Nausea (12 page)

When I found myself on the Boulevard de la Redoute again nothing was left but bitter regret. I said to myself: Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?

Behind me, in the town, along the great, straight streets lit up by the cold reflection from the lamp posts, a formidable social event was dissolving. Sunday was at an end.

Monday:

How could I have written that pompous, absurd sentence yesterday:

"I was alone but I marched like a regiment descending on a city."

I do not need to make phrases. I write to bring certain circumstances to light. Beware of literature. I must follow the pen, without looking for words.

At heart, what disgusts me is having been so sublime last evening. When I was twenty I used to get drunk and then explain that I was a fellow in the style of Descartes. I knew I was inflating myself with heroism, but I let myself go, it pleased me. After that, the next morning I felt as sick as if I had awakened in a bed full of vomit. I never vomit when I'm drunk but that would really be better. Yesterday I didn't even have the excuse of drunkenness. I got excited like an imbecile. I must wash myself clean with abstract thoughts, transparent as water.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It's rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn't worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she'll be

old, only you don't see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

If I remember correctly, they call that the irreversibility of time. The feeling of adventure would simply be that of the irreversibility of time. But why don't we always have it? Is it that time is not always irreversible? There are moments when you have the impression that you can do what you want, go forward or backward, that it has no importance; and then other times when you might say that the links have been tightened and, in that case, it's not a question of missing your turn because you could never start again.

Anny made the most of time. When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were only exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one. I remember one of those terrible evenings. I was supposed to leave at midnight. We went to an open-air movie; we were desperate, she as much as I. Only she led the game. At eleven o'clock, at the beginning of the main picture, she took my hand and held it in hers without a word. I was flooded with a bitter joy and I understood, without having to look at my watch, that it was eleven o'clock. From that time on we began to feel the minutes passing. That time we were leaving each other for three months. At one moment they threw a completely blank image on the screen, the darkness lifted, and I saw Anny was crying. Then, at midnight, she let go of my hand, after pressing it violently; I got up and left without saying a word to her. That was a good job.

7.00 f.m.

Work today. It didn't go too badly; I wrote six pages with a certain amount of pleasure. The more so since it was a question of abstract considerations on the reign of Paul I. After last evening's orgy I stayed tightly buttoned up all day. It would not do to appeal to my heart! But I felt quite at ease unwinding the mainsprings of the Russian autocracy.

But this Rollebon annoys me. He is mysterious in the smallest things. What could he have been doing in the Ukraine in 1804? He tells of his trip in veiled words:

"Posterity will judge whether my efforts, which no successcould recompense, did not merit something better than a brutal denial and all the humiliations which had to be borne in silence, when I had locked in my breast the wherewithal to silence the scoffers once and for all."

I let myself be caught once: he showed himself full of pompous reticence on the subject of a short trip he took to Bou-ville in 1790. I lost a month verifying his assertions. Finally, it came out that he had made the daughter of one of his tenant farmers pregnant. Can it be that he is nothing more than a low comedian?

I feel full of ill-will towards this lying little fop; perhaps it is spite: I was quite pleased that he lied to others but I would have liked him to make an exception of me; I thought we were thick as thieves and that he would finally tell me the truth. He told me nothing, nothing at all; nothing more than he told Alexander or Louis XVIII whom he duped. It matters a lot to me that Rollebon should have been a good fellow. Undoubtedly a rascal: who isn't? But a big or little rascal? I don't have a high enough opinion of historical research to lose my time over a dead man whose hand, if he were alive, I would not deign to touch. What do I know about him? You couldn't dream of a better life than his: but did he live it? If only his letters weren't so formal. . . . Ah, I wish I had known his look, perhaps he had a charming way of leaning his head on his shoulder or mischievously placing his long index on his nose, or sometimes, between two polished lies, having a sudden fit of violence which he stifled immediately. But he is dead: all that is left of him is "A Treatise on Strategy" and "Reflexions on Virtue."

I could imagine him so well if I let myself go: beneath his brilliant irony which made so many victims, he was simple, almost naive. He thinks little, but at all times, by a profound intuition, he does exactly what should be done. His rascality is candid, spontaneous, generous, as sincere as his love of virtue. And when he betrays his benefactors and friends, he turns back gravely to the events, and draws a moral from them. He never thought he had the slightest right over others, any more than others over him: he considered as unjustified and gratuitous the gifts life gave him. He attached himself strongly to everything but detaches himself easily. He never wrote his own letters or his works himself: but had them composed by the public scribe.

But if this is where it all leads me, I'd be better off writing a novel on the Marquis de Rollebon.

11.00 p.m.

I dined at the Rendezvous des Cheminots. The patronne was there and I had to kiss her, but it was mainly out of politeness. She disgusts me a little, she is too white and besides, she smells like a newborn child. She pressed my head against her breast in a burst of passion: she thinks it is the right thing. I played distractedly with her sex under the cover; then my arm went to sleep. I thought about de Rollebon: after all, why shouldn't I write a novel on his life? I let my arm run along the woman's thigh and suddenly saw a small garden with low, wide trees on which immense hairy leaves were hanging. Ants were running everywhere, centipedes and ringworm. There were even more horrible animals: their bodies were made from a slice of toast, the kind you put under roast pigeons; they walked sideways with legs like a crab. The larger leaves were black with beasts. Behind the cactus and the Barbary fig trees, the Velleda of the public park pointed a finger at her sex. "This park smells of vomit," I shouted.

