The Age of Reason Read online

  ‘You are out early this morning, Monsieur Sereno.’

  ‘I was afraid you were ill, dear lady,’ replied Daniel with an air of concern. ‘I got back late last night, and I saw a light under the lodge door.’

  ‘Just imagine,’ said the concierge. ‘I was so done up that I fell asleep without turning the light off. Suddenly I heard the sound of your bell. Ah, I said to myself, there’s Monsieur Sereno coming in. (You were the only tenant out.) I turned the light out immediately afterwards. I think it was about three o’clock.’

  ‘Just about...’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s a large basket you’ve got.’

  ‘They’re my cats.’

  ‘Are they ill — poor little things?’

  ‘No, but I’m taking them to my sister’s at Meudon. The vet told me they needed air.’ And he added gravely, ‘Cats tend to become tuberculous, you know.’

  ‘Tuberculous!’ said the concierge, in a voice of consternation. ‘You must look after them carefully. All the same,’ she added, ‘they’ll be missed in your flat. I had got used to seeing the little dears when I was cleaning up. You will be sorry to lose them.’

  ‘I shall indeed, Madame Dupuy,’ said Daniel.

  He smiled at her gravely and walked on. ‘The old mole, she gave herself away. She must have played about with them when I wasn’t there; she’d much better have been attending to her daughter.’ Emerging from the archway he was dazzled by the light, an unpleasant, scorching, stabbing light. It hurt his eyes, which was only to be expected: when a man has been drinking the night before, a misty morning suits him best. He could no longer see anything, he was afloat in the encompassing light, with a ring of iron round his skull. Suddenly, he saw his shadow, a grotesque and stocky figure, with the shadow of the wicker basket dangling from the end of his arm. Daniel smiled: he was very tall. He drew himself to his full height, but the shadow remained squat and misshapen, like that of a chimpanzee. ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. No; I won’t take a taxi,’ he said to himself: ‘I have plenty of time. I shall take Mr Hyde for an airing as far as the 72 stop.’ The 72 would take him to Charenton. Half a mile from there, Daniel knew a little solitary corner on the bank of the Seine. ‘At any rate,’ he said to himself, ‘I shan’t be sick, that would be the last straw.’ The water of the Seine was particularly dark and dirty at that spot, being covered with greenish patches of oil from the Vitry factories. Daniel envisaged himself with disgust: he felt, within himself, so benevolent, so truly benevolent that it wasn’t natural. ‘That,’ he thought, ‘is the real man,’ with a sort of satisfaction. His was a hard, forbidding character, but underneath it all was a shrinking victim pleading for mercy. It was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else. Not that that was really true: whatever he might do there was only one Daniel. When he despised himself he had the feeling of detachment from his own being, as though he were poised like an impartial judge above a noisome turmoil, then suddenly he found himself plunging downwards caught again in his own toils. ‘Damnation,’ thought he to himself. ‘I must get a drink.’ He had to make a little detour for this purpose, he would stop at Championnet’s in the rue Tailledouce. When he pushed open the door, the bar was deserted. The waiter was dusting the red, wooden cask-like tables. The darkness was grateful to Daniel’s eyes. ‘I’ve got a cursed headache,’ he thought, as he put down the basket and clambered on to one of the stools by the bar.

  ‘A nice double whisky, I suppose,’ said the barman.

  ‘No,’ said Daniel curtly.

  ‘Confound these fellows’ mania for classifying human beings as though they were umbrellas or sewing-machines. I am not so-and-so; one isn’t ever anything. But they pin you down as quick as look at you. One chap gives good tips, another is always ready with a joke, and I am fond of double whiskies.’

  ‘A gin-fizz,’ said Daniel.

  The barman served him without comment: he was no doubt offended. ‘So much the better,’ thought Daniel. He would not enter the place again, the people were too familiar. Anyway, gin-fizz tasted like a lemon-flavoured purgative. It scattered a sort of acidulated dust upon the tongue, and left a steely savour behind it. ‘It no longer has any effect on me,’ thought Daniel.

  ‘Give me a peppered Vodka in a balloon glass.’

