"Madame de Saint-Loup" appeared to me one spring afternoon clear as ice,
accompanied by the Barbary organ accompaniment of the merry-go-round horses in
the park where, on the benches of cast-iron and wood which have been slowly
rotting through the unseasonably bad weather and continual pigeon supremacy, I
posted myself, seated obliquely, in line with the wire gate which prevented two
monsters of gnarled stone from eroding, and which she pushed, the thirty-seventh
to do this since the moment when, at the first uncertain notes of the venerable
mechanical tune, the carousel's shuddering, I began counting the tall, slender,
rickety horses along their sinusoidal course -- and which she then held back
for a moment, abandoning it behind the child she dragged by the hand behind her.
Before her, thirty-six others had passed through this channel, thirty-six
others had scattered, unsuspecting of the fatal summons which precipitated their
entrance into the park, between the deflowered bay hedges, and the box burnt
auburn by winter, around the large, drained fountain with its water jet run-dry,
among the openwork bastions of the strollers with hoops, marshmallows, forage
caps, rub-on transfers, and cans of cola. But she was the thirty-seventh and
this election suddenly and intensely detached her from the everyday background
of strollers, distracted pedestrians who could just as easily be chasing an idea
as a sparrow; destination-less Mercury-s; shirtless, shod joggers shouting back
at each other; peril-less victors, skaters with joints covered in plastic and
Velcro, who all cluttered this park and from within which I admired that she
consented to appear without demanding of them the special respect none of them
had thought to render her, being within their profound enveloping incognito. My
gaze alone differentiated her and followed her to the bench she sat upon from
where she watched the red-hooded child already running to climb the ladders, to
use the parallel bars, to go down the entangled slides which the municipal
government never took down at the corner of the sandbox.
That which my entirely mental operation had obtained, extracted, and fixed
from the innumerable crowd of similar passers-by was a paradoxical creature. She
was that singular being that an authentic election distinguishes from the
indifferent crowd and who was, from this element where you remain secluded to
such that you cannot approach and encircle the multiplicity of nuances, vaguely
enchanting. She also had the fugacity of beings who are not known to us, who we,
constrained to our everyday life where the people we frequent have already
finished unveiling their defects, their life stories, put in such pursuit that
nothing seems to be able to stop our desire.
As all who are godlike, immediately perceptible among other gods and ignored
among the subtleties of mortals until they deign to manifest their nature in
some esoteric sign, a rigorous divination made traces appear, as with an ink
invisible to the uninitiated eye, upon the smooth surface of this individual
among many, the characters composing this name, so dear to the old snobs of a
vanished novelistic faubourg, that of "Madame de Saint-Loup." Like Mana, Mana,
Tekel, U'Pharsin inscribed upon the blank wall, the naked surface of this
passer-by's body inscribed a contraction, a rupture. In her another being was
united in differentiation, like a centaur from a horse and from other women:
that being had a body like the passer-by, and I alone could notice it. Then, the
abstract materialized itself, the being, named at last, had immediately lost its
power to remain invisible. The assumption of ignorance in Madame de Saint-Loup
announced itself so perfectly that all things which had previously seemed
otherwise indifferent to my spirit became significant like a phrase, so
senseless as to remain decomposed in random dispossessed letters, becomes
expressive, as the characters find themselves replaced -- once the secret code
is applied -- in the necessary order, a sentence which it could not previously
convey.
I watched her, like prey marked for my murderous design, and instead found
myself envisaging pleasures of a different kind, like a mortal who had surprised
a mythological creature among the flowers, a nymph or goddess.
I saw her draw a book out of the bag she was carrying which doubtless she
had begun reading before coming here -- before her metamorphosis -- since a
colourful bookmark had fallen between the pages as she read. At my distance from
her, I had no hope of deciphering, if I could catch sight of it at all, the
title of the book, her eyes rising further and further up the page as she read,
carrying them over to the sandbox where the little girl, doubtlessly tired of
playing on the sides alone, had launched herself into one of those delicate
negotiations which make-up the cruel apprenticeship of childhood and by which
she considers herself enlisted in a great game, engaged in an esoteric ritual of
which playing in the sand is but a small, contentious, screeching slice.
"Madame de Saint-Loup," the distracted reader, neglected her book little by
little and leaning her head backwards rested it against the backrest of the
bench, offering her face to the intermittent light of the avaricious sun. The
book which she held in her hand again, slid down onto her lap and appeared in
the breeze, which agitated its pages perfectly, as a butterfly with closed wings
tasting the nectar at the crossing of her legs.
The children played in the sandbox. Some kid grabbed at a marble won during
play from the child's hands; and, to prevent him from catching it, she hid them
behind her back. He threw his hands around her neck, lifting the braid she wore
over her shoulders. They struggled against each other, him attempting to entice
her, her resisting; her cheeks became enflamed by the effort, reddened and
smooth like her hood. She laughed as if being tickled.
