No matter,
somewhere
round there.
Samuel Beckett
(After ten thousand words?
Well let us say one goal - after it there will be others.
) Speak?
Yes: but to me.
I have never spoken enough to me, never listened enough to me, never replied enough to me, never had pity enough on me.
I have spoken for my master, listened for the words of my master never spoken: "Well done, my child, well done, my son - you may stop, you may go, you are free, you are acquitted, you are pardoned.
" Never spoken.
"My master.
" There is a vein I must not lose sight of.
But for the moment my concern (but before I forget: there may be more than one, a whole college of tyrants, differing in their views as to what should be done with me, in conclave since time began or a little later, listening to me from time to time, then breaking up for a meal or a game of cards) my concern is with the pensum of which I think I may safely say (without loss of face) that it is in some way related to that lesson too hastily proclaimed, too hastily denied.
For all I need say is this: that if I have a pensum to perform it is because I could not say my lesson; and that when I have finished my pensum I shall still have my lesson to say, before I have the right to stay quiet in my corner (alive and dribbling, my mouth shut, my tongue at rest) far from all disturbance, all sound, my mind at peace (that is to say, empty).
But this does not get me very far.
For even should I hit upon the right pensum (somewhere in this churn of words at last) I would still have to reconstitute the right lesson (unless of course the two are one and the same, which obviously is not impossible either).
Strange notion in any case (and eminently open to suspicion), that of a task to be performed, before one can be at rest.
Strange task, which consists in speaking of one self.
Strange hope, turned towards silence and peace.
Possessed of nothing but my voice (the voice), it may seem natural, once the idea of obligation has been swallowed, that I should interpret it as an obligation to say something.
But is it possible?
Bereft of hands, perhaps it is my duty to clap or (striking the palms together) to call the waiter; and of feet, to dance the Carmagnole.
But let us first suppose, in order to get on a little (then we'll suppose something else, in order to get on a little further), that it is in fact required of me that I say something, something that is not to be found in all I have said up to now.
That seems a reasonable
assumption. But thence to infer that the something required is something about me suddenly strikes me as unwarranted. Might it not rather be the praise of my master, intoned, in order to obtain his forgiveness? Or the admission that I am Mahood after all and these stories of a being whose identity he usurps (and whose voice he prevents from being heard) all lies from beginning to end? And what if Mahood were my master? I'll leave it at that, for the time being. So many prospects in so short a time, it's too much. Decidedly it seems impossible, at this stage, that I should dispense with questions, as I promised myself I would. (No, I merely swore I'd stop asking them. ) And perhaps before long (who knows) I shall light on the happy combination which will prevent them from ever arising again in my - let us not be over-nice - mind. For what I am doing is not being done without a minimum of mind. Not mine perhaps (granted, with pleasure), but I draw on it. At least I try and look as if I did. Rich matter there, to be exploited, fatten you up: suck it to the core, keep you going for years, tasty into the bargain. I quiver at the thought (give you my word, spoken in jest), quiver and hurry on, all life before me, on and forget, what I was saying, just now, something important. It's gone, it'll come back, no regrets (as good as new? unrecognizable? let's hope so), some day when I feel more on for high-class nuts to crack. On. The master. I never paid him enough attention. (No more perhapses either: that old trick is worn to a thread. I'll forbid myself everything, then go on as if I hadn't. ) The master. A few allusions here and there, as to a satrap, with a view to enlisting sympathy. "They clothed me and gave me money" - that kind of thing, the light touch. Then no more. Or Moran's boss (I forget his name). Ah yes, certain things, things I invented (hoping for the best, full of doubts, croaking with fatigue) - I remember certain things, not always the same. But to investigate this matter seriously (I mean with as much futile ardour as that of the underling, which I hoped was mine, close to mine, the road to mine) - no, that never occurred to me. And if it occurs to me now it is because I have despaired of mine. A moment of discouragement, to strike while hot. My master then (assuming he is solitary, in my image) wishes me well, poor devil, wishes my good. And if he does not seem to do very much in order not to be disappointed it is because there is not very much to be done - otherwise he would have done it, my great and good master (that must be it), long ago, poor devil. Another supposition: he has taken the necessary steps, his will is done as far as I am concerned (for he may have other prot ^ s), and all is well with me without my knowing it. Cases one and two. I'll consider the former first, if I can. Then I'll admire the latter, if my eyes are still open. (This sounds like one of Malone's anecdotes. ) But quick, consider, before you forget. There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite
miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done - and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world (possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him), commanding me to be well (you know, in every way, no complaints at all), with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter. If he is not pleased with this panegyric I hope I may be I nearly said hanged - but that I hope in any case, without restriction (I nearly said con-). That would cut my cackle. Ah for a neck! "I want all to be well with you, do you hear me? " That's what he keeps on dinning at me. To which I reply, in a respectful attitude: "I too, your Lordship. " I say that to cheer him up, he sounds so unhappy. (I am good-hearted, on the surface. ) No, we have no conversation, never a mum of his mouth to me. He's out of luck, that's certain: perhaps he didn't choose me. What he means by good (or my good) is another problem. He is capable of wanting me to be happy (such a thing has been known, it appears). Or to serve a purpose. Or the two at once! A little more explicitness on his part (since the initiative belongs to him) might be a help, as well from his point of view as from the one he attributes to me. Let the man explain himself and have done with it. It's none of my business to ask him questions, even if I knew how to reach him. Let him inform me once and for all what exactly it is he wants from me, for me. What he wants is my good, I know that. (At least I say it, in the hope of bringing him round to a more reasonable frame of mind - assuming he exists and, existing, hears me. ) But what good? There must be more than one. The supreme perhaps. In a word let him enlighten me, that's all I ask, so that I may at least have the satisfaction of knowing in what sense I leave to be desired. If he wants me to say something (for my good naturally), he has only to tell me what it is and I'll let it out with a roar straight away. It's true he may have told me already a hundred times. Well, let him make it a hundred and one: this time I'll try and pay attention. But perhaps I malign him unjustly, my good master. Perhaps he is not solitary like me, not free like me, but associated with others - equally good, equally concerned with my welfare, but differing as to its nature. Every day, up above (I mean up above me), from one set hour to another set hour (everything there being set and settled except what is to be done with me), they assemble to discuss me. (Or perhaps it's a meeting of deputies, with instructions to elaborate a tentative agreement. ) The fact of my continuing (while they are thus engaged) to be what I have always been is naturally preferable to a lame resolution (voted perhaps by a majority of one, or drawn from an old hat). They too are unhappy, all this time, each one to the best of his capacity, because all is not well with me. And now enough of that. If that doesn't mollify them so much the worse for me (I can still conceive of such a thing). But one
more suggestion before I forget and go on to serious matters. Why don't they wash their hands of me and set me free? That might do me good. I don't know. Perhaps then I could be silent, for good and all. Idle talk, idle talk. I am free: abandoned. All for nothing again. Even Mahood has left me, I'm alone. All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end. Of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end. Of an imposed task (once known, long neglected, finally forgotten) to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening: I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end - gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All lies. I have nothing to do (that is to say, nothing in particular). I have to speak (whatever that means). Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to (there is no one): it's an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it. There is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say: I have the ocean to drink. (So there is an ocean then! ) Not to have been a dupe, that will have been my best possession, my best deed. To have been a dupe, wishing I wasn't, thinking I wasn't, knowing I was: not being a dupe of not being a dupe. For any old thing, no, that doesn't work. That should work but it doesn't. Labyrinthine torment that can't be grasped, or limited, or felt, or suffered - no, not even suffered: I suffer all wrong too, even that I do all wrong too. Like an old turkey-hen dying on her feet, her back covered with chickens and the rats spying on her. Next instalment, quick. No cries, above all no cries. Be urbane, a credit to the art and code of dying, while the others cackle (I can hear them from here) like the crackling of thorns. (No, I forgot, it's impossible: it's myself I hear howling behind my dissertation. ) So not any old thing. Even Mahood's stories are not any old thing, though no less foreign. To what? To that unfamiliar native land of mine - as unfamiliar as that other where men come and go, and feel at home, on tracks they have made themselves, in order to visit one another with the maximum of convenience and dispatch, in the light of a choice of luminaries pissing on the darkness turn about, so that it is never dark, never deserted. That must be terrible. 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.
