A roquentin, they tell us, has as its primary meaning in the Larousse Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century: “A name formerly given to songs composed of fragments of other songs and linked together as in a cento, so as to produce bizarre effects by changes in rhythm and abrupt breaks in the succession of thoughts.”

Roquentin is a solipsist, trapped in a terrible echo-chamber of the self, haunted by the sonics of his inflamed personality. But alongside his Dostoevskyan anger, and his Céline-like contempt for the bourgeois masses, Roquentin is visited by a deeper, more philosophical ailment: he falls into bouts of what he calls his “Nausea.” These are episodes in which, afflicted by his sense that there is “absolutely no more reason for living,” he is simultaneously alienated from and over-immersed in reality. He is overcome in a café, in a street, in his study. He feels that “nothing seemed true, I felt surrounded by cardboard scenery which could quickly be removed. . . . I murmured: ‘Anything can happen, anything.’” Reality begins to lose its familiar outlines. Words, for instance, no longer seem to refer to their referents.

Roquentin is overcome by a sense of humans as “a heap of living creatures . . . we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt in the way in relation to the others. In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones.” And he continues: “I, too, was In the way.” This obstructive superfluity does not strike him as, in some way, part of the mysterious generosity of life (as religionists, and even some scientists, argue that nature’s crooked abundance, its beautiful excess, could only come from God). Far from it. The abundance of life strikes him as “dismal, ailing, embarrassed at itself.”

Roquentin concludes that nothing is simply itself. “The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. . . . The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. . . . All is free. . . .

Although Camus argued that after God we create our own meaning, one feels that he never really believed in self-determination as absolutely as Sartre did. Camus continued to live under a religious shadow, wherein the battle was always with the terms handed to us by life — a secular version of man’s battle with the Gods. Life was a religious sentence for Camus; he never quite relinquished the idea that meaning has left a residue of itself in the world. Sartre found Camus’s religiosity frustrating, and said so; it was, along with political differences, one of the reasons for the break between the two men in the early 1950s. Sartre, though his language is sometimes religious, never had any time for religion. Camus was a tragic religionist, really; Sartre was, as he described himself, “a providential atheist.”

Yet for all their differences, Camus and Sartre resemble each other most powerfully in the “solutions” they propose to the meaninglessness of existence. Roquentin thinks of writing a novel, and Camus tells us that we must fight life with our revolt, our freedom, and our passion. Are Camus’s terms really any more stringent than Sartre’s?

Camus, the more religious thinker, was actually much more realistic about the tragic, constrained, Sisyphean nature of our ordinary daily imprisonment. Camus asked us to fight that imprisonment, if necessarily wearily and repetitively; Sartre hoped that we could simply explode the prison.

These notebooks were found among the papers of Antoine Roquentin. They are published without alteration.

This is what I have to avoid, I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something.

Monday, 29 January, 1932:

Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little; I felt a little strange, a little put out, that’s all. Once established it never moved, it stayed quiet, and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me, that it was a false alarm. And now, it’s blossoming.

I think I’m the one who has changed: that’s the simplest solution. Also the most unpleasant. But I must finally realize that I am subject to these sudden transformations. The thing is that I rarely think; a crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place. This is what has given my life such a jerky, incoherent aspect.

Through the lack of attaching myself to words, my thoughts remain nebulous most of the time. They sketch vague, pleasant shapes and then are swallowed up: I forget them almost immediately.

I stayed bent down for a second, I read “Dictation: The White Owl,” then I straightened up, empty-handed. I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I will.

Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.

Now I see: I recall better what I felt the other day at the seashore when I held the pebble. It was a sort of sweetish sickness. How unpleasant it was! It came from the stone, I’m sure of it, it passed from the stone to my hand. Yes, that’s it, that’s just it—a sort of nausea in the hands.

