Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  They seemed to be having fun there, and at least one went through the village on the way to mass. Although he seemed pretty sure of himself, he was anxious at heart and asked me to accompany him because he hoped, thanks to my approval, to gain some assurance. I hesitated, not that I felt impelled to refuse on doctrinal grounds, but because his whole proposal struck me as preposterous. I was associating daily with Christians for the first time in my life, and they aroused in me neither fear nor antagonism; they even enjoyed, in my eyes, the prestige of all Europeans, members of a very powerful sect. But we quite obviously belonged to two entirely different worlds, and nothing could be more alien to me than the idea of entering one of their churches such as I had seen in the course of my Sabbath walks, when I had furtively caught sight of red draperies and of mysterious lights. But Mimouni made fun of my timidity and told me that Christian tourists often visited the old synagogue in his part of town: the faithful always received them well and loaned them caps so that they might enter it without committing any sacrilege. It would only be proper that we be equally well received. I finally yielded, not so much in the face of his arguments as because I felt impelled to bring some interruption to the rhythm of our week. Immediately, I began to await Sunday with impatience. On the Saturday evening, like all the others, I bathed carefully and got my best clothes ready. The next day, Mimouni and I took our stand in the line, with a reasonable distance between us. The walk, to begin with, was pleasant. The village was at the foot of the mountain, and the road, going all the way downhill, revealed to us, in spite of a ground mist that rose to our shoulders, a valley full of violet-colored rocks that had been scattered by a vast and cataclysmically violent landslide. It both terrified and delighted me. When we reached the church, we were distributed in two pews, with the smaller boys in the front one. I thus found myself quite close to the altar; its magnificence, with painted statues that were so unsophisticated in their expressions, with great festooned candles and the gilded utensils and flowers, all this made a great impression on me. Although a mere country chapel, the whole church struck me as grandiose. I was overcome by a sacred uneasiness that was not new to me because I had once broken the candle at the High Holiday. As a Jew pretending to be devout in a Christian house of worship, I was committing a sacrilege in the eyes of the God of the Christians. The darkness, the incense, the lights, the mysteries of the Catholic faith, all these had reduced to nothing the superficial irony and contempt with which we always dismissed the aberrations of the idolaters.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He was clumsy in speech, like most physicians, and fumbled for words. Finally, he decided I had been too “sentimental.” If the men suffered, there was nothing I could do about it, and to suffer with them and lose my own health would certainly not help matters. I got undressed as I listened without answering and pretended to be more obstinate than I really felt. He finally said no more, for he was not really sure he was right, and the rest of his argument trailed off in bad-tempered grunts. Finally, he put out the lights and the darkness isolated us from each other. I shivered when he pressed the cold screen against my chest. Then he made me turn around, breathe, and cough. He growled: “You may dress again.” Finally he decided to satisfy my suppressed impatience and he spoke triumphantly: I had been insane to leave. The X-ray gave him a considerably stronger position, and he forgot all his doubts. The healed spot on my lung was again an active focus and had spread. Had we been living in normal times, he would have ordered me to a sanatorium. Meanwhile, I was not to tire myself and must eat plentifully if not well. I did not tell my parents of my condition, for they would have lost their heads and worried me without being able to help. I preferred to keep it to myself. Maybe this was motivated as much by shyness as by the futility of telling anyone. Why should I admit that my health was wrecked? But perhaps my reserve was not so pure. Without admitting it to myself, I was giving in to one of the ridiculous prejudices of my education: tuberculosis, the “bad disease,” was considered shameful. I could not ask to have more to eat without depriving others. But I could rest, physically at least. This was possible as long as I did not have to run to the trenches and climb stairs twenty times a day. With the excuse that I was exhausted from camp life, I managed to be left in peace in my bedroom with the door shut. All day I dozed on a sofa, my cheeks feverish. For the first time in my life, I had nothing to do. My only occupation was to take my temperature three times a day, and sometimes more, out of curiosity or anxiety. When I had taken it once I took it again, with the excuse that I had to check it because I had been too impatient or had taken it too soon.

