Adventures In Immediate Irreality (11 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Convalescence was announced one morning by the extreme
fragility of the light. It entered the room where I slept through the rep curtains
of the skylight, oddly depriving the room of its density. The clarity of things made
them lighter, and no matter how deeply I inhaled, I still had a large void in my
chest, as if an important part of myself had disappeared.

Some crumbs had slipped under my calves in the warm bedclothes. My foot sought out
the iron frame of the bed, and the iron pierced it with a cold knife. I was trying
to get down. Everything was as I had suspected: the air was too inconsistent to
support me. I took a few tentative steps in it. It was like moving through a hot,
steamy river.

I sat down on a chair underneath the skylight. The light around me robbed things of
their contours. They seemed to have been washed many times over to remove their
shine. The bed in its corner was buried in darkness. How did I manage to make out
every grain in the plaster during my fever?

Slowly I began to dress. My clothes too were lighter than usual. They hung on my body
like strips of blotting paper and had the lye-like smell that comes of repeated
washing and ironing.

Floating through waters ever more rarefied, I went out into the street. I was
immediately stunned by the sun. Huge spots of its yellow and greenish rays covered
just emerged from a high fever. There was something unusual about the way the gray,
lop-sided carriage horses moved: now dragging, ponderous and unsteady, now racing,
breathing heavily through their nostrils lest they collapse in the middle of the
asphalt. The long column of houses shook slightly in the wind. A strong scent of
autumn was wafting from afar. “A fine autumn day!” I said to myself. “A splendid
autumn day!”

Strolling leisurely past the dusty houses, I came to a bookshop with a mechanical toy
performing in the window. It was a small red-and-white clown banging two tiny brass
cymbals. There it stood, shut up in its shop-window of a room amidst books, balls,
and inkwells, playing joyfully away. I was so moved I could not hold back my tears.
It was so wholesome, so refreshing, so attractive, the best spot in the world to
stand peacefully and play your cymbals in your party clothes. At last something
simple and pure after all that fever. The autumn light was all the more pleasant and
intimate in the shop window. How nice it would have been to change places with that
happy little clown, to stand there on a sheet of blue paper surrounded by those nice
clean books and balls. Bam! Bam! Bam! How nice, how nice to be in the window! Bam!
Bam! Bam! Red, green, blue. Balls, books, paints. Bam! Bam! Bam! What a fine autumn
day! . . .

Slowly and imperceptibly, however, the clown’s performance began to wind down; first
the cymbals failed to come together, then they halted in mid-air. I was horrified to
realize that the clown’s game was over; I was dumbfounded, painfully so. A beautiful
and joyful moment had frozen in mid-air. I moved quickly away from the window in the
direction of a small park in the center of town.

The chestnut trees had shed their yellow leaves. The old wooden restaurant was
closed, and a number of broken benches were strewn in front of it. I dropped into
one of them. It was in such bad repair that I nearly landed on my back looking up at
the sky. The sun was sending a gleam of tiny crystals through the branches.

For a while I stayed as I was, my eyes lost in the heights, and weak, indescribably
weak. Then up came a strapping lad and sat down beside me. A pair of large dirty
hands came out of rolled-up sleeves, a powerful red neck out of an open collar.
After giving his head a good scratch with all ten fingers, he took a book out of his
pocket and began to read. He held the pages close together to keep the wind from
turning them and muttered loudly as he read. From time to time he ran his hand
through his hair to aid his understanding of the text.

I gave a meaningful cough, then—my back still diagonal, my eyes still on the
branches—asked, “What are you reading?”

The lad thrust the book into my hands as if I were blind. It was a long tale in verse
about highwaymen. The book was filthy, covered with grease spots and dirt; it had
clearly gone through many hands. While I was perusing it, he got up and stood there
towering over me, sure of himself with his rolled-up sleeves and bare neck. Yet I
found it as pleasant and calming as the cymbal playing in the shop window.

“And . . . Well, doesn’t reading give you a headache?” I asked, returning the book to
him.

He seemed not to understand.

“Why should it?” he asked. “Not in the least.”