I ruminate heavily near the gas stove; I know in advance the day is lost. I shall do nothing good, except, perhaps, after nightfall. It is because of the sun; it ephemerally touches the dirty white wisps of fog, which float in the air above the construction-yards, it flows into my room, all gold, all pale, it spreads four dull, false reflections on my table.

I get up. There is a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be caught in it. I have. The grey thing appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it, I can no longer get away.

It is the reflection of my face. Often in these lost days I study it. I can understand nothing of this face. The faces of others have some sense, some direction. Not mine. I cannot even decide whether it is handsome or ugly. I think it is ugly because I have been told so. But it doesn’t strike me. At heart, I am even shocked that anyone can attribute qualities of this kind to it, as if you called a clod of earth or a block of stone beautiful or ugly.

Things are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea. And this time it is new: it caught me in a café. Until now cafés were my only refuge because they were full of people and well lighted: now there won’t even be that any more; when I am run to earth in my room, I shan’t know where to go.

His blue cotton shirt stands out joyfully against a chocolate-coloured wall. That too brings on the Nausea. The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the café, I am the one who is within it.

If I love this beautiful voice it is especially because of that: it is neither for its fulness nor its sadness, rather because it is the event for which so many notes have been preparing, from so far away, dying that it might be born. And yet I am troubled; it would take so little to make the record stop: a broken spring, the whim of Cousin Adolphe. How strange it is, how moving, that this hardness should be so fragile. Nothing can interrupt it yet all can break it.

What has just happened is that the Nausea has disappeared. When the voice was heard in the silence, I felt my body harden and the Nausea vanish. Suddenly: it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant. At the same time the music was drawn out, dilated, swelled like a waterspout. It filled the room with its metallic transparency, crushing our miserable time against the walls. I am in the music.

I am touched, I feel my body at rest like a precision machine. I have had real adventures. I can recapture no detail but I perceive the rigorous succession of circumstances. I have crossed seas, left cities behind me, followed the course of rivers or plunged into forests, always making my way towards other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men; and never was I able to turn back, any more than a record can be reversed. And all that led me—where?

At this very instant, on this bench, in this translucent bubble all humming with music.

This sun and blue sky were only a snare. This is the hundredth time I’ve let myself be caught. My memories are like coins in the devil’s purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.

But I don’t see anything any more: I can search the past in vain, I can only find these scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, whether they are memories or just fiction.

I have never had adventures. Things have happened to me, events, incidents, anything you like. But no adventures. It isn’t a question of words; I am beginning to understand. There is something to which I clung more than all the rest—without completely realizing it. It wasn’t love. Heaven forbid, not glory, not money. It was . . . I had imagined that at certain times my life could take on a rare and precious quality. There was no need for extraordinary circumstances: all I asked for was a little precision. There is nothing brilliant about my life now: but from time to time, for example, when they play music in the cafés, I look back and tell myself: in old days, in London, Meknes, Tokyo, I have known great moments, I have had adventures. Now I am deprived of this. I have suddenly learned, without any apparent reason, that I have been lying to myself for ten years. And naturally, everything they tell about in books can happen in real life, but not in the same way. It is to this way of happening that I clung so tightly.

The beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings: “I was out for a walk, it was an evening in May.” You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And then suddenly you think: “Something has happened.”

This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

The first light to go on was that of the lighthouse on the Ile Caillebotte; a little boy stopped near me and murmured in ecstasy, “Oh, the lighthouse!”

Then I felt my heart swell with a great feeling of adventure.

This feeling of adventure definitely does not come from events: I have proved it. It’s rather the way in which the moments are linked together. I think this is what happens: you suddenly feel that time is passing, that each instant leads to another, this one to another one, and so on; that each instant is annihilated, and that it isn’t worth while to hold it back, etc., etc. And then you attribute this property to events which appear to you in the instants; what belongs to the form you carry over to the content. You talk a lot about this amazing flow of time but you hardly see it. You see a woman, you think that one day she’ll be old, only you don’t see her grow old. But there are moments when you think you see her grow old and feel yourself growing old with her: this is the feeling of adventure.