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Oh, that pleased me no end! The little tuft of hair coming up over the crown, the lustrous eyes, the gorgeous shoulder line, and those sleeves I adore, regal, Florentine, diabolistic! I saw nothing below the bosom. I was too excited to stand off and survey you. How much I wanted to whisk you away forever. Eloping with the Infanta—ye gods. Feverishly I sought out the Father. I think I spotted him. His hair was the clue. Strange hair, strange face, strange family. Presentiment of genius. Ah, yes, Anaïs, I am taking everything quietly—because you belong in another world. I see nothing in myself to recommend your interest. Your love ? That seems fantastic to me now. It is some divine prank, some cruel jest you are playing on me . . . I want you." I said to Allendy, “Don’t analyze me today. Let’s talk about you. I am enthusiastic over your books. Let’s talk about death.” Allendy assents. Then we discuss Joaquin’s concert. He said my father looked like a young man. Henry made him think of a famous German painter—too soft, perhaps double sided? an unconscious homosexual? Now I am surprised. My article was good, says Allendy, but why do I not want to be analyzed? As soon as I begin to depend on him I want to win his confidence, analyze him , find a weakness in him, conquer him a little because I have been conquered. He is right. “Yet,” I protest, “it seems to me it is a sign of sympathy.” He says yes, because that is the way I treat all those I love. Although I want to be conquered, I do all I can to conquer, and when I have conquered, my tenderness is aroused and my passion dies. And Henry? It is too soon to tell. Allendy says that although I appeared to be seeking domination and cruelty and brutality in Henry (I found them in his writing), my real instinct told me there was a softness in the man. And that although I appear to be surprised that Henry should be so gentle, so scrupulous with me, I am now really glad. I have conquered again. I have been cruel to Hugo. Yesterday I didn’t want him to come home. I felt a terrible hostility. And it showed. Henry and his friend Fraenkel were there in the evening. I stopped Hugo when he was reading out loud, something too long, monotonously, and I changed the subject once so brusquely that Fraenkel noticed it. But Fraenkel liked Hugo, thought highly of him. Once Hugo moved his chair, after having put some books and manuscripts on the floor. Later he sat on it, and Henry’s manuscript was right under a leg of the chair. That made me restless. I finally got up and tenderly picked it up. There was a humorous moment when Fraenkel was talking about Henry’s sound way of sleeping and how long he slept.

• From Bluets (2009)

  23. Goethe wrote Theory of Colours in a period of his life described by one critic as “a long interval, marked by nothing of distinguished note.” Goethe himself describes the period as one in which “a quiet, collected state of mind was out of the question.” Goethe is not alone in turning to color at a particularly fraught moment. Think of filmmaker Derek Jarman, who wrote his book Chroma as he was going blind and dying of AIDS , a death he also forecast on film as disappearing into a “blue screen.” Or of Wittgenstein, who wrote his Remarks on Colour during the last eighteen months of his life, while dying of stomach cancer. He knew he was dying; he could have chosen to work on any philosophical problem under the sun. He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of this writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically boring. “That which I am writing about so tediously, may be obvious to someone whose mind is less decrepit,” he wrote. 24. “In view of the fact that Goethe’s explanation of color makes no physical sense at all,” one critic recently noted, “one might wonder why it is considered appropriate to reissue this English translation.” Wittgenstein put it this way: “This much I understand: that a physical theory (such as Newton’s) cannot solve the problems that motivated Goethe, even if he himself didn’t solve them either.” So what were Goethe’s problems? 25. Goethe was interested in the case of “a lady, who, after a fall by which an eye was bruised, saw all objects, but especially white objects, glittering in colours, even to an intolerable degree.” This story is but one of many Goethe relates of people whose vision has been injured or altered and who seemingly never heal, even when the cause of the injury is psychological or emotional in nature. “This indicates extreme weakness of the organ, its inability to recover itself,” he observes. 26. After my friend’s accident, I began to think of this lady of the bruised eye and these glittering white objects with more frequency. Could such a phenomenon be happening to me, with blue, by proxy? I’ve heard that a diminishment of color vision often accompanies depression, though I do not have any idea how or why such a thing is neurologically possible. So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors—or, more oddly, just one color—more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypomania? Shock? Love? Grief? 27. But why bother with diagnoses at all, if a diagnosis is but a restatement of the problem? 28. It was around this time that I first had the thought: we fuck well because he is a passive top and I am an active bottom. I never said this out loud, but I thought it often. I had no idea how true it would prove, or how painful, outside of the fucking.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  On Friday evenings when they returned from work, several of the workers would go to the stream, in spite of the cold, to take an extra wash. They put on their least tattered clothes and slowly came back to the middle of the camp. I too had dressed up and awaited them with a few determined helpers, the group captains, and the scouts. We had agreed to stay at equal distances from each other and to form a circle. The men hesitated as they approached, argued among themselves and, in their minds, drew an imaginary circumference. At last they were all still. The moment I was about to open my mouth, a difficulty I had neglected occurred to me: although I had prepared my subject and even words which would be understood without awakening the suspicions of the guards who were looking on, I realized only now that I should speak in dialect. I think in French, and my interior monologues had for a long time been in French. When it happens that I speak to myself in dialect, I always have the strange impression, not so much of using a foreign language, as of hearing an obscure and obsolete part of myself, so forgotten that it is no longer native to me. I do not feel this strangeness when speaking to others, it is rather like playing on a musical instrument. But I did not know enough words of Judeo-Arabic to convey my whole meaning to them. I can express myself well enough in Arabic for concrete everyday purposes, but I have always used French in social and intellectual exchanges and the expression of ideas. I would have liked to speak at length to the men and, above all, convey to them certain things under the very noses of the guards. For that, certain subtleties which only French allowed me were necessary, but unfortunately their knowledge of French was deficient. In the last resort, I decided to attempt the experiment in French, although I realized how much closer I would have been to them and how much more intimate had I spoken their own tongue.