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.

Page 54 of 501 · 20 per page

• 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.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  THE TWO PENNIES ~ The very existence of kindergarten was unknown in Tarfoune Street, and school, as a whole, did not assume there, as in middle-class homes, the character of an absolute necessity. I was already quite a grown boy, seven years old, I think, when my parents decided to send me to school. Whereas school seems mere play to most young children, the news of this decision made me cry. My mother tongue is the Tunisian dialect, which I speak with the proper accent of the young Moslem kids of our part of town and of the drivers of horse-trucks who were customers of our shop. The Jews of Tunis are to the Moslems what the Viennese are to other Germans: they drag out their syllables in a singsong voice and soften and make insipid the guttural speech of their Mohammedan fellow-citizens. The relatively correct intonations of my speech earned me the mockery of all: the Jews disliked my strange speech and suspected me of affectation, while the Moslems thought that I was mimicking them. But when I entered school, it was no longer a matter of shades of pronunciation but of a total break . “How shall I manage to understand the instructor? I’ve never learned French!” “Well, he’ll teach it to you,” my father concluded. “But how shall I answer his questions before he has taught me to speak it?” I faced an abyss, without any means of communicating with the far side of it. The instructor spoke only French and I spoke only dialect: how would we ever be able to meet? These childish anxieties may now seem futile and my position is surely not unique. Millions of men have had to lose their basic unity, no longer recognizing themselves and still seeking in vain their identity. But I also say to myself that this confrontation has nothing reassuring about it; that others try to reassemble, without ever managing it, their scattered limbs. This mere fact confirms me in my awareness of the split in myself. All my life I have forced my friendships and my acquisitions to readjust continually to whatever I happened to be. The first day of school came too soon for my fears. Thanks to remnants from my uncle the tailor, my mother was able to outfit me with a pair of brown pants and an overall apron of black poplin, a material the mere smell of which can still remind me of elementary school. My father had been able to get from Bodineau, his supplier, a fine calfskin school satchel. This was my only scholar’s luxury. I was allowed to wear my Saturday jockey cap, which added considerably to my awe and to the solemnity of the occasion.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Again, we met the German artillery men and their sergeant with a cook’s face. They had finished their work and were now seated on the ground, quite unconcerned. Further on, Italians were being loaded into the first convoy of trucks as they swore at fate and the Madonna to relieve their anxiety. Each time they saw our column, they were upset again. Ironically, we reassured them, but quickly, for fear of a sudden volley: “Lavoratori! Workers!” As long as we were neither “Inglesi” nor “Americani”... At one of these encounters, some soldier was struck by the idea we so dreaded and had avoided: “Why haven’t they all been shot.” We went forward, close together, without lingering among the long rows of Faravelli trucks. A car with three wheels passed us, stopped, and awaited the first men of our column. The big red head of the Neapolitan sergeant showed itself and sang out the one syllable “Stop!” Then he stuck his head out and, with much gesturing, explained the direction we were to follow by order of the lieutenant. Ten miles ahead, the road branched in two: to the left, it went straight to Tunis and, to the right, through Bir-Halima, our last camp but one, before it also reached Tunis by a roundabout way. Of course, we were to take the right and stop at Bir-Halima. The sergeant concluded by furiously screaming: “Non è finita, la guerra!” After having let us go, the lieutenant had regained control of himself. But the men’s hopes had risen too high and too fast to let resignation replace their thwarted joy. As soon as we had left our guards, we had all immediately thought of the road to the left at the other end of which were our families and friends. But the three-wheeled car now carried the bust of the sergeant away and our grumbling column pulled itself together. None of us objected or even considered the risk. We had to hurry, so we started a race against time and against our clogs and empty stomachs and the heavy sacks of loot that we did not want to abandon. We had already trudged six hours of forced marching, after twelve hours of road work. Loaded down but sustained by hope, the men still found the strength to joke and show their high spirits: “Aren’t they going to have a surprise when they see us!” “And how about Lieutenant Liquorice [that was his nickname because he was thin and long, and his skin, mustache, hair, and boots were all black] when he doesn’t see us at all!” After that, only silence could help us economize our energies.