Aminadab 0803213131 (26 page)

((I was a witness in a matter concerning the employees," he said suddenly. ( meaningless affair," said the girl, without interrupting her work. ((Should I not follow it?" asked Thomas. ((Certainly," she said. ((But you will follow it in any case." ((How do you mean?" he asked again. ((You must have heard a lot about the staff," she said in a slightly sharp tone, as if she herself had nothing to say about it. ((But that is a subject de void of interest, and there is no need to discuss it at any length. Seen from below, the life of the employees seems extraordinary and gives rise to vio lent passions. Here, it is something that passes virtually unnoticed. Higher up, there is certainly never any question about it. Do not go creating for yourself worries that would supposedly disappear if you had a different status. The affair you speak of will make use of you as long as you remain within the circle of its influence; it will vanish as soon as you have left it." ((Don't you know these employees?" said Thomas. ((Always more questions," answered the girl, with a look of annoyance. ((Don't waste your strength in such a foolish way. How could I not know them? I know them all. It may be true that I remember them individually only when I see them on the lower floors. Otherwise there is no way to think of the staff except as a solid block; they are so similar to each other that it is impossible to distinguish them in one's memory. And why would we distinguish them? Are there hundreds of them, is there only one? If they fulfill their duty, it's as if they don't exist; if they fall back into the common lot, they are always too numerous. Abandon these superfluous problems; it is not by reflecting on them that you will change the course of things." ((But aren't you part of the staff?" asked Thomas. ((What if I am?" said the girl. ((It's always possible to say that one belongs to the staff, just as one can always claim to be a tenant. Will the ceiling fall on your head if you assert that you are a porter in the house? Nothing will happen, and bolstered by such an experience, you can confidently display your title to the ordinary clientele." ((I understand what you're saying," said Thomas anxiously. ((But in speak ing of you, I was thinking of something quite different. Upon seeing you, it does not occur to one to think of how busy you are, of the services you perform, or of your situation, which must be considerable; one's mind is on very different things. There is rather an image of something very new that is not quite clear at first and that, even when one has a sense of it, is 143

never easy to grasp. Perhaps you bring with you an evocation of the world you come from; and perhaps this evocation is not always manifest to us, and our eyes can only perceive it from time to time. Then one cannot look at you without despair; but it is also true that one cannot stay with you without being comforted." "You are getting lost in illusions," said the girl. "On my face I bring with me nothing but the evocation of fatigue and the traces of a life weighed down by responsibilities. The world you speak of has not left any memo ries; there is no way to preserve even the smallest particle of something that can only be enjoyed when one remains a stranger to it." "I am probably chasing after phantoms," said Thomas, "but how could I resist them? I watch you working, and all I have before me is the pros pect opened by my recent loss. You spared nothing in taking away all my hope; I am surrounded by misfortune; and yet I make no effort to leave. Something therefore keeps me here with you, and what could it be if not the hope for a more beautiful life that you give to me despite yourself?" "No," said the girl feebly. "These are mere reveries. I am but a humble maidservant, and you do not see me as I should be seen. It is your own desire to live that you see on my face; here you would search in vain for a true light. Look around: is the darkness not growing? My lamp hardly sheds any light on me, and I, who have very good eyes, I can no longer make out your features. How could you still turn your gaze toward me?" Thomas did not have the impression that the light had dimmed; he still saw the girl in the same place, her two hands buried in the white cloth where they worked almost invisibly - her tired but brilliant face. "Is it also a dream," he said, "that you come from regions not accessible to everyone, regions that one cannot help trying to imagine? Since I will never be able to go there, must I also give up thinking about it? Now that would be rather exaggerated, it seems to me." The girl shook her head with a look of distress. "Your words," she said, "are so childish that I have trouble even hearing them. Sit quietly here with me, and banish from your mind all these images that torment it. That is the best thing I can say to you." "Perhaps I have behaved like a child up to now," said Thomas, "but now it's quite different. I am beginning to see clearly what I have to do. I will make up for lost time." "Your road ends here," said the girl. 1 44

