The Age of Reason Read online

  Still talking, he had drawn nearer to the door. ‘You can’t think,’ said Mathieu, ‘how grateful I am to you for coming to see me and offering me your help, merely because I looked awful this morning. You are right, you know, I do need help. But it is your own help I want — not Karl Marx’s help. I would like to see you often and talk to you — is that impossible?’

  Brunet averted his eyes. ‘I would be very willing,’ he said, ‘but I haven’t much time.’

  And Mathieu thought: ‘Obviously. He was sorry for me this morning and I put him off. And now we are strangers to each other once more. I have no claim on his time.’ But he said, despite himself: ‘Brunet, don’t you remember? You were once my best friend.’

  Brunet was fiddling with the door-handle. ‘Why, then, do you think I came? If you had accepted my offer, we could have worked together...’

  They fell silent. And Mathieu thought: ‘He is in a hurry, he is terribly anxious to get away.’ Brunet added, without looking at him. ‘I still like you. I like your face, your hands, and your voice, and then there are the memories of old days. But that does not alter matters. My only friends, at present, are the Comrades of the Party, with them I have a whole world in common.’

  ‘And you think we no longer have anything in common?’ asked Mathieu.

  Brunet shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. One word would have sufficed, one sole word, and Mathieu would have recovered everything, Brunet’s friendship, and some reasons for being alive. A prospect as alluring as sleep. Mathieu straightened himself abruptly. ‘I mustn’t keep you,’ said he. ‘Come and see me when you have the time.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Brunet. ‘And if you should change your mind, send me word.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Mathieu.

  Brunet had opened the door. He smiled at Mathieu, and was gone. Thought Mathieu: ‘He was my best friend.’

  He had departed. He was walking along the streets, with the pitching, rolling gait of a sailor, and the streets became real one by one. But with him the reality of the room had vanished. Mathieu looked at his green, insidious armchair, his straight chairs, his green curtains, and he thought: ‘He won’t sit on my chairs again, he won’t look at my curtains as he rolls a cigarette,’ the room was no more than a patch of green light that quivered when a motor bus passed. Mathieu went up to the window, and leaned his elbows on the balcony. And he thought: ‘I could not accept,’ and the room was behind him like a placid sheet of water, only his head emerged above the water, the insidious room was behind him, he kept his head above the water, he looked down into the street thinking: ‘Is it true? Is it true I couldn’t accept?’ In the distance a little girl was skipping, the rope swung above her head like the handle of a basket and whipped the ground beneath her feet. A summer afternoon; the light spanned the street and the roofs, serene and smooth and cold, like an eternal verity. Is it true I’m not a rotter? The armchair is green, the skipping-rope is like a basket-handle, that’s beyond dispute. But where people are concerned, there’s always matter for dispute, everything they do can be explained, from above or from below, according to choice. I refused because I want to remain free: that’s what I can say. And I can also say — I got the wind up. I like my green curtains, I like to take the air in the evening on my balcony, and I don’t want any change. I enjoy railing against capitalism, and I don’t want it suppressed, because I should no longer have any reasons for so doing. I enjoy feeling fastidious and aloof. I enjoy saying no, always no, and I should be afraid of any attempt to construct a finally habitable world, because I should merely have to say — Yes; and act like other people. From above or below: who would decide? Brunet has decided: he thinks I am a rotter. So does Jacques; so does Daniel; they have all decided I’m a rotter. Poor Mathieu, he’s a wash-out, he’s a rotter. And how can I prevail against them all? I must decide: but what am I to decide? When he had said — No, just now, he thought himself sincere, a bitter enthusiasm had suddenly arisen in his heart. But who, beneath that light, could have retained the smallest particle of enthusiasm? It was a light that extinguished hope, that eternalized everything it touched. The little girl would skip forever, the rope would forever swing above her head and forever whip the sidewalk beneath her feet: and Mathieu would look at her forever.

  What was the use of skipping? What indeed! What was the use of choosing freedom? Under that same light, at Madrid, at Valencia, men were standing at their windows looking at deserted and eternal streets, and saying, ‘What’s the use? What’s the use of continuing the struggle?’ Mathieu went back into the room, but the light pursued him there. My armchair, my furniture. On the table there was a paper-weight in the form of a crab. Mathieu picked it up by the back, as though it were alive. My paper-weight. What was the use? What was the use? He dropped the crab on the table, and said emphatically to himself: I am an utter wash-out.

