The Conspiracy (10 page)

Rosenthal, who had had no news of Simon since the dispatch of the first information, quickly grew worried. He thought of rushing to the Lourcine barracks, but reflected that if André had got himself caught, all visits would be suspect. He went and prowled about outside the barrack gates, on Boulevard de Port-Royal, at the hour when the unemployed wait in front of the guardroom for the soldiers to finish their evening meal, but he did not see Simon come out. He was convinced that all was lost. If ill, Simon would have made some arrangement to warn him. These anxieties gave him an exhilarating idea of the Conspiracy. When he saw Laforgue, he explained to him that everything must have been discovered.

— That poor fellow's going to be doing time, said Laforgue. Unless I'm much mistaken, it must be a court-martial affair.

— I know Simon, said Bernard, he won't open his mouth. They won't suspect a thing.

— It wasn't you I was thinking about, said Laforgue.

— How sentimental you are, answered Rosenthal.

The idea of danger excited him: for a few days, he felt alive, he thought about plots in Italian cities, about a world of conspiracies, police and music. He believed that police-detectives were following him and hid Simon's notes. But nothing happened: the policemen were always only passers-by.

His term of imprisonment completed, Simon renewed his acquaintance with the Clignancourt barracks, to which he had been sent back by the Paris Garrison. It was the beginning of June, the weather was quite perfect. On his first day of freedom, he wandered about in the barrack yard between the stables and the showers, from one end to the other of that crazy military planet, listening to the bugle calls whose meaning he had already forgotten. For one day more, high iron gates and grindstone-grit walls separated him from the world: long did he watch through the slats of the little guardroom gate as life's strange parade – workers, bare-headed girls, tramps, lorries, open trucks and women pushing baby-carriages alongside the flowering acacias of the Circle railway – passed by. On the other side of the yard lay the poor suburbs, with their meagre whisps of smoke, their flowering shrubs sprouting from the signs of secondhand dealers, restaurant advertisements, African huts of corrugated iron, planks and cardboard; dishevelled girls trudged through the white spring dust, their stockings round their ankles, and half-naked children played with old bicycle wheels on ground covered with loose stones, rubble, charred rags, empty cans and bed springs; the sad native land of the Parisians was studded with the black steeples of chimney stacks. For the first time for months, Simon went to bed that evening in the squadroom; all night long an indistinct pink light persisted on the far side of the casements. The squadroom woke at dawn with sighs and sounds of coughing. Simon's neighbour sat on his bed and from a piece of green baize took out an orchestral trumpet; he sounded an imaginary reveille, and played a waltz to which the men listened, dazed from sleep and lost beneath the squadroom's high ceiling. Simon told his neighbour that he played well; the soldier, who had a friendly manner, replied that he was called Di Maio and that he was soloist in a jazz band, and he took from his wallet a photo in which three young men and a woman grouped around a jazz drum-kit stared fixedly ahead of them; the skin of the bass drum bore this inscription, under a painted garland: ‘The Select's Jazz'.

— That's my brothers and a girl friend, said Di Maio. We do the dance-halls in the 13th. Do you know them?

Simon looked at the musicians' dinner-jackets and the beaded dress of the woman, who reminded him of Gladys.

— Yes, I know them, he said. Before going to gaol, I was at Lourcine, with the 23rd. That's my neighbourhood.

Thus it was that Simon, even before he was back among the men, had fallen once again among the ambiguous charms of the Gobelins district.

Simon went to see Rosenthal and told him of the tragic events regarding the defence plan. Bernard reproached him for not having taken more rigorous precautions.

— Your information was first class, he said. Now it's incomplete.

— Forgive me, replied Simon, I'm not cut out for plots.

— That's a pity, said Bernard.

X

Extracts from a Black Notebook

* * *

Saw Rosenthal and several of his friends. Unbearable, of course, givers of lessons. Growing old: I find all young people detestable. But I envy their sense of irresponsibility and improvisation. At their age, I was fighting a war, every instant of my time was taken up by the most absurd duties.

Idea that command was our absolute due. Our mistake. Wartime command never justifies the responsibilities of civilian command. Don't confuse command and government. Idiocy of the Horizon-Blue Chamber,
Italians
transforming regret for command into legitimation of government. Government is effected through politeness, flattery, knowledge of the private aspirations of the governed, persuasion. Because we believed in the rhetoric about efficiency, we all lost our bearings. Not our class. Escape from one's class is a phenomenon possible in peacetime. Little
normaliens
putting out journals are seeking their bearings too; they'll find them in the great disorders that are on the way. Not us, that's over.

