No More Learning

So be it. Not any old thing, but as near as no matter. Mahood. Before him there were others, taking themselves for me. (It must be a sinecure handed down from generation to generation, to judge by their family air. ) Mahood is no worse than his predecessors. But before executing his portrait (full-length on his surviving leg) let me note that my next vice-exister will be a billy in the bowl (that's final), with his bowl on his head and his arse in the dust, plump down on thousand- breasted Tellus
(it'll be softer for him). Faith that's an idea (yet another! ): mutilate, mutilate - and perhaps some day, fifteen generations hence, you'll succeed in beginning to look like yourself, among the passers-by. In the meantime it's Mahood: this caricature is he. What if we were one and the same after all, as he affirms (and I deny)? And I have been in the places where he says I have been, instead of having stayed on here, trying to take advantage of his absence to unravel my tangle? Here, in my domain? What is Mahood doing in my domain, and how does he get here? There I am launched again on the same old hopeless business: there we are face to face, Mahood and I (if we are twain, as I say we are). (I never saw him, I don't see him: he has told me what he is like, what I am like - they have all told me that, it must be one of their principal functions. It isn't enough that I should know what I'm doing: I must also know what I'm looking like. ) This time I am short of a leg. And yet it appears I have rejuvenated. (That's part of the programme. ) Having brought me to death's door (senile gangrene), they whip off a leg and yip! off I go again, like a young one, scouring the earth for a hole to hide in. A single leg and other distinctive stigmata to go with it (human to be sure, but not exaggeratedly, lest I take fright and refuse to nibble). "He'll resign himself in the end, he'll own up in the end" - that's the watchword. "Let's try him this time with a hairless wedge-head: he might fancy that" - that kind of talk. "With the solitary leg in the middle, that might appeal to him. " The poor bastards. They could clap an artificial anus in the hollow of my hand and still I wouldn't be there, alive with their life: not far short of a man (just barely a man) - sufficiently for a man to have hopes one day of being one, my avatars behind me. And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation: dumb with howling to be put out of my misery (and all round me the spinach blue rustling with satisfaction). Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant. Then they uncorked the champagne: "One of us at last! Green with anguish! A real little terrestrial! Choking in the chlorophyll! Hugging the slaughterhouse walls! " (Paltry priests of the irrepressible ephemeral, how they must hate me! ) "Come, my lambkin, join in our gambols. It's soon over, you'll see, just time to frolic with a lambkinette. " That's jam. Love! There's a carrot never fails: I always had to thread some old bodkin. And that's the kind of jakes in which I sometimes dreamt I dwelt, and even let down my trousers. (Mahood himself nearly codded me, more than once. ) I've been he an instant, hobbling through a nature which (it is only fair to say) was on the barren side and (what is more, it is only just to add) tolerably deserted to begin with. After each thrust of my crutches I stopped, to devour a narcotic and measure the
distance gone, the distance yet to go. My head is there too: broad at the base, its slopes denuded, culminating in a ridge or crowning glory strewn with long waving hairs like those that grow on naevi. (No denying it, I'm confoundedly well informed! You must allow it was tempting. ) I say an instant - perhaps it was years. Then I withdrew my adhesion, it was getting too much of a good thing. I had already advanced a good ten paces (if one may call them paces) - not in a straight line I need hardly say, but in a sharp curve which, if I continued to follow it, seemed likely to restore me to my point of departure (or to one adjacent). I must have got embroiled in a kind of inverted spiral: I mean one the coils of which, instead of widening more and more, grew narrower and narrower and finally (given the kind of space in which I was supposed to evolve) would come to an end for lack of room. Faced then with the material impossibility of going any further I should no doubt have had to stop - unless of course I elected to set off again at once in the opposite direction: to unscrew myself as it were, after having screwed myself to a standstill. Which would have been an experience rich in interest and fertile in surprises, if I am to believe what I once was told, in spite of my protests: namely that there is no road so dull, on the way out, but it has quite a different aspect, quite a different dullness, on the way