  He swallowed the Vodka and remained for a moment plunged in meditation, with a firework in his mouth. ‘Won’t it ever end?’ he thought to himself. But these were surface thoughts, as usual, cheques without funds to meet them. ‘What won’t ever end? What won’t ever end?’ Whereupon a shrill miaow was heard, and the sound of scratching. The barman gave a start.

  ‘They are cats,’ said Daniel curtly.

  He got off the stool, flung twenty francs on to the counter and picked up the basket. As he lifted it, he noticed a tiny red drop on the floor: blood. ‘What can they be up to inside there,’ thought Daniel distressfully. But he could not bring himself to lift the lid. For the moment the little cage contained nothing but a solid, undifferentiated fear: if he opened the basket, that fear would dissolve once more into his cats, which Daniel could not have endured. ‘You couldn’t endure it, eh? And supposing I did lift that lid?’ But Daniel was already outside, and again the blindness fell, a clear and dewy blindness: your eyes itched, fire seemed to fill the vision, then came the sudden realization that for moments past you have been looking at houses, houses a hundred yards ahead, airy and insubstantial, edifices of smoke. At the end of the road stood a high blue wall. ‘It’s uncanny to see too clearly,’ thought Daniel. It was thus that he imagined Hell: a vision that penetrated everything, and saw to the very end of the world, — the depths of a man’s self. The basket shook at the extremity of his arm: the creatures inside it were clawing each other. The terror that he felt so near to his hand — Daniel wasn’t sure whether it disgusted or delighted him: anyway, it came to the same thing. ‘There is always something to reassure them, they can smell me.’ And Daniel thought, ‘I am, indeed, for them, a smell.’ Patience, though: Daniel would soon be divested of that familiar smell, he would walk about without a smell, alone amid his fellow-men, who haven’t fine enough senses to spot a man by his smell. Without a smell or a shadow, without a past, nothing more than an invisible uprootment from the self towards the future. Daniel noticed that he was a few steps in advance of his body — yonder, at the level of the gas-jet, and that he was watching his own progress, hobbling a little under his burden, stiff-jointed and already soaked in sweat; he saw himself come, he was no more than a disembodied vision. But the shop-window of a dyeing establishment presented his reflection, and the illusion was dispelled. Daniel filled himself with viscous, vapid water: himself: the water of the Seine, vapid and viscous, would fill the basket, and they would claw each other to pieces. A vast revulsion came upon him — this was surely a wanton act. He had stopped and set the basket on the ground. One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself. Once more he thought of Constantinople where faithless spouses were put in a sack with hydrophobic cats, and the sack thrown into the Bosphorus. Barrels, leather sacks, wicker baskets: prisons. ‘There are worse things.’ Daniel shrugged his shoulders: another thought without funds to meet it. He didn’t want to adopt a tragic attitude, he had done that too often in the past. Besides, that meant taking oneself seriously. Never, never again would Daniel take himself seriously. The motor-bus suddenly appeared, Daniel waved to the driver and got into the first-class compartment.

  ‘As far as you go.’

  ‘Six tickets,’ said the conductor.

  Seine water would drive them crazy. Coffee-coloured water with violet gleams in it. A woman came in and sat opposite him, a prim, respectable female, with a little girl. The little girl observed the basket with interest: ‘Nasty little insect,’ thought Daniel. The basket miaowed, and Daniel started, as though he had been caught in the act of murder.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the little girl in a shrill
voice.

  ‘Hush,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t annoy the gentleman.’

  ‘It’s cats,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Are they yours?’ asked the little girl.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why are you taking them about in a basket?’

  ‘Because they’re ill,’ said Daniel mildly, ‘May I see them?’

  ‘Jeannine,’ said her mother, ‘mind what you’re saying.’

  ‘I can’t show them to you, they’re ill, and rather savage.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the little girl in a calm, insinuating tone; ‘they’ll be quite all right with me, the little darlings.’

  ‘Do you think so? Look here, my dear,’ said Daniel in a low, hurried voice, ‘I’m going to drown my cats, that’s what I’m going to do, and do you know why? Because, no longer ago than this morning, they clawed the face of a pretty little girl like you, who came to bring me some flowers, and now she’ll have to have a glass eye.’