Adventures. I've had them: Verdun, Gallipoli. It was war and its wonderful disorder, blood, hunger, women, states of consciousness almost unimaginable in peacetime, luck. P. said to me: ‘Why on earth should surrealism interest me? I've had more violent spiritual experiences on the Somme.' I haven't the least idea what meaning our adventures had, all the keys are missing, but I've got a bad liver and rheumatism and, after all that stinking gelatinous mass of death, life is insipid. We've put the war behind us, we've put everything behind us. Yet we expect new fortunes. Or should we take refuge in discreetly metaphysical systems: radicalism, or the League of Nations, or nationalism? Weariness. We shall be pretty decrepit ten years from now.

* * *

Impossibility of leaving Simone, or even, for the moment, of deceiving her. Oh! to win women, as at the age of twenty-five, for the pleasure of prevailing; discovering the mechanisms that undo them all; being reborn. But those dances in front of the female, the warbling, the strutting, the conversations about them and about me, the fabrication of what they expect – it all bores me. I feel myself superior to all the versions of myself they might imagine. Simone would want to avenge herself – for the sake of dignity and a sense of justice, or retaliation – for the broken contracts. I'd lose her. But I've been living like this for seven years: I'd lose myself. No way out: deceiving a woman in order not to feel oneself grow old, in order to make a new start; fearing to do so, in order not to lose seven years, ten years of one's life. Love is like a career: once one has
arrived
, is one to serve apprenticeships again, start again from zero?

Write the story of a man faithful because he fears death, a man unfaithful for the same reason.

Women never give the men they love holidays. Where should we go, if houses of pleasure did not exist? Young people are really lucky.

* * *

For want of anything better, one can imagine remarkable destinies. For want of anything better: at thirty-five, one has only one destiny left. One is neither a phoenix, nor a snake that changes its skin. The great temptation is to translate these daydreams about possible worlds into reality, to orient lives, to propose examples, to have influence. I wonder whether Stendhal was tempted. He must have been far too tough. In any case, a virile man almost never writes to you – always adolescents, women, failures, as if the writer could tell the future, console, avenge. How wearisome when one is neither God nor priest, like that father confessor
Duhamel
or that pastor Gide. Nothing will replace real holds.

Nothing is a better preparation for literature than wars. All peaces are Stendhalian.

* * *

About young men, in
Scheler's
Vom Umsturz der Werte
:

In certain psychoses, for example in hysteria, a kind of altruism is found whereby the patient can no longer live or feel by himself and constructs his experience on the basis of another's, as a function of the perception, expectation or reaction which that other may have in any given circumstances . . . Sometimes a collective illusion even occurs, as in the pre-war Russian intelligentsia, particularly among the university youth, in whom thirst for sacrifice and flight from self, both of them morbid, by assuming a dimension of moral heroism inspired political or social goals.

* * *

Rosen tells me about his ‘plan'. Stupid, ineffective, forever improvised, but how bored those young men must be! He'd like me to give him my blessing, it's very odd. He argues about espionage in general, about ‘conspiratorial values', about the significance and the ambivalence of actions, he attempts to justify his undertaking instead of seeking out its real motives or consequences. Like everybody. Fear of motivation always did encourage justification. But these young men couldn't care less about the correctness, the
congruence
of their justifications. I tell Rosen:

— Your justification of this whole business strikes me as quite arbitrary.

He laughs, it's clear he thinks I'm a fool, and answers:

— Never mind that, we'll find you others! Our attitude to action is like that of Epicurus to celestial physics, we don't give a damn about hypotheses.

Since, however, he is exceedingly careful and timid, well brought up, he wants someone to tell him that such and such a piece of spying is not repugnant, but noble instead. Why not? He's pleased with me. Fortunately, I've nothing to worry about: they'll only dream.

Growing old means (among other things, all less serious) finding it indispensable to verify hypotheses: what then appears most worthy of oneself is a justification of action capable of surviving the man justified. Ill omen: you worry about the chances for eternity of the values for which you live, you're ripe for God. Or for the inevitability of communism's great future.

No one accepts his fate. But one makes shift.

