“This letter, it’s not for me…” He couldn’t refrain from adding, absurdly, “It’s for the black man…”
“Really?” started Gobfin. “Did you see him? He’s done for now! But no, the letter’s not for him.”
An ingratiating, ghoulish grin split his face.
“Not for him nor for you either… My mistake, Monsieur Battistini, begging your pardon.”
“Ba-ttis-ti,” D stressed. “No ‘ni.’ Battistini chopped short.”
“Chopped short,” echoed Gobfin, coming down sharp with the side of his hand, and winking at the thought of the Negro.
In the marketplace of Samarkand, white-haired storytellers still chant the tales of the Thousand and One Nights as they jerk the strings of a puppet theater. Fingers move in the mystery box and out pops the Wicked Black Prince from the subterranean depths of Evil. Another movement, and the scimitar of Righteousness is brandished… The third plainclothes inspector appeared in just such a fashion. Monsieur Battisti immediately identified him by his boar-like neck and shriveled face. “Going up?” Gobfin inquired, with hidden passion. The shriveled face answered with a sinister “Not yet” as it turned to take in Monsieur Battisti. “The main thing is to get out of here,” thought D.
“Quick, Nadine! We’re off in ten minutes…” “This place is awful,” Nadine answered in a low voice. “But do we really have to leave?”
We are made in such a way that our fears subside and our obsessions vanish by virtue of a rhythm we don’t understand: often a change of scene is enough. The Battistis felt good in Le Havre. The air was salty and damp; light mists blew in from the Channel and floated over the avenues of the prosperous, peaceful city. The trees themselves, though bare of leaves, looked nourished by a richer sap, a healthier breeze, than those of Paris. The big cafés displayed a prosperous dignity. Bruno Battisti was unconcerned to find no reference to the Negro’s arrest in the papers. “They might very well keep it quiet for days,” he said to Noémi. (“Let’s get used to our new names.”) The green, foam-flecked, heavily churning sea instilled in them the carefree sense of having completed their escape, as though their connection to insoluble problems would be broken by crossing the ocean.
We live by memories accumulated within the unconscious, thought Bruno. We breathe more freely among mountains, because they arouse a quivering reminder of the primeval forest; caverns oppress us, echoing the age of fear and primitive magic — while oceans promise escape, adventure, discovery. For as long as humans have been persecuting and killing one another, hunted men have sought salvation on the seas, in such numbers that their flight must have contributed to the peopling of the earth; and it is surely fugitives, rather than conquerors, who led the way to new worlds… Even the legend of the Argonauts is that of Jason’s banishment and flight, the Golden Fleece perhaps no more than a symbol of escape. Modern man could usefully return to the study of ancient myths in the light of his recent experience… And what of our feeling that the sea is beautiful, when it is actually an inhuman, featureless mass of an enormity to appall the thinking insect standing on the beach? The expanse of it, the aimless movement, the elementary power… shattering concepts! And yet the promise of an imagined safety is stronger still.
Now that cablegrams, police descriptions, secret orders, lies can circle the globe in a matter of hours and there are no more islands to discover, no more hideaways in which to slip the net of the special services, the urban labyrinth is a safer bet than any distant archipelago; which means we are the dupes of a memory wired to our instincts, when we listen to the millenarian song that hums in our breast in communion with the ancestors, paddling out to sea in their canoes… The city is our admirable prison, outside which we now find it almost impossible to live. We long to escape it, just as we involuntarily wish — in horror — for the deaths of our nearest and dearest, no doubt because through their extinction we aspire to our own…
“Nadine-Noémi, I’ve worked out beautiful plans, like an engineer applying himself to a construction problem. We have very little money, and that merely by chance. They controlled us through that as well, it hadn’t occurred to me. (Disregard for money was one of our strengths and it’s turned against us.) “We still have our hands, and our heads, useless now… I’ve decided on definitive liberation, goodbye to Europe, Asia, cities, the coming war… Tolstoy was on the right track in some ways. How much earth does a man need? Enough to feed him and to bury him… We’ll have that much in a country that’s hot and violently alive. Because in losing everything, we should at least recover the primordial sensation of life.”
Noémi rejoined lightheartedly, “The great mystical count professed the philosophy of a petty vegetarian rentier. At least that’s what they taught me. Don’t sulk, my last-minute Tolstoyan, I love to hear you talk like that.”
It was their last morning in Europe. They spent it walking on a wet stony beach at the edge of the cold sea, making fun of the ugly villas that dotted the shoreline, houses as tawdry and pretentious as the stunted lives within. And oddly touching, all the same, for even this second-rate architecture had something to say about man’s resistance to the destruction of the best in him. An aspiration to adventure, to aesthetics, translated as plaster busts of Second Empire demimondaines protruding from the rocaille of gardens no bigger than the exercise yard of a prison cell; the love of light, of the purity of the heavenly spheres, was expressed in arrangements of tinted glass balls over fountains kept dry out of thrift. There were villas trying to look like Scottish castles, Bavarian chalets, Turkish pavilions, or Gothic piles; they looked like toys for overgrown children whose imaginations were waging a losing battle against extinction.
Beyond loomed the noble form, gray and tormented, of the cliffs. All the forms of the earth are great and noble. Have you noticed how no terrestrial thing is ridiculous? Ridicule and meanness appear in the works of men. They are defeats… We are all limited and ridiculous… Yellow grasses tousled the cliff top; below, birds nested in the holes and there was a great palaver of beating wings to deter nest-robbers. The toylike cannons of a fort poked over the summit; its blue-white-red flag waved innocently in the wind… The Battistis were forced to skirt a recent cave-in. As they contemplated this display of ruined might, they were accosted by a woman with a shopping basket on her arm, returning to some isolated cottage on the beach, curious about this pair of bad-weather walkers.