AN APPARITION
I have not changed my place. I open my eyes. Have I been sleeping? I
do not know. There is tranquil light now. It is evening or morning.
My arms alone can tremble. I am enrooted like a distorted bush. My
wound? It is that which glues me to the ground.
I succeed in raising my face, and the wet waves of space assail my
eyes. Patiently I pick out of the earthy pallor which blends all
things some foggy shoulders, some cloudy angles of elbows, some
hand-like lacerations. I discern in the still circle which encloses
me--faces lying on the ground and dirty as feet, faces held out to the
rain like vases, and holding stagnant tears.
Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side.
It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might.
Its hair falls back like nails. The nose is a triangular hole and a
little of the whiteness of human marble dots it. There are no lips
left, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering. The cheeks are
sprinkled with moldy traces of beard. This body is only mud and
stones. This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror.
Water-blackened overcoats cover and clothe the whole earth around me.
I gaze, and gaze----
I am frozen by a mass which supports me. My elbow sinks into it. It
is the horse's belly; its rigid leg obliquely bars the narrow circle
from which my eyes cannot escape. Ah, it is dead! It seems to me that
my breast is empty, yet still there is an echo in my heart. What I am
looking for is life.
The distant sky is resonant, and each dull shot comes and pushes my
shoulder. Nearer, some shells are thundering heavily. Though I cannot
see them, I see the tawny reflection that their flame spreads abroad,
and the sudden darkness as well that is hurled by their clouds of
excretion. Other shadows go and come on the ground about me; and then
I hear in the air the plunge of beating wings, and cries so fierce that
I feel them ransack my head.
* * * * * *
Death is not yet dead everywhere. Some points and surfaces still
resist and budge and cry out, doubtless because it is dawn; and once
the wind swept away a muffled bugle-call. There are some who still
burn with the invisible fire of fever, in spite of the frozen periods
they have crossed. But the cold is working into them. The immobility
of lifeless things is passing into them, and the wind empties itself as
it goes by.
Voices are worn away; looks are soldered to their eyes. Wounds are
staunched; they have finished. Only the earth and the stones bleed.
And just then I saw, under the trickling morning, some half-open but
still tepid dead that steamed, as if they were the blackening
rubbish-heap of a village. I watch that hovering dead breath of the
dead. The crows are eddying round the naked flesh with their flapping
banners and their war-cries. I see one which has found some shining
rubies on the black vein-stone of a foot; and one which noisily draws
near to a mouth, as if called by it. Sometimes a dead man makes a
movement, so that he will fall lower down. But they will have no more
burial than if they were the last men of all.
* * * * * *
There is one upright presence which I catch a glimpse of, so near, so
near; and I want to see it. In making the effort with my elbow on the
horse's ballooned body I succeed in altering the direction of my head,
and of the corridor of my gaze. Then all at once I discover a quite
new population of bronze men in rotten clothes; and especially, erect
on bended knees, a gray overcoat, lacquered with blood and pierced by a
great hole, round which is collected a bunch of heavy crimson flowers.
Slowly I lift the burden of my eyes to explore that hole. Amid the
shattered flesh, with its changing colors and a smell so strong that it
puts a loathsome taste in my mouth, at the bottom of the cage where
some crossed bones are black and rusted as iron bars, I can see
something, something isolated, dark and round. I see that it is a
heart.
Placed there, too--I do not know how, for I cannot see the body's full
height--the arm, and the hand. The hand has only three fingers--a
fork---- Ah, I recognize that heart! It is his whom I killed.
Prostrate in the mud before him, because of my defeat and my
resemblance, I cried out to the man's profundity, to the superhuman
man. Then my eyes fell; and I saw worms moving on the edges of that
infinite wound. I was quite close to their stirring. They are whitish
worms, and their tails are pointed like stings; they curve and flatten
out, sometimes in the shape of an "i," and sometimes of a "u." The
perfection of immobility is left behind. The human material is
crumbled into the earth for another end.
I hated that man, when he had his shape and his warmth. We were
foreigners, and made to destroy ourselves. Yet it seems to me, in face
of that bluish heart, still attached to its red cords, that I
understand the value of life. It is understood by force, like a
caress. I think I can see how many seasons and memories and beings
there had to be, yonder, to make up that life,--while I remain before
him, on a point of the plain, like a night watcher. I hear the voice
that his flesh breathed while yet he lived a little, when my ferocious
hands fumbled in him for the skeleton we all have. He fills the whole
place. He is too many things at once. How can there be worlds in the
world? That established notion would destroy all.
This perfume of a tuberose is the breath of corruption. On the ground,
I see crows near me, like hens.
Myself! I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my
hours; the past, and the future,--it was going to be like the past!
And at that moment I feel, weeping within me and dragging itself from
some little bygone trifle, a new and tragical sorrow in dying, a hunger
to be warm once more in the rain and the cold: to enclose myself in
myself in spite of space, to hold myself back, to live. I called for
help, and then lay panting, watching the distance in desperate
expectation. "Stretcher-bearers!" I cry. I do not hear myself; but if
only the others heard me!
Now that I have made that effort, I can do no more, and my head lies
there at the entrance to that world-great wound.
There is nothing now.
