For a day or two, the people of both houses were visibly shaken. Talk was heard in the halls: in our house, voices rose like wind in the trees before a storm; in theirs, rich confident syllables rapped out like machine-gun fire. Encounters between the tenants of the two houses were more violent: people from our house jerked away from the others, if we met them in the street, and something in our faces cut short their conversations when we came within earshot.
But then the halls grew quiet again, and for a while it seemed as though little had changed. Perhaps this incident had been so far beyond our understanding that it could not affect us, I thought. The only difference seemed to be a certain blank look on the faces of the people in my building, as though they had gone into shock. But gradually I began to realize that the incident had left a deeper impression. Mistrust filled the air, and uneasiness. The people of the house in front were afraid of us here behind, now, and there was no communication between us at all. By killing the woman from the house in front, M. Martin had killed something more: we lost the last traces of our self-respect before the people from the house in front, because we all assumed responsibility for the crime. Now there was no point in pretending any longer. Some, it is true, were unaffected and continued to wear the rags of their dignity proudly. But most of the people in the house behind changed.
A night nurse lived across the landing from me. Every morning when she came home from work, I would wake to hear her heavy iron key ring clatter against the wooden door of her apartment, her keys rattle in the keyholes. Late in the afternoon she would come out again and shuffle around the landing on little cloth pads, dusting the banisters. Now she sat behind her door listening to the radio and coughing gently. The older Lamartine sister, who used to keep her door open a crack and listen to conversations going on in the hallway — occasionally becoming so excited that she stuck her sharp nose in the crack and threw out a comment or two — was now no longer seen at all except on Sundays, when she went out to early-morning Mass with a blue veil thrown over her head. My neighbor on the second floor, Mme Bac, left her laundry out for days, in all weathers, until the sour smell of it rose to me where I sat. Many tenants no longer cleaned their doormats. People were ashamed of their clothes, and wore raincoats when they went out. A musty odor filled the hallways: delivery boys and insurance salesmen groped their way up and down the stairs looking uncomfortable. Worst of all, everyone became surly and mean: we stopped speaking to one another, told tales to outsiders, and left mud on each other’s landings.
Curiously enough, many pairs of houses in the city suffer from bad relations like ours: there is usually an uneasy truce between the two houses until some incident explodes the situation and it begins deteriorating. The people in the front houses become locked in their cold dignity and the people in the back houses lose confidence, their faces gray with shame.
Recently I caught myself on the point of throwing an apple core down into the courtyard, and I realized how much I had already fallen under the influence of the house behind. My windowpanes are dim and fine curlicues of dust line the edges of the baseboards. If I don’t leave now, I will soon be incapable of making the effort. I must lease an apartment in another section of the city and pack up my things.
I know that when I go to say goodbye to my neighbors, with whom I once got along quite well, some will not open their doors and others will look at me as though they do not know me. But there will be a few who manage to summon up enough of their old spirit of defiance and aggressive pride to shake my hand and wish me luck.
The hopeless look in their eyes will make me feel ashamed of leaving. But there is no way I can help them. In any case, I suspect that after some years things will return to normal. Habit will cause the people here behind to resume their shabby tidiness, their caustic morning gossip against the people from the house in front, their thrift in small purchases, their decency where no risk is involved — and as the people in both houses move away and are replaced by strangers, the whole affair will slowly be absorbed and forgotten. The only victims, in the end, will be M. Martin’s wife, M. Martin himself, and the gentle woman M. Martin killed.
THE OUTING
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes.
A POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY
I think I know what sort of person I am. But then I think, But this stranger will imagine me quite otherwise when he or she hears this or that to my credit, for instance that I have a position at the university: the fact that I have a position at the university will appear to mean that I must be the sort of person who has a position at the university. But then I have to admit, with surprise, that, after all, it is true that I have a position at the university. And if it is true, then perhaps I really am the sort of person you imagine when you hear that a person has a position at the university. But, on the other hand, I know I am not the sort of person I imagine when I hear that a person has a position at the university. Then I see what the problem is: when others describe me this way, they appear to describe me completely, whereas in fact they do not describe me completely, and a complete description of me would include truths that seem quite incompatible with the fact that I have a position at the university.
EXAMPLES OF CONFUSION
On my way home, late at night, I look in at a coffee shop through its plate-glass front. It is all orange, with many signs about, the countertops and stools bare because the shop is closed, and far back, in the mirror that lines the back wall, back the depth of the shop and the depth of the reflected shop, in the darkness of that mirror, which is or is not the darkness of the night behind me, of the street I’m walking in, where the darkened Borough Hall building with its cupola stands at my back, though invisible in the mirror, I see my white jacket fluttering past disembodied, moving quickly since it is late. I think how remote I am, if that is me. Then think how remote, at least, that fluttering white thing is, for being me.
I sit on the floor of the bathroom adjoining my hotel room. It is nearly dawn and I have had too much to drink, so that certain simple things surprise me deeply. Or they are not simple. The hotel is very quiet. I look at my bare feet on the tiles in front of me and think: Those are her feet. I stand up and look in the mirror and think: There she is. She’s looking at you.
Then I understand and say to myself: You have to say she if it’s outside you. If your foot is over there, it’s there away from you, it’s her foot. In the mirror, you see something like your face. It’s her face.
I am filled that day with vile or evil feelings — ill will toward one I think I should love, ill will toward myself, and discouragement over the work I think I should be doing. I look out the window of my borrowed house, out the narrow window of the smallest room. Suddenly there it is, my own spirit: an old white dog with bowed legs and swaying head staring around the corner of the porch with one mad, cataract-filled eye.