3252-Rital and Raton

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"Rital" and "Raton"

Author(s): Pier Paolo Pasolini and John Shepley

Source: October, Vol. 31, (Winter, 1984), pp. 33-48

Published by: The MIT Press
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PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

translated by JOHN SHEPLEYHe said: 'J'aifa'"In a country voice-rather shrill: for an Arab, to learn French means torepeat a rustic condition -with thoughts of the city in a house crumbling in thesun, the fetid sheep, the hens on the roost, the neighbors dressed in rags, theirshrewd old ideas, the dreamlike gestures at the end of the cultivated horizon,the destiny that combines sex and death: and since the peasant universe ispetit-bourgeois, an Arab's French has that shrill sound, high in tone and weak,plaintive, bad, like a postal clerk in a bad mood due to bad digestion or wounded

pride, dry, sterile, immature, like certain little shoots of tender winter saplings.The emission of this little vocal shoot comes from the head. Oddly enough, itdoesn't pass through the male glands. Sensuality appears bitter and sharp-asin a barnyard animal-treacherous and aggressive. That vocal emission, light,feeble, scourging- the voice of the mother- conceals a sensuality that attackslike a snake, first coiling, then straight, then coiling again on its desert road.Brahin is like a Sicilian boy, but without that soft fecundating will thatgoes back more to the mother than to the father. Tallish, with narrow shoulders,broad hips, the magical gaze of a girl: the two eyes set close above the slightlyhooked nose, the thumbprint of beauty of another race, which appears alien,with a faintly repellent aura. As though the presence of other destinies were athreat to our own. Or rendered them vain by suggesting other ways of being inthe sun, amid the houses, along the dry rivers, between the walls, etc.The water of a river that you see after showing your passport. To sip thatwater as an unnatural act of baptism, to accept its taste like a nonexistent beastthat at its contact comes into existence and cries, screaming for everything ithas lost by watering at other springs.The fact that Brahin is walking through the heart of Paris is thus thebeginning of a story.I'll go further and say: the fact that Brahin is walking through Pigalle.translation ? John Shepley


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I said his eyes are those of a girl, or a still immature boy, all lucid flesh:with his shrill voice that strikes the upper part of the palate like a current of cooland unhealthy air. Almost as though a throttle were located at the top of thelungs, similar to the constriction of a sore throat, but due to sun rather thansnow, to malnutrition rather than wind. Above the eyes is a big circle, a bigblack circle - irregular and quivering. Really and truly a big circle, looking asthough it had been traced at that moment, or woven with the wings of southernbirds.Next to that big, black, shining circle is a thin white line and a smallundeveloped circle, most surely trimmed by Parisian scissors as it emerged,reluctant and inarticulate, above the ear, so as to leave as much space as possi-ble for the big, indeed enormous, circle that starts from the thin white line andlunges like a beating wing over the hairline, over the forehead, over theeyebrows, until, like a frayed but living silk beret, it skims and almost coversthe starry eyes, etc.

The journey from Batna ("On what mountain chain, or plain, or coast ofAlgeria?" I, that fatuous author of a few years ago, would have wondered) toLyons, the banlieue,crammed with wogs and wops exchanging illusions of na-tionality. And the journey from Lyons and Paris, with his blond friend. Thatblond friend who has no racial prejudices - like two pigeons flying together.Let the blond friend - in the gratuitousness of the unwritten story - alsohave a big blond wheel over his eye. But a dirty one- and dry, not greasy,bristling, not soft, heavy, not quivering, dull, not light, ruffled, not shining orsmooth. Underneath, the little blue eyes.And further underneath, the ugly mouth - the wog's mouth is pretty ugly,too-like a sort of fat rodent's, etc., etc.