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I fumbled a while along the walls, trying to find the light switch, but soon had to give up. So I went ahead in the darkness, hoping to be able to guide myself by the streaks of light that appeared beneath the doors or the light of the glass roof above the stairwell. But the passage soon followed a bend and I then found myself in absolutely unmitigated darkness, as if I had closed my eyes. I was shortsighted by nature and had developed a kind of carelessness about looking, often trusting to my sense of touch. So I now tried to find the wall, then clung to it with one hand, and began to go ahead, for a while, hesitant and full of misgivings, until my hand felt a curve. I followed it and finally reached what I supposed to be a stair rail: I was saved! One step at a time, I then began to climb, being careful to feel my way at the edge of each step with the tip of my toes, as a precaution. But it all took a long time. I followed a first turn, then a second one, till my shoe at last met nothing ahead of it and came down again unpleasantly to the same level. I then guessed I had reached the first floor, but Michel lived on the second, so I followed the stair rail, without letting go of it, all the way round the landing until my foot bumped again against a step, the first one of the second flight of stairs, after which I began to go up. I was still in total darkness, as if I were buried in the heart of something solid and opaque. Nowhere did my eyes detect any light that could guide me at all. Again, I was able to conclude, from the way my foot had fallen a second time without having met a step, that I had reached another landing, the second floor. The stair rail was really an excellent guide in my ascension, though no longer of much use to me. I figured out that I should try to reach the wall opposite the stair rail and follow it, which would inevitably lead me to a door. So I regained some of my assurance, especially when my hand found its way quite easily to the wall and I was then able to move ahead towards the left, however slowly. Following the stone wall, I then turned a first time, then a second, in gentle curves. How odd that there should not yet be any doors! I began to feel annoyed by this business of creeping around in the silent darkness. I must have already spent a full quarter of an hour of my young life in this hole!

• From Emotional Beats: How to Easily Convert your Writing into Palpable Feelings (2018)

  Unless you have these to help*: She slammed against the chair, her adrenal system upgrading from zoned out to Defcon 1.The idea of being that close to her hit him like a shot of tequila in a Red Bull.She's crazier than a sackful of raccoons.It was as futile as carrying water with a knife.The food was spread out like a Thanksgiving feast.Her comfort zone retreated into darkness, waving farewell with a lace handkerchief.His voice was soft as a feather, yet cold as a hungry tomb.Her mouth worked soundlessly, the words unable to permeate her brain.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  bottle of olives? And the cocktails? Here, Stephen, you can tackle the cheese; it seems rather shy, it won’t leave its kennel.’ In the end it was Stephen and the cook who must do all the work, while Brockett sat down on the floor and gave them ridiculous orders. 3 BrockETT it was who ate most of the dinner, for Stephen was too over-tired to feel hungry; while Puddle, whose digestion was not what it had been, was forced to content herself with 2 cutlet. But Brockett ate largely, and as he did so he praised himself and his food between mouthfuls. ‘ Clever of me to have discovered this pâté — I’m so sorry for the geese though, aren’t you, Stephen? The awful thing is that it’s simply delicious — I wish I knew the esoteric meaning of these mixed emotions!’ And he dug with a spoon at the side that appeared to contain the most truffles. From time to time he paused to inhale the gross little cigarettes he affected. Their tobacco was black, their paper was yellow, and they came from an unpropitious island where, as Brockett declared, the inhabitants died in shoals every year of some tropical fever. He drank a good deal of the Rose’s lime- juice, for this strong, rough tobacco always made him thirsty. Whiskey went to his head and wine to his liver, so that on the whole he was forced to be temperate; but when he got home he would brew himself coffee as viciously black as his tobacco. Presently he said with a sigh of repletion: ‘ Well, you two, I’ve finished — let’s go into the study.’ As they left the table he seized the mixed biscuits and the caramel creams, for he dearly loved sweet things. He would often go out and buy himself sweets in Bond Street, for solitary consumption. In the study he sank down on to the divan. ‘ Puddle dear, do you mind if I put my feet up? It’s my new boot-maker, he’s given me a corn on my right little toe. It’s too heart-breaking. It THE WELL OF LONELINESS 263 was such a beautiful toe,’ he murmured; ‘ quite perfect — the one toe without a blemish! ’ After this he seemed disinclined to talk. He had made him- self a nest with the cushions, and was smoking, and nibbling rich-mixed biscuits, routing about in the tin for his favourites. But his eyes kept straying across to Stephen with a puzzled and rather anxious expression. At last she said: “ What’s the matter, Brockett? Is my neck- tie crooked? ’ ‘ No — it’s not your necktie; it’s something else.’ He sat up abruptly. “ As I came here to say it, I’ll get the thing over! ’ ‘Fire away, Brockett.’ ‘ Do you think you'll hate me if I’m frank?’ ‘ Of course not. Why should I hate you?’