"The road I was wrong to follow, yes," said Thomas, "but I will choose another path." "There is no other way," said the girl. ''All the exits are closed. Where would you go?" "Upstairs," said Thomas. "That again," said the girl. "Are you trying to force me to reveal what is forbidden? Keep quiet, your words will make me sick." "No," said Thomas, "I still have quite a few things to say. Let me be the one to give you some explanations now. Mlle Barbe," he continued in a louder voice, "your reproaches were no doubt well founded, and as you pointed out to me, all my exertions have been in vain. But these re proaches, which would be devastating to someone else, do not affect me in quite the same way. I may indeed confide to you that I entered the house only in passing and do not wish to be a tenant. When I was in the street, I thought I saw someone make a sign to me, and I wanted to go look for the person who had called me. After that, things did not happen as I thought they would; I encountered many difficulties, and in the end I have not suc ceeded. But if I made mistakes through a lack of reflection and through ignorance, I did not lose sight of my plan. It is this goal that I have always had in mind. I am persuaded - you see, I'm being honest with you - that if I found the person who invited me to enter, then all the obstacles would be leveled and the mistakes made good. Now, where is this person? You are the one I am counting on to help me find her." The girl looked at Thomas with a shiver and murmured: "What insanity do I have to listen to? Why do I stay here?" "I know, I know," said Thomas. "My manner of speaking offends you, but it is better to speak plainly. I will no doubt scandalize you further by saying that in my opinion, if I could communicate with the higher floors, I would be very near to establishing contact with my unknown stranger. According to what I believe I have seen, she lives on the third or fourth floor, in one of the apartments overlooking the street. With such a refer ence point, the search should not be too difficult. Of course, the best thing would have been for me to go up and see her myself. But you have proved to me that this is impossible; I will therefore give up the idea. But was it really necessary for me to go all the way to her door? Most likely not. What is indispensable, however, is that I communicate with her so that she may know how things stand for me in the house. One can certainly make ob145

jections to such a project, and I already see them rising to your lips; but even though it is a delicate matter, there is no reason to believe that it will encounter insurmountable obstacles, and I believe that with a little de termination and tact, it can be brought to a successful conclusion. In any case, I have no choice. Difficult or not, it is to this that I must apply all my strength." Thomas saw that the girl had pushed away the table and chair and was now sitting a few steps farther away; he tried to move closer. The chair felt too heavy, and he gave up. "What do you think about my plan?" he asked. Would she answer him? Would he have to keep up the conversation until the end? Would fatigue not prevent him from continuing? A single word, even a word of refusal, would have given him encouragement. "You don't want to tell me your opinion? So be it. Then I can only ex amine for myself the various means at my disposal in order to weigh the difficulties and make a decision. You cannot deny that relations do exist between the various parts of the house. You may as well deny your own existence. For as long as my eyes can rest on you, I will be certain that at least one person has been upstairs and that there is a way to come back from there. That in itself is already an essential point. So I am not overstep ping the limits of what is reasonable in thinking that, if I had a message to send, I could find an intermediary who would take responsibility for delivering it. However, I am not naIve enough to believe that, from the moment I found someone I could trust, composed my message, and saw the messenger disappear from sight, I could have much hope for success. Far from it. What goes on upstairs? I know nothing about it. Naturally I have been told a great many things, and it may be that some of them are true; nothing, however, is completely trustworthy. The most serious and the most captivating things I heard have come from you, MIle Barbe, and it is your presence that continues to provide me with the most precious in formation. To judge by what you have told me, between the floor we are on and the one above us, there is such a great distance that when one returns, one hardly remembers having been there and can no longer recall what there was to see. Consequently, any effort to imagine what goes on there is useless. Perhaps one's senses do not provide any help; perhaps thought itself remains idle there and can grasp nothing. Perhaps, since there is no way to observe what people do and what happens there, there is nothing