back, and vice versa. (No good wriggling, I'm a mine of useless knowledge. ) But a difficulty arises here. For if by dint of winding myself up (if I may venture to use that ellipse, it doesn't often happen to me now) - if by dint of winding myself up (I don't seem to have gained much time) - if by dint of winding myself up I must inevitably find myself stuck in the end, once launched in the opposite direction should I not normally unfold ad infinitum, with no possibility of ever stopping? (The space in which I was marooned being globular - or is it the earth? No matter, I know what I mean. ) (But where is the difficulty? There was one a minute ago, I could swear to it. ) Not to mention that I could quite easily at any moment, literally any, run foul of a wall, a tree or similar obstacle (which of course it would be prohibited to circumvent), and thereby have an end put to my gyrations as effectively as by the kind of cramp just mentioned. But obstacles, it appears, can be removed in the fullness of time (but not by me: me they would stop dead forever, if I lived among them). But even without such aids it seems to me that once beyond the equator you would start turning inwards again, out of sheer necessity: I somehow have that feeling. At the particular moment I am referring to (I mean when I took myself for Mahood) I must have been coming to the end of a world tour - perhaps not more than two or three centuries to go. My state of decay lends colour to this view: perhaps I had left my leg behind in the Pacific. Yes (no perhaps about it), I had: somewhere off the coast of Java and its jungles red with rafflesia stinking of carrion.
(No, that's the Indian ocean - what a gazetteer I am! No matter, somewhere round there. ) In a word I was returning to the fold. Admittedly reduced - and doubtless fated to be even more so, before I could be restored to my wife and parents (you know, my loved ones), and clasp in my arms (both of which I had succeeded in preserving) my little ones born in my absence. I found myself in a kind of vast yard or campus, surrounded by high walls, in surface an amalgam of dirt and ashes - and this seemed sweet to me after the vast and heaving wastes I had traversed (if my information was correct). I almost felt out of danger! At the centre of this enclosure stood a small rotunda - windowless, but well furnished with loopholes. Without being quite sure I had seen it before, I had been so long from home, I kept saying to myself: "Yonder is the nest you should never have left, there your dear absent ones are awaiting your return, patiently, and you too must be patient. " It was swarming with them: grandpa, grandma, little mother and the eight or nine brats. With their eyes glued to the slits and their hearts going out to me they surveyed my efforts. This yard so long deserted was now enlivened, for them, by me. So we turned, in our respective orbits: I without, they within. At night, keeping watch by turns, they observed me with the help of a searchlight. So the seasons came and went. The children increased in stature, the periods of Ptomaine grew pale, the ancients glowered at each other, muttering (to themselves): "I'll bury you yet" or "You'll bury me yet". Since my arrival they had a subject of conversation, and even of discussion (the same as of old, at the moment of my setting forth), perhaps even an interest in life (the same as of old). Time hung less heavy on their hands. "What about throwing him a few scraps? " "No, no, it might upset him. " They did not want to check the impetus that was sweeping me towards them. "You wouldn't know him! " "True, papa, and yet you can't mistake him. " They who in the ordinary way never answered when spoken to: my elders, my wife (she who had chosen me, rather than one of her suitors). "A few more summers and he'll be in our midst. Where am I going to put him? In the basement? " (Perhaps after all I am simply in the basement. ) "What possesses him to be stopping all the time? " "Oh he was always like that, ever since he was a mite - always stopping, wasn't he, Granny? " "Yes indeed, never easy, always stopping. " According to Mahood I never reached them - that is to say they all died first, the whole ten or eleven of them, carried off by sausage-poisoning, in great agony. Incommoded first by their shrieks, then by the stench of decomposition, I turned sadly away. But not so fast, otherwise we'll never arrive. (It's no longer I in any case. ) "He'll never reach us if he doesn't get a move on. He looks as if he had slowed down, since last year. " "Oh the last laps won't take him long. " (My missing leg didn't seem to affect them, perhaps it was already missing
