Already as he leans against a poplar tree and closes his eyes and lets the wind and the rain flow over him, he can see the desolate track leading straight into solitude, a broad track, like a railway without rails, a heavy track pressed down into the earth, whimpering, with flames rising up from it, and somebody is lying crushed between the wheels but the wheels just go on turning, heavy, implacable, stabbing down into the mud with their cogs, water seeps slowly up into the horses’ hoofmarks, smoke rises from the sand as the track passes through deserts, the snow screeches shrilly as it progresses over wintry routes, many lie down wheezing and think they’re drowning and just as they die, they dream the track is a log floating past them and all they need to do is to grab hold of it and they’ll be saved, and they do grab hold of it with their fingers, but then new wheels come along the same track and crush their fingers without any hint of mercy and then Ernst W. Wilson appears, sweat pouring off him, and he’s half-running in order to keep up, and he stands on the odd liver or kidney or stomach, there isn’t much time you see and they’re all dying anyway and they’re lying in such a way that you just have to stand on them if you’re going to get past — and of course you do want to get past, you want to follow that track as far as it goes, to the point where it suddenly leaves this wicked earth and leaps out like a rainbow into space, the space that’s singing out of solitude.
One after another, cigarette ends sizzle and die on the asphalt that’s slowly getting lighter, but the track just keeps on going, on and on; it’s a good track to follow, a straight track, a track full of hatred and curses and he’s never going to leave it, he’s going to love this track with all the hatred and all the love he can muster and trample on anybody who tries to spoil it, who tries to debase it with the stink of their rotting corpses, and with sweat pouring off him he’ll run along it through crunching snow, through dusty sand, through sticky mud, through fields flowing with blood, and he’ll be a private, then a corporal and a sergeant and a lieutenant and a captain — and the track will never desert him. He’ll be faithful to his track. He’ll be faithful to his solitude and unfaithful to everything else.
And just before dawn, when he and the girl go up to her room in a damp little riverside house, she flings herself straight down on to the bed in the alcove and he says to her harshly, ‘Don’t get any ideas.’
And she replies, ‘You don’t get any ideas in this job. But aren’t you going to take off your rucksack?’
Feeling better, he takes off his rucksack and sits down on the edge of the bed and he notices she’s naked underneath, but the way she shows it is less brazen than when his wife did it.
‘You’ve got undressed for nothing,’ he says. ‘I just want to have a little chat for a while, just a chat.’
‘Go on then,’ she says, closing her eyes.
‘Why are you closing your eyes?’
‘I’ve no desire to see you naked.’
‘Have you ever felt really lonely?’
‘You’re never lonely in this job.’
‘Oh,’ he says, and wanders off although his body stays on the bed for a while and his nose can smell all the men — the sweat, sandwiches and whisky — who have cashed in their despair in the alcove, ‘Oh, I’ve felt so lonely, so lonely and so happy.’
And he goes on to recall all the sublime moments of solitude when everything has sunk out of existence, people, needs and thoughts, and only that fearful music was left to flood his being. A little boy is left behind in the grass, very high grass; he can’t walk properly yet, and they’ve just seen a long, black grass snake wriggling under a tuft of grass and all the other children have raced back to the house screaming, but they’ve forgotten about him, because you can’t run as fast as you’d like to if you’re dragging along a little boy who still can’t walk properly because he’s been ill, they’ve just left him behind with his fear, his extreme terror of the black snake. He’s just about to start crying and already he can see the house and the long, soft grass through a surging haze of tears, but then the rain starts falling, violent and brutal rain that hammers away with its fists on all the roofs and swishes down into the grass and the abandoned boy is soaked to the skin straight away. There’s a dull rumbling behind the house and suddenly the thunderstorm approaches, lightning crawls over the roof and rain comes pouring down the path and swirls about at his feet, the grass hangs down like hair when you’ve just been swimming and then, all of a sudden, he realizes he’s not afraid, not the slightest bit afraid any more, he’s so alone, so abandoned by everybody, but it feels good to be alone, good to be abandoned. All there is in the whole world apart from himself is this wet grass, the rain, and the thunderstorm; there’s nobody left to pull his hair, to force him to chew his food even though everything he’s ever eaten in all his life is rising up into his throat, the lightning doesn’t have any whips and the grass doesn’t have any nails and the rain doesn’t have any harsh voices — and that’s why he starts screaming like a thing possessed and kicks and struggles like the very devil when somebody suddenly remembers about him once it’s stopped raining and runs out to fetch him in.
And then another time his piggy bank is lying in pieces on the sideboard like a shattered dream, and he’s stolen money from himself so that he can buy a little atlas showing all the countries where he can be alone, and his father, a chauffeur for the upper classes, beats him into solitude with a little whip. How delighted he is when he suddenly realizes he can get away from everything and everybody with the aid of a little whip, and he’s in a state of ecstasy as the lashes cut into him; and then he remembers all the times when he does what seem to be the strangest things, the most disgusting deeds, the crudest acts, just so that somebody will beat him into another world, that everybody will hate him into that sweet solitude. The time comes when he’s too old for that sort of thing, but he takes secret delight in discovering all the possibilities opened up by self-torture: you can take your protective membrane with you and move among people who are all laughing and with no effort at all turn their laughter into arrows that tear your heart open; or you can be desperate for sex but just as desperate for deprivation and on midsummer eve you can stroll about the big public parks where everybody’s making love all over the place in the grass, and take bitter delight in feeling your heart fill up with tears; there’s so much you can do when you’re that age, when you’re sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, and every day God gives you can discover even more things.
You can discover contempt, for instance: oh how lovely it is, how delightful, to recall some twisted memory of laughter distorted by contempt, thousands of red lips, all of them curled in disgust, and to be launched by them into the solitude of space. There’s that time when the middle-aged stoker on the little coaster he worked on as an ordinary seaman when he was still at school invites him into his cabin and seduces him after making him feel disgusted by all the nasty smells women have and all the diseases they spread and getting him to drink a few glasses of whisky, and what takes place is so surprising that he doesn’t get round to putting up any resistance, it’s so incredibly novel, it’s as if some animal he’s never seen before has suddenly revealed itself to him and rendered him helpless through surprise and fear; but afterwards, when he goes back over the deck in the dark and down into the dormitory, he feels so dirty, he wants to jump overboard and drown himself in order to get clean. And all the ones playing cards and all the ones writing letters turn to look at him at exactly the same time as he comes down the ladder.