The Navigators of Space Page 16

  On his frail legs, he thought himself as nimble as a kid goat in the jutting edges of ruins, discovering the secrets of jackdaws or, silently and patiently observing the mysteries of widgeons and the rustling of gorse. A religious veneration caused his hair to bristle when, in the woods, the gentle royal herbivore with the antlered forehead passed by with his troop of hinds, and all those tawny bodies, candid eyes and slender feet symbolized for him the angelic quality of forests.

  Soon, however, Luc descended even further into childhood. He was the little creature roaming from room to room, the collector of rags and debris in niches similar to those of thieving magpies, the stammerer sitting in the laps of those who like frail children; his brain as half-empty, but infinitely laborious and curious, about a thousand locked rooms, all admirably disposed to receive visitors. Oh, the endless labor in the suppleness of chairs, the arrival of the first ideas, like the invasion of a virgin territory by immigrants! As in the wilderness, as in the forests of a conquered continent, in the child of the Aryan race the fertile humus, the alluvion full of potential, is ready for the labor of populations, little immigrant ideas that the environment attracts in multitudes. In the same way, though, that an evening twilight is symmetrical with a morning twilight, but whose gradations descend into the gulf instead of rising from it, so that infantile re-existence was lived inversely, from the complex to the simple, from speech to mime, from sentences to words, moving towards a period of mutism, toward sensation without terminology, embryonic thought—visual, tactile and odorant—without shape and nameless.

  In that singular collapse of his being, however, reactions persisted: recurrences of active thought, virile and complex but as transient as the attempts of certain plants can be to flower again in the autumn. In sum, his being simplified itself chromatically, so that he only experienced fleeting terrors once the full-blown fevers were past, and he was only aware of his decline during his very rare returns of adult memory.

  On the day when his memory was stripped of words, however, when his vocabulary sank into the darkness of Unconsciousness, when he was no longer any more than a scarcely-thinking individual traversed by vegetative circulations, all sadness was erased from his life.

  When he became a newborn infant, however, when his pupils drank the light as mountains drink clouds, when his ears vibrated to sounds as bays to the breeze, was there not still a great soul within him, a superior personality, like an adorable beauty in the depths of the Earth, like some fossil fern dead for hundreds of millions of years?

  His individuality, for those who watched over him, seemed, in its mutism, suave, gentle and manageable, his smile exquisite, even when he degenerated further, when he descended further than infancy, when he recapitulated the epoch in which he was growing in his mother’s womb, then that in which he was formed by the contact of the generative animalcules, then the infinite periods in which the encounters of individuals slowly united the ovules from which he would be born—and it was in that surge, in the division extended to infinity, in the passage upstream toward geneses, one morning, when the first greyness tinted the west-facing windows, that Luc, without a sigh or a start, dispersed.

  ANOTHER WORLD

  To Anatole France

  I.

  I am a native of Gelderland. Our patrimony was reduced to a few acres of heath-land and stagnant water. Pines that made a metallic sound as they quivered were growing on its borders. The farmhouse only had a few habitable rooms, and was falling apart, stone by stone, in isolation. We were an old family of herdsmen, once numerous but now reduced to my parents, my sister and myself.

  My destiny, bleak at the outset, has become the finest imaginable; I have met someone who understands me; he will learn that which only I knew before—but I have been suffering for a long time. I was in despair, prey to doubt and loneliness, which ended up eroding everything of which I was once certain.

  I came into the world with a unique constitution. From the very beginning, I was an object of astonishment. Not that I seemed deformed; I am told that I was more graceful in body and face than is usual in the newly born—but I had the most extraordinary skin color: a kind of pale violet, very pale but quite distinct. By lamplight, especially that of oil-lamps, that tint paled further, becoming a peculiar off-white, like that of a lily submerged in water. That was, at least, how I appeared to other people—for I saw myself differently, as I saw everything in the world differently. To that first peculiarity others were added, which were revealed in due course.