That night a Corsican was murdered by some of his compatriots: he wentinto a bar, had a drink, asked for the telephone book, went over to the phone,the two killers, his fellow countrymen, came in and shot him, they puncturedhis hands, which he had put up to shield his face, punctured his head, and lefthim bleeding on the red floor of the bar, with the customers crowded at the tablesin the back room coming out to watch like crows. The dead man lay on hisstomach, and he seemed o besleepingwith hisforeheadon his arm, this slumbermakinghim onceagain as defenseless s a child. Brahin was among those watching.*

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Maybe Brahin hasn't enough breath to finish the word: Fa'. But it's thelack of breath of kids who grow up in cities of gangsterism. More than a lack ofbreath, it's an aspiration, a silent h, or a sigh due to sensitivity-or maybe, asthe case may be, to a calculated excess of patience; or to the wish to disappear,expiring in the painful reverence he has for himself; or else to the need todiscredit in the presence of third parties the legend of his own wickedness. Ormaybe it's some unrecognizable symptom of shyness, after all.

Simultaneously: Father M. is in his office in the Latin Quarter. In the"story that will never be written," his face would be minutely described (or bet-ter, "rendered"): anyway it's a face that primarily expresses agreeable astonish-ment, mild enthusiasm not devoid of self-irony, somewhat anxious politeness,and shyness overcome through action, whatever it may be, even simply theorganizational and intellectual kind. Or rather, the will to action is whatprevails on Father M.'s gray face, with its pointed nose and wide mouth (amouth onto which the smile drains down from the eyes, leaving the eyes withlittle smile and much of that old shyness, still almost in a state of guilt). Butaction - present action - the allusion to other actions - the great task in the ser-vice of God, which is to some extent the great task of madmen, and indeed oneof the tasks of madmen, has this air of being spent, bare, distressed, flat, bruised,and pitiful-it seems to fill time and space simply in order to fill them, exactlylike a paranoiac's innocent system of acts. Nevertheless, witnessed and vindi-cated as it is, backed up by a real power, that of the clergy, Father M.'s actionstubbornly overcomes the limitations of the means and their dreariness (for in-stance, the huge quantity of leaflets and notices--poorly printed by localtypesetters and soon yellowed and pulpy -piling up on desks, chairs, shelves,and wobbling little tables in the office, itself too small and poor for so much ac-tion). In the same disorder as in the office, the gray expanse of the LatinQuarter opens outside: it has the same desperate air of suspended action,formed by an unimaginable number of concomitant actions, past actions,forgotten actions, actions scarcely begun. I don't know if the wind is blowing.But it seems to be. If it's not wind, it's the wind of existence. Its static and eter-nal breath flutters the thin overcoats of African students, southern Frenchmen,poor Parisians--who circulate by the thousands and thousands on the widesidewalks of their boulevards, in front of stores full of those thin overcoats mo-tionless in the light - and everything open on the darkness of the Seine, and onthe rows of inextinguishable lights beyond the darkness of the Seine.Father M. acts for all these amorphous children, whom it seems impossi-ble somehow or other to count, to extract from chaos and from that infiniteseries of random acts that escape any conceivable statistics and which only apoet, to his misfortune, is in a position to grasp in their unimaginable entirety.

