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Authors: Robert Pinget

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BOOK: Trio
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At first I didn’t quite understand the reasons for this transfer of the inhabitants from one province to another on the opposite side of the territory for this chore. It’s a question of productivity. I had the honor of being introduced to one of the members of the top organizing committee. He is a morose little man who has spent his life in perfecting the administrative mechanism of the “leaves week.”

When they have arrived at their destination, the groups (about a million souls) are divided up into squads of a thousand in the province to be stripped. These squads, commonly known as “the dryasdusts,” set to work immediately. This has been going on for so long that men, women, and children can climb trees like monkeys. Every native species of tree is a legal target.

Under this system, however, varieties tend to disappear in favor of one basic type of tree which is something between an apple tree and a horse chestnut. Hedges, copses, and the vegetation of the heathlands are similar targets. Every leaf must be picked without its peduncle; this requires great dexterity in the operators. The peduncles, which normally fall in the autumn, will be collected by private firms.

As the gathering proceeds, whole cartfuls of leaves are unloaded into the canals crisscrossing the country. They discharge their load into the rivers. At the mouths of these rivers this fearsome accumulation is controlled by a system of dredgers and cranes along the bank, thus raising a vegetal bastion which, when the seadrift reaches it, slowly decomposes until the spring.

The exploitation of this huge, putrescent wall is begun in March.

November 7

The whole of their private life is autopsied in their eyes, even when they are lost in thought. When you walk down the street you are surrounded by decorticated beings. They present a spectacle of monstrous psychological division. I met almost none for whom the present had any importance. They project everything into the future. A future constituted of present and past preoccupations. Encumbered by this impossibility, they trudge from distress to downfall.

They are dangerously haunted by eternity.

As for the children, I think they resemble our own. They dream of buns, balloons, and toy ducks. But they stagger under the weight of their anxieties, as heavy as planets.

December 2

The crowd didn’t flinch at the sound of the leaves being torn off. It seemed as if it were being absorbed into an indiscernible, illocalizable object. This wasn’t the first manifestation of the sort. The most celebrated one, so I was told, was that historically classified under the name of Good Friday. I made this comparison because a little girl by my side began to desiccate. First, her hair fell out like hay. Then her face, which had become fibrous, dropped down over her doll. With one hand the little girl hugged the fetish to her bosom, and with the other she tried to hold her head up. But her hands had become glued to her body, down to her pelvis. She took two more steps. Then her legs broke.

I had never before seen a mob immobilized. The place is usually so full of movement that you can only keep your eyes on an individual, or a couple, or at the very most a group. But at that moment one could only too easily take in the whole assembly. I had no need of proof, the spectacle was hypnotic. It was only when thinking about it later that I realized that the ease with which it could be seen confirmed its reality.

December 3

You ask your way, as a matter of habit, of a passerby. He doesn’t answer. Right away, you are jerked out of your automatism. Because it’s true, the way is there in front of you, almost on top of you.

The difficulty of fighting against your mania to understand is in proportion to your isolation. I am only now, thanks to a few friends, beginning to liberate myself to a certain extent.

One of my first experiences was buying my bread without leaving my house. It took me an hour of tension to be able to relax; an hour to delimit the feeling of bread and to confine my desire to my teeth, my palate, and my esophagus; an hour to evacuate the decision; an hour to abolish the time which had elapsed (I checked, later); and there we were, the bread was on my table, I was eating it.

All this was the result of an incalculable effort.
They
make no effort at all: they have never lost this astonishing faculty.

December 4

After the rains which saturate the furrows, the season of solidifying fogs arrives. These are dry vapors which emanate from fossils. They are extremely dense, and float around for several days at the level of the tall grasses, then later spread out at the average height of human lungs. The organic reaction of the natives is instantaneous: they grow, until emersion of the respiratory apparatus is achieved. This temporary change of stature gives rise to the traditional pleasantries. A dwarf will be nominated president of the “Lanky Club,” a bigot who has finally reached the height of the font will scratch her initials on it, a girl nicknamed “the giraffe” will be given some stilts by her friends, etc.

