I caught a few words just then that confirmed this impression.
“All the same,” I put in, “we have to do something. We can’t let this go by without some reaction. I have a proposal I should like to put to the vote.”
I paused a moment, then went on: “I propose that we write the mayor a letter. In fact I’ve already drafted such a letter, and if you have no objection I’ll read it out to you now.”
Whereupon, without waiting for any such objection to be voiced, I pulled the letter out of my pocket and read it.
“No! No!” Monsieur Paulat cried in a trembling voice, waving his hands in front of his chin. “No letter! No letter! I am totally opposed to that kind of procedure!”
He sputtered, he stammered, he was quite beside himself. Because, of course, a written text, and especially a text reprimanding the mayor, is extremely difficult to repudiate once it’s been signed.
Monsieur Paulat thereupon launched a rear-guard action lasting an hour and a half, at the end of which, taking refuge in questions of procedure, he demanded an adjournment of the discussion. I immediately insisted that this particular point be put to a vote. Monsieur Paulat demanded that we first vote on the advisability of my vote. He was defeated on both motions.
“Come now, Monsieur Paulat,” I said in a conciliatory tone. “Can you tell us precisely which points in the letter you do not agree with?”
He protested. I was hustling him! I was holding a knife to his throat! It was sheer tyranny!
“And besides,” he added, “I can’t be expected to answer you point-blank like that! The letter is so long, I would need to look it over!”
“Here is a copy,” I said, handing him a carbon of my letter to the mayor across the table. It was on a sheet of yellow paper, and carried away though I was by the debate, I gave a fleeting thought to Birgitta.
Monsieur Paulat then executed an amazing piece of business. “No! No!” he exclaimed, rejecting my offer with his voice, with his head, with his shoulders, yet taking the sheet of paper from me even as he appeared to be thrusting it away from him. Then he went on in a tone of utter exasperation: “And besides, I am not a believer in texts of this sort, prepared in advance. We all know what uses—and what abuses—such methods are put to by political parties, and the Communist Party in particular.”
I signaled to Meyssonnier not to react to this piece of provocation. And besides, what Monsieur Paulat had said was in fact no more than the truth.
“This text,” I said modestly, “summarizes the ideas we have gone over now a hundred times. It is clear, it is not long, it is moderate in its tone, and it contains nothing new. So I can’t understand what there is about it that you don’t like.”
“But I haven’t said I don’t like it,” Monsieur Paulat burst out in despair. “By and large I am in agreement with it—”
“Well then, vote for it!” Meyssonnier broke in abruptly, still smarting from Monsieur Paulat’s dig at the Party.
Monsieur Paulat loftily ignored the interruption.
“Come now, Monsieur Paulat,” I said with a friendly smile, “won’t you tell us on which precise points our opinions differ?”
“Not at half past one in the afternoon!” Monsieur Paulat said after a glance at his watch. “Gentlemen,” he then went on with a shake in his voice, “I can see that you are determined to violate my scruples in this matter. So be it. But that being so, it is my duty to warn you that you will have to dispense with my vote.”
There was a silence.
“All right,” Colin said, “so let’s vote. I’m for.”
“For,” Meyssonnier said.
“For,” Peyssou said.
“For,” I said.
We looked at Monsieur Paulat. His face was yellow and set. Finally, through clenched teeth, he said, “I abstain.”
Peyssou heaved up his great bulk, stared at Paulat open-mouthed, then turned his great rough-hewn face to me, eyes as wide as they would go. “What does that mean, ‘I abstain’?”
“It means I refuse to vote on the motion, that’s all,” Monsieur Paulat said acidly.
“But has he the right to do that?” Peyssou asked me in utter consternation, the reference to Monsieur Paulat as “he” making it seem as though he were no longer in the room.
I nodded. “It is Monsieur Paulat’s absolute right.”
“If you ask me,” Peyssou said after a moment, “refusing to vote and voting against come to exactly the same thing.”
“Not at all! Not at all!” Monsieur Paulat cried in great agitation. “They are quite different. I am not against this text. I am abstaining from the vote because it is my opinion that I have been allowed insufficient time to discuss it.”
Peyssou turned his head slowly toward Monsieur Paulat and gazed at him silently for a while with an air of deep thought. “All the same,” he said, “you’re not in favor of it. Otherwise you’d have voted for it.”
“I am neither for nor against,” Monsieur Paulat said, spluttering even more violently as a result of his agitation. “I am withholding my vote. It’s quite different.”
Peyssou chewed over this answer, his gray eyes fixed on Monsieur Paulat in stupefaction. Meyssonnier shifted on his chair as though about to speak and get to his feet, but I signaled to him with a glance to stay put. I was listening. Colin too. And Meyssonnier did the same. We were waiting to see what would happen now. And we didn’t have long to wait.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Peyssou said slowly. “And that’s why you’re going along with us when you’re not for or against.”
Monsieur Paulat went pale and rose. “If my presence here is distasteful to you I can withdraw,” he said, the words almost indistinguishable, as though he were being choked by his own tongue.
