Thomas The Obscure (5 page)

IX

W
HEN
SHE
CAME
AROUND
, entirely speechless now, refusing any expression to her eyes as well as her lips, still stretched out on the ground, the silence showed her so united with silence that she embraced it furiously like another nature, whose intimacy would have overwhelmed her with disgust. It seemed as if, during this night, she had assimilated something imaginary which was a burning thorn to her and forced her to shove her own existence outside like some foul excrement. Motionless against the wall, her body had mingled with the pure void, thighs and belly united to a nothingness with neither sex nor sexual parts, hands convulsively squeezing an absence of hands, face drinking in what was neither breath nor mouth, she had transformed herself into another body whose life—supreme penury and indigence—had slowly made her become the totality of that which she could not become. There where her body was, her sleeping head, there too was body without head, head without body, body of wretchedness. Doubtless nothing had changed about her appearance, but the glance one might direct toward her which showed her to be like anyone else was utterly unimportant, and, precisely because it was impossible to identify her, it was in the perfect resemblance of her features, in the glaze of naturalness and sincerity laid down by the night, that the horror of seeing her just as she had always been, without the least change, while it was certain that she was completely changed, found its source. Forbidden spectacle. While one might have been able to bear the sight of a monster, there was no coldbloodedness that could hold out against the impression created by this face on which, for hours, in an investigation which came to nothing, the eye sought to distinguish a sign of strangeness or bizarreness. What one saw, with its familiar naturalness, became, by the simple fact that manifestly it was not what one should have seen, an enigma which finally not only blinded the eye but made it experience toward this image an actual nausea, an expulsion of detritus of all sorts which the glance forced upon itself in trying to seize in this object something other than what it could see there. In fact, if what was entirely changed in an identical body—the sense of disgust imposed on all the senses forced to consider themselves insensitive—if the ungraspable character of the new person that had devoured the old and left her as she was, if this mystery buried in absence of mystery had not explained the silence which flowed from the sleeping girl, one would have been tempted to search out in such calm some indication of the tragedy of illusions and lies in which the body of Anne had wrapped itself. There was in fact something terribly suspicious about her mutism. That she should not speak, that in her motionlessness she should retain the discretion of someone who remains silent even in the intimacy of her dreams, all this was, finally, natural, and she was not about to betray herself, to expose herself, through this sleep piled upon sleep. But her silence did not even have the right to silence, and through this absolute state were expressed at once the complete unreality of Anne and the unquestionable and indemonstrable presence of this unreal Anne, from whom there emanated, by this silence, a sort of terrible humor which one became uneasily conscious of. As if there had been a crowd of intrigued and moved spectators, she turned to ridicule the possibility that one might see her, and a sense of ridicule came also from this wall against which she had stretched herself out in a way one might have taken (what stupidity) for sleep, and from this room where she was, wrapped in a
linen
coat, and where the day was beginning to penetrate with the laughable intention of putting an end to the night by giving the password: "Life goes on." Even alone, there was around her a sad and insatiable curiosity, a dumb interrogation which, taking her as object, bore also, vaguely, on everything, so that she existed as a problem capable of producing death, not, like the sphinx, by the difficulty of the enigma, but by the temptation which she offered of resolving the problem in death.

