Nausea (30 page)

The Self-Taught Man did not look surprised. He must have been expecting this for years. He must have imagined what would happen a hundred times, the day the Corsican would slip up behind him and a furious voice would resound suddenly in his ears. Yet he came back every evening, he feverishly pursued his reading and then, from time to time, like a thief, stroked a white hand or perhaps the leg of a small boy. It was resignation that I read on his face.

"I don't know what you mean," he stammered, "I've been coming here for years. . . ."

He feigned indignation and surprise, but without conviction. He knew quite well that the event was there and that nothing could hold it back any longer, that he had to live the minutes of it one by one.

"Don't listen to him," my neighbour said, "I saw him." She got up heavily: "And that isn't the first time I've seen him; no later than last Monday I saw him and I didn't want to say anything because I couldn't believe my eyes and I'd never have thought that in a library, a serious place where people come to learn, things like that would happen; things that'd make you

blush. I haven't any children, but I pity the mothers who send their own to work here thinking they're well taken care of, and all the time there are monsters with no respect for anything and who keep them from doing their homework."

The Corsican went up to the Self-Taught Man:

"You hear what the lady says?" he shouted in his face. "You don't need to try and make fools of us. We saw you, you swine!"

"Monsieur, I advise you to be polite," the Self-Taught Man said with dignity. It was his part. Perhaps he would have liked to confess and run, but he had to play his part to the end. He was not looking at the Corsican, his eyes were almost closed. His arms hung limply by his sides; he was horribly pale. And then a flush of blood rose to his face.

The Corsican was suffocating with fury:

"Polite? Filth! Maybe you think I didn't see you. I was watching you all the time. I've been watching you for months!"

The Self-Taught Man shrugged his shoulders and pretended to drop back into his reading. Scarlet, his eyes filled with tears, he had taken on a look of supreme interest and looked attentively at a reproduction of a Byzantine mosaic.

"He goes on reading. He's got a nerve," the woman said, looking at the Corsican.

The Corsican was undecided. At the same time, the assistant librarian, a timid, well-meaning young man whom the Corsican terrorised, slowly raised himself from his desk and called: "Paoli, what's the matter?" There was a moment of irresolution and I hoped the affair would end there. But the Corsican must have thought again and found himself ridiculous. Angry, not knowing what more to say to this mute victim, he drew himself up to his full stature and flung a great fist into the air. The Self-Taught Man turned around, frightened. He looked at the Corsican openmouthed; there was a horrible fear in his eyes.

"If you strike me I shall report you," he said with difficulty, "I shall leave of my own free will."

I got up but it was too late: the Corsican gave a voluptuous little whine and suddenly crashed his fist against the Self-Taught Man's nose. For a second I could only see his eyes, his magnificent eyes, wide with shame and horror above a sleeve and swarthy fist. When the Corsican drew back his fist the Self-Taught Man's nose began pouring blood. He wanted to put his hands to his face but the Corsican struck him again on the corner of the mouth. The Self-Taught Man sank back in his chairand stared in front of him with gentle, timid eyes. The blood ran from his nose onto his coat. He groped around with his left hand, trying to find his package, while with his right he stubbornly tried to wipe his dripping nostrils.

"I'm going," he said, as if to himself.

The woman next to me was pale and her eyes were gleaming.

"Rotter," she said, "serves him right."

I shook with rage. I went round the table and grabbed the little Corsican by the neck and lifted him up, trembling: I would have liked to break him over the table. He turned blue and struggled, trying to scratch me; but his short arms didn't reach my face. I didn't say a word, but I wanted to smash in his nose and disfigure him. He understood, he raised his elbow to protect his face: I was glad because I saw he was afraid. Suddenly he began to rattle:

"Let go of me, you brute. Are you a fairy too?"