Madame de Saint-Loup might have been struggling in such a way with herself
at that moment behind a bay hedge, in a private nook in the park, in the
labyrinth of stone blocks where men squat, sphynx-like, though no longer
guarding any fabled marquis, an Ariane with plaster cheeks. In letting my gaze
slide across the round redness of her cheeks whose surfaces slowly curved down
to the first folds of her bronze hair, I mused of the circles we are allowed to
traverse over the course of our existence with their innumerable things and
beings and how I forced myself to leave their frame through the face, the body
that I had chosen from among them, to have finally brought one into my new plan
of murderous knowledge, ceasing to wander aimlessly across its surface, bashing
myself upon the enclosure of this impenetrable, unknown existence.
All action of the spirit is easy if it does not submit to reality. The drift
of this dream brought about by the spectacle of an ardent children's game did
not encumber any of the precautions which must be made by murders concerned for
their safety; I did not worry in the least about the means by which I had
discovered Madame de Saint-Loup deep in the forest. In my pleasure, I did not
dwell upon the possibility of its consummation so impatient I was to know its
taste, crossing all obstacles, the whole causal chain of ruses, chances,
maneuvers which must be strategically choreographed before engaging in battle. I
jumped over all that, spirit flexed with imagined effort, from that moment she
held me tightly to the shrub between her legs, then wanting to top, she pushed
back her arms, her hands squeezing mine around her throat. Telescoping the
moments and scenes, I hastily composed them of gestures, wove them bit by bit
into a situation whose phantasm was agreeable to me, each unravelling hardly
completed before reorganizing itself into a new pattern. I struck it without
anger nor hatred, like a butcher, like Moses striking the rock. And I made the
waters of suffering gush forth from that eyelid. My desire swelled hopefully
with the fall of these salty tears as from unknown depths.
But this lone young woman was like a many-headed goddess, and she who I had
first noticed from behind, now as I attempted to secure her for myself, revealed
to be another. A boundless profile; multiple necks; panting lips upon which I
imagined sighs of pleasure; her head overturned with an expression of terror
caught upon her face, the same, voluptuous face she offered to the sun's caress,
which by that infinitesimal deviation which holds all the distance between the
movement of a man who finishes off the wounded and one who rescues them, between
a sublime image and a banal one. Head-to-head, murky and clear. While I did not
touch her head, I saw it; all in one stroke, my eyes ceased to see anything. We
rolled in a green aquatic light, as though upon a bed of sand on the seaside,
entwined, ricocheting on a mossy rock where, enchanted, I grappled with her at
the entrance of a dark grotto which I thought was my only hope of escape,
Nereids rising and falling among seahorses, dancers in the marine
phosphorescence held behind my eyelids. She turned into a fish, a mermaid, a
wave, foamy and glimmering between my hands.
When my eyes snapped out of these semi-aquatic profundities where I slipped
about in pursuit of an imaginary nymph, the return of day caught me off guard,
the sandbox was empty of its childish stir, the banks were deserted, the wooden
horses stood immobile, draped with the residue of a cold drizzle.
Our imagination is not like a damaged Barbary organ which only ever plays
anything but the indicated tune, a crazy, pitiful fanfare flipped in reverse. My
prey had escaped into the realm of shadows where I thought I was dragging her
and where I lost myself instead. Scheherazade! My own Salome! I was enchanted by
the tale that I had woven, hypnotized by the dance I myself choreographed.
In the valley between the two peaks of sand, patterned with raid drops in
the sandbox, I found a blonde, transparent agate. I collected it and kept it, a
captive beauty which I rolled about in the hollow of my hand, a shimmering
wolf's eye which I contemplate in bed when I sleep, always at the same time.
What could I grasp onto, plunging bravely into the belly of the abyss if I
failed to draw any anonymous people there, only finding in the sandy depths
those spherical seeds, little translucent crystals, and not the shadowed blocks
of a cyclopean hecatomb? When I finally brought back twenty, one hundred wolf's
eyes, my work had not advanced one bit nor made my project less vain. What good
came from leaving my bed and going out into the world? What use was wasting my
time day after day pursuing my imaginary prey dissolved and dissipated in the
shadow realm, for the pointless pleasure of a murderous project, powerless to
retain, to fix, to achieve its object?
Now that I had discovered the shape of that which would be my work, I wanted
to expose myself to the accident of an imagination which, far from stimulating
(like she who could in my youth) a feeble impulse, was now overabundant,
threatening to overflow all at once my calculated resolution and to render the
execution of my sentences impossible.