I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken: I staggered under the weight of my responsibility. I stared and saw nothing, I struggled in the midst of rites which Anny invented on the spot and tore them to shreds with my strong arms. At those times she hated me.

Certainly, I would go to see her. I still respect and love her with all my heart. I hope that someone else has had better luck and skill in the game of perfect moments.

They have closets full of bottles, stuffs, old clothes, newspapers; they have kept everything. The past is a landlord’s luxury.

Where shall I keep mine? You don’t put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I shouldn’t complain: all I wanted was to be free.

But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn’t the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

The thing which was waiting was on the alert, it has pounced on me, it flows through me, I am filled with it. It’s nothing: I am the Thing. Existence, liberated, detached, floods over me. I exist.

I exist. It’s sweet, so sweet, so slow. And light: you’d think it floated all by itself. It stirs. It brushes by me, melts and vanishes. Gently, gently. There is bubbling water in my mouth. I swallow. It slides down my throat, it caresses me—and now it comes up again into my mouth. For ever I shall have a little pool of whitish water in my mouth—lying low—grazing my tongue. And this pool is still me. And the tongue. And the throat is me.

I see my hand spread out on the table. It lives—it is me. It opens, the fingers open and point. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat belly. It looks like an animal turned upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by moving them very rapidly, like the claws of a crab which has fallen on its back.

The crab is dead: the claws draw up and close over the belly of my hand. I see the nails—the only part of me that doesn’t live. And once more. My hand turns over, spreads out flat on its stomach, offers me the sight of its back. A silvery back, shining a little—like a fish except for the red hairs on the knuckles. I feel my hand. I am these two beasts struggling at the end of my arms. My hand scratches one of its paws with the nail of the other paw; I feel its weight on the table which is not me. It’s long, long, this impression of weight, it doesn’t pass. There is no reason for it to pass. It becomes intolerable . . .

Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns: “I have to fi. . . I ex. . . Dead . . . M. de Roll is dead . . . I am not . . . I ex. . .” It goes, it goes . . . and there’s no end to it. It’s worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I. The body lives by itself once it has begun. But thought—I am the one who continues it, unrolls it. I exist. How serpentine is this feeling of existing—I unwind it, slowly. . . . If I could keep myself from thinking! I try, and succeed: my head seems to fill with smoke . . . and then it starts again: “Smoke . . . not to think . . . don’t want to think . . . I think I don’t want to think. I mustn’t think that I don’t want to think. Because that’s still a thought.” Will there never be an end to it?

The handsome gentleman exists, the Legion of Honour, the moustache exists, it is all; how happy one must be to be nothing more than a Legion of Honour and a moustache and no one sees the rest, he sees the two pointed ends of his moustache on both sides of the nose; I do not think, therefore I am a moustache. He sees neither his gaunt body nor his big feet, if you looked in the crotch of the trousers you would surely discover a pair of little balls. He has the Legion of Honour, the bastards have the right to exist: “I exist because it is my right,” I have the right to exist, therefore I have the right not to think: the finger is raised.

...the gramophone plays, exists, all spins, the gramophone exists, the heart beats: spin, spin, liquors of life, spin, jellies, sweet sirups of my flesh, sweetness, the gramophone:

When that yellow moon begins to beam

Every night I dream my little dream.

I who listen, I exist. All is full, existence everywhere, dense, heavy and sweet. But, beyond all this sweetness, inaccessible, near and so far, young, merciless and serene, there is this . . . this rigour.

They look as though they frighten each other. Finally, the young man, awkward and resolute, takes the girl’s hand with the tips of his fingers. She breathes heavily and together they lean over the menu. Yes, they’re happy. So what.

“A few years ago I read a book by an American author. It was called Is Life Worth Living? Isn’t that the question you are asking yourself?”

Certainly not, that is not the question I am asking myself. But I have no desire to explain.

