Читать книгу The Conspiracy - Paul Nizan - Страница 10

II

Two days later, Rosenthal came to meet with his friends again.

All these encounters take place at the Ecole Normale, in Rue d’Ulm. This is a large square building dating from the time of Louis-Philippe; a courtyard forms its centre, with a cement pool where goldfish circle lazily; a festoon of great men runs between the windows, to set an example; a cold stench of refectory soup hangs about the glazed arcades; a naked man dying against a wall, proffering a stone torch that nobody is willing to take from his hands, symbolizes the War Dead; flanking Rue Rataud there is a tennis court, and between Rue Rataud and Rue d’Ulm a garden embellished with a carved stone bench and two naked women of somewhat flabby outline, often decorated with obscene inscriptions. At one extremity of the tennis court stands a little physics laboratory, in the style of the historic sheds where famous inventors discovered the internal combustion engine or the wireless detector; at the other extremity ten years ago there used to be a gymnasium and some plant biology laboratories, falling into ruins round a little botanical plot dubbed ‘Nature’.

From the rooftops you can discern – with the feeling of exaltation and power that altitudes inspire – the entire southern half of Paris and its misty horizon, bristling with domes, steeples, clouds and chimneys. It is on these roofs that Laforgue, Rosenthal, Bloyé, Jurien and Pluvinage spoke again about Civil War, without exaggerating the importance it might have, but reckoning all the same that it would take its place as one of the thousand little undertakings thanks to which, when you come right down to it, the world is thought to change.

It was the end of June in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. As these young people were living in a country quite as good as any other, but where the Prime Minister was just then explaining in a speech to the Chamber that he was not sorry to have been nicknamed by the communists Poincaré-la Guerre and Poincaré-la-Ruhr – because if he had not visited the wartime front lines with his puttees and his little chauffeur’s cap, and if he had not gone across to the other bank of the Rhine, where would France be? – and as they were not driven by the depressing need to earn their daily bread immediately, they told each other it was necessary to change the world. They did not yet know how heavy and flaccid the world is, how little it resembles a wall that can be knocked to the ground in order to put up another much finer one, how it resembles instead a headless and tailless gelatinous heap, a kind of great jelly-fish with well-concealed organs.

It cannot be said that they are entirely taken in by their speeches about transforming the world: they view the actions that their phrases entail simply as the first effects of a duty whose fulfilment will later assume forms altogether more consequential; but they feel themselves to be revolutionaries, they think the only nobility lies in the will to subvert. This is a common denominator among them, though they are probably fated to become strangers or enemies. Spinoza, Hegel, Marxism, Lenin – these are still just great pretexts, great muddled references. And since they know nothing about the life men lead between their work and their wives, their bosses and their children, their little foibles and their great misfortunes, their politics is still based only upon metaphors and shouts . . .

Perhaps Rosenthal is simply destined for literature and is only provisionally constructing political philosophies. Laforgue and Bloyé are still too close to their peasant great-grandfathers to commit themselves, without many arrière-pensées and mental reservations and serious mystical revelations. Jurien lets himself be drawn along by comrades remarkably different from himself; he has the feeling he is sowing his wild oats, as his father – a radical schoolteacher in a Jura village – puts it, and that Revolution is less dangerous to health than women: admittedly, it gives less pleasure at first and does not prevent him from having bad dreams. Pluvinage is perhaps the only one among them who adheres fully to his action; but it is an adherence that cannot but end badly, because he is basically concerned only with vengeance and believes in his destiny without any ironic reflection upon himself.

All this is terribly provisional, and they are well aware of it. It is at twenty that one is wise: one knows then that nothing commits or binds, and that no maxim is more unworthy than the notorious saying about the thoughts of youth being realized in maturity; one consents to commit oneself only because one senses the commitment will not give one’s life a definitive shape; everything is vague and free; one makes only sham marriages, like colonials looking forward to the great wedding organs of the mother country. The only freedom seen as desirable is the freedom not to choose at all: the choice of a career, a wife or a party is just a tragic lapse. One of Laforgue’s comrades had just got married at twenty; they spoke of him as of a dead man, in the past tense.

For nothing in the world would they have confessed these convictions: his wisdom does not prevent the young man from lying. Two days earlier, it had taken an hour of indolence on the grass, the temptations and the inimitably confidential tone of the night, for Rosenthal to slip into speaking out loud about demolished buildings and burned books. They treated their improvisations as lifelong decisions, for they still accompanied their actions with illusions that did not deceive them. They were not even misled about the meaning of their friendship, which was merely a rather strong complicity among adolescents too threatened not to feel the worth of collective bonds, too lonely not to strive to replace the reality of their nocturnal playmates by the images of virile comradeship. Basing the future upon the connivances of youth seemed to each of them the height of cowardice.

On the cover of the journal – whose dummy they settled upon that day, stretched out on the burning metal of the roofs with their heads buzzing from the sun – they decided to have a machine-gun engraved; it was Pluvinage who made the suggestion.

The year was ending. Rosenthal wanted everything to be ready for November. He invested the same impatience in this project that could sometimes draw him into pursuing a woman. Everything that Bernard undertook had to be accomplished at such a rapid pace that he seemed to have little time for living; to be preparing himself for a death full of regrets, memories, plans. His friends dared not resist him: such impatient individuals do sometimes play the role of leaders. Besides, it was Rosenthal who had found the funds for the journal: those twenty-five thousand francs, that skill in worldly matters, gave him the right and the means to convince young people who had not yet emerged from their studies and the confinement of the lycée, and to whose eyes money seemed absolutely magical.