We are simultaneously actors engaged upon the stage of the world and of
murder, since all action is double, half sheathed only within an object were are
able to hold within our power, sustained within ourselves by the other half; we
hasten to neglect the first, that is to say the one we are se attracted to,
while we account for the other half which burrows deeper and deeper into itself
since it is already interior and will cause us no fatigue. The little furrow
which the blueprint of agony or massacre begins to inscribe within us is what we
find so difficult to prolong. But we reset the tonearm of the gramophone, we
replay the grooved disc until, in the long flight of our murder that we had the
patience to perpetrate and which we call imagination, we hallucinate as well, in
the same manner as the most consummate enthusiast of novels or other acts.
Am I to condemn myself in keeping it and never fulfill my project, to age
innocently and powerlessly like those celibates of crime, compulsive voyeurs,
escapist readers? They are the sorrowful virgins and cowards which combat sin
and danger. They are, incidentally, more exalted in crime than real criminals
since fame was not the impetus for their intense effort of execution; they turn
inward, use their imagination, check their will. They uselessly fall back into
their anodyne conversations, making grand gestures, grimacing, nodding their
heads while they talk about crime, speak-to violence, engage-with massacres.
Listen to these puppets relate how they went to the movies. They didn't connect
with it... The husband surprised his wife and her lover... Ah! fuck! what a
twist! Goddamn, the shit they saw there, it's atrocious, it's butchery, but it's
demented, it's inhuman... A pathetic, popular inhumanity... Despite the various
things in Film Noirs, they pass their innocent, amateur lives, bitter and
unfulfilled, going grey, within some kind of criminal asceticism.
Again, they're just laughable, though not all to be despised. They are but
the first attempts society has made to evoke the assassin. These impotent,
vacillating amateurs must be for us like the first missiles which could leave
the ground, not yet the secret, yet-to-be-invented medium, only the desire for
destruction. "And, old boy, take the arm of the amateur, for me it's the eighth
I've had since the start of the week, and I swear it won't be the last." And as
they don't fix that violence which nurtures their fantasies effectively, they
always need more criminal atrocities, continually prey of bulimic deficiency.
Televisophages, cinephiles, sonovores, they follow the same long series of
shows, the same variety of events, believing ever more that their zeal (like
those people who are buried or certain classes at the College de France) to
follow each new development of the investigation, of the explanation until the
trial realizes the deed. Then comes another wave of massacres, another cycle of
crimes, whether political, cinematic, or way out in the sticks. Since the
faculty of starting up doctrines, hatred, and fashions, and above all adhering
to them has always been much more frequent, even amongst professionals, which
true taste, of course, expands considerably since radio, TV, networks, all the
boxes of images and palavers, nauseating TV series, reporting, the news,
scandals, anecdotes, debates which have proliferated, and with them the
artificial vocations of criminals and murderers. Also, most of the public, the
most cynical part, no longer like, in criminal matters, for murders to have a
grand impact whether political, sociological, or even religious. They imagine
that the criterion of interest in a crime renews the error of Lombroso, of
Durkheim, and of Mauss. They prefer these to Theodore Kazczynski whose best
assaults have required a much greater level of meticulousness than the assassins
which seem simpler since they kill without elegance. The complicatedness of that
strategy for murder beheld the mark of an intellectual, of a mathematician, say
the populists, which in this way give intellectuals and mathematicians
undeserved honour.
I now know from experience that the momentum of our sensibility holds little
hegemony over the retinue of our acts and the pursuit of our vocation, and that
respect of formal constraints, fidelity to a design, the execution of a crime,
the observance of an aesthetic have surer foundation in blind habit which in
their momentary conveyance are ardent and barren. I had determined to go out
again the day after tomorrow, with a method this time. I would no longer allow
vague imaginations to distract me from my murderous pursuits, since the need to
enact my work took precedence over the indulgence of my fantasies. They insisted
without a doubt, they of which I had been deprived for so long, as waves rolled
in upon desert expanse of my vocation-less life as it seemed to end, and with
the same character of imperious urgency which I had felt in its absence. But I
would have the courage to respond to those things that would insinuate
themselves or assail me, so that the things it necessarily made manifested as an
urgent, crucial meeting with a chimera.
Was it not for their given embodiment that I dismissed them, for the deepest
pursuit which could not make them leave, search for their own revelation,
incarnate them? Unfortunately, I would have to fight against this habit of
closing myself off if it favours the conception of a crime while slowing its
execution. Well away from my unhappy belief in this cruel asceticism, without
example, without interior, without fantasy to which I devoted, I rendered myself
to account the forces of enthusiasm that expend themselves in the imagination as
a kind of instability aiming for a common phantasm which leads to nothing and
diverts itself away from the realisation through which we are capable of
passing.