Without this spontaneous hypertrophy, it would be impossible to survive. The fogs petrify everything on their level. With people, therefore, the region around the waist, which is then immersed, rapidly becomes like a slab of marble. This causes the momentary arrest of the lower functions, while the legs continue to move normally. I have been told that many natives with spiritualistic tendencies can’t wait for the foggy period to come and put the brakes on certain of their appetites. The others, the creatures of habit, are obliged to lie or sit on the ground, below the fogs, that is, for as long as is necessary for the blocked organs to thaw, if I may so put it, when they want to use them. They have to do this three or four days in advance.

The small animals aren’t disturbed. Nor are the large ones; pulmo- narily, they are above the fatal level.

The foggy season, which returns about every ten years, lasts for six months of the Gregorian calendar.

December 18

When they are trying to escape from shame, they are the most pitiable creatures I have ever seen. Since the transparency of their souls is not merely constitutional but also an active function, a little like a walking windowpane which might go and shatter itself against an obstacle, no base action is the attribute of the person who commits it. It comes within the network of turpitudes that binds all these people together.

This kind of permanent link of omniconsciousness should, it would seem, exclude the feeling of the irremediable, which is egotistic, and substitute for it that of complicity, of collusion. But this is far from being the case; the sense of shame persists. I have seen poor wretches who were at odds with it perch up in the trees like owls and remain there sleepless for nights on end. The structure of sin and remorse, of their interpenetration and mutual influence, rose up, tangible and useless, in front of them, and up there on their perches they gave the impression of being false meeting points, artificial intersections.

For their notions of the absolute are deficient. They have but a vague knowledge of divine mysteries and allegorical redemptions, whose disproportion to their wealth of emotion is such that the slightest lapse from honesty plunges them into dejection.

Oh, those trees, with their weight of suffering flesh
 

 

December 20

Superficially, one might take the meadows for doors, for the sides of swing doors. They open out lengthwise onto little fences, but close with difficulty if one ignores their inscriptions. The inscriptions serve as hinges. They are periodically replaced, blue letters alternating with red ones. This produces a pretty effect at the changeover, before all the inscriptions are unified.

Their agricultural work is backbreaking. They have to activate the doors at the same time as they tread down the excrescences that tend to form on the fences. I tried this, with the help of a peasant. But just as I was making an oblique movement over the unexposed part I let go my hold, the excrescence came and knocked on my foot, and the man only just had time to push me back out of the way. I had a narrow escape from what they call “rape” in those parts.

Such is the superficial aspect of the meadows. But beneath the surface, I know that they are tombs.

December 21

One may attach oneself to any ribbon. They sinuate through all the towns at the approach of a disease, either to conjure it or to provoke it. A gyratory movement is established, which sweeps the interested parties along in its train. The last to get moving are ejected laterally and form a buffer at the corner of the buildings. To tell the truth, no sooner has he joined the ribbon than each demonstrator degenerates in the web, where he becomes filified. In the workers’ districts this superribboning is liable to cause disasters. Some time ago, the wave had become so compact at “Navigation” that it even dragged the buildings into its wake and rolled on as far as the Forest of Grance. No trace of either stones or inhabitants was found there. The web had devoured the lot.

Normally, the ribbons stop after six days. The disease either recedes or breaks out with violence, according to the rogations. It sometimes happens that the desired epidemic is considered to be insufficiently virulent. Then they hurriedly construct artificial ribbons. But their power is far less great, and the supplementary virus obtained never satisfies the need. This is what inspired the dictum: “evil be the virus of the evil ribbon.”

March 15

One would like to be a Colorado beetle or a cockchafer so as to be able to gorge oneself on the sap of their plants. It is instantaneously intoxicating, but deteriorates on contact with our oral mucus. It has to be ingested through tubes. The pleasure is very mediocre. A study is in progress of the chemical composition of the mandibles of the cockchafer, in order to market a liquid gum based on its formula. Then one would merely need to paint one’s throat beforehand in order to ingurgitate this beneficient sap.