when I left. ) "What about throwing him a sponge? " "No, no, it might confuse him. " In the evening, after supper, while my wife kept her eye on me, gaffer and gammer related my life history, to the sleepy children. Bedtime story atmosphere. (That's one of Mahood's favourite tricks: to produce ostensibly independent testimony in support of my historical existence. ) The instalment over, all joined in a hymn: "Safe in the arms of Jesus" (for example), or "Jesus lover of my soul, let me to they bosom fly" (for example). Then they went to bed (with the exception of the one on watch duty). My parents differed in their views on me, but they were agreed I had been a fine baby, at the very beginning - the first fortnight or three weeks. "And yet he was a fine baby" - with these words they invariably closed their relations. Often they fell silent, engulfed in their memories. Then it was usual for one of the children to launch, by way of envoy, the consecrated phrase "And yet he was a fine baby". A burst of clear and innocent laughter, from the mouths of those whom sleep had not yet overcome, greeted this premature conclusion. And the narrators themselves, torn from their melancholy thoughts, could scarce forbear to smile. Then they all rose (with the exception of my mother whose knees couldn't support her) and sang "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" (for example), or "Jesus my one, my all, hear me when I call" (for example). (He too must have been a fine baby. ) Finally my wife announced the latest news, for them to take to bed with them: "He's backing away again", or "He's stopped to scratch himself^", or "You should have seen him hopping sidelong", or "Oh look children, quick he's down on his hands and knee". (Admittedly that must have been worth seeing. ) It was then customary that someone should ask her if I was approaching none the less, if in spite of everything I was making headway: they couldn't bear the thought of going to bed (those who were still awake) without the assurance that I wasn't losing ground. Ptoto set their minds at rest: I had moved, no further proof was needed. I had been drawing near for so long now that provided I remained in motion there could be no cause for anxiety. I was launched, there was no reason why I should suddenly begin to retreat, I just wasn't made that way. Then having kissed all round and wished one another happy dreams they retired (with the exception of the watch). "What about hailing him? " Poor Papa, he burned to encourage me vocally: "Stick it, lad, it's your last winter. " But in view of the trouble I was having, the trouble I was taking, they held him back, pointing out that the moment was ill-chosen to give me a shock. But what were my own feelings at this period? What was I thinking of? With what? Was I having difficulty with my morale? The answer to all that is this (I quote Malone): that I was entirely absorbed in the business on hand and was not at all concerned to know precisely (or even
approximately) what it consisted in. The only problem for me was how to continue (since I could not do otherwise), to the best of my declining powers, in the motion which had been imparted to me. This obligation (and the quasi-impossibility of fulfilling it) engrossed me in a purely mechanical way (excluding notably the free play of the intelligence and sensibility). So that my situation rather resembled that of an old broken-down cart- or bat-horse unable to receive the least information either from its instinct or from its observation as to whether it is moving towards the stable or away from it (and not greatly caring either way). The question, among others, of how such things are possible had long since ceased to preoccupy me. This touching picture of my situation I found by no means unattractive, and as I recall it I find myself wondering again if I was not in fact the creature revolving in the yard (as Mahood assured me). Well supplied with pain-killers I drew upon them freely, without however permitting myself the lethal dose that would have cut short my function (whatever that may have been). Having somehow or other remarked the habitation and even admitted to myself that I had perhaps seen it before, I gave it no further thought - nor to the near and dear ones that filled it to overflowing, in a mounting fever of impatience. Though now close at hand, as the crow flies, to my goal, I did not quicken my step. I could have no doubt, but I had to husband my strength, if I was ever to arrive. I had no wish to arrive, but I had to do my utmost, in order to arrive. A desirable goal? No, I never had time to dwell on that. To go on (I still call that on), to go on and get on has been my only care (if not always in a straight line, at least in obedience to the figure assigned to me). There was never any room in my life for anything else. (Still Mahood speaking. ) Never once have I stopped. (My halts do not count. Their purpose was to enable me to go on. I did not use them to brood on my lot, but to rub myself as best I might