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For as night falls in a Paris quarter it sets some tens of thousands of students inmotion like robots: it gives meaning to something they have in their hearts, andit's strange how all of them together throw it away, this something that's so .well, sacred, so marvelous- they throw it away as though it were an ordinarything. Only when seen as an undifferentiated whole does this public act of"throwing something away" regain its vague sacred meaning: it's a genuineritual and it keeps escaping, escaping. In the end, God might say to Father M.:"You have given my name to something that escaped you." Still, in this way,Father M. can act: he is attached to his action, he too is a robot of the eveningon the Seine: he throws away his something along with all the others, theeasygoing black students, the hook-nosed Arabs, the tiny Vietnamese, thevulgar Italians, the serious Parisians-always paired with a still more seriousgirl, wrapped in a scarf and melting with tenderness.How could Father M. have entered like this into unison with all thesechildren, who come at random from the four corners of the earth, each with adestiny whose randomness and precariousness is multiplied by the infinitenumber of destinies of the others, engaged in strolling like an army that a nightbreeze has been enough to disperse under the lights of the boulevards?There was once a time when Father M. was a little boy. And I can seehim, that good-looking little Jewish boy, with his rather pointed nose and wide,thin, timid lips, still immature at the age of thirteen, but with the precocity ofthat age-which is the old age of childhood, the full experience of the wholeperiod of life in which one is a child -made still more adult and almost refinedby the fact of being reached in Paris.The scene is the following. A state school (if I must imagine it to set thestage, I'm thinking of a little white school - that's the way it has remained in mymind's eye - white from the lime of Arab countries - in an old alley of thatParis that even Italians know fondly, like one of their own sufficiently familiarplaces, since it is located in the quarter behind a famous caf6): there's a rainyair in the narrow alley between the overhanging houses, a rainy Paris air ofsuch intensity as to make the walls crack, besides covering them with a bluishpatina. And the wind of existence now flutters the thin overcoats of little boysleaving school on that far-off day before the war, a day whose chance nature isset in a light that it would after all be crazy to call funereal (though it belongsto that past that we share with the dead). Little M. is there, with his intenseand bashful smile: the readiness and sugary sweetness of the Eastern smile thatremains on the lips of many Jews, especially when at thirteen years of age suchreadiness and sweetness are as yet scarcely veiled by the anxiety to adapt to theWest. As in a photograph suffused with sepia, a little out of focus due to thesudden movement of someone in the picture, of whose face or arm all you cansee is a kind of brief whitish streak, etc., etc., a group of his contemporaries,some in cruel short pants like the two drooping wings of a fledgling sparrow,some in the knickerbockers imposed on them by the Anglophile snobbery of

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their entrepreneur or paint-manufacturer fathers, etc., etc., has gathered by it-self, to the exclusion of anyone else. The one excluded is the little boy M., whois unable to do anything about it but smile. The others turn their backs on him,they exclude him, and he smiles to mask his persistence in staying there, in try-ing to worm his way into this group of companions just coming out of school.He goes closer, he slips in among them, he listens, with the wretched look ofone who is rejected and is ready for any abdication of his own dignity, for thelowest sort of humility, so long as he is accepted. Maneuvering like a little birdapproaching food, he kept begging. Finally the others reacted. What ensuedwas a scene from an elegant French film, something by Renoir, with these littleboys affecting to speak like grown-ups, and not neglecting to use the cruelphrases of a serial novel: that, after all, is the sign of supreme elegance. Thefact is that one of them turned to him, and excluding him definitely, explicitly,for good, said: "We're talking about God. You can't be one of us because yourfather's a Jew."The consequences of the matter are well known. A few years later, M.'smother and all his relatives were taken by the Germans and deported to theconcentration camps, where they died in the manner we heard about later. M.and his father succeeded in saving themselves by fleeing to the South of France,and there in the middle of the war - cursed by this wandering father of his - ona day of fine weather with the sun beating down on terror and silence -M."heard the call." He found his true father in the God of the Catholics. He waslater able to go back to Paris with a father who was not a Jew, and with acatechumen's marvelous love. And not only did he belong to Catholic groups,but he acted in them as well. There are now thousands of students aroundhim -they will shortly come into the meeting hall. In the meantime the winddisperses them throughout small pensions, brasseries, cafeterias, alleys, andboulevards, it flaps their scarves and the skirts of their thin overcoats- it entersinto the dusty office of Father M., who is smoking.

As for Brahin, he's now at the foot of Pigalle, near a big round publicsquare. His sidekick and "blond counterpart" has disappeared.In conceiving the latter, I'm thinking of an Italian boy glimpsed in thePrenestina shantytown. I'd met him before, his name was Palmiro, but rushingpast in a Fiat 1100 amid the painted shacks, mud on mud, the gray of a dried-up swamp, he looked quite different. He wore a jersey lobster pink in color, butfaded from the sun, with a kind of dusty and sugary sheen about it, whichmade the pink look pale in the middle areas and bright at the edges, as in themannerist painters. Contrasting sharply with that lobster pink was the yellowof his hair-blond, with a soft and scanty mop. Only one little streak of thatyellow mop was golden, a shining glint, one little streak of old Ostia sunlight.