When day had come, as she was waking up, one might have thought she had been drawn from sleep by the day. However, the end of the night did not explain the fact that she had opened her eyes, and her awakening was only a slow exhausting, the final movement toward rest: what made it impossible for her to sleep was the action of a force which, far from being opposed to the night, might just as well have been called nocturnal. She saw that she was alone, but though she could rise only in the world of solitude, this isolation remained foreign to her, and, in the passive state where she remained, it was not important that her solitude should burst in her like something she did not need to feel and which drew her into the eternally removed domain of day. Not even the sadness was any longer felt as present. It wandered about her in a blind form. It came forward within the sphere of resignation, where it was impossible for it to strike or hit. Crossing over betrayed fatality, it came right to the heart of the young woman and touched her with the feeling of letting go, with absence of consciousness into which she leapt with the greatest abandon. From this moment on, not a single desire came to her to elucidate her situation in any way, and love was reduced to the impossibility of expressing and experiencing that love. Thomas came in. But the presence of Thomas no longer had any importance in itself. On the contrary, it was terrible to see to what extent the desire to enjoy this presence, even in the most ordinary way, had faded. Not only was every motive for clear communication destroyed, but to Anne it seemed that the mystery of this being had passed into her own heart, the very place where it could no longer be seized except as an eternally badly formulated question. And he, on the contrary, in the silent indifference of his coming, gave an impression of offensive clarity, without the feeblest, the most reassuring sign of a secret. It was in vain that she looked at him with the troubled looks of her fallen passion. It was as the least obscure man in the world that he came forth from the night, bathed in transparency by the privilege of being above any interrogation, a transfigured but trivial character from whom the problems were now separating themselves, just as she also saw herself turned away from him by this dramatically empty spectacle, turned away upon herself where there was neither richness nor fullness but the oppressiveness of a dreary satiety, the certainty that there should evolve no other drama than the playing out of a day where despair and hope would be drowned, the useless waiting having become, through the suppression of all ends and of time itself, a machine whose mechanism had for its sole function the measurement, by a silent exploration, of the empty movement of its various parts. She went down into the garden and, there, seemed to disengage herself at least in part from the condition into which the events of the night had thrown her. The sight of the trees stunned her. Her eyes clouded over. What was striking now was the extreme weakness she showed. There was no resistance left in her organism, and with her transparent skin, the great pallor of her glances, she seemed to tremble with exhaustion whenever anyone or anything approached her. In fact one might have wondered how she could stand the contact of the air and the cries of the birds. By the way she oriented herself in the garden, one was almost sure that she was in another garden: not that she walked like a somnambulist in the midst of the images of her slumber, but she managed to proceed across the field full of life, resounding and sunlit, to a worn-out field, mournful and extinguished, which was a second version of the reality she traveled through. Just when one saw her stop, out of breath and breathing with difficulty the excessively fresh, cool air which blew against her, she was penetrating a rarified atmosphere in which, to get back her breath, it was enough to stop breathing entirely. While she was walking with difficulty along the path where she had to lift up her body with each step, she was entering, a body without knees, onto a path in every way like the first, but where she alone could go. This landscape relaxed her, and she felt the same consolation there as if, overturning from top to bottom the illusory body whose intimacy oppressed her, she might have been able to exhibit to the sun which threw light on her like a faint star, in the form of her visible chest, her folded legs, her dangling arms, the bitter disgust which was piecing together an absolutely hidden second person deep within her. In this ravaged day, she could confess the revulsion and fright whose vastness could be circumscribed by no image, and she succeeded almost joyously in forcing from her belly the inexpressible feelings (fantastic creatures having in turn the shape of her face, of her skeleton, of her entire body) which had drawn within her the entire world of repulsive and unbearable things, through the horror that world inspired in her. The solitude, for Anne, was immense. All that she saw, all that she felt was the tearing away which separated her from what she saw and what she felt. The baneful clouds, if they covered the garden, nevertheless remained invisible in the huge cloud which enveloped them. The tree, a few steps away, was the tree with reference to which she was absent and distinct from everything. In all the souls which surrounded her like so many clearings, and which she could approach as intimately as her own soul, there was a silent, closed and desolate consciousness (the only light which made them perceptible), and it was solitude that created around her the sweet field of human contacts where, among infinite relationships full of harmony and tenderness, she saw her own mortal pain coming to meet her.