with Ellman's Embrocation, for example, or to give myself an injection of laudanum - no easy matter for a man with only one leg. ) Often the cry went up "He's down! ". But in reality I had sunk to the ground of my own free will, in order to be rid of my crutches and have both hands available to minister to myself in peace and comfort. Admittedly it is difficult, for a man with but one leg, to sink to earth in the full force of the expression - particularly when he is weak in the head and the sole surviving leg flaccid for want of exercise (or from excess of it). The simplest thing then is to fling away the crutches and collapse. That is what I did. They were therefore right in saying I had fallen (they were not far wrong). Oh I have also been known to fall involuntarily - but not often. (An old warrior like me: you can imagine. ) But have it any way you like. (Up or down, taking my anodynes, waiting for the pain to abate, panting to be on my way again. ) I stopped, if you insist - but not in
the sense they meant when they said "He's down again, he'll never reach us". When I penetrate into that house (if I ever do) it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive (like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms), overturning the furniture - in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once: until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good-evening. I must really lend myself to this story a little longer, there may possibly be a grain of truth in it. Mahood must have remarked that I remained sceptical, for he casually let fall that I was lacking not only a leg, but an arm also. (With regard to the homologous crutch, I seemed to have retained sufficient armpit to hold and manoeuvre it - with the help of my unique foot to knock the end of it forward - as occasion required. ) But what shocked me profoundly (to such a degree that my mind - Mahood dixit - was assailed by insuperable doubts) was the suggestion that the misfortune experienced by my family (and brought to my notice first by the noise of their agony, then by the smell of their corpses) had caused me to turn back. From that moment on I ceased to go along with him. I'll explain why (that will permit me to think of something else - and in the first place of how to get back to me, back to where I am waiting for me). I'd just as soon not, but it's my only chance (at least I think so) - the only chance I have of going silent, of saying something at last that is not false (if that is what they want) so as to have nothing more to say. My reasons. (I'll give three or four, that ought to be enough for me. ) First this family of mine. The mere fact of having a family should have put me on my guard. But my goodwill at certain moments is such, and my longing to have floundered (however briefly, however feebly) in the great life torrent streaming from the earliest protozoa to the very latest humans, that I No - parenthesis unfinished. I'll begin again. My family. To begin with it had no part or share in what I was doing. Having set forth from that place, it was only natural I should return to it, given the accuracy of my navigation. And my family could have moved to other quarters during my absence, and settled down a hundred leagues away, without my deviating by as much as a hair's- breadth from my course. As for the screams of pain and wafts of decomposition (assuming I was capable of noticing them), they would have seemed to me quite in the natural order of things, such as I had come to know it. If before such manifestations I had been compelled each time to turn aside, I should not have got very far. Washed (on the surface only) by the rains, my head cracking with unutterable imprecations, it was for myself I should have had to turn aside, before all else. (After all perhaps I was doing so: that would account for my vaguely circular motion. ) Lies, lies: mine was not to know, nor to judge, nor talk, but to go.
That the bacillus botulinus should have exterminated my entire kith and kin (I shall never weary or repeating this) was something I could readily admit - but only on condition that my personal behaviour had not to suffer by it. Let us rather consider what really took place, if Mahood was telling the truth. And why should he have lied to me, he so anxious to obtain my adhesion? (To what, now that I come to think of it? To his conception of me? ) Why? For fear of paining me perhaps. But I am there to be pained, that is what my tempters have never grasped. What they all wanted (each according to his particular notion of what is endurable) was that I should exist and at the same time be only moderately (or perhaps I should say finitely) pained. They have even killed me off, with the friendly remark that having reached the end of my endurance I had no choice but to disappear. (The end of my endurance!