“His conclusion,” the Self-Taught Man says, consolingly, “is in favour of voluntary optimism. Life has a meaning if we choose to give it one. One must first act, throw one’s self into some enterprise. Then, if one reflects, the die is already cast, one is pledged. I don’t know what you think about that, Monsieur?”

“Nothing,” I say.

Rather I think that that is precisely the sort of lie that the commercial traveller, the two young people and the man with white hair tell themselves.

He has become respectful again, respectful to the tip of his toes, but in his eyes he has the ironic look of someone who is amusing himself enormously. He hates me. I should have been wrong to have any feeling for this maniac.

“So you see!”

“See what?”

“You see that you don’t love them. You wouldn’t recognize them in the street. They’re only symbols in your eyes. You are not at all touched by them: you’re touched by the Youth of the Man, the Love of Man and Woman, the Human Voice.”

“Well? Doesn’t that exist?”

“Certainly not, it doesn’t exist! Neither Youth nor Maturity nor Old Age nor Death. . . .”

The face of the Self-Taught Man, hard and yellow as a quince, has stiffened into a reproachful lockjaw.

The Self-Taught Man laughs candidly, but his eyes stay wicked:

“You are too modest, Monsieur. In order to tolerate your condition, the human condition, you, as everybody else, need much courage. Monsieur, the next instant may be the moment of your death, you know it and you can smile: isn’t that admirable? In your most insignificant actions,” he adds sharply, “there is an enormous amount of heroism.”

“What will you gentlemen have for dessert?” the waitress says.

The Self-Taught Man is quite white, his eyelids are half-shut over his stony eyes. He makes a feeble motion with his hand, as if inviting me to choose.

“Cheese,” I say heroically.

They don’t answer. I leave. Now the colour will come back to their cheeks, they’ll begin to jabber.

I don’t know where to go, I stay planted in front of the cardboard chef. I don’t need to turn around to know they are watching me through the windows: they are watching my back with surprise and disgust; they thought I was like them, that I was a man, and I deceived them. I suddenly lost the appearance of a man and they saw a crab running backwards out of this human room. Now the unmasked intruder has fled: the show goes on.

A priest advances slowly, reading his breviary. Now and then he raises his head and looks at the sea approvingly:—the sea is also a breviary, it speaks of God. Delicate colours, delicate perfumes, souls of spring. “What a lovely day, the sea is green, I like this dry cold better than the damp.” Poets! If I grabbed one of them by the back of the coat, if I told him: “Come, help me,” he’d think, “What’s this crab doing here?” and would run off, leaving his coat in my hands.

I turn back, lean both hands on the balustrade. The true sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this thin green film made to deceive human beings. The sylphs all round me have let themselves be taken in: they only see the thin film, which proves the existence of God.

...usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can’t say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word “to be.” Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface. If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence.

If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a deflection. Trees, night-blue pillars, the happy bubbling of a fountain, vital smells, little heat-mists floating in the cold air, a red-haired man digesting on a bench: all this somnolence, all these meals digested together, had its comic side. . . . Comic . . . no: it didn’t go as far as that, nothing that exists can be comic; it was like a floating analogy, almost entirely elusive, with certain aspects of vaudeville.

In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. Of these relations (which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities, and directions)—I felt myself to be the arbitrator; they no longer had their teeth into things. In the way, the chestnut tree there, opposite me, a little to the left. In the way, the Velleda. . . .

And I—soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts—I, too, was In the way.

And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. Absurdity: another word; I struggle against words; down there I touched the thing. But I wanted to fix the absolute character of this absurdity here.

But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it. Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: “This is a root”—it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all.

Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real red, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves.

But this richness was lost in confusion and finally was no more because it was too much.

This moment was extraordinary. I was there, motionless and icy, plunged in a horrible ecstasy. But something fresh had just appeared in the very heart of this ecstasy; I understood the Nausea, I possessed it. To tell the truth, I did not formulate my discoveries to myself. But I think it would be easy for me to put them in words now. The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift.

