They found him under the débris of his plane with his face pressed against the earth. He did not lose consciousness.
G. takes Chavez’ hand and offers his congratulations. He is unaccustomed to finding a man mysterious; mystery, for him, is the prerogative of women. About men he asks only questions to which the number of answers is limited, as one asks what time it is—according to a clock or a watch. He looks into Chavez’ dark eyes, whose expression is suspicious, at his swollen lips which, even when unbruised, were absurdly full and curved, at the backs of his hands, and he sees the whole appearance of the small young man, forced to lie unexpectedly there in a bed in a hospital in a garden in Domodossola, as an outer covering no less arbitrary or opaque than the misshapen cylinders of plaster round his legs. A hand on a woman’s breast conjures up the same mystery. Beneath the tangible extends the enormity of what is intangible and invisible. A doctor can take the plaster off his legs. But a surgeon making an incision in his flesh and opening up the organs within would not disclose the mystery. The mystery lies in the vastness of the system by which Chavez, so long as he is alive, constitutes the world in which he is living (which includes your hand shaking his) as his own unique experience.
This morning I went into a glove shop and the woman who served me spoke of you as though you were a saint, a saint with the courage of a hero.
I know, interrupted Chavez, they think of me like that. Perhaps they are right or perhaps they are not. Anyway the question will never be settled because, meanwhile, I’m dying.
The weather improved. He suggested that Monsieur Hennequin should drive the motor car. In the late afternoon they were driving through a pine forest which overlooked the lake. Madame Hennequin wanted to stop so that they could walk a little in the forest.
The light enters the forest almost horizontally. Each entry between the trees into the depths of the forest acquires in this light an exaggerated stereoscopic quality. The trees which are against the light look entirely black. The tree trunks which are sunlit are a greyish honey colour. The same light falls upon the taffeta and silk of the two women’s dresses which are pearly and luminous. As the women walk, their feet in their buttoned boots tread lightly but deeply into a carpet of pine needles, rotted cones, moss and the leaves of flowers. Every surface is more than usually vivid, but in the forest everything loses something of its substantiality.
To Camille he has been no more than formally polite, so as to emphasize to her the depth and seriousness of the conspiracy which now links them. He has concentrated his attention upon Monsieur Hennequin and Harry Schuwey. He is encouraging the latter to talk about the resources of the Congo. He appears to listen with interest; every so often he asks a supplementary question or makes an encouraging sign of agreement. Yet despite the impression he gives, he is scarcely listening to what is being said. In a mixed language, where words are only one of the expressive means—a language not essentially different from that in which he questioned himself as a child but now possessing a wider range of references—he addresses, silently, the two men whom he is walking between.
How did you choose them? You chose them for exactly the same reasons as you would have chosen any other woman. Men in your position must have the best. The best is not an absolute, though. Men in your position must have the best for men in your position. If you choose a woman without considering this you may jeopardize your position and the putting of your position in jeopardy may cause you—and therefore her—unhappiness. Cut the cloth according to the purse, and choose the wearer of the cloth according to its cut. But apart from being men with positions you are men with penises.
On their left, the ground rises steeply so that the roots of the distant trees are level with the top branches of the near ones. Beween the higher distant trees there are rocks, jagged in shape but covered in green moss. On their right, when there is a sufficiently straight avenue to look down, they can see the surface of the lake shimmering like mica below.
And your penises are much given to idealizing. Your penises want the best possible—and to hell with your positions. How can you satisfy both?
A forest is not incontrovertible like a mountain. It is tolerant, like the sea, of everything which occurs within it.
You cannot. But you can protect yourselves or you can try to protect yourselves against the worst consequences of an open rift. And this you have done from the moment you attained the age of responsibility, with the help of your colleagues, your friends, your church, your professors, your novelists, your dressmakers, your comedians, your lawyers, your forces of order, your public men and of course your women.
Monsieur Hennequin wonders whether what his friend is saying might be of interest to Peugeot. Everything that motor cars will need should be of interest to Peugeot. He would like to visit the Congo himself. He has been to Algeria but in his opinion that is scarcely Africa. Africa begins with the jungle. He picks up a stick from the path and with it he lightly taps the trunks of the trees which are within his reach as they pass them.
You had to find a third value, a third interest that your social ambition, which, unlike pure ambition, must always wear the dress of conformity, and the idealism of your penises could acknowledge as arbiter. And this third value was property. The third interest was an interest in owning. Not a remote merely financial interest, but a passionate one which stirs you physically, which becomes a sense as acute as the sense of touch. Indeed you have seen to it that your children are taught to touch nothing that is not theirs, not a flower nor an animal nor the hand of a stranger. To touch is to claim as property. To fuck is to possess. And you take possession either by paying rent or by buying outright.
The women were walking behind the men. Harry Schuwey is explaining that whereas ivory is a luxury material today, rubber with the development of the motor industry is becoming an essential one and that therefore the future of the Congo lies in rubber. The forest is very still except for the party advancing along the path. Occasionally, high up among the topmost branches, a bird sings a few notes and then stops.
Has nobody told you about your houses? I discovered it a long time ago. You are walking leisurely—in any city in Europe—through a well-off residential quarter down a street of your own houses or apartments.
The trees are spruce firs or larches. Lichen grows more readily on the former. Many dead branches are festooned with matted pale green hair, like dried seaweed. On other branches lines and clusters of lichen algae are fixed like tarnished white silver press-studs.
Their window-frames and shutters have been freshly painted but their colour barely differentiates them from the façades around them, which absorb the sunlight but give off a slight granular scintillation like starched linen table-napkins. You look up at the curtained windows in which the curtains are so still that they might be carved out of stone, at the wrought iron-work of balconies imitating plants, at ornamental flourishes referring to other cities and other times, you pass polished wooden double doors with brass bells and plates, the silence of the street consists of the barely perceptible noise of a distant crowd, a crowd made up of so many people so far away that their individual exertions, their individual inhaling and exhaling combine in a sound of continuous unpunctuated breathing, gentle as a breeze, this silence which is not entirely a silence, receives and contains the noise of a front door being shut by a maid, or the yapping of a dog among upholstered furniture and heavy carpets, as a canteen with its green baize lining receives the knives and forks deposited in it. Everything is peaceful and well-appointed. And then suddenly you realize with a shock that each residence, although still, is without a stitch of clothing, is absolutely naked! And what makes it worse is their stance. They are shamelessly displaying themselves to every passer-by!