It was one second they should have schooled me to endure: after that I would have held out for all eternity, whistling a merry tune. ) The hard knocks they invented for me! But the bouquet was this story of Mahood's in which I appear as upset at having been delivered so economically of a pack of blood relations (not to mention the two cunts into the bargain: the one for ever accursed that ejected me into this world and the other, infundibuliform, in which - pumping my likes - I tried to take my revenge). To tell the truth (let us be honest at least), it is some considerable time now since I last knew what I was talking about. It is because my thoughts are elsewhere. I am therefore forgiven. So long as one's thoughts are somewhere everything is permitted. On then, without misgiving, as if nothing had happened. And let us consider what really took place (if Mahood was telling me the truth when he represented me as rid at one glorious sweep of parents, wife and heirs). I've plenty of time to blow it all sky-high, this circus where it is enough to breathe to qualify for asphyxiation: I'll find a way out of it, it won't be like the other times. But I should not like to defame my defamer. For when he made me turn and set off in the other direction, before I had exhausted the possibilities of the one I was pursuing, he had not in mind a shrinking of the spirit, not for a moment: but a purely physiological commotion, followed by a simple desire to vomit - corresponding respectively to the howls of my family as they grudgingly succumbed and the subsequent stench (this latter compelling me to beat in retreat under penalty of losing consciousness entirely). (This version of the facts having been restored, it only remains to say it is no better than the other and no less incompatible with the kind of creature I might just conceivably have been if they had known how to take me. ) So let us consider now what really occurred. Finally I found myself, without surprise, within the building (circular in form as already stated, its ground-floor consisting of a single room flush with the arena) and there completed my
rounds - stamping under foot the unrecognizable remains of my family (here a face, there a stomach, as the case might be), and sinking into them with the ends of my crutches, both coming and going. To say I did so with satisfaction would be stretching the truth. For my feeling was rather one of annoyance at having to flounder in such muck just at the moment when my closing contortions called for a firm and level surface. I like to fancy (even if it is not true) that it was in mother's entrails I spent the last days of my long voyage, and set out on the next. (No, I have no preference: Isolde's breast would have done just as well, or papa's private parts, or the heart of one of the little bastards. ) But is it certain? Would I have not been more likely, in a sudden access of independence, to devour what remained of the fatal corned-beef? How often did I fall during these final stages, while the storms raged without? But enough of this nonsense: I was never anywhere but here, no one ever got me out of here. Enough of acting the infant who has been told so often how he was found under a cabbage leaf that in the end he remembers the exact spot in the garden and the kind of life he led there before joining the family circle. There will be no more from me about bodies and trajectories, sky and earth - I don't know what it all is. They have told me, explained to me, described to me, what it all is, what it looks like, what it's all for (one after the other, thousands of times, in thousands of connections), until I must have begun to look as if I understood. Who would ever think, to hear me, that I've never seen anything, never heard anything but their voices? (And man! The lectures they gave me on men, before they even began trying to assimilate me to him! ) What I speak of, what I speak with, all comes from them - it's all the same to me. But it's no good, there's no end to it. It's of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language. It will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness: the madness of having to speak and not being able to - except of things that don't concern me, that I don't believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put an end to it, from doing what I have to do. How they must hate me! Ah a nice state they have me in - but still I'm not their creature (not quite, not yet). To testify to them, until I die (as if there was any dying with that tomfoolery): that's what they've sworn they'll bring me to. Not to be able to open my mouth without proclaiming them, and our fellowship: that's what they imagine they'll have me reduced to. It's a poor trick that consists in ramming a set of words down your gullet on the principle that you can't bring them up without being branded as belonging to their breed. But I'll fix their gibberish for them. I never understood a word of it in any case - not a word of the stories it spews, like gobbets in a vomit. My inability to absorb, my genius for