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  In spite of my refusal to take myself seriously, I was in fact far more worried than I admitted, and the rhythm of my daily life was determined by the thermometer. I tried to work in spite of the doctor’s advice, but within a few minutes, my eyes would burn, my head grew heavy, and I would feel exhausted. I had always worked too much, but I now knew that it would be unbearable if I were not able to. I could no longer think of anything but myself and the balance-sheet of my life that I was now forced to examine. In the past, some urgent task had fortunately always required attention, and I had only stopped once in a while to ponder the meaning of my life. But I was now locked up with myself by war and sickness, with no possible diversion. The worst part of being sick, I found, was this concentration on one’s self and the tyranny of the self. Perhaps others who live more extrovertedly find this profitable. But for those who tend to be introspective, sickness is stark solitude, the worst of all possible conditions. For several weeks I had not been able to make entries in my diary. I now returned to my scrupulous and methodical habits, but my point of view had changed. Before, it had been metaphysical and impersonal, scrutinizing the world passionately to understand it. Now I became the only center of my own preoccupations. Who was I? What were the results of my long struggle ever since my childhood? In the confusion of my buzzing ears and burning cheeks and feverish brain, I was certain only of the need to come to a conclusion. Would I have the courage to go on living in so unstable an equilibrium? But once more my balance-sheet was almost forgotten. The collapse of the Germans was as sudden as the arrival of their Junker transports full of troops had been, at least to me. One afternoon, probably at about five, I had just taken my temperature when shots rang out in the streets. As we always expected the worst, we started to put up barricades, before we caught sight of the first American tanks. For several days we gave ourselves up to delirious joy. Miraculously, our anxiety was gone, and here again were freedom and abundance. The German planes soon disappeared and our nights ceased to be nightmares, we devoured endless cans of meat, and spoke loudly in the streets to relieve ourselves. It was more than peace: it was a party. Then we had to start everyday life again. I realized that the historical change in our situation required a new kind of behavior. (But I wonder whether the gravest problems are not less painful than having to face one’s own self.) This was certainly one of the most terrible periods of my life.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I watched the druggist, small and bald and drowned in a great white overall, with his face hidden behind the thick lenses of his spectacles; but he didn’t even look up, handed the little package at arm’s length, and vanished behind the cash desk which rang a bell. Until we got to the labyrinth that led to the red-light district, we spoke of all sorts of other things while my heart thumped away. By the time we reached the first shop under the old green vault and crossed this passage beyond which I had never dared venture by myself, my heart beat so hard that I could no longer hear what Bissor was still saying in the same tone of voice. At the other end of the tunnel-like passage, I could see the women standing in their doorways. Bissor slowed down and walked nonchalantly, still talking as we approached, with me close to him like an animal, silent and distracted by the emotion in my dry throat. I looked straight ahead, like a horse with blinkers, and passed among all the women whose presence I merely guessed. But soon I felt all the promises held in the scattered crowd around me. The little cells were close by each other and seemed no wider than their doors; in very little space, there seemed to be lots of women. Some were Europeans in shorts and blouses, of all ages, of all nationalities, of all colors, with their hair bound up. There were blondes — whether real or not, I could not tell — and Sicilian brunettes in bathrobes cut out of blankets; Spanish women who stressed their type by displaying the appropriate high combs, black shawls, and beauty spots; Moslems and Jewesses with flowers behind their ears, shaven eyebrows replaced by thick streams of black makeup, and even some Negresses with wiry hair and scarlet or bright blue petticoats. I no longer knew where to look. I was stunned by so much opulence and upset by all this offered flesh which I could see and even touch if I wished or dared. After all, my wildest dreams had never gone beyond trying to give shape to vague memories of a street encounter or to give life to an illustration. I was frightened now at having come so far, so close at last to the mysteries I had secretly dreamed of and which morality forbade. I no longer knew whether I stood on the verge of a scandal or a wonderful adventure. There were as yet but few customers.