Aminadab 0803213131 (27 page)

caught if I saw anything. How many transformations would be necessary! How many radical changes in one's habits! It's as much as to say that one must be reduced to nothing oneself." "But not at all," said Barbe, with anger. "You are uselessly complicating everything. I do not know in what form you would arrive up there; obvi ously you would be in a fine state; but you would see no more and no less than what there is to see, an empty, deserted apartment, brighter than the others perhaps, covered with dust and uninhabited." "I like your way of presenting the facts," Thomas said calmly. "You are right to place them before me and to be wary of my unrefined imagination. There is no better way to make a man like myself understand the feeling that would take hold of him in these regions, which he believes he could enter, whereas he must continue to be separated from them forever; in a sense, he would witness nothing surprising; what could be more ordinary than the desolate, timeworn rooms without furniture that he would actu ally see there, instead of the sumptuous palace conjured up by his imagi nation? For years he would wander in vain through these spaces; I can ap preciate your image; everything would remain as sad, as uninhabitable as it ever was, until the day when he would have to die in disappointment and ignorance, having found nothing of what he had hoped for. As for myself, what else could happen to me, a man from the basement who, as you were kind enough to inform me, will remain attached for his entire life to the humble room that the administration assigned to him once and for all as his residence? I have absorbed your lesson very well and have no fear of falling into my oId errors." "You're even more obstinate than I thought," said Barbe. "Has there ever been anyone so blind? What can I possibly say to make you stop distort ing the truth? You speak constantly ofyourself, as if everything I told you about the apartments above concerned only you. But there is no question of what you would see or what you would do, and there will never be any question of that. Rather it has to do with me, and with the others, with all those, whoever they may be, who have entered into the secrets of the house. Well, everything we have learned is contained in the word noth ing; we have seen nothing, because there is nothing, and there is nothing because, between the four walls of each room, no furniture remains, no stove, no useful objects of any kind; likewise the doors have been removed, the paintings taken down, and the carpet carried away. So, please, enough 1 49

with your childish ideas; your messenger may well accept your message, learn it by heart, and take it up above at the risk of his own life, but he will find no one to deliver it to." "That's understood," said Thomas, "it is categorical, and your language could not be clearer. Nevertheless, I will make a few more remarks. First, however distrustful I have become regarding the value of my memories, I have difficulty believing that I was mistaken when I saw someone in the window on one of the upper floors. I saw her very distinctly, and although I cannot describe her now - I am much too tired - I believe that I would easily recognize her if she were to appear again. Is it an illusion, a confu sion born from fever? I am inclined to admit as much, but I have reason to think that there is a bit too pronounced a tendency here to explain every thing in terms of illusions. Besides, the illusions may not all be mine. I was struck, MIle Barbe, during your exceedingly clear explanations, by certain contradictions - no doubt they are due to my obtuse mind, but they are no less surprising for all that - between what you said to me a while ago and what you later asked me to accept as true. Explain to me, then, how you could have described - and indeed with so many interesting details the conditions of these famous apartments, whereas, if my memory serves me correctly, you also claimed that no one could retain any memory of the time they have spent there. This worries me. Might there not be a confu sion on your part that has led you to express your absence of memory with this word nothing that you pronounce with such energy, a word that you then, since it is so easy to use, rendered even more significant by comple menting it with the image of a dusty, empty apartment? I cannot pretend that there is nothing more to say on this subject; everything is no doubt different from what one might be able to think using the feeble means at our disposal here. And yet I had the impression, no doubt mistaken, that although you gave up trying to preserve any memory, properly speak ing, of your time upstairs, you brought back an extraordinary, inexpress ible feeling, something completely unique that could only be experienced outside the bounds of our everyday life. If my impression was justified, should I not conclude from this that these supposedly empty apartments are nonetheless very attractive, to the point of imprinting on a sensibility such as yours traces that anyone can then admire?" "Where do you see any contradictions?" answered Barbe. She had almost finished her work and poised herself stiffly on her chair without looking 15 0