  CHAPTER 9

  IT WAS ten o’clock. On leaving his office, Daniel had surveyed himself in the lobby mirror, and thought, ‘It’s starting again,’ and he had been afraid. He turned into the Rue Réaumur. A man could lose himself there, it was just a mere tunnel standing open to the sky, a vast antechamber. Evening had emptied the business premises on either side; there was, at least, no inducement to imagine any intimacies behind their darkened windows. Daniel’s vision, now released, sped between those pierced cliffs towards the patch of pink and stagnant sky which they enclosed on the horizon.

  It was not so easy to hide; even for the Rue Réaumur he was too conspicuous. The tall painted lasses who came out of the shops made bold eyes at him, and he was conscious of his body. ‘Bitches,’ said he between his teeth. He was afraid to breathe: however much women washed, they always smelt. Fortunately, the women were, in fact, not many, it was not a street for women, and the men ignored him, they were reading their newspapers as they walked along, or listlessly polishing their spectacles, or smiling quizzically at nothing. It was indeed a crowd though not a dense one, moving slowly on its way, apparently crushed beneath the destiny that prevails on crowds. Daniel fell into step with this slow procession, he adopted the men’s somnolent smile, their vague and menacing destiny, and he was lost; there was nothing left within him but the dull thud of avalanches, he was now no more than a sea-strand of forgotten light. ‘I shall arrive too early at Marcelle’s, I’ve got time to walk a bit.’

  He drew himself, up, stiffened, and looked warily about him: he had recovered himself, indeed he never slipped far beyond his own control. ‘I’ve got time to walk a bit.’ That meant: I’ll look in at the Fair, it was a long while since Daniel had managed to deceive himself. Indeed, what was the point of doing so? Did he want to go to the Fair? Well he would go. He would go because he had not the slightest wish to refrain from doing so. The morning with the cats, Mathieu’s visit, then four hours’ pestilential work, and, this evening — Marcelle: it was intolerable — I can very well allow myself a little distraction.

  Marcelle was a morass. She listened for hours to what she was told, she said Yes, yes, nothing but yes — and ideas disappeared into her head, she existed solely in appearance. It is all very well to play for a while with fools — slacken the cord and they rise into the air, vast and imponderable, like elephant-balloons; pull the cord, and down they drop to the level of the earth, where they gyrate distractedly, or bounce about in response to every jerk upon the string: but fools must be changed fairly often, or the entertainment becomes tiresome. Moreover, Marcelle was in an unwholesome condition at the moment: the air in her room was hardly fit to breathe. Indeed, it was always difficult to refrain from sniffing when entering that room. It didn’t exactly smell, but it induced an uneasy sensation at the base of the bronchial tubes, which often resulted in a touch of asthma. I shall go to the Fair. There was no need of such excuses, in any case it was quite an innocent project: he wanted to observe the manoeuvres of perverts on the trail. The Fair on the Boulevard de Sebastopol was famous in its own line, it was there that the Finance Ministry official,
Durat, had collected the little brute that did him in. The scamps who loafed round the penny-in-the-slot machines awaiting custom were much more amusing than their colleagues on Montparnasse: they were amateurs, half-baked little louts, brutal, coarse, with raucous voices, and a sly cunning all their own, on the look-out for ten francs and a dinner. Then there were the paying clients, intensely comic creatures, silkily affectionate, with honeyed voices and a furtive, appealing, vague expression in their eyes. Daniel could not stand their humility, they looked as if they were perpetually pleading guilty. He wanted to knock them down, just as one always wants to use violence on a man self-condemned, and smash up his small remaining dignity. He usually leaned against a pillar and watched them, as they preened themselves under the bleared, derisive eyes of their young admirers. The clients took him for a detective, or for one of the boys’ bullies: he spoilt all their pleasure.