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I had never liked this kind of gathering, even long before I had become fully aware of my reasons for rejecting things. I feared, for instance, the too heavy scent of incense, not so much because it struck me as unpleasant as because it upset me and made me nervous. I associated it, at a very early age, with strange old wives’ tales where the hero loses his memory or goes insane after breathing a magical scent, or with the incantations which my mother sang by my sickbed; and that is why they continued to provoke in me some nervous reactions that no reasoning was ever able to dispel. I have now learned, from reliable scientific sources, that ouchak and amber have absolutely no mysterious properties at all, but I was still unable to conquer even slightly the feeling of uneasiness that overcame me as soon as I began to inhale their sweetish fumes. For all this somber folklore and its uninnocent myths I felt no sympathy at all. The Djnoun, those divinities from beneath the earth’s surface, are by no means charming creatures of man’s poetic imagination, capable of puckish malice but also of justifiable anger and of love, too. Poor beings exiled in perpetual darkness, they are all vicious and cruel, envious of man’s happiness and constantly seeking, on women in childbirth, on healthy babies, and on families blessed with many children, vengeance to compensate some unknown personal sufferings of their own, some life that has been entirely misspent. That is why they like to pierce eyes, to afflict with madness, to twist bones, to paralyze limbs, even to kill. Of course, all this has no meaning at all, except in the minds of crazy old women, but I always avoided returning, if even as a joke, to this world of human miseries and fears. Could I, besides, forget that I too, not so long ago, had been careful to cry out, after spilling water on the floor, to evil spirits: “Excuse me, please excuse me!” and that I had then felt a cold shiver run along my spine?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She herself couldn’t understand my negligence; so much trouble simply because I persisted in spending all my time at school for so-called study, as if I didn’t have a home to work in, and so on, and so on... Then, without any transition, her scolding gave way to coy persuasion. “Let’s go. Come with me,” she concluded. She lowered her voice as if revealing a secret in the midst of a large crowd. “I know it bores you. I waited for you because I was afraid you wouldn’t come. But it’s your father’s brother, his oldest brother — in fact his father! You know how your father hates to complain, but he’s very angry that you didn’t come back at once.” It was a long time now since my mother’s simple histrionics had ceased to amuse or irritate me. I followed her without a word. The sun was now directly overhead, completely flooding the streets, and I abandoned all hope of making use of the fringes of shade. Crushed, I accepted this walk through hell. Perspiration, as it evaporated, made my shirt cling unpleasantly to my skin like the coarse linen bandages that my mother used to put on my childhood boils. My mother, on the contrary, had kept her race’s capacity to withstand the sun and now walked without any apparent effort, chattering cheerfully and skipping from topic to topic with the lively grace of the once pretty and lightheaded girl. My temples throbbed; preoccupied with my worries about the examination, I was distracted from her babbling and hardly replied. I admired the way she remained lively and enthusiastic even under the crushing weight of a family of ten. It frightened me to think how far apart we had grown, how foreign she was to all that I was becoming. With a simplicity that tried to be cunning, she attempted to give me some advice. Really, she’d never seen my father in such a state; true, Uncle Joseph had given him his education and been a father to him and such a father had the right to all honors. So it would be better if I acted as if the deceased were my own father (God forbid!); then I would show my father how I would act when his time came too. As I said nothing, she finally came around to mentioning what was obviously the most difficult thing: naturally, as a sign of mourning, I wouldn’t shave for a month. This time I emerged from my torpor and angrily refused. No, they couldn’t count on that. I couldn’t go to school unshaven. She heaved a deep sigh, half-sincere, half-feigned.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Joseph, the eldest of my uncles on my father’s side, was the patriarchal head of the family and respect was owed him because he had really been a father to his younger brothers when they had become orphans at a tender age. I refused, however, to accept these old-fashioned hierarchical systems and smiled contemptuously when my father bemoaned the disappearance of an uncle’s rights. Had we been on more intimate terms, my uncles would have had the right to box my ears. Still, I would have liked to see one of them try to spank me! But I knew how irritated my father would be if I failed to come home at once, and how the whole family would be scandalized. If my oral examination hadn’t been only two days off, I wouldn’t have minded wasting a whole afternoon. But I couldn’t afford now to squander precious time on such absurd family obligations; besides, I hardly knew Uncle Joseph at all. I sent Birou away with a vague explanation that I couldn’t come now and promised to go home as soon as I was free. I went back along the warm passage to the study hall and dropped into my uncomfortable wooden seat. I tried to get back into the mood for work. The air moved wearily, but all hope of a breeze vanished when I realized a sirocco was raising and stirring the white dust in the courtyard: it would be wiser now to close the windows. I didn’t like thinking about death. It seemed dirty and ugly to me; it stank of sulphur disinfectants and of black draperies that had been badly laundered and were produced hastily out of closets. To me, death was as disgusting as it was frightening. The mere thought of my scandalized family and of my father’s probable anger upset me, and I couldn’t settle back to my work. The heat was such that I could scarcely breathe, and I was offered the alternatives of stewing in my own sweat where I was or of swallowing the dust of the yard. Finally, I decided to interrupt my work long enough for a visit to my Uncle Joseph’s home. Why irritate my father unnecessarily? Why not take a little time off to simulate, like all the others? I shut my book and went out into the furnace of the street where I was attacked by the dry breath of the sirocco that parched my lips and my eyelids. Somehow, I still found the energy to run all the way home. I went first to the Passage. Dressed up and waiting for me, my mother was prancing about with anxiety and excitement. Marriage, birth, death, any group event made her feverish and enthusiastic in exactly the same way; the housekeeping routine would be interrupted, meals would appear at unlikely moments, and she would come home at all hours. Called to greater duties, she seemed to cease to belong to us body and soul for several days.