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Brahin is now alone, and so his staring gaze is infinitely more significant.He is alone with his gaze, which is now the only vital thing about him (hisbody, in its solitude, appears crushed; his trousers hang limply over that mortalflesh that he too can be said to share with us; his shoulders are narrower). Hestares at the people inside the plate-glass window of a caf -like a lot of fishmotionless inside a fish bowl, etc., and their immobility makes them seem moreluminous - almost as though they were on a small stage lit by reflectors in aperformance by the Living Theatre. The leading character in their midst is "theblonde." I say thebecause she is a character denoted and connoted in Brahin'slife. My the is almost one of definition.About her, whom I know only visually, through Brahin's gaze from afar,a long shot to that little stage at the end of one of the countless squares of Paris,with its open-air oyster stands that seem sculpted in wrought iron, deeplydemocratic and art nouveau, with a grandiose anonymity inconceivableanywhere else but Paris-I can still allow myself to say many things. For awriter's gaze has its rights, especially if that writer isn't afraid of being infectedby literature, like a Hindu by poor human beings of another caste, if he doesnot have the altogether bourgeois terror of seeming and being what thebourgeoisie wants and imagines him to be, or as the Communist party wantsand imagines him to be, if he's not continually obsessed by the thought of notbeing what he's expected to be, whether as vulgar as he is, or as nowadays it'snolonger permitted to be, etc. So, arbitrarily, as an impure writer, I can write thefollowing notes about the blonde whom I've merely seen. First of all, obviously,she had split herself by the fact of being one of the girls of Pigalle. Merchandis-ing herself had not been without its consequences. She had lost any conceivableidea of what sexual life was, since sexual life was something she experienced asmerchandise and not as herself. As for pure and simple physical pleasure, atfirst she had been unable to feel it because, as a virgin, she could not allowherself to yield to such weaknesses, attributed to men; later, as a whore, thesepleasurable weaknesses were a question of money, and not for a moment couldshe allow herself to yield for any other reason but money. In the presence of thesexual act, therefore, she placed herself in a state of mind in which, not havingto show pleasure, she was prevented from feeling it.True, her professional deformation presented life to her in the guise of amale member emerging from and going back into its nest inside the darktrousers of taxi drivers, porters at Les Halles, provincial students, foreign im-migrant workers in Paris, and so on, but this constant, nagging appearanceand disappearance of the member, which in itself had left its mark on her wholeexistence, reducing it to a sluggish theater of such monotonous, hot, guilty,and often painful performances, had imprinted on her face a changeless expres-sion of nonexistence, sometimes melancholy, sometimes fierce. But Brahin sawnothing of all this. Or-who knows?-maybe he liked it. Maybe he liked theseeming death of that body.

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minds, to what is revolutionary. The neophyte has already carried out a revo-lution - a scandalous and in some way disgraceful one - and now he must serveit. The few Arabs who will come to Father M.'s meeting will be converts . . .(Charles de Foucauld in Morocco . . . silent . . . 50?C in the shade . . .)

Brahin goes with the blonde along a street so Parisian as to seem a dream,one small hotel after another, under red neon signs that glow in patient defeat.Until they come to the one they were looking for. The old hag takes their docu-ments at the desk in the clean little lobby-with its overhanging staircase that,precipitously beckoning, rises upward without even giving you time to catchyour breath - behind a glass door as in a post office. Unlike Europeans, Brahinis not modest about his member. Ever since he was a little boy-as we will see-an erection has been taken for granted as one of his public rights, it has hadthe approval of onlookers, an approval not even based on the triumph of virilityas a norm, as health, etc., but directly on his feeling of sweet and confused ado-lescent desire (among non-Western peoples it is difficult for a man to emergeentirely from adolescence; his ideal age is the moment when he becomes aman: a man determined to renounce all the responsibilities of men in exchangefor the sweet right to pursue, with his great mop of hair and beautiful lips, thecourse of his erection).