  ‘Oh!’ cried the little girl in consternation. She threw a terror-stricken glance at the basket, and clung to her mother’s skirts.

  ‘There, there,’ said the mother, turning indignant eyes upon Daniel. ‘You must keep quiet, you see, and not chatter to everyone you meet. Don’t be frightened, darling, the gentleman was only joking.’

  Daniel returned her look placidly. ‘She detests me,’ he thought, with satisfaction. Behind the windows he could see the grey houses gliding by, and he knew that the good woman was looking at him. ‘An angry mother: she’s looking for something to dislike in me. And it won’t be my face.’ No one ever disliked Daniel’s face. ‘Nor my suit, which is new and handsome. My hands, perhaps.’ His hands were short and strong, a little fleshy, with black hairs at the joints. He spread them out on his knees (‘Look at them — just look at them’). But the woman had abandoned the encounter; she was staring straight ahead of her with a crass expression on her face: she was at rest. Daniel eyed her with a kind of eagerness: these people who rested — how did they manage it? She had let her whole person sag into herself and sat dissolved in it. There was nothing in that head of hers that resembled a frantic flight from self, neither curiosity, nor hatred, nor any motion, not the faintest undulation: nothing but the thick integument of sleep. Abruptly she awoke, and an air of animation took possession of her face.

  ‘Why, we’re there,’ said she. ‘Come along! You bad little girl, you never notice anything.’

  She took her daughter by the hand, and dragged her off. The bus restarted and then pulled up. People passed in front of Daniel laughing.

  ‘All change,’ shouted the conductor.

  Daniel started: the vehicle was empty. He got up and climbed out. It was a populous square containing a number of taverns: a group of workmen and women had gathered round a handcart. Women eyed him with surprise. Daniel quickened his step and turned down a dirty alley that led towards the Seine. On both sides of the road there were barrels and warehouses. The basket was now miaowing incessantly, and Daniel almost ran: he was carrying a leaky bucket from which water oozed out drop by drop. Every miaow was a drop of water. The bucket was heavy, Daniel transferred it to his left hand, and wiped his forehead with his right. He must not think about the cats. Oh? So you don’t want to think about the cats? Well, that’s just why you must think of them. You can’t get away with it so easily. Daniel recalled Poppae’s golden eyes, and quickly thought of whatever came first into his head — of the Bourse, where he had made ten thousand francs the day before, of Marcelle — he was going to see her that evening, it was his day: ‘Archangel!’ Daniel grinned: he despised Marcelle profoundly. ‘They haven’t the courage to admit that they’re no longer in love. If Mathieu saw things as they were, he would have to make a decision. But he didn’t want to: he didn’t want to lose his bearings. He is a normal fellow,’ thought Daniel ironically. The cats were miaowing as though they had been scalded, and Daniel felt he would soon lose his self-control. He put the basket on the ground, and gave it a couple of violent kicks. This produced a tremendous commotion in the interior, after which the cats were silent Daniel stood for a moment motionless, conscious of an odd shiver like a tuft behind his ears. Some workmen came out of a warehouse and Daniel resumed his journey. Here was the place. He made his way down a stone stair to the bank of the Seine and sat down on the ground, beside an iron ring and between a barrel of tar and a heap of paving-stones. The Seine was yellow under a blue sky. Black barges loaded with casks lay moored against the opposite quay. Daniel was sitting in the sun and his temples ached. He eyed the rippling stream, swollen with patches of opal iridescence. He took the ball of string out of his pocket, and cut off a long strand with his clasp-knife: then, without getting up, and with his left hand, he picked out a paving stone. He fastened one of the ends of the string to the handle of the basket, rolled the rest of it round the stone, made several knots and replaced the stone on the ground. It looked a singular contrivance. Daniel’s idea was to carry the basket in his right hand and the stone in his left hand: he would drop them into the water at the same moment. The basket would perhaps float for the tenth of a second after which it would be forcibly dragged beneath the surface and abruptly disappear. Daniel felt hot, and cursed his thick jacket, but did not want to take it off. Within him something throbbed, something pleaded for mercy, and Daniel, the hard and resolute Daniel, heard himself say in mournful tones: ‘When a man hasn’t the courage to kill himself wholesale, he must do so retail.’ He would walk down to the water and say: ‘Farewell to what I love most in the world...’ He raised himself slightly on his hands and looked about him: on his right the bank was deserted, on his left — some distance away, he could see a fisherman, a black figure in the sunshine. The ripples would spread under water to the cork on the man’s line. ‘He’ll think he’s had a bite.’ Daniel laughed and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe away the sweat that beaded his forehead. The hands of his wrist-watch stood at eleven twenty-five. ‘At half-past eleven!’ He must prolong that strange moment: Daniel had split into two entities; he felt himself lost in a scarlet cloud, under a leaden sky. He thought of Mathieu with a sort of pride, ‘It is I who am free,’ he said to himself. But it was an impersonal pride, for Daniel was no longer a person. At eleven twenty-nine he got up and felt so weak that he had to lean against the barrel. He got a smear of tar on to his tweed jacket, and looked at it.