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  It was only the next day, when my mother returned from her marketing, that I was punished. Oh, it all happened without any insults, without any blows. How much would I have preferred a good thrashing! A spanking delivered with the hard and horny hand of my father, or even a whipping, with his belt, on the soles of my feet. I would then have howled, swallowed my tears for a good quarter of an hour, and been able to publicize my suffering; after which my conscience would have been appeased and I would have played out of doors until I had forgotten my crime. Instead, a vague anxiety already began to pervade me when my mother refused me the privilege, granted to me twice a week, of awaiting her return from the market at the opening of Tarfoune Street. As soon as we saw her, we always rushed toward her from there and seized her heavy basket that my sister and I would then drag as far as our kitchen. Seated side by side on the brick-red tiled floor that was never cold, we played a wonderful game of fishing in it, punctuating our fun with loud cries of joy. Mother always left us in peace, our excuse being that we put the vegetables away in the kitchen closet and the fruit in the room. We always put all the yellow lemons together, so vividly bright and rich in aroma that I never wearied of breathing their scent deep in my lungs, as if I wanted to absorb their contents through my sense of smell, and then the eggplants, dark purple with mysterious lighter spots that turned to red, the tender green artichokes that seemed to paraffin the whole mouth and to coat the palate with rubber, lastly the heavy watermelon that was so heavy we had to roll it along the floor to the room. Each time we discovered a little surprise, some peanut butter, a piece of halva, a sesame cake. But we always tasted everything: a fresh mouthful of fennel, a lick of sugar, a bite into a carrot. Mother knew our joy and didn’t constrain it with useless nagging. To prevent any damage was her only concern: “Be careful with the eggs! Don’t get all dirty from the fish!” On this particular morning that I remember so bitterly, she wouldn’t let us take hold of her basket. I knew the meaning of her tight lips. Her fine Berber face was drawn taut over the jaws and the hard peaks of her cheekbones. A painful anxiety began to pervade me, all the more disturbing because its cause was unknown. Desperately I searched my conscience and discovered several grave sins, but I was still afraid that some terrible and odious crime might rise to the surface of my memory. It did indeed come to the surface, and I felt no sense of relief at all when she said to me: “I’ve just seen little Fraji’s mother...”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I feared, for instance, the too heavy scent of incense, not so much because it struck me as unpleasant as because it upset me and made me nervous. I associated it, at a very early age, with strange old wives’ tales where the hero loses his memory or goes insane after breathing a magical scent, or with the incantations which my mother sang by my sickbed; and that is why they continued to provoke in me some nervous reactions that no reasoning was ever able to dispel. I have now learned, from reliable scientific sources, that ouchak and amber have absolutely no mysterious properties at all, but I was still unable to conquer even slightly the feeling of uneasiness that overcame me as soon as I began to inhale their sweetish fumes. For all this somber folklore and its uninnocent myths I felt no sympathy at all. The Djnoun, those divinities from beneath the earth’s surface, are by no means charming creatures of man’s poetic imagination, capable of puckish malice but also of justifiable anger and of love, too. Poor beings exiled in perpetual darkness, they are all vicious and cruel, envious of man’s happiness and constantly seeking, on women in childbirth, on healthy babies, and on families blessed with many children, vengeance to compensate some unknown personal sufferings of their own, some life that has been entirely misspent. That is why they like to pierce eyes, to afflict with madness, to twist bones, to paralyze limbs, even to kill. Of course, all this has no meaning at all, except in the minds of crazy old women, but I always avoided returning, if even as a joke, to this world of human miseries and fears. Could I, besides, forget that I too, not so long ago, had been careful to cry out, after spilling water on the floor, to evil spirits: “Excuse me, please excuse me!” and that I had then felt a cold shiver run along my spine? I decided to return home after six o’clock, and meanwhile sought refuge in Henry’s home. I found him by his window that was wide open in the park; he was practicing his violin. Without saying a word, I sat down and waited until he had finished. I was listening to him absent-mindedly, and I think he was reaching the end of a Bach piece. I must admit that Western music rather bored me. As I had not been taught any appreciation of music, I generally had a hard time trying to avoid finding it monotonous and oversophisticated. So I would force myself to follow the development of the harmonies, but it escaped my attention and I would soon be a hundred miles away from the music, dreaming out in the park or worrying over the solution of some problem.