up, as if she had to focus all her strength on the final stitches. She spoke in a softer tone, with the very pleasant voice she had had in the beginning. "There are contradictions only between your hopes and this world that does not grant them. Do you want to know the truth?" "Yes," said Thomas. "In principle," she continued, "I should keep silent, for it is strictly for bidden to speak of these matters; we fear that words, no matter how care fully chosen, cannot suitably express such delicate facts; it is therefore wrong of me to be discussing it with you; however, if I disregard this pro hibition, it is because I cannot bear to see you get lost in these hopes, and because in any case you will have no opportunity to misuse the truth. Most of those who enter the house," she said, "are driven at first by the desires you yourself have experienced. Some feel them so strongly that they can not make any progress at all. They are nailed to the spot. They exhaust themselves in the first place they light on here, and they offer a sorry sight, for they are still accustomed to the life outside, and their senses are ob scured by the fog they cannot manage to penetrate; they burn like unruly candles suffocated by their own flame, and they let off a black smoke and a sickly odor. Newcomers such as these are lost from the very first step. They are locked awaycso that they will not pollute the atmosphere of the house, which is already so impure. Others, on the contrary, live for a long time in the building without ever coming out of their idleness, which they enjoy without being attracted by the restlessness of change. These are good ten ants. They accept their lot. They submit to the rules, these famous rules that people are so anxious to discuss in the grand halls and that most often exist only in the minds of the people who get worked up about them. Gradually, as a result of the relations they develop, and by dint of living in the midst of the perpetual intrigues in which everyone here passionately struggles, the fever seizes hold of them, and they begin to be driven upward. Naturally, for most of them it is only a question of an inner migration. What would happen to us if this crowd actually got it into their heads to begin their journey? But they drift along with their dreams, and these dreams allow them to glimpse great and mysterious hopes that absorb their contempla tion and that they project into places they do not know and will never have the strength even to hope to know. The fate that awaits them is therefore infinitely varied, and as I was saying, it is almost impossible to compare the destiny of one to that of another. For some, their desire becomes so press15 1

ing that they can resist it only by involving themselves in some febrile and disordered activity; they find it necessary to take care of the business of the house; or they need to create a sense of belonging - even if from afar, from infinitely far away -to the mysterious existence whose center they locate somewhere up above, and from which they receive, so they think, the impulse to continue, as well as a few rules to live by. This applies, if you will, to the bulk of the staff. When they work, they often forget the desire that burns in them, and their service, which is so chaotic and so full of conflict, reflects the vicissitudes oflife and death through which they pass, and in which their passion remains just as often unconscious as conscious. It happens in the long run that this desire, which has been unable to tri umph over their busy activity, begins to find nourishment wherever it can and takes more and more crude forms, to the point of erasing this hope from above, toward which their desire had directed them. They are then momentarily cured of their torments, and they fall into base and servile occupations from which they sometimes never rise again. But others who are in truth very rare - escape from this need for miserable activity that drives their companions to flee what had at first attracted them. They resent with great fervor the strange conditions in which they find them selves, and before giving in to the attraction exerted upon them, they are as if indefinitely held back by the vanity of their efforts, and they attach themselves almost forever to the low places they first came to know. In the place where they are, it seems to them that they will never be able to exhaust completely whatever it is they might enjoy there, and despite the bitterness they harbor and the inexplicable sufferings of their very simple life, they patiently wait, persuaded that they are condemned to remain in an obscure and plaintive distress. This wait can last a very long time. It is uncertain whether for some it ever comes to an end. They are seen trying to transform themselves, changing the color of the room they never leave, each day becoming more disaffected and dull, to the point that they are easily confused with objects and come to resemble the house itself. There is really nothing to be said about them; no one knows what becomes of them later. But among the small group of those who have mistrusted their desire, there are some who, one day, receive the order to change places; sometimes they move up, sometimes down, it matters little. The important thing for them, what renews their strength, is that they have been given the proof that in patience and passivity the principle of a blessed action may be 15 2