I got up too. “Now come, Monsieur Paulat, I can assure you that Peyssou meant nothing of the kind...”
And I went on in the same tone for a good five minutes, pouring sufficient oil on his departure for it to be accomplished as painlessly as possible. I noticed, however, that as he was replying to me Monsieur Paulat was at the same time folding up the carbon of my letter to the mayor and tucking it into his pocket. I promptly asked if I might have it back, for my “records.” He appeared to hesitate for a moment, then realized his error and handed the sheet of paper over with a sickly smile. And that sickly smile was the last I saw of him.
After Monsieur Paulat’s departure I escorted my friends down to the parking area at the foot of the outside wall without a word. Perhaps I was a little weary after our long meeting, because I suddenly felt slightly depressed. The whole thing was, after all, so trivial really. And so were the rest of the local elections, that spring of 1977, all over the country, despite the passions they were arousing in our fellow countrymen. And what about the government, so confident that it was in control of our national destinies? Perhaps the problems confronting it were just as inconsequential.
Outside the castle we were confronted with a technical problem. Colin’s Renault refused to start. Colin was in a state of panic. He had arranged to meet his wife and two children that afternoon at the local railroad station, where they were due in on the 2:58 express. But it was Sunday, there was no service station open in Malejac. And in any case, there was already barely time left for him to cover the thirty-five miles into town. There was a brief consultation. Eventually, I got out my own Renault and drove Colin to meet the train myself.
I stop writing, read through that last sentence again, and it’s almost a physical blow. Not that there’s anything so amazing about it intrinsically, of course. “I got out my own Renault and drove Colin to meet the train myself.” What could be simpler? And yet, rereading it, I am gazing into a gaping chasm. My Renault, the train—that’s where the rift lies, in those two nouns, slicing our lives in two. In fact, the ravine dividing the two halves of our existence is so irremediable that I can’t quite bring myself to believe now that it was actually possible for me—“before”—to accomplish
that succession of staggering actions: to reverse my Renault out of its garage, stop at a filling station for gas, drive my friend to meet a train, and be back home again by mid-afternoon, after having taken only two hours to cover seventy miles, and all along an absolutely safe road, without incurring any danger other than that inherent in the speed of the car I was guiding along it. How far away all that seems! And what a brave old world it was that had such wonders in it!
It is something I never think about, God be praised. Except incidentally, when the thoughts occur on the fringe of some personal memory. Or when I consciously linger, as I am doing at this moment, to describe that world of “before”—so protected, so childlike, so easy.
CHAPTER THREE
No, I’m wrong. That short drive to meet the Paris train with Colin isn’t my last memory of the “before” world. Another has just surfaced, a moment before the darkness. And I know perfectly well why I almost “forgot” it.
A month before, on a Tuesday, I had received a letter from Birgitta. She was methodical in everything, and it was her unvarying custom to write me every Sunday a sort of love letter couched in very simple, grammatically correct French, stuffed with idiomatic phrases that were occasionally slightly misapplied.
The construction was always the same. First a short sentence inquiring about my life at Malevil, then four pages telling me all about hers, and finally a third section devoted entirely to the erotic vein.
Nor was this third section ever any more varied than the letters as a whole. On Saturday evening, before going to bed, she had reread “the yellow paper,” she had slid naked between her sheets, she had thought about me and all the things I had described in “the yellow paper,” in particular about my caresses (“Ach, Emmanuel, those hands of yours!”), and she had felt “passionately aroused.” And as a result, she would add with great emphasis, she experienced great difficulty in getting to sleep.
Why on Saturday evenings? Presumably because Sunday morning was the only morning in the week when she needn’t get up to work, so she could indulge in a modicum of insomnia without detracting from her productivity the following day.
Exactly the conscientious Birgitta I remembered. I read her letter, then reread it, or rather I reread the erotic coda; and although I knew it would be there and found it amusing, there was no denying that it still worked its intended effect on me. And why not? But it was time for me to start being conscientious too and get to work. I stood up and was on the point of putting the letter back in its envelope when I noticed the P.S.
Birgitta was going into the hospital the following Monday to have her appendix out. She appended the address of the hospital together with the hope that I would write to her.
Birgitta’s appendix reminded me that I ought by now to have been disencumbered of my own—gross negligence, my doctor had told me—and I made a mental note that after Easter, work or not, I really must set aside a week of idleness to be rid of it. I also wrote to Birgitta and phoned a pharmacist in the county town to have him send a bottle of Chanel No. 5 to the Munich hospital.
A week went by without news. Worried, and afraid that complications had set in, I wrote again. Two weeks later the answer arrived.
All Birgitta’s letters were simple, but the simplicity of this one was a masterpiece. Ten lines in all. Birgitta had met a young man in the hospital who had fallen in love with her. She too was in love with him. She was going to marry him. She would of course miss my caresses, because I had spoiled her so much in that respect, “and thank you for the presents too, Emmanuel. I kiss you very hard, Birgitta. P.S.—I am very happy.”