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Outside the drugstore he asked me for the price of the rubber. As I seemed to intend to wait for him, he took me gently by the arm and said: “No, you must get used to doing this yourself.” In a clear voice, perhaps slightly histrionic, or at any rate so it seemed to me, he asked for a prophylactic — surely it was not necessary to speak so loud. 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.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  When I had enough courage for another attempt, I would choose a different part of town, and eventually I eliminated half the drugstores in the city this way. Sometimes, I would pluck up enough courage to face the druggist, or at least I thought I had, but then the presence of customers would prevent me from going in and, however long I waited outside, the shop would never empty. My torture lasted until the day I finally admitted to myself that I would never get to the streets of love alone, nor even to the drugstore. I needed a mediator between my sexual isolation and women. It did not take me long to choose one; of all the more experienced boys, Bissor was the only one who would not cruelly humiliate me. This certainty calmed me for a while and even made me less impatient. One Friday afternoon, I set to work at my uncomfortably high chest of drawers, with its cold slab of marble broken in three places. I could not concentrate and, at first, blamed the objects around me. As usual, I had carefully placed four newspapers under the marble to even it and a cushion on the chair to raise my own level. But no position was comfortable. First, I sat on my left leg, then on the other; then I was uncomfortably warm and removed the cushion. Finally, I recognized the old turmoil within me that I knew so well. Without thinking twice, since the idea was now well rooted within me, I quickly got up and, with trembling hands, stuffed my books and papers into my briefcase. I never left any of my things lying around because of the children who tore up everything. I had often run, in imagination, this errand to Bissor’s house, so my legs now carried me there without any hesitation, while my brain stood still. Bissor was just home from his tiring evening paper round. I knew his schedule. As I had hoped, he made no joke, but simply took on an older brother’s manner for which I was almost grateful. Outside the drugstore he asked me for the price of the rubber. As I seemed to intend to wait for him, he took me gently by the arm and said: “No, you must get used to doing this yourself.”

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We dared not consider the more probable alternative of extermination on the spot, but we were reminded of it by a Czech noncommissioned officer in a German uniform whose Volkswagen we retrieved from a ditch. He confirmed the signs of the coming Nazi collapse and the preparations for a retreat. The Germans no longer had enough ships and would certainly not set us free. We should therefore expect the worst and escape immediately. One morning, we thought the hour for our mass executions had struck. The whistle which usually roused us at dawn failed to sound. From habit we awoke at the same hour, surprised at such a respite. Soon the camp began to buzz, but no one moved, of course, so as to avoid the beginning of work. We formulated hundreds of suppositions as to the cause of our luck: our whistling guard had had a stroke, Germany had been defeated, the Nazis had suddenly become humanitarian, our guards had all gone out of their minds together... We joked as though we were in a holiday camp, and we had difficulty in refraining from pillow fights. At last, as time passed, we risked a few steps outside the tents. Our new camp was on a bare slope with an open horizon at the bottom of the valley. The army huts had been built a few yards higher up; to get out of their field of vision and escape being shot, one would have to run for several miles. Up there, nothing had moved. We washed and ate without hurrying and settled down peacefully to tasks like letter-writing and sewing. I was signing my last letter when one of the scouts came in, alarmed. Above us, between their huts, the soldiers were carrying out strange operations. Wearing battledress and hideous oilskin overalls striped green, yellow, and brown, they had lined up at fixed intervals and were fixing their machine guns on pivots. The mechanical slowness of their movements made the scene all the more solemn and sinister. When they stopped moving, we found we were in the center of a semicircular firing line from which escape was impossible. We would be mown down like rabbits. I smiled to my companions and tried to lie all the same. “It’s only a maneuver.” But I could see that our death was being planned. That day, however, it was only a rehearsal. It was time to escape and, a week later, there came a chance. ~ 5. ESCAPE ~ We were still at work when the clear and bright-eyed night fell on us. Our guards were as bad-tempered as we were tired. In the last fortnight, the Germans had handed us over to an elegant Italian lieutenant who kept perfecting this strip of road to avoid being sent to the front.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  A dumb Bedouin came in this morning with a head as hard as a log and offered me fifty francs for a two-hundred-franc halter. It made my lungs ache to try to explain that I couldn’t sell it for less than cost price. He left without buying. Nothing more all afternoon. At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as though I were a luggage-merchant or a leather- worker.” Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique. “Then why did you do it?” my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected. “How could I refuse? Besides,” he admitted, “if she’d paid me decently, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn’t worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn’t worth two hundred francs. So I said: ‘Pay me what you want.’ She gave me twenty francs — they’re in my pocket. If it goes on like this, I’ll close the shop.” He repeated this threat all his life. We didn’t more than half-believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable. Every time he had an asthma attack he would give us solemn warning that the end had come, that we must now look after ourselves, that, if he recovered, he had made up his mind to give up. Despite the frequency of the attacks, they always impressed us deeply. They might come at any hour of the day or night. At certain seasons, particularly in the fall, the long, hard, strangling cough announcing the attack would awake me every night. Her eyelids heavy, my frightened mother would climb out of bed in her slip and, barefooted, would rush to fix the usual medication. Soon the flat would be smoky with the fumes of the burning Legras powders. We heard my father gasp, choke, call upon death to deliver him. Since we could do nothing for him, we remained under our blankets. The younger children whispered their reassurance to one another through the darkness: “It’s nothing. Dad is having an attack. It’ll be over right away.” Only Kalla, because she was too nervous to stay in bed, got up and went to my father; and when the cough hardened into a threat of convulsions, she would stand beside the bed, motionless and mute as a ghost, her pale delicate face framed by black hair always marvelously supple and wavy. She would stand there and suffer with him.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  He left without buying. Nothing more all afternoon. At five, a European lady came in and made me spend two hours repairing her suitcase, as though I were a luggage-merchant or a leather-worker.” Like most artisans, he hated dealing with anything outside his own craft, and he refused to change a single detail of his technique. “Then why did you do it?” my mother asked with an interest that was at least partly affected. “How could I refuse? Besides,” he admitted, “if she’d paid me decently, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But what could I ask for the job? It takes a long time and isn’t worth much. When her suitcase had been new, it wasn’t worth two hundred francs. So I said: ‘Pay me what you want.’ She gave me twenty francs — they’re in my pocket. If it goes on like this, I’ll close the shop.” He repeated this threat all his life. We didn’t more than half-believe him, but that was enough to keep us permanently anxious and unstable. Every time he had an asthma attack he would give us solemn warning that the end had come, that we must now look after ourselves, that, if he recovered, he had made up his mind to give up. Despite the frequency of the attacks, they always impressed us deeply. They might come at any hour of the day or night. At certain seasons, particularly in the fall, the long, hard, strangling cough announcing the attack would awake me every night. Her eyelids heavy, my frightened mother would climb out of bed in her slip and, barefooted, would rush to fix the usual medication. Soon the flat would be smoky with the fumes of the burning Legras powders. We heard my father gasp, choke, call upon death to deliver him. Since we could do nothing for him, we remained under our blankets. The younger children whispered their reassurance to one another through the darkness: “It’s nothing. Dad is having an attack. It’ll be over right away.” Only Kalla, because she was too nervous to stay in bed, got up and went to my father; and when the cough hardened into a threat of convulsions, she would stand beside the bed, motionless and mute as a ghost, her pale delicate face framed by black hair always marvelously supple and wavy. She would stand there and suffer with him. The morning after an attack, my father often rose in a bad temper. His illness was a part of his life and he didn’t seem to try to avoid it absolutely.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  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. It turned out to be even more painful than I had expected. I had quite forgotten the ritual words and gestures; not only did I have to simulate fervor, but also to watch my neighbors and copy their gestures, sway to and fro, nod my head, mutter and answer at the right moment. I would be lost if the men guessed my ignorance. But the last Amen of the service delivered me from this unbearable situation. I had expected a great show at the end, but before parting, I suggested we all sing the Hatikvah, the old Jewish national hymn. Although it was little known, there was a danger that the hymn might be recognized by our guards, but even such a risk would be useful in consolidating the effect. I called the congregation to attention in Hebrew. The word itself is a modern creation of the Zionists but, for every believing Jew, Hebrew remains a sacred language. The men stared at each other, then slowly obeyed like inefficient and ungainly automatons, every inch of their body hesitating. As soon as they were in position, they stiffened, staring into space. I counted “one, two, three” in Hebrew, then gave the signal, and their discordant, wholehearted voices burst into song with such conviction that I stopped watching them and also turned to stare at the sky. It was almost dark, and all the light was concentrated in the distant flickering stars. In moments like this, in spite of my shyness and my complexes, I caught glimpses of what being saved through others might be. But these moments were scarce, unfortunately, and almost immediately followed by doubts.