The Conspiracy (23 page)

I knew Rosenthal had been back in Paris for weeks: I had seen him one morning when I was crossing Place du Carrousel; he was walking beside a tall young woman dressed in black and pink, who was looking at him the way a woman looks only at the man she loves. I passed within two metres of them, Rosenthal pretended not to see me. I felt you were all more distant, harder, more immersed in your lives than ever. Perhaps that was all it took to guide my steps towards
Place du Parvis Notre-Dame
. I was on my way that day to the Bibliothèque Nationale, but I did not cross Rue de Rivoli, I turned towards Châtelet, I arrived at the place where Superintendent Massart worked.

A policeman told me how to find the offices of the Special Branch. I lost myself in drab grey corridors that resembled the corridors of a hospital. I was rushing, eyes closed, into the depths of my childhood, my father was about to open the first of those glazed doors, I would see again his funerary water-colours on the walls. An office-boy finally announced me to Massart, who made me wait a long time. I went in, and the superintendent stood up and said:

— What brings you here?

— Are you still looking for Carré?

— Which Carré? asked Massart.

— The Carré from the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

— Oh! Carré! he cried out. I should certainly think we are looking for him, the beggar! Would you happen to know where he's gone to ground?

— He's living at Mesnil-le-Roi, on the road to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, at the writer François Régnier's place.

The superintendent jotted down these names, looked at me and said:

— Sure?

— I saw him there, three weeks ago . . .

— And you waited all this time to tell me about it!

— What I'm doing isn't the easiest thing in the world to make up one's mind to.

— Of course, of course, said Massart. It all gets tangled up with honour . . . Does this little initiative mean that you've been thinking about our conversation, or rather my monologue, at Neuilly?

— I'm not one of yours, I said. Today I have – personal reasons . . .

The superintendent smiled, and gave me a gentle slap on the shoulder:

— There, there, he said. There's always some jibbing, at first.

I do not know what happened after that, in Massart's office. I recall only a vile photograph on the wall, under the family portraits of the heads of Special Branch – a photo showing the outer wall of the Santé, with a little man in an overcoat and top hat standing beneath the flintstone bulwark, and bearing the following dedication: ‘To Massart. Short and sharp!
Deibler
.' Eventually I went down the grimy Prefecture stairs: it was done. I breathed again, as people say paranoiacs do who have long dreamed of murder.

Nothing was recognizable any longer in that world which had not moved. Informing on someone is nothing, it is just a phrase one uses, it is much less theatrical than a crime, it is neither a fragment from a thriller, nor a scene from a gloomy opera; but it is much more irreparable than a murder, much deeper, it is a metamorphosis in the depths, a leap, a break, a reincarnation: one is ‘outside existence' as Montaigne says of the dead.

Shortly after that, our meeting at the Ecole Normale took place. As you waited for me, Rosen and you were talking about me; I had been listening to you from the other side of the door, I knew you suspected me. Those three months of holidays had taken you still further away. You had the skin of people who have experienced the sea, the sun, happiness. I shall always hear Rosen asking me in a vile, judge's tone, amid a horrible silence, when I had last been at Régnier's place and whom I had seen there. When I left your room, I was sure the two of you were going to reveal everything, and that I was going to be called up in front of the party Control Commission. I shammed dead, like those little hunted animals which flatten themselves on the ground and mimic the immobility of a corpse. I expected insults from all sides, like arrows. Perhaps I was at bottom hoping for the public exposure and the sentence; perhaps I was living only in the hope of some explosion that would deliver me for ever from you and from the party. I have never had the strength to be truly two-faced, even the intoxication of duplicity is not for me.

I tell myself today that some great idea must guide spies and informers, if they wish to survive. It is necessary for them to believe in the sacred character even of their treachery: man is decidedly too noble an animal for my taste. I do not feel myself justified. So here I am your enemy, the enemy of the communists: how am I to live without proving to myself the dignity of my treachery? Without forgetting that it was governed only by the hatred I felt for you, the desire to strike at you? Grudges lead to betrayal, but betrayal does not cure grudges. What was needed was an outburst, a discharge of resentment in hatred; but this explosive substance never explodes, all its bombs fail to go off . . .

Am I going to have to believe, in order not to despair of myself, that capitalism is an everlasting order, capable of sanctifying like a God all the treacheries one commits in its name? Am I going to have to believe in the filth of Order?

It is hard to think that the communists were right. That I have betrayed not just hated individuals, but truth and hope. You taught me everything about your truth, I can fight it. But I can no longer be taken in by the lies they marshal against it. The man who wants to trick history is always tricked, nothing can be changed by petty means. Revolution is the
opposite
of policing.