In a small village in the South of France - when the landing in Normandywas still in the distant future, and Cassino a name known only to educated tour-ists - a Jewish boy of eighteen - on one of those afternoons that belong only tothe past-while the meaning of the sunlight on the houses of one of those vil-lages famous only for floods or military defeats belonged to the mothers, thebrothers and sisters, the cousins who had been taken away heaven knows where-and history was in the hands of Catholics and Protestants in possession of alltheir age-old mystery of affirmation and victory- a boy of eighteen heard him-self called by the God of his enemies, and he took refuge by obeying that calland becoming a catechumen among the Christian persecutors of his mother,father, and relatives. In the midst of the tragedy depicted everywhere, andespecially in that peaceful southern village toward Franco's Spain-burst anameless happiness.God's call was a summons to return among men. It was exactly like com-ing into the world all over again, with all the goodwill of an already grown boyto learn about real life and to serve it. No one has ever given a name to thiskind of happiness, a happiness so intense that it is almost necessary to concealit, or at least not show it too much, and this is achieved through a childish expe-

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dient: by making it coincide with attitudes of similar happiness (or, better still,with particular moments of that happiness that public opinion advises againstshowing in its pure and total state). The happiness of communion, the happi-ness of humility, the happiness of obedience, the happiness of action - these arelesser aspects of that Happiness, smiling masks over the profound smile pro-duced by presenting oneself to the world as reborn. This smile is not, however,reciprocated by other men, who accept the matter with an indifference owing toold experiences foreshadowing it, etc. It's like the smile of a maniac at a girlwho knows nothing about him except the fact that he's there: but he pretends tohimself, or really believes, that this girl can imagine the whole ceremony of hisrelations with her- even his gesture of strangling her and licking her blood -and not only imagine it, but even become his accomplice in that silent exchangeof smiles.Or else that smile is like the smile of beggars, which simultaneously im-plores and demands connivance in the pity they consciously feel for their ownmisery. But they do it all alone: the recipient of that smile pays little attention,accepts their presence and demand with a vague generosity, etc., etc. Yet thatsmile is enough, for the degenerate or the beggar: even if complicity is estab-lished by his initiative alone, and only in his mind. And so he continues tosmile. In the case of someone "reborn"(reborn to the religion of nations thathave been victorious for centuries), that smile will be, I repeat, "covered" byother smiles, and above all by great bustle, and by cooperation in action, action.It's painful to say so, but the convert will always feel a profound hatred, uncon-scious of course, toward those who are not yet converted, and who thereforeremind him of his previous state -when he himself was excluded from true (!)humanity. But the world has stepped on the gas, and these are no longer itsproblems.

Brahin in the hotel room with the blonde. There would be a bed with ared cover, an ugly wooden wardrobe, light and polished, a washstand behind acheap cloth curtain with a pattern of small flowers, a window beyond the foot ofthe bed. The blonde, as far as the sexual act she is about to perform is concerned,an act for which Brahin is quite ready, is nothing but an object. An object thattakes off its clothes as though doing a duty. Any judgment of Brahin, on herpart, has been suspended. She doesn't have to have seen him, or see him. Therules of the game keep her from having any curiosity about him. He could be ablond Belgian with a potbelly, his member cold and all skin and hair inside hisbrown trousers. There's no reason why he should be Brahin, an Arab grownpale in the weak sunlight of the banlieue,with the black trousers of the under-world and the erection of a boy without father and mother, who goes forth intothe world with nothing to boast but his mop of hair as in his dusty native village.