  Daniel was seized with a sudden access of impatience and quickened his step. ‘This is going to be amusing!’ His throat was dry, and the air was dry and torrid. He could no longer see, there was a blur before his eyes, the remembered vision of a turbid light like the yellow of an egg-yolk, repellent and alluring, a noisome light which he longed to see, but it was still far away, hovering between low walls, like the smell of a cellar. The Rue Réaumur vanished, nothing was left confronting him but a perspective dotted with obstacles, in the shape of people: rather like a nightmare. Only, in real nightmares, Daniel never reached the end of the street. He turned into the Boulevard de Sebastopol, which lay scorching under a clear sky, and slackened his pace. FAIR: he looked up at the sign, made sure that the faces of the passers-by were unknown to him, and went in.

  It was a long narrow hall, with brown-washed walls, and the gaunt ugliness and vinous reek of a warehouse. Daniel plunged into the yellow light, it was gloomier and murkier than usual, and the daylight drove it into the far end of the hall, for Daniel, it was the light of sea-sickness: it reminded him of the night of nausea he had passed in the boat to Palermo: in the deserted engine-room there had been just such a yellow murk, he dreamed of it sometimes and awakened with a start, thankful to find himself in darkness. The hours he spent at the Fair seemed to him punctuated by the dull, rhythmic thud of crankshafts.

  Along the walls stood a row of roughly constructed boxes standing on four legs; these were the games. Daniel knew them all: the football-players, sixteen little figures of painted wood impaled on long brass wires, the polo players, the tin automobile that ran on a felt-covered track between houses and fields, the five little black cats on the moonlit roof and a revolver to shoot them off it, the electric rifle, and the sweets and scent machines. At the far end of the room there were three rows of ‘kineramas’ the titles of the films being displayed in large black letters: The Young Couple, Naughty Chambermaids, The Sun-Bath, The Interrupted Wedding-Night. A spectacled gentleman had unobtrusively approached one of these machines, slipped a franc into the slot, and was goggling eagerly through the mica-covered eye-holes. Daniel was choking: it was the dust and the heat, and the thud of heavy blows which came at regular intervals from the other side of the wall. On his left he observed the attraction: some ragged youths had gathered round the Negro boxer, a wooden figure six feet tall, with a leather pad and a dial in the centre of his stomach. There were four of them, one fair, one red-haired, and two dark, they had taken off their coats, rolled their shirt-sleeves up their skinny arms, and were pounding on the pad with all their might. A needle on the dial indicated the strength of their fists. They flung sly glances at Daniel and went on hitting savagely. Daniel glared back in response to indicate that there was nothing doing, and turned his back on them. On the right, near the cash-desk, and against the light, he noticed a tall, grey-faced young man, wearing a crumpled suit, a night-shirt, and slippers. He was certainly not a homo, besides he did not appear to know the others, he had come in quite by chance — Daniel was sure of that — and seemed wholly absorbed in the contemplation of a mechanical crane. After a moment or two, attracted no doubt by the electric lamp and the Kodak displayed behind the windows on a heap of sweets, he approached noiselessly and with a knowing look slipped a piece of money into a slit in the apparatus, drew back a little, and seemed to plunge again into meditation, stroking his nostrils with a pensive finger. Daniel felt a familiar thrill run down the back of his neck. ‘Ah — the Narcissus type,’ thought Daniel; ‘he enjoys touching himself.’ That was the most alluring, the most romantic type: those whose lightest movement revealed an unconscious coquetry, a deep and stealthy love of self. The young man briskly seized the two handles of the apparatus and swung them with a knowing air. The crane revolved with a noise of locking gears, and its senile creaking shook the whole apparatus. Daniel wished he might win the electric lamp, but a slot ejected a spate of multi-coloured sweets which looked as mean and uninviting as dried beans. The young man did not appear to be disappointed; he felt in his pocket and produced another coin. ‘That’s his last,’ said Daniel to himself: ‘he hasn’t had a meal since yesterday.’ But this wouldn’t do. He must not be lured into imagining, behind that lean, alluring body, so intent upon itself, a mysterious life of privation, freedom, and hope. Not today. Not here in this inferno, under this sinister light, to the accompaniment of those dull blows upon the wall — I swore I would resist. And yet Daniel understood so well how a man could be caught by one of those machines, lose his money bit by bit, and begin again and yet again, his throat dry from dizziness and rage: there were many sorts of dizziness and Daniel knew them all. The crane began to revolve in cautious and deliberate fashion: the nickelled apparatus seemed content with its operations. Daniel was afraid: he had taken one step forward, he ached to put his hand on the young man’s arm — he already felt the contact of the rough and threadbare stuff — and say to him, ‘Don’t play any more.’ The nightmare was about to begin again, with its accompanying savour of eternity, the triumphant tom-tom from the other side of the wall, and the surge of uncomplaining melancholy that rose within him, that infinite and familiar all-engulfing melancholy, days and nights would pass before he could shake it off. But a man came in and Daniel was delivered: he stood up and thought he was going to burst out laughing. ‘That is the man,’ he thought. He was a trifle bewildered, but all the same glad because he had resisted.