  Although born apparently healthy, my development was difficult. I was thin and cried incessantly; at the age of eight months, I had not yet been seen to smile. My parents despaired of my ever growing up. The doctor in Zwartendam declared that I was suffering from a congenital weakness; he saw no other remedy but rigorous hygiene. I continued nonetheless to grow weaker; I was expected to perish at any moment. My father, I believe had resigned himself to it, somewhat dented in his self-respect—his Dutch pride in order and regularity—by his infant’s bizarre appearance. My mother, by contrast, loved me all the more for my strangeness, having ended up finding the color of my skin pleasant.

  That was how things stood when a very simple occurrence came to my rescue; as everything concerning me was abnormal, though, the event was a cause of scandal and apprehension.

  When one of the servants left, she was replaced by a vigorous Friesian girl, very hard-working and honest but inclined to drink. I was confided to the newcomer. Seeing that I was so weak, she took it into her head to give me, secretly, a little beer and water mixed with schiedam—a sovereign remedy, in her opinion, against all ills.

  The curious thing is that I was not long delayed in recovering my strength, and showed thereafter an extraordinary predilection for alcohol. The young woman rejoiced secretly, not without taking some pleasure in puzzling my parents and the doctor. Under interrogation, however, she ended up revealing the secret. My father was extremely angry; the doctor railed against superstition and ignorance. Strict orders were given to the servants and I was removed from the Friesian woman’s care.

  I began to grow thinner and weaker again, until, heedless of everything but her affection, my mother put me back on a diet of beer and schiedam. I immediately recovered my vigor and vivacity. The experiment was conclusive; alcohol was revealed to be indispensable to my health. My father felt humiliated; the doctor got himself out it by prescribing tonic wines. Since then, my health has been excellent, although no one hesitated to predict a future of drunkenness and debauchery.

  Shortly after this incident, a further anomaly was observed by those around me. My eyes, which had seemed normal to begin with, became strangely opaque, acquiring a horny texture like the wing-cases of certain beetles. The doctor predicted that I would lose my sight, but confessed nevertheless that the ailment seemed absolutely bizarre, and that he had never had an opportunity to study one like it. Soon, the pupil was so confused with the iris that it was impossible to distinguish between them. It was noticed, in addition, that I could look directly at the Sun without any discomfort. In truth, I was not blind at all, and it had to be admitted eventually that I could see perfectly well.

  I reached the age of three. According to our neighbors, I was then a little monster. The violet color of my skin had hardly changed; my eyes were completely opaque. I spoke badly, with incredible rapidity. I was clever with my hands and well-adapted for all actions that demanded more agility than strength. No one denied that I would have been graceful and good-looking if I my skin color had been natural and my pupils transparent. I showed intelligence, but with gaps that those around me could not fathom, inasmuch as, save for my mother and the Friesian woman, no one liked me very much. To strangers, I was an object of curiosity, and to my father a constant thorn in his side.

  At any rate, if my father had conserved any hope of seeing me revert to normality, time certainly disabused him. I became increasingly strange, in my tastes, my habits and my abilities. At six, I nourished myself
almost entirely on alcohol, only rarely eating a few mouthfuls of fruit and vegetables. I grew with prodigious rapidity, but I was incredibly thin and light. I mean “light” in terms of specific gravity, which is the opposite of thinness; thus, I could swim without the slightest difficulty, floating like a plank of poplar-wood. My head was no more inclined to sink than the rest of my body.

  I was as nimble as I was light. I could run as fast as a roe deer, easily jumping ditches and obstacles that no other man would even have tried to jump. I could reach the top of a beech-tree in the blink of an eye, or—which was even more surprising—leap on to the roof of our farmhouse. On the other hand, the slightest burden was too much for me.