forgetting, are more than they reckoned with. Dear incomprehension, it's thanks to you I'll be myself in the end. Nothing will remain of all the lies they have glutted me with. And I'll be myself at last (as a starveling belches his odourless wind, before the bliss of coma). But who, they? Is it really worth inquiring? With my cogged means? No, but that's no reason not to. On their own ground, with their own arms, I'll scatter them, and their miscreated puppets. (Perhaps I'll find traces of myself by the same occasion. ) That's decided then. What is strange is that they haven't been pestering me for some time past (yes, they've inflicted the notion of time on me too). What conclusion, using their methods, am I to draw from this? Mahood is silent: that is to say his voice continues, but is no longer renewed. Do they consider me so plastered with their rubbish that I can never extricate myself, never make a gesture but their cast must come to life? But within, motionless, I can live, and utter me, for no ears but my own. They loaded me down with their trappings and stoned me through the carnival. I'll sham dead now, whom they couldn't bring to life, and my monster's carapace will rot off me. But it's entirely a matter of voices: no other metaphor is appropriate. They've blown me up with their voices, like a balloon, and even as I collapse it's them I hear. Who, them? And why nothing more from them lately? Can it be they have abandoned me, saying "Very well, there's nothing to be done with him, let's leave it at that, he's not dangerous"? Ah but the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles! The little gasp of the condemned to life, rotting in his dungeon garrotted and racked, to gasp what it is to have to celebrate banishment! Beware! No, they have nothing to fear. I am walled round with their vociferations. No one will ever know what I am, none will ever hear me say it: I won't say it, I can't say it, I have no language but theirs. No, perhaps I'll say it (even with their language), for me alone - so as not to have not lived in vain, and so as to go silent. (If that is what confers the right to silence - and it's unlikely: it's they who have silence in their gift, they who decide, the same old gang, among themselves. ) No matter, to hell with silence: I'll say what I am, so as not to have been born for nothing. I'll fix their jargon for them. Then any old thing (no matter what, whatever they want), with a will, till time is done - at least with a good grace. First I'll say what I'm not (that's how they taught me to proceed), then what I am. It's already under way: I have only to resume at the point where I let myself be cowed. I am neither (I needn't say) Murphy, nor Watt, nor Mercier, nor, (no, I can't even bring myself to name them, nor any of the others whose very names I forget, who told me I was they, who I must have tried to be - under duress, or through fear, or to avoid acknowledging me): not the slightest connection. I never desired, never sought, never suffered, never
partook in any of that, never knew what it was to have things, adversaries, mind, senses. But enough of this. There is no use denying, no use harping on the same old thing I know so well, and so easy to say - and which simply amounts in the end to speaking yet again in the way they intend me to speak: that is to say about them (even with execration and disbelief). Perhaps they exist in the way they have decreed will be mine? It's possible: I don't know and I'm not interested. (If they had taught me how to wish I'd wish they did. ) There's no getting rid of them without naming them and their contraptions, that's the thing to keep in mind. I might as well tell another of Mahood's stories and no more about it (to be understood in the way I was given to understand it: namely as being about me). That's an idea. To heighten my disgust. I'll recite it. This will leave me free to consider how I may best proceed with my own affair, beginning again at the point where I had to interrupt it (under duress, or through fear, or through ignorance). It will be the last story. I'll try and look as if I was telling it willingly, to keep them quiet in case they should feel like refreshing my memory (on the subject of my behaviour above in the island, among my compatriots, coreligionists and companions in distress). This will leave me free to consider how to set about showing myself forth. No one will be any the wiser. But who are these maniacs let loose on me from on high for what they call my good? Let us first try and throw a little light on that. To tell the truth, No, first the story. The island. I'm on the island. I've never left the island, God help me. I was under the impression I spent my life in spirals round the earth. Wrong, it's on the island I wind my endless way. The island, that's all the earth I know. (I don't know it either, never having had the stomach to look at it. ) When I come to the coast I turn back inland. And my course is not helicoidal (I got that wrong too), but a succession of irregular loops - now sharp and short as in the waltz, now of a parabolic sweep that embraces entire boglands, now between the two (somewhere or other) - and invariably unpredictable in direction (that is to say determined by the panic of the moment). But at the period I refer to now this active life is at an end. I do not move and never shall again (unless it be under the impulsion of a third party). For of the great traveller I had been (on my hands and knees in the later stages, then crawling on my belly or rolling on the ground) only the trunk remains, in sorry trim, surmounted by the head with which we are already familiar (this is the part of myself the description of which I have best assimilated and retained). Stuck like a sheaf of flowers in a deep jar, its neck flush with my mouth, on the side of a quiet street near the shambles, I am at rest at last. If I turn (I shall not say my head, but my eyes, free to roll as they list) I can see the statue of the apostle of horse's meat: a bust. His pupilless eyes of stone are fixed upon