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women chatted among themselves like housewives on their doorsteps. Some smiled at us, perhaps because we were so young and so obviously embarrassed. Like in a novel, a big brunette said, and I am sure it was to me, a phrase I knew well and was at last really hearing: “Won’t you come in, darling?” Enchanted and petrified, I hardly dared look at her and, unable to smile, I went by obediently at the same pace as Bissor. Bissor had a plan. He stopped in front of a plump little woman with a pleasant face and a pointed nose. She was dressed in a short blue frock with big celluloid buttons well spaced out all the way down the front. They smiled and greeted each other: “I’ve brought you a friend. Be kind to him, he’s nice.” She turned to go into her cell. She had said not a word to me, hardly looked at me. I did not, of course, expect her to welcome me in and shake hands formally. Still, I was taken aback. In any case I had expected nothing, and anything would have surprised me as much. I hesitated in the doorway, daring neither to enter nor to leave and awaiting God only knows what. Bissor gave me a push in the back, and I found myself inside a tiny rectangular room, as narrow as a corridor, so narrow that the sparse furniture had had to be placed along the two walls. She had just finished putting a sheet of rubber cloth on the iron bed. She came back to shut the door and, as there was not room enough for two between the bed and the wall, she pushed me with her hand against the little table, covered with a newspaper, on which were crowded all sorts of combs and creams and women’s magazines. The mere contact of her hand, of the body I was about to possess, upset me. This pressure already seemed familiar and promising to me, and I tried to catch her eye to express to her my budding tenderness. But her back was turned and she was preparing herself. She poured two measures of water into an enamel basin which she then placed on top of the earthenware jar that was also against the wall. Thus crowned, with its long neck and its narrow hips, the jug looked like a water-carrier, but was all sticky with filth. Both the furniture and the room were extremely poor and evidently of no interest to their owner, for her only effort at decoration were a few pictures on the walls, women naked or in their underclothes.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  She gave him a look of gratitude and answered: “He looks like a nice man, your teacher.” I translated this comment at once for Poinsot. After that, they both remained silent and waited again. I was trying to find some other verbal link between them when I suddenly felt with real anguish how impossible any communication would be. It was like an access of vertigo. When I find myself at the foot of a wall and look up at the top and see it rising above me endlessly toward the sky, I feel this same vertigo, as if the sky had suddenly become an abyss. The two parts of my being spoke two different languages and would never understand each other. Thus, I allowed the conversation to die. My mother retired into her kitchen, accustomed to being excluded. Poinsot calmly filled his pipe and waited for the end of the storm, without asking me any questions about my nervousness and my sudden silence. It had always been his habit to wait for me to reveal my preoccupations to him. But an explanation, this time, was beyond me. I felt as if walled in. Besides, he would interpret my explanations as useless histrionics, believing that the obstacle could be overcome if one found out first what the whole problem really was. But would I ever be strong enough to survive this split in my being? I was beginning to understand that, however much I might want to become a second Poinsot, the chances were stronger that I would become but another Marrou. Faced with the impossible problem of joining the two parts of myself, I made up my mind to choose one of them. Between the East and the West, between African superstitions and philosophy, between our dialect and the French language, I now had to choose. And it was Poinsot whom I chose passionately, with all the strength of my being. One day, as I entered a café, I suddenly saw myself in a mirror and was terribly scared. I was both myself and a stranger. The mirror ahead of me covered the whole wall, so completely that I could see no frame. Each day, I thus became more alien to myself. I had to stop watching myself, I had to step out of this mirror.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Sometimes, in the dark, I thought I could feel their horrible little legs crawling over my body. At once I would turn on the light and suddenly throw off the blankets and strip myself naked, only to find it had been a false alarm. But I would go ahead and make a new inspection of all my bedding and my clothing. In the middle of the night, with silence all around me and the electric light making my tired eyes smart, I worked furiously and methodically in an attempt to exterminate my enemy. At long last, I had to give it up and decided to spend all my nights in the high school dormitory, even when I had a twenty-four hour pass. My colleagues were surprised at this, for in their eyes a night away from the dormitory was a great relief. Actually, there was another reason that made it unpleasant for me to stay at home. The children there didn’t have enough to eat and were growing up all bones, with big heads and long knotty legs. My little cousins, however, unlike my brothers and sisters, were all soft and flabby, rather too fat, with the unhealthy fat one gets from eating too many starches. They seemed to suffer from a dyspeptic appetite and they constantly asked for food. Nothing was more unbearable for me than the exasperated voice of my widowed aunt grumbling all day long after her children: “May the Red Death carry you off! You’re eating too much! I’ve nothing left to give you!” All this made me feel