From IN THE SKY:
All around, coming from everywhere, you
hear rifle shots; above you, from all over, like moans, like screams. The sky
is filled with death throes, just like the earth.
This
evening, I came back up from the canal a bit drunk, not really wasted, but with
a strange heaviness in my head. On the threshold of the cabaret, where I left
the grinning men behind, a chill seized me, and the ascent from the canal bank
hasn’t warmed me up. Ordinarily when I’ve drunk too much, I fall like a lump
into bed and I sleep and sleep, a happy sleep, a sleep full of parades of beautiful
chimeras and consoling joys. But this evening I’m not sleepy; I’ve never felt
as sad as I do tonight. I try in vain to recover and follow the train of my
memories. I remember nothing anymore… it all floats in my head, like a heavy,
impenetrable fog. And I’m afraid of the silence that surrounds me, I’m afraid
of my shadow there on the wall, I’m afraid of that wailing dog… why does he
only bark when I’m sad? Oh! These still nights! These dead nights, when not a
breath of air comes to stir the branches of the trees, or lift the tiles of my
roof, or make the windows crack—how terrible they are! I try to take refuge in
the past, to recall faces and things… my father is dead, my mother is dead, my sisters
are married… but this evening I can’t even remember how all of that
happened!...
Ah!
Here’s my companion. My only companion. It’s a little spider. She dropped from
the ceiling on an invisible thread and stopped a few centimetres from the lamp’s
glass cover, but outside of its glow. And she rests there, her long limbs folded,
at the end of the thread she just spun. Why? There are no more flies, no more
insects. And she hangs there idle, doesn’t spin any webs or lie in ambush. She
seems to sleep, her belly turned to the warmth of the lamp. She sleeps or she
dreams. A mischievous impulse makes me move the lamp to the right. So, nimble
like a gymnast, the spider climbs back up the invisible thread, crosses the
ceiling, and drops back down a new thread until she’s set herself up again in
the heat of the lamp. She refolds her long spindly legs, seesaws for an instant,
and is still again. I repeat the experiment several times, pulling away the
lamp, to the right, to the left, and the spider always climbs back up and back
down to station herself, with an admirable precision, close to the glass with
its gentle warmth. As I watch the spider, the minutes pass, the hours roll by;
I watch the still little spider, and it seems that she’s watching me as well,
her eight eyes fixed ironically upon me; and I hear her say to me:
“You’re
sad, you despair, and you cry! It’s your own fault. Why did you want to become
a fly? You could have easily been like me, a joyful spider… Don’t you see, in
life, you have to eat or be eaten? Myself, I prefer to eat… and it’s so
amusing! The flies are so confident, so stupid. You put out a little snare,
practically nothing—a few threads in the sun, between two leaves, between two
flowers. The flies like the sun, they like light, they like flowers, they’re
all poets. They come and tangle their wings in the webs strung round those
flowers in the sun… and you take them, and you eat them. Flies taste so good!...
Oh, how stupid you are, go away! Your lamp is dying, good night!’
And
the spider climbs back up to the ceiling and disappears behind a rafter in the
shadows.
That
dog is still barking outside! Another dog, farther away, answers. I feel the chill
of death invade me.
I
go to the window. The moon has risen and chased away the fog. Between the bare
branches of the trees, the sky alights and the stars burn cruelly. And I think:
“So
what if I had been a human spider, so what if I had savored the joy of murder?
Would I have been happy, or happier? Would I not have been crushed anyway by
the mystery of that sky, by all that’s unknown, by all of this infinity that
weighs on me? What does it matter if I live the way I live? Life is the only
sorrow! To live in pleasure amongst the crowd, or to live in solitude,
surrounded by dread and silence—aren’t they the same thing? And I don’t have
the courage to kill myself!”
I
didn’t drink enough tonight...