Yet there is that man. He was laid out like one dead. But suddenly,
through his shut eyes, he smiled. He, no doubt, will come back here on
earth, and something within me thanks him for his miracle.
And there was that one, too, whom I saw die. He raised his hand, which
was drowning. Hidden in the depths of the others, it was only by that
hand that he lived, and called, and saw. On one finger shone a
wedding-ring, and it told me a sort of story. When his hand ceased to
tremble, and became a dead plant with that golden flower, I felt the
beginning of a farewell rise in me like a sob. But there are too many
of them for one to mourn them all. How many of them are there on all
this plain? How many, how many of them are there in all this moment?
Our heart is only made for one heart at a time. It wears us out to
look at all. One may say, "There are the others," but it is only a
saying. "You shall not know; you shall _not_ know."
Barrenness and cold have descended on all the body of the earth.
Nothing moves any more, except the wind, that is charged with cold
water, and the shells, that are surrounded by infinity, and the crows,
and the thought that rolls immured in my head.
* * * * * *
They are motionless at last, they who forever marched, they to whom
space was so great! I see their poor hands, their poor legs, their
poor backs, resting on the earth. They are tranquil at last. The
shells which bespattered them are ravaging another world. They are in
the peace eternal.
All is accomplished, all has terminated there. It is there, in that
circle narrow as a well that the descent into the raging heart of hell
was halted, the descent into slow tortures, into unrelenting fatigue,
into the flashing tempest. We came here because they told us to come
here. We have done what they told us to do. I think of the simplicity
of our reply on the Day of Judgment.
The gunfire continues. Always, always, the shells come, and all those
bullets that are miles in length. Hidden behind the horizons, living
men unite with machines and fall furiously on space. They do not see
their shots. They do not know what they are doing. "You shall not
know; you shall _not_ know."
But since the cannonade is returning, they will be fighting here again.
All these battles spring from themselves and necessitate each other to
infinity! One single battle is not enough, it is not complete, there
is no satisfaction. Nothing is finished, nothing is ever finished.
Ah, it is only men who die! No one understands the greatness of
things, and I know well that I do not understand all the horror in
which I am.
* * * * * *
Here is evening, the time when the firing is lighted up. The horizons
of the dark day, of the dark evening, and of the illuminated night
revolve around my remains as round a pivot.
I am like those who are going to sleep, like the children. I am
growing fainter and more soothed; I close my eyes; I dream of my home.
Yonder, no doubt, they are joining forces to make the evenings
tolerable. Marie is there, and some other women, getting dinner ready;
the house becomes a savor of cooking. I hear Marie speaking; standing
at first, then seated at the table. I hear the sound of the table
things which she moves on the cloth as she takes her place. Then,
because some one is putting a light to the lamp, having lifted its
chimney, Marie gets up to go and close the shutters. She opens the
window. She leans forward and outspreads her arms; but for a moment
she stays immersed in the naked night. She shivers, and I, too.
Dawning in the darkness, she looks afar, as I am doing. Our eyes have
met. It is true, for this night is hers as much as mine, the same
night, and distance is not anything palpable or real; distance is
nothing. It is true, this great close contact.
Where am I? Where is Marie? What is she, even? I do not know, I do
not know. I do not know where the wound in my flesh is, and how can I
know the wound in my heart?
* * * * * *
The clouds are crowning themselves with sheaves of stars. It is an
aviary of fire, a hell of silver and gold. Planetary cataclysms send
immense walls of light falling around me. Phantasmal palaces of
shrieking lightning, with arches of star-shells, appear and vanish amid
forests of ghastly gleams.
While the bombardment is patching the sky with continents of flame, it
is drawing still nearer. Volleys of flashes are plunging in here and
there and devouring the other lights. The supernatural army is
arriving! All the highways of space are crowded. Nearer still, a
shell bursts with all its might and glows; and among us all whom chance
defends goes frightfully in quest of flesh. Shells are following each
other into that cavity there. Again I see, among the things of earth,
a resurrected man, and he is dragging himself towards that hole! He is
wrapped in white, and the under-side of his body, which rubs the
ground, is black. Hooking the ground with his stiffened arms he
crawls, long and flat as a boat. He still hears the cry "Forward!" He
is finding his way to the hole; he does not know, and he is trailing
exactly toward its monstrous ambush. The shell will succeed! At any
second now the frenzied fangs of space will strike his side and go in
as into a fruit. I have not the strength to shout to him to fly
elsewhere with all his slowness; I can only open my mouth and become a
sort of prayer in face of the man's divinity. And yet, he is the
survivor; and along with the sleeper, to whom a dream was whispering
just now, he is the only one left to me.
A hiss--the final blow reaches him; and in a flash I see the piebald
maggot crushing under the weight of the sibilance and turning wild eyes
towards me.
No! It is not he! A blow of light--of all light--fills my eyes. I am
lifted up, I am brandished by an unknown blade in the middle of a globe
of extraordinary light. The shell----I! And I am falling, I fall
continually, fantastically. I fall out of this world; and in that
fractured flash I saw myself again--I thought of my bowels and my heart
hurled to the winds--and I heard voices saying again and again--far,
far away--"Simon Paulin died at the age of thirty-six."