I still wonder why I let him go. Was I afraid of complications? Had these lazy years in Bouville rotted me? Before, I wouldn't have let go of him without knocking out his teeth. I turned to the Self-Taught Man who had finally got up. But he fled from my look, head bowed, and went to take his coat from the hanger. He passed his left hand constantly over his nose, as if to stop the bleeding. But the blood was still flowing and I was afraid he would be sick. Without looking at anyone, he muttered:

"I've been coming here for years. . . ."

Hardly back on his feet, the little man had become master of the situation again. . . .

"Get the hell out," he told the Self-Taught Man, "and don't ever set foot in here again or I'll have the police on you."

I caught up with the Self-Taught Man at the foot of the stairs. I was annoyed, ashamed at his shame, I didn't know what to say to him. He didn't seem to notice I was there. He had finally taken out his handkerchief and he spat continuously into it. His nose was bleeding a little less.

"Come to the drugstore with me," I told him awkwardly.

He didn't answer. A loud murmur escaped from the reading-

room.

"I can never come back here," the Self-Taught Man said. He turned and looked perplexedly at the stairs, at the entrance to the reading-room. This movement made the blood run between

his collar and his neck. His mouth and cheeks were smeared with blood.

"Come on," I said, taking him by the arm.

He shuddered and pulled away violently.

"Let me go!"

"But you can't stay by yourself, someone has to wash your face and fix you up."

He repeated:

"Let me go, I beg you, sir, let me go."

He was on the verge of hysterics: I let him go. The setting sun lit his bent back for a moment, then he disappeared. On the threshold there was a star-shaped splash of blood.

One hour later:

It is grey outside, the sun is setting; the train leaves in two hours. I crossed the park for the first time and I am walking down the Rue Boulibet. I know it's the Rue Boulibet but I don't recognize it. Usually, when I start down it I seem to cross a deep layer of good sense: squat and awkward, the Rue Boulibet, with its tarred and uneven surface, looked like a national highway when it passes through rich country towns with solid, three-storey houses for more than half a mile; I called it a country road and it enchanted me because it was so out of place, so paradoxical in a commercial port. Today the houses are there but they have lost their rural look: they are buildings and nothing more. I had the same feeling in the park a little while ago: the plants, the grass plots, the Olivier Masqueret Fountain, looked stubborn through being inexpressive. I understand: the city is the first one to abandon me. I have not left Bouville and already I am there no longer. Bouville is silent. I find it strange that I have to stay two more hours in this city which, without bothering about me any more, has straightened up its furniture and put it under dust-sheets so as to be able to uncover it in all its freshness, to new arrivals this evening, or tomorrow. I feel more forgotten than ever.

I take a few steps and stop. I savour this total oblivion into which I have fallen. I am between two cities, one knows nothing of me, the other knows me no longer. Who remembers me? Perhaps a heavy young woman in London. . . . And is it reaJly of me that she thinks? Besides, there is that man, that Egyptian. Perhaps he has just gone into her room, perhaps he has taken her in his arms. I am not jealous; I know that she is outliving herself. Even if she loved him with all her heart, it would stillbe the love of a dead woman. I had her last living love. But there is still something he can give her: pleasure. And if she is fainting and sinking into enjoyment, there is nothing more which attaches her to me. She takes her pleasure and I am no more for her than if I had never met her; she has suddenly emptied herself of me, and all other consciousness in the world has also emptied itself of me. It seems funny. Yet I know that I exist, that I am here.

Now when I say "I," it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for on one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out.

