Nausea (31 page)

In the back of the room there is a thick-set man who has been sleeping with her recently. He calls her:

"Patronne!"

She gets up:

"Excuse me, Monsieur Antoine."

The waitress comes over to me:

"So you're leaving us just like that?"

"I'm going to Paris."

"I lived in Paris," she says proudly. "For two years. I worked in Simeon's. But I was homesick."

She hesitates a second, then realizes she has nothing more to say to me:

"Well, good-bye, Monsieur Antoine."

She wipes her hand on her apron and holds it out to me.

"Good-bye, Madeleine."

She leaves. I pull the Journal de Bouville over to me, then push it away again: I read it in the library a little while ago, from top to bottom.

The patronne does not come back: she abandons her fat hands to her boy friend, who kneads them with passion.

The train leaves in three-quarters of an hour.

I count my money to pass the time.

Twelve hundred francs a month isn't enormous. But if ] hold myself back a little it should be enough. A room for 30C francs, 15 francs a day for food: that leaves 450 francs for petty cash, laundry, and movies. I won't need underwear or clothes for a long while. Both my suits are clean, even though they shine at the elbows a little: they'll last me three or four years if I take care of them.

Good God! Is it I who is going to lead this mushroom existence? What will I do all day long? I'll take walks. I'll sit on a folding chair in the Tuileriesùor rather on a bench, out of economy. I'll read in the libraries. And then what? A movie once a week. And then what? Can I smoke a Voltigeur on Sunday? Shall I play croquet with the retired old men in the Luxembourg? Thirty years old! I pity myself. There are times when I wonder if it wouldn't be better to spend all my 300,000 francs in one yearùand after that . . . But what good would that do me? New clothes? Women? Travel? I've had all that and now it's over, I don't feel like it any more: for what I'd get out of it! A year from now I'd find myself as empty as I am today, without even a memory, and a coward facing death.

Thirty years! And 14,400 francs in the bank. Coupons tc cash every month. Yet I'm not an old man! Let them give me something to do, no matter what ... I'd better think about something else, because I'm playing a comedy now. I know very well that I don't want to do anything: to do something is to create existenceùand there's quite enough existence as it is.

The truth is that I can't put down my pen: I think I'm going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I'm delaying it while writing. So I write whatever comes into my mind.

Madeleine, who wants to please me, calls to me from the distance, holding up a record:

"Your record, Monsieur Antoine, the one you like, do you want to hear it for the last time?"

"Please."

I said that out of politeness, but I don't feel too well disposed to listen to jazz. Still, I'm going to pay attention because, as Madeleine says, I'm hearing it for the last time: it is very old, even too old for the provinces; I will look for it in vain in Paris. Madeleine goes and sets it on the gramophone, it is going to spin; in the grooves, the steel needle is going to start jumpingand grinding and when the grooves will have spiralled it into the centre of the disc it will be finished and the hoarse voice singing "Some of these days" will be silent forever.

It begins.

To think that there are idiots who get consolation from the fine arts. Like my Aunt Bigeois: "Chopin's Preludes were such a help to me when your poor uncle died." And the concert halls overflow with humiliated, outraged people who close their eyes and try to turn their pale faces into receiving antennas. They imagine that the sounds flow into them, sweet, nourishing, and that their sufferings become music, like Werther; they think that beauty is compassionate to them. Mugs.

I'd like them to tell me whether they find this music compassionate. A while ago I was certainly far from swimming in beatitudes. On the surface I was counting my money, mechanically. Underneath stagnated all those unpleasant thoughts which took the form of unformulated questions, mute astonishments and which leave me neither day nor night. Thoughts of Anny, of my wasted life. And then, still further down, Nausea, timid as dawn. But there was no music then, I was morose and calm. All the things around me were made of the same material as I, a sort of messy suffering. The world was so ugly, outside of me, these dirty glasses on the table were so ugly, and the brown stains on the mirror and Madeleine's apron and the friendly look of the gross lover of the patronne, the very existence of the world so ugly that I felt comfortable, at home.

Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I'd like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am not wanted, if the sincerest of my sufferings drags and weighs, with too much flesh and the skin too wide at the same time, like a sea-elephant, with bulging eyes, damp and touching and yet so ugly? No, they certainly can't tell me it's compassionateùthis little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the

stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it.

It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn't reach it. It is beyondùalways beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don't even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is.

And I, too, wanted to he. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli's Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: "You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm."

The voice sings:

Some of these days You'll miss me, honey

Someone must have scratched the record at that spot because it makes an odd noise. And there is something that clutches the heart: the melody is absolutely untouched by this tiny coughingof the needle on the record. It is so farùso far behind. I understand that too: the disc is scratched and is wearing out, perhaps the singer is dead; I'm going to leave, I'm going to take my train. But behind the existence which falls from one present to the other, without a past, without a future, behind these sounds which decompose from day to day, peel off and slip towards death, the melody stays the same, young and firm, like a pitiless witness.