  The man moved briskly down the hall: his knees sagged as he walked, but he kept his body stiff, though his legs moved easily beneath him. ‘You,’ thought Daniel, ‘are wearing a corset.’ He was getting on for fifty, closely shaven, with a bland countenance gently moulded by the years, a peach-coloured complexion, white hair, a fine Florentine nose, and a rather harsher, more myopic expression in the eyes than seemed quite in character: and a roving eye. His entrance caused a sensation: the four little scamps turned round simultaneously, affecting the same air of vicious innocence, and then resumed their blows on the Negro’s pelvis, but by no means with the same enthusiasm. The man surveyed them for a moment with an aloof and slightly disapproving air, then turned round and approached the football game. He twirled the metal wires, and examined the little figures with smiling curiosity as though in amusement at the caprice which had brought him there. Daniel noticed that smile, and felt a catch at his heart; all these pretences and subterfuges appalled him, and made him want to run away. But only for an instant: it was a familiar flush of feeling that soon passed. He set his back comfortably against a pillar and gazed steadily at the new-comer. On his right, the young man in a night-shirt had produced a third coin from his pocket, and for the third time resumed his silent acrobatics around the crane.

  The handsome gentleman leaned over the game and slid his forefinger over the slender bodies of the little wooden players: he was not going to demean himself to make advances, he no doubt considered that he was, with his white hair and summer suit, a sufficiently delectable dish to attract all these young flies. And in fact, after a few moments’ confabulation, the fair youth detached himself from the group, and flinging his jacket rou
nd his shoulders without putting it on, strolled up to the prospective client with his hands in his pockets. He came up with a timorous, sniffing sort of air, and the expression in the eyes beneath the thick brows was doglike. Daniel looked disgustedly at his plump hips, his broad bucolic cheeks, grey and already begrimed with an incipient beard. ‘Female flesh,’ he thought, ‘as lush as dough.’ The gentleman would take him home, give him a bath, soap him, and perhaps scent him. At this thought, Daniel’s rage revived. ‘Swine,’ he murmured. The youth had stopped a few paces away from the old gentleman, and in his turn pretended to be examining the apparatus. They were bent over the wires and inspected them without looking at each other, and with an air of absorption. Then the youth appeared to take a prompt decision: he grasped a knob and one of the pegs spun round and round. Four little players described a semicircle and stopped head-downwards.

  ‘You know the game?’ asked the gentleman in an almond-paste voice. ‘Ah, indeed! Will you explain it to me? I don’t understand it.’

  ‘You put in twenty sous, and then you pull. The balls come out and you’ve got to get them into the hole.’

  ‘But there must be two to play, mustn’t there? I try to get the ball into the goal, and you have to stop me, eh?’

  ‘That’s so,’ said the young man. And he added after a brief pause: ‘One of us has to be at either end.’

  ‘Would you like to play a game with me?’

  ‘Sure,’ said the youth.

  They played. And the gentleman said in a heady voice: ‘But this young man is so clever. How does he do it? He wins all the time. Do show me.’

  ‘It’s just knowing how,’ said the youth modestly.

  ‘Ah! You practise? You come here often, no doubt? I happened to look in as I passed, but I have never met you before. I should have noticed you. Yes, indeed, I should have noticed you, I am something of a physiognomist, and you have an interesting face. You come from Touraine?’