me. That makes four, with those of my creator. (Omnipresent: do not imagine I flatter myself I am privileged. ) Though not exactly in order I am tolerated by the police. They know I am speechless and consequently incapable of taking unfair advantage of my situation to stir up the population against its governors, by means of burning oratory during the rush hour or subversive slogans whispered, after nightfall, to belated pedestrians the worse for drink. And since I have lost all my members (with the exception of the one-time virile) they know also that I shall not be guilty of any gestures liable to be construed as inciting to alms (a prisonable offence). The fact is I trouble no one - except possibly that category of hypersensitive persons for whom the least thing is an occasion for scandal and indignation. But even here the risk is negligible: such people avoiding the neighbourhood for fear of being overcome at the sight of the cattle (fat and fresh from the pastures) trooping towards the humane killer. From this point of view the spot is well chosen (from my point of view). And even those sufficiently unhinged to be affected by the spectacle I offer (I mean upset and temporarily diminished in their capacity for work and aptitude for happiness) need only look at me a second time (those who can bring themselves to do it) to have immediately their minds made easy. For my face reflects nothing but the satisfaction of one savouring a well-earned rest. It is true my mouth was hidden, most of the time, and my eyes closed. (Ah yes: sometimes it's in the past, sometimes in the present. ) And alone perhaps the state of my skull (covered with pustules and bluebottles, these latter naturally abounding in such a neigbourhood) preserved me from being an object of envy for many, and a source of discontent. I hope this gives a fair picture of my situation. Once a week I was taken out of my receptacle, so that it might be emptied. This duty fell to the proprietress of the chop-house across the street, and she performed it punctually and without complaint (beyond an occasional good-natured reflection to the effect that I was a nasty old pig): for she had a kitchen garden. Without perhaps having exactly won her heart it was clear I did not leave her indifferent. And before putting me back she took advantage of the circumstance that my mouth was accessible to stick into it a chunk of lights or a marrow-bone. And when snow fell she covered me with a tarpaulin still watertight in places. It was under its shelter, snug and dry, that I became acquainted with the boon of tears (while wondering to what I was indebted for it, not feeling moved). And this not merely once, but every time she covered me - that is to say twice or three times a year. Yes, it was fatal: no sooner had the tarpaulin settled over me, and the precipitate steps of my benefactress died away, than the tears began to flow. Is this, was this, to be interpreted as an effect of gratitude? But in that case should not I have felt
grateful? Besides I realized darkly that if she took care of me thus, it was not solely out of goodness (or else I had not rightly understood the meaning of goodness, when it was explained to me). It must not be forgotten that I represented for this woman an undeniable asset. For quite apart from the services I rendered to her lettuce, I constituted for her establishment a kind of landmark, not to say an advertisement - far more effective than for example a chef in cardboard (pot-bellied in profile and full face wafer thin). That she was well aware of this is shown by the trouble she had taken to festoon my jar with Chinese lanterns (of a very pretty effect in the twilight, and a fortiori in the night). And the jar itself (so that the passer-by might consult with greater ease the menu attached to it) had been raised on a pedestal at her own expense. It is thus I learnt that her turnips in gravy are not so good as they used to be, but that on the other hand her carrots (equally in gravy) are even better than formerly. (The gravy has not varied. ) This is the kind of language I can almost understand, these the kind of clear and simple notions on which it is possible for me to build: I ask for no other spiritual nourishment. A turnip, I know roughly what a turnip is like. A carrot too (particularly the Flakkee, or Colmar Red). I seem to grasp at certain moments the nuance that divides bad from worse. And if I do not always feel the full force of yesterday and today, this does not detract very much from the satisfaction I feel at having penetrated the gist of the matter. Of her salad, for example, I have never heard anything but praise. Yes, I represent for her a tidy little capital and, if I should ever happen