Lucid, forlorn, consciousness is walled-up; it perpetuates itself. Nobody lives there any more. A little while ago someone said "me," said my consciousness. Who? Outside there were streets, alive with known smells and colours. Now nothing is left but anonymous walls, anonymous consciousness. That is what there is: walls, and between the walls, a small transparency, alive and impersonal. Consciousness exists as a tree, as a blade of grass. It slumbers, it grows bored. Small fugitive presences populate it like birds in the branches. Populate it and disappear. Consciousness forgotten, forsaken between these walls, under this grey sky. And here is the sense of its existence: it is conscious of being superfluous. It dilutes, scatters itself, tries to lose itself on the brown wall, along the lamp post or down there in the evening mist. But it never forgets itself. That is its lot. There is a stifled voice which tells it: "The train leaves in two hours," and there is the consciousness of this voice. There is also consciousness of a face. It passes slowly, full of blood, spattered, and its bulging eyes weep. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. It vanishes; a bent body with a bleeding face replaces it, walks slowly away, seems to stop at each step, never stops. There is a consciousness of this body walking slowly in a dark street. It walks but it gets no further away. The dark street does not end, it loses itself in nothingness. It is not between the walls, it is nowhere. And there is consciousness of a stifled voice which says: "The Self-Taught Man is wandering through the city."

Not the same city, not between these toneless walls, the Self-Taught Man walks in a city where he is not forgotten. People

are thinking about him; the Corsican, the fat woman; perhaps everybody in the city. He has not yet lost, he cannot lose himself, this tortured bleeding self they didn't want to kill. His lips and nostrils hurt him; he thinks: "It hurts." He walks, he must walk. If he stopped for one instant the high walls of the library would suddenly rise up around him and lock him in; the Corsican would spring from one side and the scene would begin again, exactly alike in all the details, and the woman would smirk: "They ought to be in jail, those rotters." And the scene would begin again. He thinks: "My God, if only I hadn't done that, if only that could not be true."

The troubled face passes back and forth through my consciousness: "Maybe he is going to kill himself." No: this gentle, baited soul could never dream of death.

There is knowledge of the consciousness. It sees through itself, peaceful and empty between the walls, freed from the man who inhabited it, monstrous because empty. The voice says: "The luggage is registered. The train leaves in two hours." The walls slide right and left. There is a consciousness of macadam, a consciousness of the ironmongers, the loopholes of the barracks and the voice says: "For the last time."

Consciousness of Anny, of Anny, fat old Anny in her hotel room, consciousness of suffering and the suffering is conscious between the long walls which leave and will never return: "Will there never be an end to it?" the voice sings a jazz tune between the walls "some of these days," will there never be an end to it? And the tune comes back softly, insidiously, from behind, to take back the voice and the voice sings without being able to stop and the body walks and there is consciousness of all that and consciousness of consciousness. But no one is there to suffer and wring his hands and take pity on himself. No one, it is a suffering of the crossroads, a forgotten sufferingùwhich cannot forget itself. And the voice says: "There is the 'Railwaymen's Rendezvous'," and the I surges into the consciousness, it is I, Antoine Roquentin, I'm leaving for Paris shortly; I am going to say goodbye to the patronne.

'I'm coming to say good-bye to you."

"You're leaving, Monsieur Roquentin?"

"I'm going to Paris. I need a change."

"Lucky!"

How was I able to press my lips against this large face? Her body no longer belongs to me. Yesterday I was able toimagine it under the black wool dress. Today the dress is impenetrable. This white body with veins on the surface of the skin, was it a dream?

"We'll miss you," the patronne says. "Won't you have something to drink? It's on the house."

We sit down, touch glasses. She lowers her voice a little.

"I was used to you," she says with polite regret," we got along together."

"I'll be back to see you."

"Be sure to, Monsieur Antoine. Stop in and say hello to us the next time you're in Bouville. You just tell yourself: 'I'm going to say hello to Mme Jeanne, she'll like that.' That's true, a person really likes to know what happens to others. Besides, people always come back here to see us. We have sailors, don't we, working for the Transat: sometimes I go for two years without seeing them, they're either in Brazil or New York or else working on a transport in Bordeaux. And then one fine day I see them again. 'Hello, Madame Jeanne.' And we have a drink together. You can believe it or not, but I remember what each one likes. From two years back! I tell Madeleine: Give a dry vermouth to M. Pierre, a Noilly Cinzano to M. Leon. They ask me: How can you remember that? It's my business, I tell them."