Nausea (22 page)

His eyes question me; I nod approval, but I feel he is a little disappointed, that he would like more enthusiasm. What can I do? Is it my fault if, in all he tells me, I recognize the lack of the genuine article? Is it my fault if, as he speaks, I see all the humanists I have known rise up? I've known so many of them! The radical humanist is the particular friend of officials. The so-called "left" humanist's main worry is keeping human values; he belongs to no party because he does not want to betray the human, but his sympathies go towards the humble; he consecrates his beautiful classic culture to the humble. He is generally a widower with a fine eye always clouded with tears: he weeps at anniversaries. He also loves cats, dogs, and all the higher mammals. The Communist writer has been loving men since the

second Five-Year Plan; he punishes because he loves. Modest as all strong men, he knows how to hide his feelings, but he also knows, by a look, an inflection of his voice, how to recognize, behind his rough and ready justicial utterances, his passion for his brethren. The Catholic humanist, the late-comer, the Benjamin, speaks of men with a marvellous air. What a beautiful fairy tale, says he, is the humble life of a London dockhand, the girl in the shoe factory! He has chosen the humanism of the angels; he writes, for their edification, long, sad and beautiful novels which frequently win the Prix Femina.

Those are the principal roles. But there are others, a swarm of others: the humanist philosopher who bends over his brothers like a wise elder brother who has a sense of his responsibilities; the humanist who loves men as they are, the humanist who loves men as they ought to be, the one who wants to save them with their consent and the one who will save them in spite of themselves, the one who wants to create new myths, and the one who is satisfied with the old ones, the one who loves death in man, the one who loves life in man, the happy humanist who always has the right word to make people laugh, the sober humanist whom you meet especially at funerals or wakes. They all hate each other: as individuals, naturally not as men. But the Self-Taught Man doesn't know it: he has locked them up inside himself like cats in a bag and they are tearing each other in pieces without his noticing it.

He is already looking at me with less confidence.

"Don't you feel as I do, Monsieur?"

"Gracious ..."

Under his troubled, somewhat spiteful glance, I regret disappointing him for a second. But he continues amiably:

"I know: you have your research, your books, you serve the same cause in your own way."

My books, my research: the imbecile. He couldn't have made a worse howler.

"That's not why I'm writing."

At that instant the face of the Self-Taught Man is transformed: as if he had scented the enemy. I had never seen that expression on his face before. Something has died between us.

Feigning surprise, he asks:

"But ... if I'm not being indiscreet, why do you write, Monsieur?"

"I don't know: just to write."

1 17He smiles, he thinks he has put me out:

"Would you write on a desert island? Doesn't one always write to be read?"

He gave this sentence his usual interrogative turn. In reality, he is affirming. His veneer of gentleness and timidity has peeled off; I don't recognize him any more. His features assume an air of heavy obstinacy; a wall of sufficiency. I still haven't got over my astonishment when I hear him say:

"If someone tells me: I write for a certain social class, for a group of friends. Good luck to them. Perhaps you write for posterity. . . . But, Monsieur, in spite of yourself, you write for someone."

He waits for an answer. When it doesn't come, he smiles feebly.

"Perhaps you are a misanthrope?"

I know what this fallacious effort at conciliation hides. He asks little from me: simply to accept a label. But it is a trap: if I consent, the Self-Taught Man wins, I am immediately turned round, reconstituted, overtaken, for humanism takes possession and melts all human attitudes into one. If you oppose him head on, you play his game; he lives off his opponents. There is a race of beings, limited and headstrong, who lose to him every time: he digests all their violences and worst excesses; he makes a white, frothy lymph of them. He has digested anti-intellectualism, Manicheism, mysticism, pessimism, anarchy and egotism: they are nothing more than stages, unfinished thoughts which find their justification only in him. Misanthropy also has its place in the concert: it is only a dissonance necessary to the harmony of the whole. The misanthrope is a man: therefore the humanist must be misanthropic to a certain extent. But he must be a scientist as well to have learned how to water down his hatred, and hate men only to love them better afterwards.

I don't want to be integrated, I don't want my good red blood to go and fatten this lymphatic beast: I will not be fool enough to call myself "anti-humanist." I am not a humanist, that's all there is to it.

"I believe," I tell the Self-Taught Man, "that one cannot hate a man more than one can love him."

The Self-Taught Man looks at me pityingly and aloof. He murmurs, as though he were paying no attention to his words:

"You must love them, you must love them. . . ."

"Whom must you love? The people here?"

"They too. All."

He turns towards the radiant young couple: that's what you must love. For a moment he contemplates the man with white hair. Then his look returns to me: I read a mute question on his face. I shake my head: "No." He seems to pity me.

"You don't either," I tell him, annoyed, "you don't love them."

"Really, Monsieur? Would you allow me to differ?"

He has become respectful again, respectful to the tip of his toes, but in his eyes he has the ironic look of someone who is amusing himself enormously. He hates me. I should have been wrong to have any feeling for this maniac. I question him in my turn.

"So, those two young people behind youùyou love them?"

He looks at them again, ponders:

"You want to make me say," he begins, suspiciously, "that I love them without knowing them. Well, Monsieur, I confess, I don't know them. . . . Unless love is knowing," he adds with a foolish laugh.

"But what do you love?"

"I see they are young and I love the youth in them. Among other things, Monsieur."

He interrupts himself and listens:

"Do you understand what they're saying?"

Do I understand? The young man, emboldened by the sympathy which surrounds him, tells, in a loud voice, about a football game his team won against a club from Le Havre last year.

"He's telling a story," I say to the Self-Taught Man.