Basically, what took me to the superintendent was the suspicion you inflicted upon me from the first day. A desire to justify your mistrust: that accusing look in which my name, my face and my childhood all condemned me to live out the character you were never able to avoid suspecting me of being. The sense of my
difference
, of the impossibility of communion . . .

Massart told me one day that many policemen are workhouse boys, men without a name who were one day christened
Fauxpasbidet or Peudepièce
. I shall not escape those lost children. For twenty years I shall have eluded that universe of death where I was born – and which, for every man, forms only by degrees. A terrible inevitability is transporting me back to my father's environment. But only today, for the last time, do I admit that inevitability. Rosen is dead, so I shall hold you alone responsible for my fall, because you
existed
 . . .

Pluvinage's story ended with these confused sentences. Serge had written another three words: ‘It is useless . . .' but crossed them out.

XXIV

‘How does a person leave their youth?' Laforgue wondered, on the platform of the Gare de l'Est, where he was pacing up and down outside the train that was about to take him to Strasburg and the snows of the Christmas holiday.

Many things had just ended.

Rosenthal was dead, which was after all more serious, more irreparable than all the rest. Pluvinage was an informer working for the Special Branch. His friendship with Bloyé and Jurien would last, as it was, till the end of the year, till the farewells – with no illusions or great hopes – after the
agrégation
, on the eve of their last long vacation, their military service, and travels that would scatter them for a long while. Philippe imagined they would see each other ten years on, their years of teaching in the provinces completed, with wives and children who would look askance at one another, and having only tepid memories of the Ecole Normale and the Sorbonne to keep them from mutual silence.

‘We'll not go very far,' he thought.

He suspected that some ordeal awaited him, because youth is always brought to an end by an ordeal and it is impossible to pass without a break from adolescence to manhood.

‘Savages are really lucky,' he said to himself, ‘with their initiation ceremonies . . . There are great dances and there's drink. Lots of manly secrets are disclosed to them, under cover of a faked darkness and amid the bellowing of bull-roarers. One of their canines is broken, or they're circumcised. Rather elegant incisions are made in the skin of their backs . . . All the same, I'm not going to have myself circumcised, I'd lack faith . . . It's a quite simple matter of blood and erections, with suffering that comes from outside. But afterwards, just like with a beating up, it's settled. You're initiated. You've had your face smashed in, but you can have a chat with your ancestors and show off to women with a bit of white magic – you're a man . . . Whereas we don't have any medicine-men to make things easy for us . . . it's just love, death, filth, sicknesses of the mind . . .'

Philippe can sense that he is about to enter the age of ambiguity.

The young male is defined well enough in relation to his parents, about whom he thinks with a mixture of affection and rage – and a desire not to copy them. The man will be defined by rather more mysterious relations with his wife, his children and his job, whose various chains are perhaps subtler than those of a father or mother . . . Laforgue understands that, on his parents' side, everything is settled or is about to be; that within six months they will look upon him as a man, because he will have finished his studies, he will have letters after his name, and they will be able to file him away with his label in their herbarium of social conditions. But until such time as he finds himself manly bonds, he is afraid he will drift somewhat at random and, as he puts it, play the
Cartesian diver
 . . .

When the express left, Laforgue stuck his head through the window. It was 22 December and freezing. Laforgue at once wept from the cold. But as he watched Paris disappear, giving way gradually to the black waves of the dark, he told himself that he would not escape: that things were going to happen . . .

Illness intervened in Laforgue's life and fulfilled for him the function of a sorcerer. One almost never thinks how illnesses sort everything out: how you are transformed, and how you meditate, during those flights and slumbers in which everything is suspended pending your return, your awakening.

Laforgue thought he was going to die. The doctors began to talk round his bed about blood poisoning, only too happy to have available an entity – microbes – to exorcise death. Laforgue, who had just been operated on in the usual way for one of those attacks of appendicitis which clearly play the same role among whites in the twentieth century as circumcisions do among negroes, two days after the operation had lapsed into the dizzy spells and nauseas symptomatic of serious infections.

Vaguely he would see his father, his mother or nurses bending over his bed; he was driven crazy by the injections, the thermometers in his rectum, the drips and probes; he would put his hand between his thighs and raise it slowly to his nostrils – and would find that he stank abominably. In the morning and again in the afternoon the doctors would reappear. One evening there was a consultation: one of the doctors had a long black beard and shook his head, another scratched the back of his neck.

‘There are the sorcerers,' thought Philippe.