"I didn't want to wake you up," the woman said, "but the sheet got folded under my back and besides I have to go down and look after the customers from the Paris train."

Shrove Tuesday:

I gave Maurice Barres a spanking. We were three soldiers and one of us had a hole in the middle of his face. Maurice Barres came up to us and said, "That's fine!" and he gave each of us a small bouquet of violets. "I don't know where to put them," said the soldier with the hole in his head. Then Maurice Barres said, "Put them in the hole you have in your head." The soldier answered, "I'm going to stick them up your ass." And we turned over Maurice Barres and took his pants off. He had a cardinal's red robe on under his trousers. We lifted up the robe and Maurice Barres began to shout: "Look out! I've got on trousers with foot-straps." But we spanked him until he bled and then we took the petals of violets and drew the face of Deroulede on his backside.

For some time now I have been remembering my dreams much too often. Moreover, I must toss quite a bit because every morning I find the blankets on the floor. Today is Shrove Tuesday but that means very little in Bouville; in the whole town there are hardly a hundred people to dress up.

As I was going down the stairs the landlady called me:"There's a letter for you."

A letter: the last one I got was from the curator of the Rouen public library, last May. The landlady leads me to her office and holds out a long thick yellow envelope: Anny had ritten to me. I hadn't heard from her for five years. The letter

written

had been sent to my old Paris address, it was postmarked the first of February.

I go out; I hold the envelope between my fingers, I dare not open it: Anny hasn't changed her letter paper, I wonder if she still buys it at the little stationer's in Piccadilly. I think that she has also kept her coiffure, her heavy blonde locks she didn't want to cut. She must struggle patiently in front of mirrors to save her face: it isn't vanity or fear of growing old; she wants to stay as she is, just as she is. Perhaps this is what I liked best in her, this austere loyalty to her most insignificant features.

The firm letters of the address, written in violet ink (she hasn't changed her ink, either) still shine a little:

"Monsieur Antoine Roquentin"

How I love to read my name on envelopes. In a mist I have recaptured one of her smiles, I can see her eyes, her inclined head: whenever I sat down she would come and plant herself in front of me, smiling. She stood half a head higher than I, she grasped my shoulders and shook me with outstretched arms.

The envelope is heavy, it must have at least six pages in it. My old concierge has scrawled hieroglyphics over this lovely writing:

"Hotel PrintaniaùBouville"

These small letters do not shine.

When I open the letter my disillusion makes me six years younger:

I don't know how Anny manages to fill up her envelopes: there's never anything inside.

That sentenceùI said it a hundred times during the spring of 1924, struggling, as today, to extract a piece of paper, folded in four, from its lining. The lining is a splendour: dark green with gold stars; you'd think it was a heavy piece of starched cloth. It alone makes three-quarters of the envelope's weight.

Anny had written in pencil:

"I am passing through Paris in a few days. Come and see me at the Hotel d'Espagne, on February 20. Please! (she had

added 1 beg you' above the line and joined it to 'to see me' in a curious spiral). I must see you. Anny."

In Meknes, in Tangiers, when I went back, in the evening, I sometimes used to find a note on my bed: "I want to see you right away." I used to run, Anny would open the door for me, her eyebrows raised, looking surprised. She had nothing more to tell me; she was even a little irritated that I had come. I'll go; she may refuse to see me. Or they may tell me at the desk: "No one by that name is stopping here." I don't believe she'd do that. Only she could write me, a week from now and tell me she's changed her mind and to make it some other time.

People are at work. This is a flat and stale Shrove Tuesday. The Rue des Mutiles smells strongly of damp wood, as it does every time it's going to rain. I don't like these queer days: the movies have matinees, the school children have a vacation; there is a vague feeling of holiday in the air which never ceases to attract attention but disappears as soon as you notice it.

I am undoubtedly going to see Anny but I can't say that the idea makes me exactly joyous. I have felt desoeuvre ever since I got her letter. Luckily it is noon; I'm not hungry but I'm going to eat to pass the time. I go to Camille's, in the Rue des Horlogers.

It's a quiet place; they serve sauerkraut or cassoulet all night. People go there for supper after the theatre; policemen send travellers there who arrive late at night and are hungry. Eight marble tables. A leather bench runs along the walls. Two mirrors eaten away by rust spots. The panes of the two windows and the door are frosted glass. The counter is in a recess in the back. There is also a room on the side. But I have never been in it; it is reserved for couples.

"Give me a ham omelet."

The waitress, an enormous girl with red cheeks, can never keep herself from giggling when she speaks to a man.

"I'm afraid I can't. Do you want a potato omelet? The ham's locked up: the patron is the only one who cuts it."

I order a cassoulet. The patron's name is Camille, a hard

man.

The waitress goes off. I am alone in this dark old room. There is a letter from Anny in my despatch case. A false shame keeps me from reading it again. I try to remember the phrases one by one.

"My Dear Antoine------"I smile: certainly not, Anny certainly did not write "My Dear Antoine."