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midst: three such small boys, but of a later generation. They had all been bornaround May of '45. From infant wails they had immediately passed first towords, and then with extreme elegance to remarks from serial novels: at theage of twenty they were practiced in a complicated and intellectual childhoodand adolescence, with no memories of the countryside. Only one of them mayhave been really rich. The others showed, along with the signs of precociousexperience - of the intellectual and civic, in addition to the erotic kind-thesigns of indigence. The indigence of the petite bourgeoisie, which had madethem cruel little gods until the sprouting of their first beards, and then, in ac-cordance with tradition, had practically left them to starve. On their faces, too,there were signs of starvation, or near-starvation, or of the poor and too heavynourishment of small student restaurants. The only really rich one was a Jew.Of the other two, the hungrier was the one with the more lower-class face - thatof a taxi driver, or a postman- small and adolescent-looking, but also dressedin the black, tight-fitting clothes that go with the subtle rowdyism of student lifein Paris (the black of his trousers may have been velvet, and under his shirt,around his rather mottled neck, already that of an old man, he may have worna foulard). The third had two dark, elongated, black-rimmed eyes, like the heroof a silent film, set in the transparent pallor of his face, which was triangularwith the wide base of the forehead. All this gave him a certain ambiguity. Andin fact he was the most obstinate in his rebellion against the obstinacy of thedisappointing heroes of the French Communist party. He, too, indulged inmoralism: and moralistic was the whitish radiance of his skin, moralistic themurkiness of his eyes. The unhappiness and rage curdled in the depths of hisexpression were feminine. His name was Jean-Luc. The Jew's name wasMarcel. The other, the rather shriveled adolescent, Vincent. Behind them, notfar away, a meeting was being held in the hall of some Palais famous in thechronicles of history-in a glacial cold that had made three or four girls faint.Under the reflectors and flashbulbs of the photographers, people spoke, in thatdreadful cold, for twenty, thirty hours at a stretch. It was a meeting of "Italians."They were furiously demanding liberalization. They spoke a perfect French,which is to say a perfect liberalism. And indeed their magazine was called Clarte.Besides, even the CP had lived a perfect French experience. Whether amongadversaries or observers, from whatever side it sprouted, the idea of freedomhad the same characteristics. Even inJean-Luc. A return to freedom, but whatfreedom? Freedom, that's all. It was therefore an irrational dream. But of thatFrench irrationalism that has been explained and catalogued by rationalism,which grants it its centers, its rights, its traditions. Thus the sadism of the parasand Godard's pre-grammaticality are both provided for. It is, in short, an irra-tionalism that always ends up being presented in some elegant way. Not onlyin behavior but in language, which with its progressive sequences literally pre-vents any sort of writing that is not classicistic (Celine's pages are models of al-most rigid clarity compared to certain analogous English, German, or Italian

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ones). Unlike other nations, the Frenchification of the French is total. Even ourthree rebels are so Frenchified that: (1) they themselves are basically the objectof their revolt, (2) or else they revolt against others with their own arguments.How, how do you overcome liberalism? the Jewish boy, with his big adult face,repeats.It was a rainy day, and Paris was a fatal topos.

'J'aifa" are the only words we've heard uttered in French direct discourseby Brahin (a hunger assuaged standing against the white walls of a small bras-serie opposite some shooting galleries). The Jew with the adult face knows that,in Brahin's speech, the Arabs are called ratons,"wogs," by French racists. Andthe Italians for the same reasons are called ritals, "wops"(a reminder?). But, ofcourse! Let Brahin's tough, mysterious friend be an Italian! Let him be Palmiro,that Prenestino boy of Calabrian origin, with his mop of blond hair- not a bar-barian: it's the brutality of emigration that will turn him into a barbarian. Forthe moment neither Brahin nor Palmiro speak French. But they will speak it,and once they do they'll be completely Frenchified. Then, within the sphere ofFrenchification, they can be expected to take up slang.

Brahin has scarcely mounted the blonde -with the baleful air of one whoisn't doing it because he's paying for it, but out of violence-when, in sometwenty angry and punitive thrusts of the loins, it's all over.

Where the judgment that one person gives of another is not political, i.e.,philosophical, but moral, men become each other's slaves. Judgment in liberalsocieties is always moral. Moralism is the alibi for the wolf who squelches thelamb. In the new Communist societies judgment continues to be moralistic:this means they have not carried the revolution through to the end, and musttherefore go on with it.