in particular to set it apart, and one might find oneself there without even knowing it. All these hypotheses, concerning which I will refrain from ask ing your opinion, make the following conclusion seem most likely; namely that, despite his good will, the messenger, upon arriving upstairs, will have forgotten his message and will be unable to transmit it; or else, assuming he has scrupulously retained the terms in which it was formulated, it will be impossible for him to understand its meaning, for what has a certain meaning here must have a completely different one there, or perhaps none at all; he will wander aimlessly then, and when he returns, he will simply bring my petition back to me as a categorical refusal that will take away my very last hope. This is assuredly a very serious difficulty, and if it stood in my way, I would be forced to recognize my failure. Is there then no pos sibility of establishing any contact between the people upstairs and us? I believe there is. For it is a notion proper to this place - which certainly does not have the slightest value anywhere else -that the message would have to be pronounced in order to be understood. A crude and false idea. How could I place any importance at all on words that my mind could dic tate, when these words are meant to be heard in a place to which no mind has access? How could I be more intent on transmitting words whose inter est depends on the circumstances of my life, than on attaining - in a form that I can hardly conceive, and precisely through the forgetting of these words - the place it is most important for me to reach? Unheard-of luck and good fortune if the messenger has no memory of the message; noth ing better could ever happen; if he casts out my thought, then he remains truly faithful to it, has understood it perfectly, and has taken it into his heart. But then how can he communicate this thought that he has totally eliminated because it comes from below, in what way can he make heard in silence the voice translated by muteness alone? Do I really need to know this? He will be there and will simply have to show himself. What he him self will have become, I refuse to imagine, for 1 assume that he will be as different from what I am as the transmitted message will be different from the one that is received. Everything that distances him brings him closer; everything that makes me fear he is lost confirms me in the hope that he will succeed." Thomas interrupted himself as if it were better to conclude silently what he still had to say; then he added: "Am I still in error?" He said this not in order to receive an answer -he no longer expected any - but to challenge 1 47

the girl, who seemed to him to be the last obstacle to his project. What silence surrounded him now! It was true that she seemed to have receded a thousand miles from him, although at times -was this an illusion pro duced by his tired vision? -this face, from which he never moved his eyes away, seemed larger than it had been at the beginning of the conversa tion. The lips at which he ardently stared moved as if they personally had something to say but something from which the rest of the body wanted to dissociate itself. Well, what was she saying? He leaned his ear toward her; he was mistaken; she spoke to him in the ordinary way. "I am trying," she said, "to understand your words; but try as I might, they have no meaning for me. According to the few scraps I managed to catch, I have the vague impression that you are waiting for help and that, so you think, this help should come from someone who lives up above. A strange thought. You are no doubt unaware that there is no one in the upper floors." "No one?" asked Thomas. "No one," the girl repeated. "But there is nothing surprising in that. You yourself know enough to guess that the material conditions are defective and that for this reason there is nothing to be found there but emptiness and desolation. Get this into your head: Up above, there is nothing and no one." "Nothing," said Thomas again. "Really nothing?" He thought for a mo ment, and then he said, as though coming out of a dream: "Naturally. What could I have been thinking? It could not be otherwise. I understand your response perfectly well, MIle Barbe. For me, having been so deeply ab sorbed in the life that goes on here - and, after all, even for you who reside at least momentarily in these lower places -there is no other way to put it. You are absolutely right then: There is nothing, and there is no one." Barbe shook her head. "There you are again out of your depth, and I can no longer comprehend you. And yet I spoke clearly enough, however painful it may have been. Nothing. Do you understand this word? Nothing. Its meaning is simple. Assuming you did have the strength to go up there, well, you could wander around for hours, for months, for your entire life, and you would find nothing there." "Now wait a moment, MIle Barbe, you take me for more of a child than I am. It's obvious; I would find nothing. As I am now, poorly dressed, with out the least bit of guidance or experience? I would be the first one to be