement, the troop of rebels rushed toward the stairway leading to the first floor, as if in that instant they had crossed the line of demarca tion beyond which they had no right to go. It seemed already to these men that they were in the forbidden zone, surrounded by threats and driven by fear into the very place they dreaded most. A strange illusion, a profound mirage. The entire house was forbidden to them. They could not [accept] that what they had before them were ideal barriers that they had to break down but that they could not overcome.l With each step they committed the fault of violating the rules, although they were still completely free, and this fault seemed to them so weighty and so terrible that they felt they were lost and required the greatest excesses to redeem themselves from the feeling of their crimes. With an ax they broke down the first closed door they came to. They hacked at the stairway, attempting through an instinctive prudence to cut themselves off from the path they believed it was scandalous to follow. But they pressed ever onward. They arrived on the first floor without recognizing it, and in their fury, they believed they had reached the accursed spaces. Their madness knew no bounds. They wanted to annihilate everything, disperse everything, kill everything, and kill themselves too, so that as the house collapsed, they and their faults would be buried in the rubble. Such murderous rage, such destruction memory alone cannot contain its traces. Coming across the unfortunate tenants who were panic stricken from this avalanche, they saw in them
1.

This sentence is ungrammatical as it stands in the original and requires a verb here;

accordingly, a word has been added as a likely possibility. -Tr.

l

the strangers whose vengeance would soon strike out against them; they let loose the blows that would forestall this condemnation; they knocked against the walls and attacked the floorboards. Everything ended in a sin ister collapse. But there were a few who must have climbed even higher. They actually reached the upper floors. What did they see, what did they do? The only thing they have ever said, again and again, is that it was the same. Naturally, the same. How could these forbidden places have been any different for them compared to the places they had just left, since even the latter were already forbidden to them? Beginning already with the first floor, what they saw, with their eyes and their minds, was the tearing apart of appearances that had made life possible up to then. They perceived what we did not see, because we had remained faithful to the rule. Hardly had they set out on the old familiar ways when they found themselves already, and in fact, in this separate world where they had no right to be, having reached in a single step the heights from which they could now only fall. This is what is expressed in their terror and their madness. In the unreason that struck them, they behaved like reasonable beings whose eyes, now opened onto nameless things, commanded them to perform unnamable acts that they could not carry out and that they replaced with acts that were merely desperate. Their loss itself was the only thing that could con sole them for what they were losing. How it was that all these thoughts arose in our minds, how it was that in our overwhelming distress we pulled together the scraps of truth made audible to us only in the language of the dead, that is what would be incomprehensible if the curse that befell us had not conveyed us little by little into the heart of evil. For the true curse began only after the disaster itself. I am not speaking of the physical pain, which we managed to ease, nor of the material upheaval, which later on, thanks to the trained teams that remained with us, we were able to re pair, more or less. But one day, while we were dragging around like sick people, we saw all the rebels -all those whose wounds had not hastened their end - rise up together all at once. Even the ones we believed to be struck dead regained their strength and joined their companions. It was a mysterious sight. Would they attempt new acts of madness? Had disorder brought them together once again? No, no. Silently, with a quiet discipline, they formed a sort of troop, the ordered and yet derisory counterpart to the little army they had been at the time of the rebellion. They set out for the basement. The worm-eaten stairway that used to lead there still 90

existed. They worked their way down it. Fearing that I had guessed their thoughts, I ran after them, took one by the arm, held on to his clothes. What would they do? Where were they going? For the first time I con templated their faces. Sad, impossible looks. There was no need to stare at them for very long to understand what they had in mind. Their faces were unrecognizable. Although their features had remained the same, they already resembled one another and no longer bore any resemblance to us. A sort of beauty ravaged them. Their eyes, which seemed tired from the light of the place, gave off a kind of spark that made me ashamed. Their cheeks took on strange hues that attracted and repelled. They seemed to bathe in life and joy, and yet there was a desperation in their smallest ges tures. I threw myself at their feet and called to the other tenants, and we all begged them to give up their plans. Some of them heard our prayers and broke down in tears. We said nothing more; their pain itself overwhelmed us, for it only proved to us that we could not hold them back. We would have had to encircle them with chains, as we sometimes did later, trying to stop them from setting out again, but everything seemed useless. Their hearts were no longer able to bind them to us. So they left; they left the house. Such a step was unheard-of. What did they hope to find outside, what did they w.ant? Peace? A new life? But no such things could be given them. So then who was driving them far from our dwelling, who was trans forming them so much that it had become unbearable for them to stay? Perhaps an illusion, perhaps remorse? When I asked them to explain their decision, they responded with childish babbling. Some of them said that they could no longer live surrounded by four walls, that they needed open spaces and sunshine. Others spoke for the first time of their families and friends to whom they wanted to bring news. Such ideas were ridiculous. What was this sun, what was this climate they were now going in search of, when already long ago they could bear the memory of it no more? Could they even have relatives and friends anywhere other than in the house? Such madness! And what happened next confirmed this. Seeing that their resolutions were unshakable, we tried to gain time in the hope that they would not remain so. Since they were numerous and the half-rotten stair way threatened to collapse whenever a single person stepped foot on it, we managed to convince them that a new one had to be built. All our hope lay in this return to life in common. We mingled with them; we never ceased by our very presence to press them to abandon their plan. The construc91

tion proceeded slowly. They were as docile as they were disciplined. They worked with a sad eagerness that seemed to come not from their impa tience but rather from the very habits of diligence that we ourselves had imparted to them and that today only served to hasten their exile. These were heavy, oppressive days. Not only were we unhappy because of these companions we were losing, we were also tormented by the thought that this departure, more than any collapse, would be the end of the house and that it would drastically alter our lot. These fears took shape in our minds. We began again to look anxiously at these creatures who were sacrificing us to their misfortune. Our contact with them, already a cause for repug nance, filled us with disgust. Was it because of the judgments they had made against us, or because of the bizarre transformation they had under gone, whose effects I was the first to feel? It seemed to us that something evil was being exhaled through their mouths. Their smell was no longer like ours at all, and when they touched us, their hands made us shiver. We had to keep ourselves at a distance. We avoided speaking to them. The words they themselves spoke seemed to us so clamorous and so strangely chosen that they left us numb and sometimes remained completely in comprehensible. It soon became impossible for us to maintain ordinary relations with them. We addressed each other with gestures and signs, and even then we did not always understand them. We came to the point of wanting them to disappear as quickly as possible. Was not their stay here now regarded with disapproval? Of course it was; they were leaving be cause they no longer had the right to stay, and if they did not like the house, that's because it was entirely forbidden to them. The house was pushing them out. The prohibition had slowly come down from the closed spaces in which it originated, and now it was making its way to them, forcing them into a position where no defense was possible because no hope was pos sible. How insane we were to hold them back! Should we not have driven them out instead? We completed the construction in a few hours and pre pared everything for their departure. How long it took us to relieve our selves of their presence! But now, on the verge of finding that freedom they had desired, they felt nothing but the shame, the distress, and the fear that it represented to them. We had to send them down to the basement and barricade our doors. We shouted and screamed, trying to frighten them. We heard them moaning, and these moans excited our hatred all the more. "Go!" we said to them. "Go to the sun you love so much; console your92