  All these things, in sum, were merely phenomena indicative of a special nature, which, in themselves, would only have served to single me out and make me unwelcome; no one would have classified me as other than human. I was undoubtedly a monster, but certainly not to the extent of people born with horns or animal ears, the head of a calf or a horse, fins, devoid of eyes or with a supplementary eye, four arms, four legs or devoid of arms or legs. My skin, despite its unusual tint, was not so very different from sun-tanned skin; my eyes were not repulsive in spite of their opacity. My extreme agility was a talent. My need for alcohol could pass for a mere vice, a hereditary addiction—the country folk, in any case, like our Friesian housemaid, only saw it as a confirmation of their ideas regarding the “power” of schiedam, a slightly exaggerated demonstration of the excellence of their tastes. As for the rapidity and volubility of my speech, which was impossible to follow, that seemed little different from faults of pronunciation—stammering, lisping and stuttering—common to many young children. I did not, therefore, have any marked characteristics of monstrosity, even though the ensemble was extraordinary. The most curious aspect of my nature was invisible to those around me: no one was aware that my vision was strangely different from normal vision.

  Although I saw some things less well than other people, I could see a great many that no one else saw. That difference manifested itself most obviously in colors. Everything that other people called red, orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo appeared to me as varying shades of darkness, while I perceived violet, and a series of colors beyond that—colors that were nothing but darkness to normal people. I eventually realized that I am able to distinguish 15 colors as dissimilar as, for instance, yellow and green—with infinite gradations, of course.

  Furthermore, transparency does not manifest to my eyes in ordinary conditions. I can only see poorly through a window or through water; glass, for me, is brightly colored; water noticeably so, even when very shallow. Many crystals said to be clear are more or less opaque; by contrast, a large number of substances called opaque do not inhibit my vision. In general, I can see through far more substances than you can, and translucency—modified transparency—is so often present that I can say that, for my eyes, it is the general rule of nature, while complete opacity is the exception. Thus, I can discern objects through wood, foliage, the petals of flowers, magnetized iron, coal and so on. At a variable thickness, however, these substances—such as a stout tree-trunk, water a meter deep, a large lump of coal or quartz—become obstacles.

  Gold, platinum and mercury are black and opaque; ice is quite dark. Air and water vapor are transparent, but colored, as are certain kinds of steel and very pure clay. Clouds do not prevent me from seeing the Sun or the stars, although I can clearly distinguish those same clouds suspended in the atmosphere.

  This difference between my vision and that of other people, as I have said, went largely unnoticed by those around me; they simply thought that I was color-blind—which is too common an infirmity to attract much attention. It was inconsequential for the meager activities of my everyday life, for I saw the shapes of objects in the same fashion—and perhaps more subtly—as the majority of people. The designation of an object by its color, when it was necessary to distinguish it from another object of the same shape, only caused me difficulty if they were unfamiliar. If someone called the color of one waistcoat blue, and that of another red, it scarcely mattered what color the waistcoats seemed to me to be; blue and red became purely mnemonic terms.

  Given that, you might think that there was some sort of correspondence between my colors and those of others, and that it amounted to the same thing as my being able to see their colors, but as I have already said, red, green, yellow, blue, and so on, when pure—as the colors of the prism are—I perceived as shades of darkness; they were not colors to me. In nature, where no color is simple, it is not the same; one substance called green, for example, is for me a certain composite color,35 while another substance called green—which is an identical shade so far as you are concerned—is by no means the same color to me. You can see, therefore, that my scale of colors has no correspondence with yours; when I consent to call both brass and gold “yellow,” it is rather as if you were consenting to call a cornflower “red” as well as a poppy.

  II.

  If the difference between my vision and normal vision stopped there, it would be extraordinary enough, to be sure. That is very little, however, compared to what I still have to tell you. The different coloration, transparency and opacity of the world; the ability to see through clouds, to see the stars on the most overcast nights, to see through a wooden partition-wall what is happening in the next room or outside a house—what is all that compared with the perception of a living world, a world of animate creatures moving alongside and around human beings, without humans being aware of it, without them being alerted by any kind of immediate contact?