assumption. But thence to infer that the something required is something about me suddenly strikes me as unwarranted. Might it not rather be the praise of my master, intoned, in order to obtain his forgiveness? Or the admission that I am Mahood after all and these stories of a being whose identity he usurps (and whose voice he prevents from being heard) all lies from beginning to end? And what if Mahood were my master? I'll leave it at that, for the time being. So many prospects in so short a time, it's too much. Decidedly it seems impossible, at this stage, that I should dispense with questions, as I promised myself I would. (No, I merely swore I'd stop asking them. ) And perhaps before long (who knows) I shall light on the happy combination which will prevent them from ever arising again in my - let us not be over-nice - mind. For what I am doing is not being done without a minimum of mind. Not mine perhaps (granted, with pleasure), but I draw on it. At least I try and look as if I did. Rich matter there, to be exploited, fatten you up: suck it to the core, keep you going for years, tasty into the bargain. I quiver at the thought (give you my word, spoken in jest), quiver and hurry on, all life before me, on and forget, what I was saying, just now, something important. It's gone, it'll come back, no regrets (as good as new? unrecognizable? let's hope so), some day when I feel more on for high-class nuts to crack. On. The master. I never paid him enough attention. (No more perhapses either: that old trick is worn to a thread. I'll forbid myself everything, then go on as if I hadn't. ) The master. A few allusions here and there, as to a satrap, with a view to enlisting sympathy. "They clothed me and gave me money" - that kind of thing, the light touch. Then no more. Or Moran's boss (I forget his name). Ah yes, certain things, things I invented (hoping for the best, full of doubts, croaking with fatigue) - I remember certain things, not always the same. But to investigate this matter seriously (I mean with as much futile ardour as that of the underling, which I hoped was mine, close to mine, the road to mine) - no, that never occurred to me. And if it occurs to me now it is because I have despaired of mine. A moment of discouragement, to strike while hot. My master then (assuming he is solitary, in my image) wishes me well, poor devil, wishes my good. And if he does not seem to do very much in order not to be disappointed it is because there is not very much to be done - otherwise he would have done it, my great and good master (that must be it), long ago, poor devil. Another supposition: he has taken the necessary steps, his will is done as far as I am concerned (for he may have other prot ^ s), and all is well with me without my knowing it. Cases one and two. I'll consider the former first, if I can. Then I'll admire the latter, if my eyes are still open. (This sounds like one of Malone's anecdotes. ) But quick, consider, before you forget. There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite
miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done - and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world (possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him), commanding me to be well (you know, in every way, no complaints at all), with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter. If he is not pleased with this panegyric I hope I may be I nearly said hanged - but that I hope in any case, without restriction (I nearly said con-). That would cut my cackle. Ah for a neck! "I want all to be well with you, do you hear me? " That's what he keeps on dinning at me. To which I reply, in a respectful attitude: "I too, your Lordship. " I say that to cheer him up, he sounds so unhappy. (I am good-hearted, on the surface. ) No, we have no conversation, never a mum of his mouth to me. He's out of luck, that's certain: perhaps he didn't choose me. What he means by good (or my good) is another problem. He is capable of wanting me to be happy (such a thing has been known, it appears). Or to serve a purpose. Or the two at once! A little more explicitness on his part (since the initiative belongs to him) might be a help, as well from his point of view as from the one he attributes to me. Let the man explain himself and have done with it. It's none of my business to ask him questions, even if I knew how to reach him. Let him inform me once and for all what exactly it is he wants from me, for me. What he wants is my good, I know that. (At least I say it, in the hope of bringing him round to a more reasonable frame of mind - assuming he exists and, existing, hears me. ) But what good? There must be more than one. The supreme perhaps. In a word let him enlighten me, that's all I ask, so that I may at least have the satisfaction of knowing in what sense I leave to be desired. If he wants me to say something (for my good naturally), he has only to tell me what it is and I'll let it out with a roar straight away. It's true he may have told me already a hundred times. Well, let him make it a hundred and one: this time I'll try and pay attention. But perhaps I malign him unjustly, my good master. Perhaps he is not solitary like me, not free like me, but associated with others - equally good, equally concerned with my welfare, but differing as to its nature. Every day, up above (I mean up above me), from one set hour to another set hour (everything there being set and settled except what is to be done with me), they assemble to discuss me. (Or perhaps it's a meeting of deputies, with instructions to elaborate a tentative agreement. ) The fact of my continuing (while they are thus engaged) to be what I have always been is naturally preferable to a lame resolution (voted perhaps by a majority of one, or drawn from an old hat). They too are unhappy, all this time, each one to the best of his capacity, because all is not well with me. And now enough of that. If that doesn't mollify them so much the worse for me (I can still conceive of such a thing). But one
more suggestion before I forget and go on to serious matters. Why don't they wash their hands of me and set me free? That might do me good. I don't know. Perhaps then I could be silent, for good and all. Idle talk, idle talk. I am free: abandoned. All for nothing again. Even Mahood has left me, I'm alone. All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I can end. Of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end. Of an imposed task (once known, long neglected, finally forgotten) to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening: I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end - gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All lies. I have nothing to do (that is to say, nothing in particular). I have to speak (whatever that means). Having nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels me to (there is no one): it's an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from it. There is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say: I have the ocean to drink. (So there is an ocean then! ) Not to have been a dupe, that will have been my best possession, my best deed. To have been a dupe, wishing I wasn't, thinking I wasn't, knowing I was: not being a dupe of not being a dupe. For any old thing, no, that doesn't work. That should work but it doesn't. Labyrinthine torment that can't be grasped, or limited, or felt, or suffered - no, not even suffered: I suffer all wrong too, even that I do all wrong too. Like an old turkey-hen dying on her feet, her back covered with chickens and the rats spying on her. Next instalment, quick. No cries, above all no cries. Be urbane, a credit to the art and code of dying, while the others cackle (I can hear them from here) like the crackling of thorns. (No, I forgot, it's impossible: it's myself I hear howling behind my dissertation. ) So not any old thing. Even Mahood's stories are not any old thing, though no less foreign. To what? To that unfamiliar native land of mine - as unfamiliar as that other where men come and go, and feel at home, on tracks they have made themselves, in order to visit one another with the maximum of convenience and dispatch, in the light of a choice of luminaries pissing on the darkness turn about, so that it is never dark, never deserted. That must be terrible. 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.