She adds, in the decisive tone with which you end old quarrels:

“It didn’t look at all nice on you.”

I don’t know what hat she’s talking about.

“Did I say it looked good on me?”

“I should say you did! You never talked of anything else. And you were always sneaking a look in the glass when you thought I wasn’t watching you.”

This knowledge of the past overwhelms me. Anny does not even seem to be evoking memories, her tone of voice does not have the touch of tender remoteness suitable to that kind of occupation. She seems to be speaking of today rather than yesterday; she has kept her opinions, her obstinacies, and her past resentments fully alive. Just the opposite for me, all is drowned in poetic impression; I am ready for all concessions.

“Well then, it’s because there are no more . . .”

“Ha, ha!” she shouts theatrically, “he hardly dares believe it!”

Then she continues softly:

“Well you can believe me: there are no more.”

“No more perfect moments?”

“No.”

She stares at me without seeming to see me. She is going to speak. I expect a tragic speech, heightened to the dignity of her mask, a funeral oration.

She does not say a single word.

“I outlive myself.”

The tone does not correspond in any way to her face. It is not tragic, it is . . . horrible: it expresses a dry despair, without tears, without pity. Yes, something in her has irremediably dried out.

The masks falls, she smiles.

“I’m not at all sad. I am often amazed at it, but I was wrong: why should I be sad? I used to be capable of rather splendid passions. I hated my mother passionately. And you,” she says defiantly, “I loved you passionately.”

She waits for an answer. I say nothing.

“All that is over, of course.”

“How can you tell?”

“I know. I know that I shall never again meet anything or anybody who will inspire me with passion. You know, it’s quite a job starting to love somebody. You have to have energy, generosity, blindness. There is even a moment, in the very beginning, when you have to jump across a precipice: if you think about it you don’t do it. I know I’ll never jump again.”

She adds with apparent inconsequence, and a far-away look:

“It isn’t good for me to stare at things too long. I look at them to find out what they are, then I have to turn my eyes away quickly.”

“Why?”

“They disgust me.”

“The privileged situations?”

“The idea I had of them. They were situations which had a rare and precious quality, style, if you like. To be king, for example, when I was eight years old, seemed a privileged situation to me. Or to die. You may laugh, but there were so many people drawn at the moment of their death, and so many who spoke such sublime words at that moment that I quite genuinely thought . . . well, I thought that by dying you were transported above yourself. Besides, it was enough just to be in the room of a dying person: death being a privileged situation, something emanated from it and communicated itself to everyone there. A sort of grandeur.”

“Well, was it especially necessary for people to be impassioned, carried away by hatred or love, for example; or did the exterior aspect of the event have to be great, I mean—what you could see of it. . . .”

“Both . . . it all depended,” she answers ungraciously.

“And the perfect moments? Where do they come in?”

“They came afterwards. First there are annunciatory signs. Then the privileged situation, slowly, majestically, comes into people’s lives. Then the question whether you want to make a perfect moment out of it.”

“Yes,” I say, “I understand. In each one of these privileged situations there are certain acts which have to be done, certain attitudes to be taken, words which must be said—and other attitudes, other words are strictly prohibited. Is that it?”

“I suppose so. . . .”

“In fact, then, the situation is the material: it demands exploitation.”

“That’s it,” she says. “First you had to be plunged into something exceptional and feel as though you were putting it in order. If all those conditions had been realized, the moment would have been perfect.”

“In fact, it was a sort of work of art.”

“You’ve already said that,” she says with irritation. “No: it was . . . a duty. You had to transform privileged situations into perfect moments. It was a moral question. Yes, you can laugh if you like: it was moral.”

I am not laughing at all.

That’s it. There are no adventures—there are no perfect moments . . . we have lost the same illusions, we have followed the same paths. I can guess the rest—I can even speak for her and tell myself all that she has left to tell:

“So you realized that there were always women in tears, or a red-headed man, or something else to spoil your effects?”