What's eating Brahin? What's he waiting for now?This uncertainty, I repeat, brings the blonde to life; otherwise she'd bedead. She pretends to be in a hurry, but without the blind fury typical of suchcircumstances. One would say she's worried. And that to conceal her worry shepretends to more naturalness and calm than what is called for in fastening her

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snaps or putting on her stockings. She's almost nice, good-natured. What isBrahin doing behind her back? He looks like a millipede a row of whose feet hasbeen crushed, and which continues to move as though it had lost its sense ofdirection, turning round on itself, innocently incapable of going on its way.Brahin seems to want to stretch himself, or take a breath of air at the window,but he would have to force himself to do it. Meanwhile he is seen more fore-shortened still, with the high cheekbone, and above it the black pupil of theeye, more curdled than ever with grief and rage.

"... literature is no longer a boast or refuge, it begins to become a lucidact of information, as though it were first necessary for it to learn the circum-stances of social inequality by reproducinghem ...."... since the universality of a language - in the present state of society-is a fact of audition, and by no means of diction: within a national norm such asFrench, ways of speaking differ from group to group, and each individual is theprisoner of his own speech: outside his class, hisfirst wordgives him away, placeshim entirely, and puts him and his whole history on view. Man is exposed, de-livered up by his speech, betrayed by a formal truth that eludes his selfish oraltruistic lies. Thediversityof speech hus unctionsas a Necessity,and that is why itpro-duces a tragicsituation."Thus the restoration of spoken language, first conceived in amused imi-tation of the picturesque, has ended by expressing the whole content of socialcontradiction. . . . But it must be admitted that of all the means of description(since the aim of Literature so far has been chiefly that) the grasping of a reallanguage is for the writer the most human literary act" (Roland Barthes).

Vincent will go off somewhere with his girl friend, among the thousandsof young people who, like an army disbanding to the sound of distant bombard-ments, throng the boulevards of the Latin Quarter on Saturday night. Theymay end up in an art movie house to see an old film they missed. Marcel will gohome to his beautiful, richly furnished study, which his old banking family hasput at his disposal ever since he was a boy: he must prepare for an exam (he isstudying medicine). Jean-Luc will go and visit his friend Pierre, who came withhim from the provinces afterJean-Luc's mother, the mistress of this friend, hadkilled herself on discovering that Pierre and her son were making love.For these three youths there will be no encounter with any language, norwill they put themselves in a position to conceive any different vital experience.*

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Brahin no longer holds back. He looks at the blonde in dismay, furious asa bandit about to kill a traveler from another social class, upright, uncommuni-cative as a serpent. He says he's sick, that he's crazy. That he can do as he likes,because he doesn't care if he ends up in prison, and anyway he's already been inprison, it's not so bad there, and in prison he met other Arabs, three or fournon-Algerian Arabs, with whom he became friends. Who cares if in prisonthere are no women, it's all the same. Why does he say all this? As he speaks,he gazes steadily, his face averted, at the window - then he gazes at the blonde-and then again at the window- as though to set up a bond between them.His anxious cheekbone is seen foreshortened, and the wave of his full mop ofhair, now of a pointless beauty.

The blonde is very busy putting on her clothes.Brahin takes a few steps directly toward the window, stopping in front ofthe washstand.Gazing at the blonde, he begins saying once more that he's likea madman,a lone gypsy who goes about the world, and already there'd been times when hewas about to jump out the window, and now too he'd like to jump - or wouldshe like to jump? And meanwhile he approaches the window, and touches it, asout of an old passion, which subsides a bit at the touch - or prepares to explodewith more violence. The window, cracked and pitiful, with its shutters closedon the Rue du Loup Blanc, lets itself be touched.Brahin is in the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed. Something hascurdled in his eyes that does not dissolve. If it's a question of grief, it's neverthe-less replaced by that special feeling by which we blame our grief on someoneelse, and we provoke this someone else into insisting on being to blame, so thatthe grief will have good reason to be transformed into rage.And so Brahin seems to be prodding the blonde to make her insist on tak-