He sat down again and went back to his reading.

So there was a category of things in the world I was destined never to be part of:
carefree mechanical clowns, strapping lads undisturbed by headaches. A broad and
vigorous river, full of life and purity, was flowing past me—in the trees, in
the sunlight—and I, all darkness and frailty, was fated to remain on its
banks.

I stretched out my legs on the bench and, propping my back against a tree, made
myself comfortable. What prevented me from being strong and detached, I wondered,
from feeling the fresh, vibrant sap circulating in all these branches and leaves,
and circulating in me, from standing straight, tall, and unencumbered by thought in
the light of the sun, sober, my life clearly laid out in front of me, self-enclosed,
as in a trap?

The first step in that direction might be to breathe more slowly and more deeply. I
was not good at breathing: my chest was either too full or too empty. I began
inhaling with confidence. Within a few minutes I felt better. A fluid of perfection,
weak at first but gaining in intensity moment by moment, had begun to flow through
my veins. The noise of the street recalled the presence of the city, which was now
revolving around me slowly like a gramophone record. I had become in a way the
center and axis of the world. The most important thing was not to lose my
equilibrium.

One morning I happened to be at a circus when the performers were rehearsing, and I
witnessed a scene that came back to me now. A fan, a regular member of the audience
with no circus training whatsoever, had, without blinking an eye, scrambled to the
peak of the table-and-chair pyramid that an acrobat had just descended. Like all
those present I admired the precision with which he scaled the rickety construction.
The exaltation that came of surmounting the first obstacles imbued the amateur with
what one might call a science of equilibrium, which pointed his hands to the exact
place they needed to be and enabled his feet to gauge the minimal weight required to
hoist himself onto the next step. Encouraged, exhilarated by the sureness of his
progress, he reached the top in a matter of seconds. But there something very
strange occurred: he suddenly became aware of the fragility of his position and the
audacity of his undertaking. His teeth chattering, he begged the acrobats for a
ladder and pleaded with them over and over to hold it steady. The once bold amateur
came down step by step with great caution, covered with sweat from head to toe,
amazed and upset at having had the idea to make the climb.

My position in the park at that time was like the peak of that flimsy pyramid: I felt
a fresh and powerful sap circulating through me but had to make an enormous effort
to keep from falling from the heights of my certitude. It occurred to me that this
was how I should be when I saw Edda: calm, sure of myself, full of light. It was a
long time since I had been to their place. For once in my life I wanted to put on a
firm, unbending front.

Placid and magnificent as a tree. Just so—a tree. I filled my lungs with air
and addressed a warm, comradely salute to the branches above my head. There was
something rough and simple in a tree, something that went perfectly with my new
strength. I stroked the trunk as if patting a friend on the back. “My friend the
tree!” The more closely I observed the branches in its crown reaching out to
infinity, the more I felt my flesh divide and let the fresh air from outside
circulate through the spaces. And my blood, majestic and mixed with sap, rose in my
veins, foaming from the percolation of the simple life.

I stood up. My knees buckled at first, unsure of themselves, as if wishing to compare
my strengths and weaknesses in a moment of hesitation. Then I strode off to see
Edda.

The heavy wooden door leading to the terrace was closed. Its immobility disturbed me.
All my ideas vanished into thin air. I leaned on the handle. “Chin up!” I said to
myself but immediately took it back: only the timid need to keep their chins up to
do something; the strong—normal people—know neither courage nor
cowardice. They simply open doors.

The cool darkness of the first room enveloped me in its calm and cheerful mood. It
seemed to have been waiting for me. This time the bead portière coming together
after I had passed through it made a strange click that gave me the impression I was
alone in an empty house at the edge of the world. Was that the sense of extreme
equilibrium the man felt at the peak of the chair pyramid?

I knocked loudly on Edda’s door. Frightened, she told me to come in.

Why did I go in so slowly? Did I go in slowly? I thought that the presence of a
person such as myself or, rather, of a tree should be perceptible from far off, yet
I could tell that it caused neither surprise nor excitement nor any emotion
whatever.