He existed feebly inside something hollow, which was at times a vast, yellowish thorax, at times a cellar lit by flickering lamps, and then sometimes a dazzling cell of a pure, cold, shiny blue that made him close his eyes – this meant there was sunlight on the snow in the clinic garden. He was not displeased by this existence as an irresponsible, feverish grub. He wanted nothing, he was filled with scornful indifference for everything that was happening, he was not even suffering; he merely felt vague, buzzing and sonorous. The action of the blood in his fever proceeded amid a deafening racket: the least external sound – a spoon knocking against a glass, a door closing – would reverberate with prolonged, lazy undulations and almost visible perturbations of the air. He was adrift on all that cotton wool: at moments he would recognize the whole wall facing his bed – it had a navy-blue door, a radiator and a blurred print – then it would all suddenly start to dwindle and vanish, and he would be surveying this whole universe from a great height and, as he mechanically repeated to himself that he was having Lilliputian hallucinations, he would have a stupid desire to laugh. Then he would lapse into the moist darkness of deep slumbers, where he had nightmares about his body of which he would remember nothing – it was what, in hushed voices, people were calling a coma. During a brief half-waking he heard the word, and told himself with stupefaction that he was in the process of dying; but he sank back, he no longer had the strength to brush away the luminous flies of the words or to fly into a rage because he was going to die.

Philippe did not die. There was an evening when he woke up again on this side of death's sandy frontiers: his room was in shadow, there was just a little electric night-lamp tinted blue that gave to his return the feel of a sleeping-car, of a nocturnal journey; on an armchair a night nurse was sleeping in her blankets and faintly snoring, her mouth half-open. He was transfixed by a surge of happiness, after which all his pleasures would never again seem to him anything more than shadows. He existed! Rising again from gloomy depths, he floated on his back upon the sparkling surface of his life. He smiled and went back to sleep as the living go back to sleep, to await the day.

In the morning, there was a great fuss around him; the doctors exclaimed that he was saved, congratulated him, and told him he must have an iron constitution; his mother wept, his father arrived from the factory and broke a glass on the night table – it was a great hurly-burly of resurrection. Laforgue closed his eyes on all that tumult: he was taking possession again of his long-lost body, giving orders to his limbs, clenching his toes under the sheet and feeling amazed that they should be obedient to the commands he was sending them from so far away. He was still empty and weak, but he felt upon himself an imperceptible breeze that no one could suspect, which passed over his chest, his forehead, his stomach: a breath from mountain and sea which flowed through the stifling heat of his room. His temperature was down to 38.2.

He could at last be moved back to his parents' house, in an ambulance which drove noiselessly over the snow in the garden. He continued his return to life alone.

That happiness of self-recovery absorbed him entirely, he was concerned with nothing in the world except his refound consciousness of existence: he would listen to himself breathe; he would lay an ear against his pillow to hear his blood. He did not speak, he asked for nothing, he would watch his nurse or his mother walk around and sit by his bed like shadows, he took no interest in anybody but himself, he was working at his return: the task diverted his attention from everything that was not himself. Every existence other than his own seemed to him inexplicable, indecent and full of cumbersome clowning.

He was allowed to get up, to look out through the open windows at the trees still covered in snow, the dazzling plain, the frozen ponds. He was more silent, more taciturn than ever. He reflected that he had just been born, that his illness had been his second birth. Everything had been consumed – his childhood, his adolescence. He existed; he had begun to exist for the first time at the very second when he had woken up in the darkness of the clinic under the blue light. And at the same time he had begun to walk towards his death, after the twenty-two-year reprieve that had stretched from his first birth to his great illness – after that parenthesis in which the time lost was of no consequence. He had been close enough to dying for even anguish not to be missing from his happiness at being alive; for it to give his every least thought or action an exhilarating character of defiance. This was one further similarity with his first appearance in the world, after the first anguish of taking breath.

‘Was it then necessary to risk death in order to be a man?'

Everything was beginning, there was no longer a second to lose before existing passionately. The great game of abortive attempts had come to an end, since it is really possible to die.

‘I'm going to have to choose. Dreams about the duration of life have had their day . . . I'm going to have to look for intensity . . . Sacrifice what is of little consequence . . .'

What perhaps best gave Philippe the sense of the change that had just transformed his life was the dreadful debt of gratitude that his mother required him to pay off, once she could reckon he was out of danger. She harshly reproached him for his silence, his distance and his selfishness, and claimed from him the marks of gratitude he owed to the person who had watched over him for nights, who had no doubt torn him from death's clutches. He at once found himself back in that world where the people who love you best call you to account for your existence: do not forgive you for the solitary nature of happiness. Since he really had almost died, there were grounds for mistrust for the rest of his life. But he was still too weak to rebel, he could scarcely move. He began to weep silently. His mother thought these tears were signs of remorse.

But he was crying only for himself: everyone was mistaken.