found. They have been remembered; they have been pulled from the ditch where they were sure to die. It is true that, as soon as they have entered a new place or a new function, they begin once again to believe they will never get out. They are still distraught at the height of their prison walls, and though their strength may have increased, even if they possessed the keys that opened every door for them, they are incapable of taking the few steps required to attain the object of their wishes. One would think that the passion that ravages them and that grows as they climb higher is only directed against another deeper passion whose fire they will feel when it has been extinguished. As the desire drawing them upward becomes more intense, because its obstacles have been diminished, the more they find within themselves the means to combat it and to detach themselves from it. Thus it is that they alone approach those regions that remain inaccessible to others. I could never describe to you the last stages through which they pass before coming upon that great opening without a door that lies at the end of their aspirations. The torments and delights they undergo there are such that they cannot preserve them in their memory. They are no longer anything, and yet they are everything. They are touched by an intense love that, however, has none of the colors oflove and that reaches them through the abandonment in which it leaves them. They are driven by a glorious hope composed of all the hopes they have previously renounced. They are finally so annihilated by the effort required to resist the temptation to go where they desire with all their soul to go, that they are often consumed by it and succumb to the force of their passion. Some never move past the first step; others go as far as the doorway, where they remain lying in a heap; and yet most of them do enter and leave, after realizing, as they take their last steps in utter indifference and in the death of their last desire, that everything was indeed as they themselves had guessed; the apartment is quiet and empty, and there is nothing left to desire because there is noth ing. When they return, life begins again; the feelings that remain with a person from such a journey are so fine and complex that what one remem bers is liberated from the journey itself, and memory itself retains only the deep and intense ardor that has animated them up to the end. A stronger hope is formed from the particles of images that still burn with a new pas sion. One aspires to return to these unspeakable places that are tarnished by no disappointment and to which one remains ever near in a patience that is renewed as well. They are the same paths, the same stations where 153

one finds traces of the tears one has shed, and it is the same radiant suffer ing, the same tragic happiness in progressing so slowly toward a goal that one wishes all the more to reach, since one knows that in attaining it, there will be nothing more to wish." The girl seemed to have finished her work; she had set the needle and thread down on the table, and she laid her hands on the large cloth that, however, she had left unfolded. She raised her head, and Thomas met her gaze, a pure and candid gaze from which all light had faded away. He wanted to answer her; but although he knew what he had to say, he shrank back from the effort required to search for the words he needed. Yet he re gretted his silence when he saw that the girl still wanted to speak to him. No matter how gently she might address him, he was oppressed and fatigued by all this talk. "What could you have seen at the window?" she said. "The shutters are closed, and no one can open them onto the outside and lean out. If a ray of light happens to slip between the cracks, it is so feeble that no one notices it, and only later, when going back down, or even much later than that, does one perceive it, as though it could only illuminate you when you have come back into those dark rooms below. No, you have been the victim of an illusion; you thought someone was calling you, but no one was there, and the call came from you. Now," she said, standing up, "it's getting late; you are very tired; you should think about getting some rest. What a mess here," she said, looking at the shreds of fabric and loose thread on the floor. ''I'm going to clean up after my work." Thomas watched her intently. She was small and agile; he had not been mistaken when, downstairs, he had been struck by her childlike face, full of kindness and charm. She stepped lightly across the room. In a few moments everything was put back in order. She stopped near Thomas, touched his shoulder, and said: ''I'm going to open the door. You can look out for a second; it's nice to have some open space out in front of you after being closed up in this room." She went to the door opposite Thomas and then turned back to add: "I am disobeying the orders, so look quickly." Through the opening, Thomas saw a long vault held up by short, thick columns that came together in arches. He was able to see clearly the first columns, which were lit on each side by a shimmering light like the fire of a distant star, but in the other two-thirds of the nave he saw nothing more. 1 54