“Yes, naturally,” she answers without enthusiasm.

“Isn’t that it?”

“Oh, you know, I might have resigned myself in the end to the clumsiness of a red-headed man. After all, I was always interested in the way other people played their parts . . . no, it’s that . . .”

“That there are no more privileged situations?”

“That’s it. I used to think that hate or love or death descended on us like tongues of fire on Good Friday. I thought one could radiate hate or death. What a mistake! Yes, I really thought that ‘Hate’ existed, that it came over people and raised them above themselves. Naturally, I am the only one, I am the one who hates, who loves. But it’s always the same thing, a piece of dough that gets longer and longer . . . everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions.”

I tell her my adventures, I tell her about existence—perhaps at too great length. She listens carefully, her eyes wide open and her eyebrows raised.

When I finish, she looks soothed.

“Well, you’re not thinking like me at all. You complain because things don’t arrange themselves around you like a bouquet of flowers, without your taking the slightest trouble to do anything. But I have never asked as much: I wanted action. You know, when we played adventurer and adventuress: you were the one who had adventures, I was the one who made them happen. I said: I’m a man of action. Remember? Well, now I simply say: one can’t be a man of action.”

”But the theatre . . .”

“What about the theatre? Do you want to enumerate all the fine arts?”

“Before, you used to say you wanted to act because on the stage you had to realize perfect moments!”

“Yes, I realized them: for the others. I was in the dust, in the draught, under raw lights, between cardboard sets. I usually played with Thorndyke. I think you must have seen him at Covent Garden. I was always afraid I’d burst out laughing in his face.”

“But weren’t you ever carried away by your part?”

“A little, sometimes: never very strongly. The essential thing, for all of us, was the black pit just in front of us, in the bottom of it there were people you didn’t see; obviously you were presenting them with a perfect moment. But, you know, they didn’t live in it: it unfolded in front of them. And we, the actors, do you think we lived inside it?”

“I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn’t do any harm, you’d almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I’m still living inside it. I have other characters, too. . . . You have to know how to concentrate.

I am afraid of cities. But you mustn’t leave them. If you go too far you come up against the vegetation belt. Vegetation has crawled for miles towards the cities. It is waiting. Once the city is dead, the vegetation will cover it, will climb over the stones, grip them, search them, make them burst with its long black pincers; it will blind the holes and let its green paws hang over everything. You must stay in the cities as long as they are alive, you must never penetrate alone this great mass of hair waiting at the gates; you must let it undulate and crack all by itself. In the cities, if you know how to take care of yourself, and choose the times when all the beasts are sleeping in their holes and digesting, behind the heaps of organic debris, you rarely come across anything more than minerals, the least frightening of all existants.

I take a few steps and stop. I savour this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer. Who remembers me? Perhaps a heavy young woman in London. . . . And is it really of me that she thinks? Besides, there is that man, that Egyptian. Perhaps he has just gone into her room, perhaps he has taken her in his arms. I am not jealous; I know that she is outliving herself. Even if she loved him with all her heart, it would still be the love of a dead woman. I had her last living love. But there is still something he can give her: pleasure. And if she is fainting and sinking into enjoyment, there is nothing more which attaches her to me.

It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond—always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense.

I don’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is.

And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note.

And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: “You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.”

The voice sings:

Some of these days

You’ll miss me, honey

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

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

The Negress sings. Can you justify your existence then? Just a little?

Naturally, at first it would only be a troublesome, tiring work, it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a time would come when the book would be written, when it would be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over my past. Then, perhaps, because of it, I could remember my life without repugnance. Perhaps one day, thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I wait, stooping, for it to be time to get on the train, perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: “That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started.” And I might succeed—in the past, nothing but the past—in accepting myself.

Night falls. On the second floor of the Hotel Printania two windows have just lighted up. The building-yard of the New Station smells strongly of damp wood: tomorrow it will rain in Bouville.