I folded the letter, slid it back into its envelope, and said aloud, “Exit Birgitta.” But the attempted flippancy didn’t succeed, and sitting there at my table, I went through a very nasty few minutes. My throat was constricted, my hands shook, and I was filled with a distressing sensation of loss, of failure, of diminution. I didn’t love Birgitta, but all the same there was a bond between us. I had fallen victim, I think, to that ancient Christian distinction between love and lust. Because I didn’t love Birgitta, I had assumed that my attachment to her was negligible.
It wasn’t true. My morality had been false, my psychology misguided, and I was now experiencing what I cannot avoid describing as genuine grief. It caught me completely off balance, because this time I had assumed I just couldn’t lose. Love for Birgitta, I had told myself, nil; friendship for her, a smidgin; esteem for her, very limited (especially on account of her own lack of feelings). Hence my aloofness, my ironical attitude toward her, as well as the numerous offhand gifts.
Lust, the Abbé Lebas would have said. All right. But lust isn’t always what we take it to be. He knew nothing about it, the old Abbé Lebas. And how could he have been expected to, after all, poor repressed old maid that he was? Lust is a very strong moral bond, since it causes such pain when it is broken.
I left my table, lay down on my bed, and let the shock take over. It was a horrible few moments. And when I tried to think I immediately became tangled up again in that distinction between the body and the soul, even though I could see how false it was. The body thinks too! It thinks and feels without any reference at all to the soul. I wasn’t in the process of falling in love with Birgitta after the event. Oh, no, not in the slightest! She was a monster of insensitivity, that girl. I despised her violently—as violently as she used to embrace me. But the thought of never holding her yielding body in my arms again did tear at my heart. I say “my heart” because that’s how they put it in novels. You could use some other word if you like. But I know what I felt.
When I think back now to my desolation that day, it seems almost comic. A tiny grief exactly to scale with my little life, and ludicrously out of proportion with what was about to follow. For it was in the midst of this minuscule private tragedy that “the day it happened” arrived to drive everything out of our hearts but terror.
—|—
In a consumer society the product consumed by man in largest quantities is optimism. Since the days when it became known that the planet was gorged with everything needed to destroy it—and if necessary our neighbor planets as well—somehow we had all learned to sleep peacefully at nights again. And oddly enough, the very excess of those terrifying weapons and the growing number of nations possessing them had actually proved a factor in our gradual reassurance. From the fact that since 1945 none of them had yet been used, it was emotionally deduced that no one would ever dare to and that nothing was going to happen. This false security in which we lived had even been found a name and given the semblance of a grand strategy. It was called “the balance of terror.”
And another thing needs to be said. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the weeks preceding Zero Day made it possible to predict it. There were wars, of course, and famines and massacres. And here and there a few atrocities. Some of them flagrant (in the underdeveloped countries), others less obvious (in the Christian countries). But nothing, taken all in all, in any way different from what we had been seeing for the past thirty years. And all of these things had in any case occurred at a convenient distance, among peoples far removed from us. We were distressed by them, of course, we expressed indignation, signed petitions, or even donated small sums of money on occasions. But at the same time, in our heart of hearts, after having dutifully experienced these vicarious sufferings, we returned to our usual feeling of security. Death was something that always happened to others.
The mass media—I still have the last numbers of Le Monde and only the other day reread them—were not being particularly alarmist during those weeks. Or if they were it was on a long-range basis. About pollution, for example. They were predicting that in forty years’ time the whole planet might be teetering on the edge of the abyss. Forty years! It’s like a dream! If only we could count on those forty years still!
It is simply a fact, one I state without any intention of irony, since that would really be too easy. Newspapers, radio, television, none of the great orga
ns of communication that used to keep us so well informed—or at any rate so abundantly informed—foresaw in any way or at any point what was about to happen. And when it did happen they couldn’t even cover the story after the event; they had vanished from the face of the earth.
Although it’s quite possible that what happened was totally unpredictable anyway. Was it perhaps some terrifying miscalculation on the part of a statesman persuaded by military advisers that he at last held the ultimate weapon? Or was it sudden insanity on the part of someone in a position of responsibility who gave an order that no one was subsequently able to reverse? Perhaps a physical breakdown producing a chain reaction of automatic responses, thereby unleashing identical responses from an opponent, until the moment of terminal annihilation was reached?
One could go on piling up such hypotheses ad infinitum. But all means of verifying them have been forever destroyed.
Darkness begins on that day when History came to an end simultaneously with its object. The civilization whose progress it was there to record had ceased to exist.
—|—
At eight o’clock I went to pick up my mail at the gate tower, which was La Menou and Momo’s quarters. As on any other morning, I found the postman Boudenot there, a good-looking curly-headed young fellow, already a little red-faced and fuddled by the wine drunk from farm to farm. He was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of mine, and when he saw me come in he lifted half a buttock off his chair as a sign of respect. I told him not to get up, picked my letters up from the table, and as usual refused the glass that La Menou had taken out of the closet and filled for me. And as usual too, “so as it shouldn’t go to waste,” she drank it herself.