March 16

Along the cutting edge of the lintels, along the sharp edge of the windowpanes, along the blade of a penknife, their sympathies advance backwards. How timid they are! The imperceptible drawl with which they weight a word makes their declarations of love falter. They cannot continue, they barricade themselves in. If you question them about their emotional troubles you will never forget their response. I felt the greatest respect for them, but I believe that this is precisely what makes them suffer. They would prefer to be ridiculed.

March 17

The parks are overrun by leguminous plants of the Papilionaceae family. They stifle every form of vegetation and proliferate in vast Carinas. You get absorbed in the valvulations of the lianas, and then you find yourself surmounted by stamens. Mortises hollowed out in the trunks serve as a base for the props underpinning the upper floors where, in the botanical species, capillarimeters are located. A permanent check on the suction obviates any impoverishment of the soil. The unemployed can sign on at any branch of the Chlorophyl Center as assistants. They are invaluable to the children, who pester them with questions and use them as guides to the labyrinths. One of these government employees, whom I know well, piloted me around on a corolla. No one else was there. The marvelous tissue was melting in the sun and was as dangerous as a glacier. We made two crossings, equipped with the appropriate chisels, carving out our path, and bursting the blisters. What a joy to the eye! Every fold, in the shape of a cornet, opened out below onto the immense panorama of the garden! The capillarimeters seemed no bigger than acne pimples, the greenhouses looked like drops of water. The incurvation of the carinas, the assistant explained, promotes fructification. I had thought this was natural, and expressed my astonishment. He interrupted me with these words: “Nature dixit—genius fix it.” Their habit of talking in proverbs is one of their defects.

The people who sleep in the parks are licensed by the government. In the twilight hours, when the strollers go home, they install themselves in the copses with their bird-organs on which they play the sempiternal Air of the Allobroges. Their crutches, which are their stock-in-trade when they go to mulct inns, crash down through the sewers and pervade the hotels.

March 18

Their artists work in isolation. They have no public. As they are recruited from common criminals, they are banned. Any kind of contact with them is a felony. Their penitentiaries are of a greater variety than ours and convicts may be placed in any artist’s studio.

Far from being blunted, the sensitivities of this vermin increase in proportion to their guilt. When an interested observer, defying the risk of prosecution, goes to see them and admires one of their works, this feeling that the visitor is a kindred spirit is so unexpected that the criminals lose their heads. They whirl around, throw themselves on the work and trample it, lacerate it, pulverize it. Then they disappear into the walls, where for the rest of their lives they are racked by qualms of conscience at having deceived people.

March 19

If you lose a contour, or a segment, or one whole side of your body, the hachured surface is reduced by the same amount and your armpits are no longer included in it. You wander around with holes in you, carrying your charcoal-drawn silhouette in a satchel. Your cheek becomes emancipated. Your prominent jaw commutes between your neck and your glottis; the wings of your nose erupt in pharyngeal edemas; nauseating liquids ooze out down your apophyses. Your truncated sphincters flow back towards your nerve centers, your epigastrium becomes subdivided. The satchel finally drops, too, your hand becomes invaginated, and the sketch so carefully made the day before is stained with liquid manure. This is the result of a plasma deficiency. It frequently happens during country rambles. Several comrades have gone for a day’s outing and come back unrecognizable.

March 20

This is the plectrum they use in orchestras. It is retractile in the hands of nonprofessionals, hence difficult to operate. But what harmonics it elicits! The instrumental solos, which are more in vogue, are confined to the higher registers. My eardrum can still only pick up the occasional snatch of a melody. Lack of flexibility. But regular listeners appreciate almost no other music. You can see it in their faces. They denote such spirituality, while the piece is being played, that their expression enables me to imagine the eloquence of the musical phrase. The slightest acoustical disturbance —a glove being pulled off, a lace coming undone must certainly destroy the whole impression, for the soloist is requested to repeat the piece at the end of the concert. The encores are to a certain extent the failures. In the most select concert halls, listeners are obliged to wear special clothes made of soundproofed material.

BOOK: Trio
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