Either this was never taken seriously, or while we were out there together hardly anything emerged having to do with the particular region. The region lost its value; did not even begin to reveal it. First of all, as soon as the other person was at my side, I had to fight off a bad mood, as if by his mere presence he were displacing our surroundings, and then most people, and not only the dyed-in-the-wool city dwellers, after at most a brief period of alertness, stopped paying attention, were somewhere else entirely in their thoughts, and what they said neither had anything to do with the landscape we were passing through together — which was almost all right with me — nor was affected, guided, or inspired by it in the slightest (which then enraged me against my companions).
In my imagination they should have stood up straighter, moved their whole bodies, looked around them, spoken in a calmer, deeper, solid voice, and instead they fell in on themselves, stumbled repeatedly, kept their eyes on the ground, and now and then one of them lost his urban-sophisticate tone, which turned out to have been an affectation, and spoke in a labored way, without emphasis and resonance, precisely as one imagines a lifelong resident of the suburbs.
And I was infected by it: I mumbled, hobbled, and stumbled along just like the man next to me, and we two formed a pair that was not merely ludicrous like Bouvard and Pécuchet but also out of place.
Walking with others, I usually experienced something similar to what I had earlier experienced when I read aloud, to a person to whom I felt close, something I had just written: although I had been glowing with pleasure as I set out with my manuscript to see him, and he, too, had been eager, it was as if each of us scuttled away into a corner, farther and more apart than ever before, and I still have those stranger’s eyes before me whenever, after reading aloud, stumbling more and more, I with effort raise my head.
Thus, with rare exceptions, I stopped taking others with me to places where for me, and, as I realized, for me alone, a new territory opened up — where my personal field of exploration lay.
I even kept my forays, pushed farther every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, an unusually long one; had played billiards at the Place de Clichy, had crashed a reception at the Austrian embassy and drunk an entire bottle of wine, had got into an argument with a policeman in front of Les Invalides; with the woman from Catalonia I even used the lie that for professional reasons I had spent hours following an unknown beauty, a “worldly woman,” from the Pont Neuf to God knows where; I went so far as to lie to my son, unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.
But for me that disappearing day in, day out into the suburbs was the first good habit I had acquired up to then. Here was finally a habit I could be happy about; never would I want to be rid of it.
The morning after a trip the first thing I did, under the pretext of going to the doctor’s, was to plunge into the bushes on the far side of the Périphérique overpass and head for the wide-open spaces in the no-man’s — land between Malakoff, Laplace, and Fontenay-aux-Roses. The first tree beyond the city limits, no matter how scrawny, rustled at me more tangibly than the more luxuriant exemplars of its species on the other side. Drinking coffee, more bitter than anywhere in the city, in one of the cavelike bars, I tasted a more penetrating reality, and the sight of the old aqueduct stretching high above the Bievre Valley, not just one monument among many like the monumental structures of Paris, gave me a sense of monumentality different from that in the city, as did the similarly scattered churches in the region, often lower than their surroundings, also sunk deeper into the ground, as if forming part of the ruins behind them, where I regained possession of the past and of history, which in the course of my life had made me skittish, regained it for instance in the stone figures around the arched portal of the church in Bagneux, made easier to overlook by the fact that the devotees of progress who participated in various revolutions had thoroughly smashed their faces and limbs, leaving only a few curves of shoulders, heads, and toes: never again, was the message that came across to me from that scratching-out of eyes and smashing of skulls, would the perpetrators go back to the saints, whose stories had been told to the end. They had stood there as the idols of a power that had become illegitimate; this had to be hammered into the world with each blow.
I was increasingly suffering in my metropolis — and it seemed to me it would have been even worse in New York, let alone in Rome — from something that had already menaced me in childhood, since my time in boarding schooclass="underline" from loss of place, or space deprivation. (The prophet of Porchefontaine, who originally, before he became an innkeeper, going from one bankruptcy to the next, in suburb after suburb, had been trained as a philosopher, uses the word “dereification.”) And my suffering was not improved by stays in the country, even in the most remote villages, which, after all, should have been familiar to me from childhood.
Those suburbs, on the other hand, no matter how ailing they might be themselves, became something like my healer. I needed them, urgently, imperatively. “Dull in the head” is for me the same as “ill.” And then there were times, in Paris, and even close to the edge of town, when I became so dull and ill that I wanted nothing but to get out. I felt at once locked in and locked out. The sounds, which my son, whom I otherwise believed unquestioningly, found quieter and more uniform than in small towns, hemmed me in, just as I experienced the absence of sound in the middle of the night as a sort of trap. Sometimes, on my way out to the suburbs, I suddenly broke into a run, as if I were fleeing, all the while scolding myself angrily for not setting out much sooner, and spreading my arms wide, in all seriousness, once I got out there into the empty spaces. More than once tears even came to my eyes, as when a pain is cured all at once, or rather is transformed into something bearable, something sweet.
Thus I welcomed the widening circle of the suburbs: to the east, windy Ivry-sur-Seine, where more crimes occurred than just those that were always solved in the books of Simenon, which were often set there; to the west, Vanves, furrowed and difficult to take in; spreading up the mountainside, Chatillon with its scattering of buildings, from whose highest point in 1871 Prussian cannon had fired down on Paris, and occasionally even those towns with which nothing could be done and which, along with those responsible, deserved to be blown up. My greeting was silent, and at the same time somewhat resembled an exclamation, and it was directed at the three-dimensionality I had so greatly missed and had now found once more outside the gates, in the form of an apple crate, a dwarf palm, but also for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is. And day after day, as I was walking through the suburbs, although I myself did not always know exactly where I was, I was trustingly asked by the many people lost there, especially in cars, for directions.
I made up my mind to live somewhere out there, for a time. I felt a powerful urge to experience the nights out there, and to expose myself to the nights. I thought it would not be forever, just as I pictured myself as married only temporarily, sort of playing at being a father, and also not writing forever.