4
As they don’t have any spades nor anything else they can dig with and moreover the sand is too hard for their nails to cope with, they have to carry out the burial by fetching wet sand from the bottom of the lagoon and spreading it over the dead body. They work for a large part of the hottest period around noon and make no attempt to hurry, except at first when the stench is so awful, but then they bury their terror, with the kind of calm, sweeping, convincing gestures you make when you’re frightened, under four layers of wet sand which soon hardens in the heat. They dig away with their hands quite close to the shore but at different places along the beach and all the time the burial is taking place they hardly ever look at one another. Sometimes they arrive at the corpse simultaneously and then they get down on their knees side by side and their hands touch as, full of devotion, they spread the new, soft sand over the old, hard surface.
But no matter how much sand they carry under the hot midday sun, they cannot bury their fear along with the corpse. Even if they had a whole desert, the vast Sahara Desert or one of Mongolia’s deserts, they may not have had enough sand. One of them wishes they had a train, a little train with lots of deep wagons, like the train that used to run from the claypit to the brickworks back home when he was so little that everything was an animal and the train was the biggest animal he’d ever seen. If only they’d had that train and the wagons heaped up with sand! He could have run from one wagon to the next with the biggest spade the parish had to offer and emptied them just as they were clanking past a boxer lying dead by the side of the track.
Another of them is walking in the desert. The sun is blazing down from a sky as empty and relentless as the white of an eye. Nothing but sand all around, all the sand in the world is spread round about him and he is the shifting centre in this ocean of sand, for no matter where he goes, the centre goes with him. There’s no end and no beginning, no up and no down, no forward and no backward. The world’s clock has stopped and God is busy with a lit de parade on some other planet far, far away. The sun has also stood still, and now it’s going to burn away until it melts: that’s the challenge it’s taken on. And everywhere, nothing but sand. You’ve stripped naked and lain down on your back in the sand, and the sand is millions, milliards of little animals that have been asleep for ages but if the sun blazes down as fiendishly as this for just a few more hours — no, there’s no such thing as time! — as few hundred paces forwards and backwards and round and in a square until they wake up and they’re raving when they wake up and all they want to do is to grab hold of this swine who has disturbed their sleep — ‘and in order to reach the sun they climb up on me, the lonely wanderer in the desert, but then eventually when they realize they’re wasting their time they’ll turn their fury on me and creep into all my grottoes, over the bridge of my tongue, into the sewers of my nose, through the mineshafts of my ears, and into my eyes, the things I’d like to have preserved till last so that in the least false moment of annihilation I could establish that all my hopes of salvation were just as naïve as I’d always thought, and they’d bore their tiny little holes into the middle of my pupils and then trickle in through them, curious about the marvels they were bound to find behind such beautiful membranes — but God only knows how disappointed they’ll be, oh, how disappointed they’ll be’.
But of course, like all the rest, the man walking through the desert is just as keen as all the rest on preserving his fragile life and is prepared to sacrifice anything, even his life, in order to preserve it. He wants to create a shadow, a big, deep shadow like the one cast by the chestnut trees of summer, and armed with that shadow he’ll traverse as much of the desert as anybody manages to traverse in a normal life, and he’ll bend under the shadow like an all-too-small cross — let’s face it, there are pitiful little crosses that bend under the people carrying them — in the vain hope that the shadow it casts will be so soothing, the slumbering creature of the desert will not be wakened unto life until he himself has passed away, since ‘if anything, I regard it as a basic human right, perhaps the most basic human right, to choose the manner in which one dies. In a way, I think it was more humane in the old days when some people at least could be executed by the sword. As for me, I’d like to be crucified, crucified in a desert like this one, provided the cross could cast enough of a shadow, cold enough to keep the animals of the sand in check until I’d managed to die. But somebody will say you can’t crucify an innocent man, assuming you can talk about abstract concepts like a crucifixion when there are so many concrete alternatives, and I reckon it’s obvious you can’t, but it all depends on the fact that my attitude to innocence is quite different from that of lots of other people’s.
‘I think that being innocent means that either you haven’t been born, or you’re dead, and once anybody has got as far as agreeing with that, I’d probably be prepared to admit there are many kinds of guilt: a sort of guilt that’s more innocent than most, and a sort of guilt that’s more burdened with guilt than any other, guilt positively dripping with guilt, and guilt which merely drips. Many people can’t see that, they can’t understand that, they’ll never have the faintest idea of what it’s all about, they’11 just go to sleep by the fire and they’ll have forgotten all about it by the time they wake up and are overcome by the heat and all they can yearn for is a shapely woman, a juicy orange, a glass of sweet wine, a better class of toothbrush, or nothing at all.
‘But for me, wandering through the sands of the desert, always having been wandering through the sands of the desert, and at last aware of the fact that I shall die in the sands of the desert, all that is no longer hard to understand; but it’s true that it’s only just recently even I’ve begun to catch on, once upon a time I too had a fire to sleep by -1 was lying when I claimed I’d always been wandering through the desert, that’s something which must have happened to me quite recently, in fact — but the difference between me and lots of the others was that when I woke up, I was so cold I was shivering and my teeth were chattering and I hadn’t the slightest yearning for any of the usual things, the things you ought to be yearning for if you’re normal. But as I lay there freezing and agonizing, I kept thinking after a while that I too had a yearning, that even I wanted something, just like all the others, but at that time I was so frightened of not being normal that I never dared to put it into words — but now that I’m finally wandering through the desert and nobody but me can hear my confused words, I can say it however many times I like.
‘I yearned for the deepest feeling of peace there is, a peace that passeth all normal understanding, not the peace of the tranquil creek, not the peace of the fishing rod, not the peace of the bank after closing time, not the peace of the cellar when the rest of the house is asleep, no, a peace which can only be found in innocent solitude, the peace of a lonely man who hasn’t forsaken anyone in order to be lonely, a lonely man who stands apart from all contexts of blood and suffering without anyone being able to pin any responsibility for that on him. And maybe I was aware even then that there was one place on earth, that there was a desert somewhere or other where that kind of peace is possible, or rather that there’s a place in that desert, not a banal oasis, oh no, on the contrary: a place which is sandier, hotter, more unbearable than any other in this sandy, hot and already inherently unbearable desert, and if I haven’t yet found that place, I’m still wandering around looking for it and if I don’t find it even though I think I’ve got down and stuck my nose into every hollow there is among the sand dunes — well, gentlemen, in that case I would beg to be crucified, in that case I’m guiltier than anyone else, guiltier not because I’ve acted more unjustly than anyone else, but because my self-reproach, my feelings of guilt and my part in so much suffering had a higher temperature than those of anyone else.