to die, I am convinced she would be genuinely annoyed. (This should help me to live. ) I like to fancy that when the fatal hour of reckoning comes (if it ever does), and my debt to nature is paid at last, she will do her best to prevent the removal, from where it now stands, of the old vase in which I shall have accomplished my vicissitudes. And perhaps in the place now occupied by my head she will set a melon, or a vegetable-marrow, or a big pineapple with its little tuft (or better still, I don't know why, a swede), in memory of me. Then I shall vanish quite (as is so often the way with people when they are buried). But it is not to speak of her that I have started lying again. (De nobis ipsis silemus: decidedly that should have been my motto. Yes, they gave me some lessons in pigsty Latin too - it looks well, sprinkled through the perjury. ) It is perhaps worth noting that snow alone (provided of course it is heavy) entitles me to the tarpaulin. No other form of filthy weather lets loose in her the maternal instinct, in my favour. I have tried to make her understand, dashing my head angrily against the neck of the jar, that I should like to be shrouded more often. At the same time I let my spittle flow over, in an attempt to show my displeasure. In vain. I wonder what explanation she can have found to account for
this behaviour. She must have talked it over with her husband and probably been told that I was merely stifling. That is the reverse of the truth. But credit where credit is due: we made a balls of it between us, I with my signs and she with her reading of them. This story is no good, I'm beginning almost to believe it. But let us see how it is supposed to end, that will sober me. The trouble is I forget how it goes on. (But did I ever know? ) Perhaps it stops there. Perhaps they stopped it there, saying (who knows? ): "There you are now, you don't need us any more. " This in fact is one of their favourite devices: to stop suddenly at the least sign of adhesion from me, leaving me high and dry, with nothing for my renewal but the life they have imputed to me. And it is only when they see me stranded that they take up again the thread of my misfortunes - judging me still insufficiently vitalized to bring them to a successful conclusion alone. But instead of making the junction (I have often noticed this) - I mean instead of resuming me at the point where I was left off - they pick me up at a much later stage, perhaps thereby hoping to induce in me the illusion that I had got through the interval all on my own; lived without help of any kind for quite some time, and with no recollection of by what means or in what circumstances: or even died, all on my own, and come back to earth again (by way of the vagina like a real live baby), and reached a ripe age, and even senility, without the least assistance from them and thanks solely to the hints they had given me. To saddle me with a lifetime is probably not enough for them: I have to be given a taste of two or three generations. But it's not certain. Perhaps all they have told me has reference to a single existence - the confusion of identities being merely apparent and due to my inaptitude to assume any. If I ever succeed in dying under my own steam, then they will be in a better position to decide if I am worthy to adorn another age (or to try the same one again, with the benefit of my experience). I may therefore perhaps legitimately suppose that the one-armed wayfarer of a moment ago and the wedge-headed trunk in which I am now marooned are simply two phases of the same carnal envelope (the soul being notoriously immune from deterioration and dismemberment). Having lost one leg, what more likely than that I should mislay the other? And similarly for the arms. A natural transition in sum. But what then of that other old age they bestowed upon me (if I remember right), and that other middle age, when neither legs nor arms were lacking, but simply the power to profit by them? And of that kind of youth in which they had to give me up for dead? If I have warm place it is not in their hearts. Oh I don't say they haven't done all they could to be agreeable to me, to get me out of here (on no matter what pretext, in no matter what disguise). All I reproach them with is their insistence. For beyond them is that other who will not give me quittance until
they have abandoned me as inutilizable and restored me to myself. Then at last I can set about saying what I was, and where, during all this long lost time. But who is he, if my guess is right, who is waiting for that, from me? And who these others whose designs are so different? And into whose hands I play when I ask myself such questions? But do I, do I? In the jar did I ask myself questions? And in the arena? I have dwindled, I dwindle. Not so long ago (with a kind of shrink of my head and shoulders, as when one is scolded) I could disappear. Soon, at my present rate of decrease, I may spare myself this effort. And spare myself the trouble of closing my eyes, so as not to see the day (for they are blinded by the jar a few inches away). And I have only to let my head fall forward against the wall to be sure that the light from above (which at night is that of the moon) will not be reflected there either, in those little blue mirrors.