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Authors: Robert Pinget

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BOOK: Trio
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The public flocks to the concerts where a singer of either sex is due to appear. Indeed, in their amazing concern for their art, they have cultivated a breathing technique which abolishes respiration. In this way the essential monotony of the melodic line is safeguarded. But at the end of the recital the virtuosi are irrevocably exhausted. They die in front of the ecstatic crowd. A ceremony bears them away from the stage to the cemetery. As the corpse goes by, every listener, one after the other, comes and breathes in from the martyred mouth what little oxygen has been introduced into it by the hiccups of the death agony.

March 29

There are numerous blanketers. This uninteresting trade is a popular profession here. During the very long apprenticeship the various aptitudes are demarcated. No one is ever sure of the result, for the appearance of a twelfth sense—or, according to some, a thirteenth—takes place only after superintensive training. Whal then occurs, to the blanketer who has a genuine vocation, is a “blanket” phenomenon nicknamed “voltage” by clinicians. Strictly speaking, this is undefinable. It is a halo. The subject’s nervous tension is transferred to it
en bloc.

The ordeal which constitutes the investiture of the future artisan consists in confronting him with the prototype of a carding-brush of no practical value—which unites all the essential parts, enlarged twentyfold, of all the material needed in this work. The candidate is bound hand and foot, and, using nothing but his voltage, he must be capable of making three blankets of varying thickness and weave. These test-samples are the property of the syndicate.

June 1

Marks, topographical signs, and standard measures of all sorts — whether monetary, spatial, or whatever—are symbols that are as antiquated as the embolismic concordance. It’s ages since this whole arsenal of conventions was practically abandoned.

Indeed, disciplines such as for example geography or astrology now stimulate only those whose intelligence has become sclerosed, following the example of mathematics.

Nevertheless, there is still a danger threatening their teaching, and that is the superstitious survival of scientifico-historical notions which no longer correspond in any way to the evolution of their minds. Hence, in university lectures, frequent confusions and anachronisms. A distinguished professor recently risked the statement that the druids used to immolate the azimuths and centipedes of Reason. This is regrettable. But I am optimistic, in spite of these aberrations. For they do no harm to anyone except the academic young, who in any case are more and more losing their memory.

June 13

In the burying-ladies’ huts, there is room for only one person. When you are going home at night, you are only too glad to stop at one of them. Their occupant is rarely there. Her task requires her presence elsewhere, among the bushes, or the ravines, which she examines at dusk. A strange task! So you go into the shed, where digging tools, hoes, and grappling-irons are piled up pell-mell. The cutting-up hemp has been rammed into a crate, it’s merely the work of a moment to throw it onto the fire and thus thaw yourself out a little. This custom of cutting up corpses with hemp goes back a long way. By dint of unremitting friction on the joints, the burying-ladies finally manage to detach the flesh, which they stuff with bits of lint before tying them to the grappling-irons. Next, they pitch them down, simultaneously, into the bottom of the twelve or so surrounding wells. It is only the carcass and the viscera that are interred, and not by the burying-lady herself, but by her nearest neighbor. They travel leagues through the woods in order to meet each other, and sink waist-deep into the bogs.

The grubs that they fatten up in these marshes are as big as sausages when they come to eat them.

But their existence can only be called wretched. It consists in sleeping standing up in their shacks, suffering from cranial rheumatism—at the frontoparietal suture, which is very slack—from which they have no respite, fighting against the blisters that periodically erupt on their epidermis—and these may sometimes attain the dimensions of the shack and the strength of its framework—and living in fear and trembling night and day in case they’ve left a grappling-iron down a well
 

 

They mate amongst themselves, without the slightest desire, and give birth to edible daughters who are a kind of saprophyte.

July 28

“You can take it or leave it”: an injunction frequently used by hairdressers. Their clients make no bones about it. The poor women know their duty; they hang their heads. To prevent the spread of dandruff, they are scalped. Then their cranial periosteum is curled. The slum kids adore this calcined odor. During the operation they hang outside the windows in bunches. They get dispersed with insecticide. But since the hairdressers’ salons are located under the ballast in the stations, and the upper parts of their heating pipes serve as buffers for the freight cars, the kids don’t go far. They wait for the next client, perching on the gauges. And every time, it’s the same to-ing and fro- ing. The railroad employees have signed petitions. Waste of effort! The wives of the minister responsible are all clients.

July 29

When you make an inventory of your matches, one thing strikes you: how few there are. What! this derisory portion allotted to each national is the sole source of light in the country? Judging by the light they diffuse—and there is never any shortage of it either in the built-up areas or in the countryside—there must be some sort of magic at work.

They often maintain that God has too much pleasure. And from there to doing without daylight by having recourse to this makeshift expedient, there is but a step. Potential rebellion? Ill-disguised rancor? I’m merely making an observation. The natural light is suspended. Polyhedral receptacles, mounted on steel shafts, keep it prisoner. These pseudo-street lamps, whose architecture is of the greatest austerity, are the characteristic feature of the landscape. No more is needed to divert the thoughts of a layman from their habitual course and fill him with doubt. The match solution, which is only a last resort, even for the nationals—which they don’t deny nevertheless provides some opportunities for certainty. How many times have I not burned my last twig to convince myself of this! The moment it has burned out, others spring up between my fingers—irrefutable proof of the mystery.

Let anyone try to tell me, after that, that they don’t believe in God! The pseudo-street lamps are the childish symbol of the temptation.