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  That was what I was suffering from, far more than my lungs. I stood before myself as before a deforming mirror; something strange had slipped into the core of my life. Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep. During all this period, Henry was an admirable example of calm, of smiling serenity. He had no ties that he felt he needed to break, and he saw and acted directly, without suffering. Although I was too agitated to listen to him properly, he reduced my scruples by teasing me. Do others have scruples about us? He had turned a part of his room into a workshop where he manufactured toys. He invented new toys and he carved and painted wood with great skill and taste; it was the only useful thing he had learned in his Italian school, he said. The merchants of the city had long been short of goods and they paid him whatever he asked. This source of income allowed him to break with his father for longer periods and his independence made him happy. I used to stretch out on his couch and watch him at work. As his paintbrush moved over a panel of plywood, he would talk away about his latest daydream, with great precision and carefully collected details. In his generosity, he included me in his plans. This time, he had found he had an uncle who was a planter in Argentina, a new country full of possibilities. Europe was ruined and would need everything. We would go to Argentina and carry on his uncle’s flourishing business, even extend it and plant more and more to supply Europe. Soon we would be powerful and perhaps famous in Argentina, where cultured and educated men must be relatively scarce. Henry was a practical dreamer and quoted figures as well as the promises of his uncle who had answered his questions through his daughter. He even showed me some letters! I did not take him seriously, any more than when he had planned a fishing business on the desert coasts of the South. Did the uncle really exist? But I liked Henry’s daydreams. They were a relief for me from the insoluble problems that entangled me. With a single stroke of his brush, an eye appeared; another, and there was the bear’s snout too. Henry would then stop and judge the whole. “How d’you like it?” he would ask. I emerged from my silence. “And what about the war, Henry?”

• From Henry and June (1986)

  Soon we are lying side by side. He has penetrated me, but his penis suddenly ceases to move and becomes soft. I say, smiling, “You didn’t want to fuck today.” He says, “It isn’t that. It’s because I have been thinking a great deal these days about growing old and how one day . . .” “You’re crazy, Henry. Old, at forty! And you, who never think at such moments. Why, you’ll be fucking when you are a hundred.” “This is so humiliating,” says Henry, hurt, bewildered. I can only think for the moment of his humiliation, his fears. “It is natural,” I say. “It happens to women, too, only in women it doesn’t show! They can conceal it. Hasn’t it ever happened to you before?” “Only when I didn’t want my first mistress, Pauline. But I want you desperately. I have a terrible fear of losing you. Yesterday I was worrying like a woman. How long will she love me? Will she get tired of me?” I kiss him. “Now you kiss me as if I were a child, you see.” I observe that he is ashamed of himself. I say and do everything to make everything natural. He imagines he will be impotent from now on. As I comfort him I conceal the beginning of my own fears and my own despair. “Perhaps,” I say, “you feel that you must always fuck me when I come to see you so that I will not be disappointed.” This strikes him as the truest explanation. He accepts it. I myself am against our unnatural meetings. We cannot meet when we want each other. That is bad. I want him more when he is not there. I beg him not to take it seriously. I convince him. He promises to go out that night, to the same play where I must go with some bank people. But in the taxi my own disproportionate fears return. Henry loves me, but not fuckingly, not fuckingly. That same night he came to the play and sat up in the balcony. I felt his presence. I looked up at him, so tenderly. But the heaviness of my mood stifled me. For me everything was finished. Things die when my confidence dies. And yet . . . Henry went home and wrote me a love letter. The next day I telephoned and said, “Come to Louveciennes if you are not in the mood to work.” He came immediately. He was gentle, and he took me. We both needed that, but it did not warm me, resuscitate me. It seemed to me that he, too, was fucking just to reassure himself. What a leaden weight on me, on my body. We had only one hour together. I walked with him to the station. As I walked back I reread his letter. It seemed insincere to me. Literature. Facts tell me one thing, my instincts another. But are my instincts just my old neurotic fears?