"Ah! I can't hear them very well. But I hear the voices, the soft voice, the grave voice: they alternate. It's . . . it's so sympathetic."

"Only I also hear what they're saying, unfortunately."

"Well?"

"They're playing a comedy."

"Really? The comedy of youth, perhaps?" he asks ironically. "Allow me, Monsieur, to find that quite profitable. Is playing it enough to make one young again?"

I stay deaf to his irony; I continue:

"You turn your back on them, what they say escapes you. . . . What colour is the woman's hair?"

He is worried:"Well, I ..." He glances quickly at the young couple and regains his assurance. "Black!"

"So you see!"

"See what?"

"You see that you don't love them. You wouldn't recognize them in the street. They're only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you're touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice."

"Well? Doesn't that exist?"

"Certainly not, it doesn't exist! Neither Youth nor Maturity nor Old Age nor Death. . . ."

The face of the Self-Taught Man, hard and yellow as a quince, has stiffened into a reproachful lockjaw. Nevertheless, I keep on:

"Just like that old man drinking Vichy water there behind you. I suppose you love the Mature Man in him: Mature Man going courageously towards his decline and who takes care of himself because he doesn't want to let himself go?"

"Exactly," he says definitely.

"And you don't think he's a bastard?"

He laughs, he finds me frivolous, he glances quickly at the handsome face framed in white hair:

"But Monsieur, admitting that he seems to be what you say, how can you judge a man by his face? A face, Monsieur, tells nothing when it is at rest."

Blind humanists! This face is so outspoken, so frankùbut their tender, abstract soul will never let itself be touched by the sense of a face.

"How can you," the Self-Taught Man says, "stop a man, say he is this or that? Who can empty a man! Who can know the resources of a man?"

Empty a man! I salute, in passing, the Catholic humanism from which the Self-Taught Man borrowed this formula without realizing it.

"I know," I tell him, "I know that all men are admirable. You are admirable. I am admirable. In as far as we are creations of God, naturally."

He looks at me without understanding, then with a thin smile:

"You are undoubtedly joking, Monsieur, but it is true that all men deserve our admiration. It is difficult, Monsieur, very difficult to be a man."

Without realizing it, he has abandoned the love of men in Christ; he nods his head, and by a curious phenomenon of mimicry, he resembles this poor man of Gehenna.

"Excuse me," I say, "but I am not quite sure of being a man: I never found it very difficult. It seemed to me that you had only to let yourself alone."

The Self-Taught Man laughs candidly, but his eyes stay wicked:

"You are too modest, Monsieur. In order to tolerate your condition, the human condition, you, as everybody else, need much courage. Monsieur, the next instant may be the moment of your death, you know it and you can smile: isn't that admirable? In your most insignificant actions," he adds sharply, "there is an enormous amount of heroism."

"What will you gentlemen have for dessert?" the waitress says.

The Self-Taught Man is quite white, his eyelids are half-shut over his stony eyes. He makes a feeble motion with his hand, as if inviting me to choose.

"Cheese," I say heroically.

"And you?"

He jumps.

"Eh? Oh, yes: well ... I don't want anything. I've finished."

"Louise!"

The two stout men pay and leave. One of them limps. The patron shows them to the door: they are important customers, they were served a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice.

I study the Self-Taught Man with a little remorse: he has been happy all the week imagining this luncheon, where he could share his love of men with another man. He has so rarely the opportunity to speak. And now I have spoiled his pleasure. At heart he is as lonely as I am: no one cares about him. Only he doesn't realize his solitude. Well, yes: but it wasn't up to me to open his eyes. I feel very ill at ease: I'm furious, but not against him, against Virgan and the others, all the ones who have poisoned this poor brain. If I could have them here in front of me I would have much to say to them. I shall say nothing to the Self-Taught Man, I have only sympathy for him: he is someone like M. Achille, someone on my side, but who has been betrayed by ignorance and good will!

A burst of laughter from the Self-Taught Man pulls me out of my sad reflections."You will excuse me, but when I think of the depth of my love for people, of the force which impels me towards them and when I see us here, reasoning, arguing ... it makes me want to laugh."

I keep quiet, I smile constrainedly. The waitress puts a plate of chalky Camembert in front of me. I glance around the room and a violent disgust floods me. What am I doing here? Why did I have to get mixed up in a discussion on humanism? Why are these people here? Why are they eating? It's true they don't know they exist. I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in. ... But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trof.

The Self-Taught Man grows softer. He expected more resistance on my part. He is ready to pass a sponge over all I have said. He leans towards me confidentially:

"You Jove them at heart, Monsieur, you love them as I do: we are separated by words."

I can't speak any more, I bow my head. The Self-Taught Man's face is close to mine. He smiles foolishly, all the while close to my face, like a nightmare. With difficulty I chew a piece of bread which I can't make up my mind to swallow. People. You must love people. Men are admirable. I want to vomitùand suddenly, there it is: the Nausea.

A fine climax: it shakes me from top to bottom. I saw it coming more than an hour ago, only I didn't want to admit it. This taste of cheese in my mouth. . . . The Self-Taught Man is babbling and his voice buzzes gently in my ears. But I don't know what he's talking about. I nod my head mechanically. My hand is clutching the handle of the dessert knife. I feel this black wooden handle. My hand holds it. My hand. Personally, I would rather let this knife alone: what good is it to be always touching something? Objects are not made to be touched. It is better to slip between them, avoiding them as much as possible. Sometimes you take one of them in your hand and you have to drop it quickly. The knife falls on the plate. The white-haired man starts and looks at me. I pick up the knife again, I rest the blade against the table and bend it.