July 30

The redhibitory songs which the malcontents hum in the mornings tend to help them recover their desire, or return to a less precarious mental state. This matutinal drone expresses great candor. But we should be on the alert for rapid metamorphoses: these are due to the ferryboat “noyou.” Contrary to appearances—the suavity of the refrain—the tremolo is not in order. Watchword: not to employ any reflexive verbs in the threnodies you hum. “Noyou” is the pleonastic reflexive pronoun which means: “we to ourselves
”—“nous nous à nous-même
,” in their language. It has been stigmatized by popular imagery, which represents it in the form of a small modern replica of Charon’s ferryboat.

July 31

Wobbly knees are immobilized on bail. The bail money is paid when children are born. It is collected by the register offices. Earth taken from molehills, with the addition of pulverized Molasse and water has proved to be an excellent “barbotine,” or potter’s clay. Provided that a supply depot can be found not far from the place where the sick person collapses—for he cannot be moved—they immediately immobilize his knees. They coat them with barbotine and leave it to dry. The patient stays on the ground, wherever he happens to be, until a decision has been taken by the coater on duty at the supply depot. The latter declares the fall to the register office himself. The bail money is then reimbursed to the parents, or, if they are dead, to the victim. It is irreclaimable in cases where they haven’t managed to master the wobbling. It’s a barbotine-insurance.

September 1

Their dwarfs are sold at auction a few days after their first bout of jaundice. They are much sought-after by religious communities who destine them for the vocation of candelabra. When they come of age, a paraliturgical service is celebrated for their benefit: this is reputed to endow them with petrifying grace, and it invests them in their sacred charge. A bogus priest places them on the altars while a mixed choir intones the “Nanum neutrum Deo.” A poignant ceremony, on condition that grace descends. Unfortunately, I have seen some burlesque ones in which the dwarfs, not in the least petrified, bawled their heads off and had to be tied to the tabernacle. You could no longer hear the canticle, the deacons and sub-deacons broke out in a sweat, and the faithful lost their faith.

September 5

The relative importance of their acts bothers them. And when you think of the intentions some of us impute to what they do!
They
do not have this
amour-propre
: they counter you with an uncontrolled gesture, phrase, or absence. That they are not creators—in the sense in which this function demands a permanent watch on oneself—that I will grant, but what is serious is that their attitude leads us to doubt the validity of the work of art. “Even so,” I used to say to myself when I was in their company, “if that is the truth, just one more second’s obstinacy in my researches and I shall become a clown, a liar.” I had to reflect at length before finally justifying my dissimilarity. As I am incapable of being a gentleman who walks, who smokes, who sees his friends, my natural reaction is to invent, in clay or on canvas or on paper, a walk, a taste for smoke, or a visit which makes my arteries throb.

And that is why I am now convinced that in a work of art we do not try to conjure up beauty or truth. We only have recourse to them—as to a subterfuge—in order to be able to go on breathing.

September 6

A person of medium height, by my side, stepped onto the automatic weighing machine. We’re always interested in other people’s weight. With apparent nonchalance, I watched the needle. It went all the way around the dial, once, twice, three times
 

What does that mean? One ton, two tons, three tons! I was at a loss. The person wasn’t upset. And then I heard, coming from her ribcage: “Hallo, hold the line. I’m connecting you with Warsaw. Who’s speaking? Shares, 320-4, debentures
 

, etc.”

This woman was a telephone exchange.

September 8

Blizzards, while they do not occur every day, are nevertheless so frequent that they have had an influence on their habits and customs. And in particular on their diet—with the reservation that they only cook hailstones for very precise purposes.

If a little girl, or a boy, shows signs of irascibility or violence, they cultivate this tendency and elevate it to the dignity of a national virtue—by giving them a surfeit of explosives. Of these, hail is one which has the advantage of operating by delayed action.

The moment the blizzard has abated, cooks, nursemaids, and mothers are to be seen everywhere, rushing out of doors and filling tubs with hailstones.

They make them into puddings (by adding baking powder and other ingredients) which the child devours. There must be an idiosyncratic phenomenon here, a need inherent in these choleric temperaments, for I never heard tell of any child who made the slightest fuss about taking this tonic. Where are the dramas associated with cod liver oil!

They persevere with this treatment for three or four years. The child grows “in age and in anger.” He becomes insufferable, but he must be treated with the greatest circumspection. At puberty, he becomes subject to trances: to demolish a street door, a party wall, a drainage system— this is mere child’s play to him.

His virulence then decreases until his thirtieth year. But the diastase operates in depth. So it’s far from rare for the storm to flare and the blizzard to blow up his gizzard.

THAT VOICE
P
REFACE
TO
THE
A
MERICAN
E
DITION

The structure of this novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end. The first example of this procedure, at the beginning of the book, is the theme of the cemetery, cut into by that of the gossip at the grocery, then resumed shortly afterwards.

Apart from this peculiarity, as from the middle of the book the themes are taken up again in the inverse order of their appearance. The last themes of the first part, that is, become the first of the second part and are thus retold in reverse. A procedure resembling anamnesis.

Further, to give the impression of the interdependence of the different inspirations and the multiplicity of the sources of the voice heard by the ear, the French text was written with no other punctuation than a period at the end of each paragraph.

In order to make the book easier for the Anglo-Saxon public to read, I put the commas back. To my surprise, the text has lost nothing of its impact. On the contrary. But just a moment! This is very largely due to the art of Barbara Wright, whose profound knowledge of French enables her to render its slightest inflections into English. She recreates in her own language, which is of remarkable flexibility, richness and subtlety, the exact tone of this novel.

I thank her with all my heart for the work she has done with such care and enthusiasm, and I should like to take this opportunity to pay her the tribute she also deserves for her translations of three of my other novels. I also thank Joanna Gunderson for the warm, sustained interest she takes in my work.

It must be rare for a writer to be so fortunate.

Robert Pinget

P
REFACE
{1}

Nothing is more comic, from a certain point of view, than the tragic adventure of a brain becoming unhinged.

BOOK: Trio
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