The voice is silent. The disc scrapes a little, then stops. Delivered from a troublesome dream, the cafe ruminates, chews the cud over the pleasure of existing. The patronne's face is flushed, she slaps the fat white cheeks of her new friend, but without succeeding in colouring them. Cheeks of a corpse. I stagnate, fall half-asleep. In fifteen minutes I will be on the train, but I don't think about it. I think about a clean-shaven American with thick black eyebrows, suffocating with the heat, on the twenty-first floor of a New York skyscraper. The sky burns above New York, the blue of the sky is inflamed, enormous yellow flames come and lick the roofs; the Brooklyn children are going to put on bathing drawers and play under the water of a fire-hose. The dark room on the twenty-first floor cooks under a high pressure. The American with the black eyebrows sighs, gasps and the sweat rolls down his cheeks. He is sitting, in shirtsleeves, in front of his piano; he has a taste of smoke in his mouth and, vaguely, a ghost of a tune in his head. "Some of these days." Tom will come in an hour with his hip-flask; then both of them will lower themselves into leather armchairs and drink brimming glasses of whisky and the fire of the sky will come and inflame their throats, they will feel the weight of an immense, torrid slumber. But first the tune must be written down. "Some of these days." The moist hand seizes the pencil on the piano. "Some of these days you'll miss me, honey."

That's the way it happened. That way or another way, it makes little difference. That is how it was born. It is the worn-out body of this Jew with black eyebrows which it chose to create it. He held the pencil limply, and the drops of sweat fell from his ringed fingers on to the paper. And why not I? Why should it need precisely this fat fool full of stale beer and whisky for the miracle to be accomplished?

"Madeleine, would you put the record back? Just once, before I leave."

Madeleine starts to laugh. She turns the crank and it begins again. But I no longer think of myself. I think of the man out

176

there who wrote this tune, one day in July, in the black heat of his room. I try to think of him through the melody, through the white, acidulated sounds of the saxophone. He made it. He had troubles, everything didn't work out for him the way it should have: bills to payùand then there surely must have been a woman somewhere who wasn't thinking about him the way he would have liked her toùand then there was this terrible heat wave which turned men into pools of melting fat. There is nothing pretty or glorious in all that. But when I hear the sound and I think that that man made it, I find this suffering and sweat . . . moving. He was lucky. He couldn't have realized it. He must have thought: with a little luck, this thing will bring in fifty dollars. Well, this is the first time in years that a man has seemed moving to me. I'd like to know something about him. It would interest me to find out the type of troubles he had, if he had a woman or if he lived alone. Not at all out of humanity; on the contraryùbesides, he may be dead. Just to get a little information about him and be able to think about him from time to time, listening to the record. I don't suppose it would make the slightest difference to him if he were told that in the seventh largest city of France, in the neighbourhood of a station, someone is thinking about him. But I'd be happy if I were in his place; I envy him. I have to go. I get up, but I hesitate an instant, I'd like to hear the Negress sing. For the last time.

She sings. So two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. Maybe they thought they were lost irrevocably, drowned in existence. Yet no one could think of me as I think of them, with such gentleness. No one, not even Anny. They are a little like dead people for me, a little like the heroes of a novel; they have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course, but as much as any man can. This idea suddenly knocks me over, because I was not even hoping for that any more. I feel something brush against me lightly and I dare not move because I am afraid it will go away. Something I didn't know any more: a sort of joy.

The Negress sings. Can you justify your existence then? Just a little? I feel extraordinarily intimidated. It isn't because I have much hope. But I am like a man completely frozen after a trek through the snow and who suddenly comes into a warm room. I think he would stay motionless near the door, still cold, and that slow shudders would go right through him.Some of these days You'll miss me, honey

Couldn't I try. . . . Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune . . . but couldn't I, in another medium? ... It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existedùan existant can never justify the existence of another existant. My error, I wanted to resuscitate the Marquis de Rollebon. Another type of book. I don't quite know which kindùbut you would have to guess, behind the printed words, behind the pages, at something which would not exist, which would be above existence. A story, for example, something that could never happen, an adventure. It would have to be beautiful and hard as steel and make people ashamed of their existence.

I must leave, I am vacillating. I dare not make a decision. If I were sure I had talent. . . . But I have neverùnever written anything of that sort. Historical articles, yesùlots of them. A book. A novel. And there would be people who would read this book and say: "Antoine Roquentin wrote it, a red-headed man who hung around cafes," and they would think about my life as I think about the Negress's: as something precious and almost legendary. A book. Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn't stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a litt'e of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I wait, stooping, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: "That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started." And I might succeed ùin the past, nothing but the pastùin accepting myself.