X

W
HEN
THEY
FOUND
HER
stretched out on a bench in the garden, they thought she had fainted. But she had not fainted; she was sleeping, having entered into sleep by way of a repose deeper yet than sleep. Henceforth, her advance toward unconsciousness was a solemn combat in which she refused to give in to the thrill of drowsiness until she was wounded, dead already, and defended up to the last instant her right to consciousness and her share of clear thoughts. There was no complicity between her and the night. From the time the day started to fade, listening to the mysterious hymn which called her to another existence, she prepared herself for the struggle in which she could be defeated only by the total ruin of life. Her cheeks red, her eyes shining, calm and smiling, she enthusiastically mustered her strength. In vain the dusk brought its guilty song to her ear; in vain was a plot woven against her in favor of darkness. No sweetness penetrated her soul along the path of torpor, no semblance of the holiness which is acquired through the proper acceptance of illness. One felt that she would deliver into death nothing other than Anne, and that, fiercely intact, retaining everything that she was until the very end, she would not consent to save herself by any imaginary death from death itself. The night went on, and never had there been so sweet a night, so perfect to bend a sick person. The silence flowed, and the solitude full of friendship, the night full of hope, pressed upon Anne's stretched-out body. She lay awake, without delirium. There was no narcotic in the shadows, none of those suspicious touchings which permit the darkness to hypnotize those who resist sleep. The night acted nobly with Anne, and it was with the girl's own weapons, purity, confidence and peace, that it agreed to meet her. It was sweet, infinitely sweet in such a moment of great weakness to feel around oneself a world so stripped of artifice and perfidiousness. How beautiful this night was, beautiful and not sweet, a classic night which fear did not render opaque, which put phantoms to flight and likewise wiped away the false beauty of the world. All that which Anne still loved, silence and solitude, were called night. All that which Anne hated, silence and solitude, were also called night. Absolute night where there were no longer any contradictory terms, where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common substance with black. And yet, night without confusion, without monsters, before which, without closing her eyes, she found her personal night, the one which her eyelids habitually created for her as they closed. Fully conscious, full of clarity, she felt her night join the night. She discovered herself in this huge exterior night in the core of her being, no longer needing to pass before a bitter and tormented soul to arrive at peace. She was sick, but how good this sickness was, this sickness which was not her own and which was the health of the world! How pure it was, this sleep which wrapped around her and which was not her own and blended with the supreme consciousness of all things! And Anne slept.

During the days which followed, she entered into a delicious field of peace, where to all eyes she appeared bathed in the intoxication of recovery. Before this magnificent spectacle, she too felt within herself this joy of the universe, but it was an icy joy. And she waited for that which could be neither a night nor a day to begin. Something came to her which was the prelude not to a recovery but to a surprising state of strength. No one understood that she was going to pass through the state of perfect health, through a marvelously balanced point of life, a pendulum swinging from one world to another. Through the clouds which rushed over her head, she alone saw approaching with the speed of a shooting star the moment when, regaining contact with the earth, she would again grasp ordinary existence, would see nothing, feel nothing, when she could live, live finally, and perhaps even die, marvelous episode! She saw her very far away, this well Anne whom she did not know, through whom she was going to flow with a gay heart. Ah! Too dazzling instant! From the heart of the shadows a voice told her: Go.

Her real illness began. She no longer saw anyone but occasional friends, and those who still came stopped asking for news. Everyone understood that the treatment was not winning out over the illness. But Anne recognized in this another sort of scorn, and smiled at it. Whatever her fate might be, there was more life, more strength in her now than ever. Motionless for hours, sleeping with strength, speed, agility in her sleep, she was like an athlete who has remained prone for a long time, and her rest was like the rest of men who excel in running and wrestling. She finally conceived a strange feeling of pride in her body; she took a wonderful pleasure in her being; a serious dream made her feel that she was still alive, completely alive, and that she would have much more the feeling of being alive if she could wipe away the complacencies and the facile hopes. Mysterious moments during which, lacking all courage and incapable of movement, she seemed to be doing nothing, while, accomplishing an infinite task, she was incessantly climbing down to throw overboard the thoughts that belonged to her alive, the thoughts that belonged to her dead, to excavate within herself a refuge of extreme silence. Then the baneful stars appeared and she had to hurry: she gave up her last pleasures, got rid of her last sufferings.