ashamed of the luxurious diet I enjoyed at school, and I tried to ignore the guilt-feelings I felt. Most of my joys were indeed spoiled for me in this manner, though I had learned to drive out of my mind all disquieting thoughts. At least, I had a room where I could live protected from all this, so I moved all my belongings and my books there. For a while I even thought I would be able to build myself, within the sphere of philosophy, a sort of private garden, fenced off with little columns on which would be placed the busts of Aristotle and Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. Of course, I no longer wanted to live alone, but it was good too to have a place where I could withdraw and feel at peace with myself. It was in this period that I began to keep a diary, which contributed not a little toward giving me a taste for certain other adventures. At least it seems significant to me that I adopted this habit of careful written introspection exactly at the time when I had decided to abandon my reclusion and face the outside world.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The best of them, those who in a moment of revolt tried to escape, had to cross hostile country and were quickly caught and shot or deported to Germany. Those who came home, wounded, sick, or on leave, were so thin, dazed, or aggressive in their filthy rags all caked with mud, that we were ashamed to look at them. The Germans, following a plan which we could not guess, grew more and more demanding and vicious. They shot the stragglers and the sick. They multiplied their demands and became increasingly difficult to satisfy. After they had taken all the men younger than thirty-five years of age, they demanded those aged forty, and then those aged forty-five. We began to realize that if the German occupation were to last much longer we would be completely lost, for the Germans had time on their side and would eventually exhaust us. It was no longer possible to answer their summonses, and the community could no longer furnish the required monthly quota of men, so the raids began again. Our anxiety of the first days gripped us again, but this time we were angry and disturbed, like hunted down beasts. We could not sleep any more. The German air force was busy elsewhere, so we spent our nights, which were nothing but one long alarm, standing half-asleep in trenches, with our backs against the damp earth. In the daytime we skirted the walls as we hurried to find some bread or to get news of our loved ones, safe at most for an hour or so. The women were hysterical, not knowing whom to blame, and not daring to accuse the Germans, they invaded the community offices and demanded their brothers, husbands, and sons, screaming insults at our overwhelmed department heads, spitting in their faces, and rolling on the floor. In order to make the President of our community understand what her only son was suffering one woman emptied a box of live lice on his head. Another, whose son had been killed and his corpse half-charred, tried to set fire to the office. What could one do? What could we do for all these men who were suffering and dying in camps, and for those who were half-crazed? By now I was far from thinking only of myself, as I had at the beginning of this adventure. I could no longer bear to stay behind my desk filling out forms all day. Every day we had a procession of women, weeping or fierce.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  At last they were all still. The moment I was about to open my mouth, a difficulty I had neglected occurred to me: although I had prepared my subject and even words which would be understood without awakening the suspicions of the guards who were looking on, I realized only now that I should speak in dialect. I think in French, and my interior monologues had for a long time been in French. When it happens that I speak to myself in dialect, I always have the strange impression, not so much of using a foreign language, as of hearing an obscure and obsolete part of myself, so forgotten that it is no longer native to me. I do not feel this strangeness when speaking to others, it is rather like playing on a musical instrument. But I did not know enough words of Judeo-Arabic to convey my whole meaning to them. I can express myself well enough in Arabic for concrete everyday purposes, but I have always used French in social and intellectual exchanges and the expression of ideas. I would have liked to speak at length to the men and, above all, convey to them certain things under the very noses of the guards. For that, certain subtleties which only French allowed me were necessary, but unfortunately their knowledge of French was deficient. In the last resort, I decided to attempt the experiment in French, although I realized how much closer I would have been to them and how much more intimate had I spoken their own tongue. I did my best, avoiding abstract terms and using comparisons with events in their own lives. The pivot, I think, of my sermon was dignity and one’s duty to preserve it. I linked dignity with hygiene. I gave them hope, promising they would soon be home, and warning them of the memories they would then retain of themselves; I quoted Ecclesiastes to prove that nothing ever lasts, and insisted on courage and morale in the fight against our vices and weaknesses. When all seemed lost and the enemy invincible, obstinate courage would triumph. I ended with the example of the glorious Maccabees whose courage had not been merely of the spirit. The men followed me attentively, and I could see in their sparkling eyes that they had difficulty in repressing their reaction. They were evidently enjoying our complicity very much, only a few yards from the guards. Sooner or later, we had to come to that part of the ceremony which was our excuse for holding it. I made a gesture to signify that it was time to start the ritual.