Novel. How to describe a mutable man or world with means effective enough to give one's description a chance of durability? Let's give up writing. But one's not wise at all, one believes in books, in children, one lives as though the world didn't even have to come to an end.

What bothers me is not just having to die, but the idea that one day there will be
absolutely
no more men. Is it then necessary to come thus far in history only the better to leap into annihilation?

* * *

I seek to please young people as an ageing woman seeks to please men. Am I finally going to try to believe in myself in mirrors?

Rosen comes to visit me, tells me the story of his friend S. in his barracks and the defence plan. He looks strangely proud of it, like a man who has just discovered his sovereign power over a woman he did not even love, but who is ready for anything in order to follow him. I tell him:

— My dear fellow, you behaved like a swine, risking nothing as you did!

He explodes, telling me:

— Moral scruples! I thought such fetishes left you cold. That you were much less the black savage. You'll be telling me next that a person must be straight with his friends: whatever is this pimp ethics?

* * *

Lie. Through pretermission. How one does keep quiet with a good conscience! ‘I've a perfect right to keep quiet: it's by reason of this silence that I shall some day be fruitful. I'm the sole judge.' Reserve for the future. In literature. In love.

I imagine a time when greatness will lie less in rejection than in joining, when there will be a certain glory about feeling one is conforming. All human greatness has hitherto been only negative. In hope. The spirit always says no only in the name of hope. Imagine the day when one will no longer hope.

* * *

These young people spend their time in a state of dreaming; they're quite satisfied by the manufacture of their symbols and signs. They're indifferent to the traces and effects of their action. It's enough for them that one of the deeds they adumbrate bear a family likeness to their dreams; that they recognize themselves in it. Their actions do not have a very high coefficient of reality, that's why they're never afraid of causing suffering. I say to Rosen:

— After all, suppose everything had gone wrong, your friend had really gone to gaol, been court-martialled?

— What then? says he. He'd have finally understood it was serious, it wasn't a game.

— The gap between your speeches, your ambitions and your successes strikes me, all the same, as extremely comical.

— You don't understand a thing about it.

How serious we were at the Sorbonne, before the war, in the days of Alfred de Tarde and
Massis
! The war which took away their fathers has robbed this generation of every last whiff of responsibility.

Rosen is quite right! It's still a game for them, any little thing diverts them. They lack perseverance, they switch games with the versatility of children. They don't know how lucky they are.

* * *

The conformity of life would cease to be unintelligible and ignoble only if time could be reversed, and it were possible to change one's direction. There isn't any direction to be changed, there's just a single way, obligatory,
one-way
and
no way
 . . .

The basic situation of life consists in never being able to return to a crossroads – always left behind and always imaginary – of possibilities and choices: all roads go the same way. This situation is not so much agonizing as absurd, it doesn't bear thinking about.

In an absurd spirit of punning on the word
way
, people have always tried to substitute a
solution
for a
direction.
But existence is unrelated to anything. All our intelligence fails to discover a dimension of meaning in life's one-way street to death.

May ONE perish! ‘ONE' disguises everything, ‘ONE' has no destiny.

Man has never produced anything that testified in his favour except acts of anger: his most remarkable dream is his principal greatness, to reverse the irreversible. All his physics, all his industry aim only to raise the energy that fails, to climb back up from its most degraded forms to its noblest forms, to delay its falls and dissipations. Whatever the losses and weaknesses of the yield may be.

To delay death by rage. In private life. In politics.

* * *

Read on a wall, opposite the Santé prison:

— The woman who whips her children inspires passion. Heard in Rue des Martyrs, in front of a shop window full of pink underwear and silk stockings, a man with a piece of green canvas under his arm. He was talking to himself and said:

— I want to speak about nature. I don't have horses, and you make tin contraptions and want to fly away!

Heard two months ago, a concierge chatting with a tenant, in front of her cubbyhole:

— It's not our fault, she was saying. It's all to do with Evolution . . .

* * *

I'm too lazy for anger.

Poe, in
The Domain of Arnheim
:

‘. . . even now, in the present darkness and madness of all thought on the great question of the social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may be happy.'

Still too ambitious. For fifty years perhaps or a hundred, it's going to be necessary to renounce happiness
absolutely.

Luckily, I've no child: I don't see myself growing old. But each day I feel myself erased. The only hope would be to re-commence.

A man can scarcely re-commence other than by a woman. Or by war, revolution. Let's write books.