  He saw the black smear on the brown material, and suddenly he felt that he was one person and no more. One only. A coward. A man who liked his cats and could not chuck them in the river. He picked up his pocket-knife, bent down, and cut the string. In silence. Even within himself there was silence now, he was too ashamed to talk in his own presence. He picked up the basket again, and climbed the stair: it was as though he were walking with averted head past someone who regarded him with contempt. Within himself desolation and silence still reigned. When he reached the top of the steps he ventured to speak his first words to himself: ‘What was that drop of blood?’ But he didn’t dare open the basket: he walked on, limping as he went. It is I: it is I: it is I. The evil thing. But in the depths of him there was an odd little smile because he had saved Poppaea.

  ‘Taxi!’ he shouted.

  The taxi stopped.

  ‘Twenty-two, Rue Montmartre,’ said Daniel. ‘Will you put this basket beside you?’

  He swayed to the movement of the cab. He couldn’t even despise himself any longer. And then shame resumed the upper hand, and again he began to see himself: it was intolerable: ‘Neither wholesale nor retail,’ he reflected bitterly. When he took out his pocket book to pay the chauffeur, he observed without satisfaction that it was stuffed with notes. ‘Make money, — oh yes, I can do that.’

  ‘So here you are again, Monsieur Sereno,’ said the concierge. ‘Someone has just gone up to your flat. One of your friends, a tall gentleman, with high shoulders. I told him you were out. Out, says he, well I’ll leave a note under his door.’

  She noticed the basket and exclaimed: ‘
Why, you’ve brought the little darlings back!’

  ‘Ah well, Madame Dupuy,’ said Daniel. ‘I daresay it was wrong of me, but I couldn’t part with them.’

  ‘It’s Mathieu,’ he thought, as he went upstairs. ‘He’s always on the spot.’ He was glad to be able to hate another person.

  He encountered Mathieu on the third-floor landing.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Mathieu, ‘I’d given you up.’

  ‘I’ve been taking my cats for an outing,’ said Daniel. He was surprised to feel a sort of inner warmth. ‘Are you coming in with me?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘Yes, I want you to do something for me.’

  Daniel flung him a rapid glance and noticed that his face was drawn and ashen. ‘He looks damnably under the weather,’ he thought. He wanted to help the man. They went upstairs. Daniel put the key in the lock, and pushed open the door. ‘Go along in,’ he said. He touched the other lightly on the shoulder, and immediately withdrew his hand. Mathieu went into Daniel’s room, and sat down in an armchair.

  ‘I couldn’t make sense of what your concierge said,’ he remarked. ‘She told me that you had taken your cats to your sister’s place. Have you made it up with your sister lately?’

  Something within Daniel suddenly froze. ‘He would look sick enough if he knew where I had come from.’ He gazed unsympathetically into his friend’s steady, penetrating eyes: ‘It’s true,’ thought he to himself, ‘he’s quite normal.’ And he was conscious of the gulf between them. He laughed: ‘Ah yes — my sister’s place. That was an innocent little falsehood,’ he said. He knew that Mathieu would not press the point: Mathieu had the irritating habit of treating Daniel as a romancer, and he affected never to inquire into the motives that compelled him to lie. Mathieu accordingly eyed the wicker receptacle with a perplexed air and fell silent.