  What is all that, compared with the revelation that there exists on this Earth a fauna other than our fauna, and a fauna with no resemblance to ours in its form, its organization, its mores, or its manner of growth, birth and death? A fauna that lives alongside and in the midst of ours, influencing and influenced by the elements that surround us, nourished by those elements, without our suspecting its presence. A fauna which—as I have proved—is as ignorant of us as we are of it, as insensible to our movements as we are insensible to its movements. A living world, as varied as ours, as powerful as ours—perhaps more so—in its effects on the planet’s surface! A kingdom, in sum, extended over land and sea and in the atmosphere, modifying that land, sea and atmosphere in fashions very different from ours but with a very formidable energy—and, by virtue of that, indirectly influencing us, and our destinies!

  This, however, is what I—alone among men and animals—have seen; this is what I have studied, ardently, for five years, after having spent my childhood and adolescence merely observing it.

  III.

  Observing it! For as long as I can remember, I have been instinctively subject to the seduction of that creation, foreign to our own. At first, I confused it with other living things. Perceiving that no one was troubled by its presence—that everyone, on the contrary, seemed indifferent to it—I scarcely felt any need to point out its peculiarities. At the age of six, I was perfectly conscious of its distinction from the plants in the field, the animals in the farmyard and the stables, but I still confused it slightly with inert phenomena like fire and light, running water and clouds. That was because these creatures were intangible; when they touched me, I did not experience any effect of their contact. Besides, their forms, although very various, had the singularity of being so thin in one of their three dimensions that they were comparable to moving drawings, surfaces and geometric lines. They passed through all organic matter; on the other hand, they sometimes seemed to be halted or hampered by invisible obstacles…but I shall describe them later. For the present, I only want to call attention to them, to affirm their variety in shape and size, their near-absence of thickness and their impalpability, in combination with the autonomy of their movements.

  By the time I was eight years old, I was perfectly able to distinguish them from atmospheric phenomena as well as the animals of our kingdom. In the excitement that this discovery gave me, I tried to c
ommunicate it, but I was never able to succeed. Apart from the fact that my speech was almost completely incomprehensible, as I have said, the extraordinary nature of my vision rendered it suspect. No one took the trouble to interpret my words and gestures, nor was anyone ready to admit that I could see through wooden partitions, even though I gave proof of it many times over. Between me and other people there was an almost-insurmountable barrier.

  I became discouraged and took to daydreaming; I became a sort of young recluse; I provoked unease in the company of children of my own age, and was aware of it. I was not exactly a ready-made victim, for my agility put me out of range of infantile malice and gave me a means of avenging myself easily. At the slightest threat, I was far away, mocking any pursuit. No matter how many of them there were, mischief-makers never succeeded in surrounding me, much less in taking hold of me. There was no point in even trying to catch me by trickery. Although too weak to carry any load, my agility was irresistible, freeing me immediately. I could return unexpectedly, and crush my adversary—adversaries, even—with rapid and well-aimed blows. I was, therefore, left in peace. I was taken for both an innocent and something of a magician—but a magician of an unintimidating sort, who could be treated with scorn. By degrees I cultivated an outdoor life, wild and meditative, but not devoid of gentleness. The only humanizing influence I had was my mother’s affection, although, being busy all day long, she found little time for caresses.

  I shall try to describe, briefly, a few scenes from my tenth year in order to make the preceding explanations more concrete.

  It is morning. Broad daylight illuminates the kitchen—a pale yellow glow for my parents and the servants, very various for me. Breakfast is being served, bread and tea—but I don’t drink tea. I’ve been given a glass of schiedam and a boiled egg. My mother is taking care of me, affectionately; my father is asking me questions. I try to answer him, slowing down my speech; he only understands the occasional syllable, and shrugs his shoulders.