ing the blame for his grief, leaving him free to let himself go- through slowphases, increasing in an almost voluptuous way- in a state of blind and turgidrage. Since the blonde, as though chilled, keeps putting on her clothes, turningher back on him, he, with swift and continuous glances toward the window-like an old man who as he speaks feels a cold draught from a crack, and auto-matically looks around at the window behind him to see where it's coming from- starts confessing something, his words put together as though for a popularsong, or a faint and broken melody.One by one, his words can be "seen."He says: when he was a child, in Algiers, he was walking by himself onenight through the streets of a remote suburb, which smelled of dynamite thathad just exploded, amid twisted store shutters and rubble strewn like garbage- I was ten years old, and five or six youths and boys, in European clothes andcarrying a machine gun, called me over to them, they grabbed me with theirMuslim hands, which smelled of saffron, they put me up against the demolished

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wall of a French store as though they were going to shoot me, and there they alltook advantage of the fact that I was a child.Of course, Brahin's speech, as an auditory fact, cannot be reproduced:true, like an exercise in penmanship it is all frontal and linear, but in the tremorbetween one word and another there are holes, and when you look into thoseholes your head starts to spin, because they give on endless depths illuminatedby a sun, the sun of Algiers and of another life: they are pure abysses of previ-ous existence, unthought, unconceived in French.He says that from that night on he got in the habit of doing the same thinghimself, with the dead (but does he say it? or does he let it be imagined? whatgrammatical connection does he use to carry on such a discourse, a discoursethat cannot be heard?). It was a time when there were many of them, deadyouths in the streets of Algiers.They lay stretched out, half an hour, an hour after the last bursts ofmachine-gun fire had faded away, as though to ponder, or to breathe the lin-gering odor of saffron: perhaps to remember it forever, on the new journey theyhad undertaken by the will of Allah: they lay face down, in their military shirtsand warriors' trousers, as though better to concentrate, youths in appearance,children in strength. I took advantage of the silence of the curfew, and wentlooking for those dead bodies that awaited me defenseless.He was completely excluding them from himself, obviously with thesingle-mindedness felt by children when they play. He had been so intent onperforming his act - like hunting or fishing- an act that gave an exclusive andexperimental pleasure to him alone-that he was unaware of them. They hadgone away, and the odor of saffron had stayed behind in the world.As for myself, I limit myself to placing the reader in the presence of a dif-ferent vital experience. Try to imagine it, if you can, and not be carried awayby your moralism.One day I saw my little brother (saying this, even if he's about to commita murder or whatever, he quickly makes the graceful gesture of someone calmlysleeping, with his forehead resting on his arm): and then I did it, you know, aswith a dead body, I held him tight, taking advantage of the fact that he had achild's turban wound around his head and was wearing a long Arab shirt, onwhich only the faintest traces of red and green embroidery were left.Even this voluptuous speech of Brahin's, poured forth on the girl to goadher into taking on herself the blame for his grief, has no voice: perhaps it istranslated quite literally from a dialect in which there is no need for ties, andwords can be aligned like so many things, in the tearful confusion of unknowntragedies. The Arabs I met in jail, in Lyons, were like those dead men, broughtback to life exactly the same, with their partisans' trousers: they were goingthrough France like murderers, together with Italians and Spaniards.His voice cracked and trembling, a lump at the back of his throat, Brahinmoves toward the ashtray on the night table, touches it, lets go of it, picks it up

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again, but as though that hand, a schoolboy's large hand, were very far fromhis body, in another world full of dust. The ashtray was a plastic one, light ascardboard ..

Outside, Paris was filled with a profound odor, which was not only that ofthe rain. It was the odor of the time, of the authority and inconceivable andbrutal grandeur of reality--it was the odor of power. A power all the moreharsh the more truly it was based on freedom, which had become intoxicationand habit. And yet you could feel that the world had need of change, of greatchanges.

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3252-Rital and Raton