For several seconds my thoughts ran ahead of me, depicting a perfect, dignified
entrance: I saw myself advancing with self-confidence, aloof, and taking a seat at
the foot of the bed in which Edda was lying. My actual person was as incapable of
realizing these beautiful projects as a broken down old trailer: when Edda asked me
to sit, I went to a chair on the other side of the room.

The grandfather clock between us made an annoyingly loud ticktock, and strange to
say, it would crescendo and diminuendo with the ebb and flow of the tides, rolling
away in a wave in Edda’s direction until I could scarcely hear it and returning as a
breaker so violent that I thought my eardrums would burst.

“Edda,” I began, interrupting her silence, “I have something very simple to tell
you.”

Edda made no response.

“Do you know what I am, Edda?”

“No, what are you?”

“I’m a tree, Edda, a tree . . .”

Of course this brief conversation took place entirely in my imagination; not a word
of it was actually uttered.

Edda pulled her dressing gown over her legs and nestled further into the bed. Then
she put her hands under her head and looked at me attentively. I would gladly have
parted with anything I owned to turn her gaze anywhere else in the room. Suddenly I
saw the large bouquet of flowers in a vase on a shelf. That saved me.

How is it I had failed to notice it before? I looked all over the room when I
entered. To verify it really existed, I looked away for a moment, then looked back.
There they were, exactly where they had been: large, red . . . Then how had I failed
to see them? I began to doubt my arboreal certitude: an object had appeared out of
nowhere in the room. Was my sight still good? Perhaps there were remains of weakness
and darkness circulating in my body amidst my new luminosity like clouds in an
otherwise sunny sky, obstructing my sight as they passed my eyes as a haze might
suddenly screen the sun and throw a part of part of the landscape into shade.

“Aren’t those flowers beautiful!” I said to Edda.

“What flowers?”

“The ones over there, on the shelf . . .”

“What flowers?’

“Those beautiful red dahlias . . .”

“What dahlias?”

“What do you mean ‘what dahlias’?”

I stood and rushed over to the shelf. I found a red scarf thrown over a pile of
books. As I reached out to verify it was in fact a scarf, something within gave me
pause. It was like the wavering courage of the amateur acrobat at the peak of the
pyramid hovering between skill and dilettantism: I too had arrived at my peak. Now
the problem was how to come down and return to my chair. And what to do after that,
what to say.

For a few seconds I was so preoccupied with the problem that I could not make the
slightest move. Just as flywheels seem motionless because of the great speed at
which they turn, my profound distress gave me the rigidity of a statue. The nails of
sound that were the clock’s powerful ticktock kept me in place. It was with great
difficulty that I managed to break the spell.

Edda was in the same position in her bed, watching me with the same cool surprise.
One would have thought that a malicious power had made things look as ordinary as
could be to make me as uncomfortable as possible. Such is what I had to struggle
with, what implacably opposed me: the ordinary look of things.

In a world so precise any initiative was superfluous if not downright impossible.
What made the blood pound in my head was that Edda could not be other than a woman
with well-groomed hair, violet-blue eyes, and a smile at the corners of her lips.
What could I do with a precision so severe? How, for instance, could I make her
understand that I am a tree? I would have had to send its giant, magnificent crown
with all its branches and leaves through the air using immaterial, formless words.
How might I have done that?

I went up to the bed and leaned against the wooden frame. My hands radiated a
certitude that seemed to come from their having suddenly been made the nexus of all
my concerns. What now? The intoxicatingly limpid air separating Edda and me,
impalpable, yet palpably inconsistent, contained all the forces within me that could
lead nowhere: procrastinations weighing tens of kilograms, pauses lasting hours on
end, trials and tribulations of the flesh and the blood—they all fit easily
into that miserable space without revealing the black tints and shadowy matter it
contained. Distances in the world were not as I saw them with my eyes, small and
easily overcome; they were invisible, populated by monsters and timid midgets,
fantastic projects and undreamed-of gestures which, if reincarnated in the matter
that had originally constituted them, would impose a terrifying cataclysm upon the
world, an extraordinary chaos fraught with cruel misfortune and ecstatic bliss.