The Man Who Sleeps (Un homme qui dort)

The Man who sleeps

Your alarm clock goes off,

you do not stir,

you remain in your bed,

you close your eyes again.

It is not a premeditated action,

or rather it's not an action at all,

but an absence of action,

an action that you don't perform,

actions that you avoid performing.

You went to bed early,

you slept peacefully,

you had set the alarm clock,

you heard it go off,

you waited for it to go off, for several minutes at least,

already woken by the heat,

or by the light.

or by expectation itself.

You do not move; you will not move.

Someone else, your twin, conscientious double is perhaps..

perhaps performing in your stead, one by one,

the actions you have eschewed:

he gets up, washes, shaves, dresses, goes out.

You let him bound down the stairs,

run down the street,

leap onto the moving bus,

arrive on time, out of breath but triumphant, at the doors in the hall.

You get up too late.

You will not set down on four, eight or twelve sheets of paper what you know,

what you think,

what you know you are supposed to think, about alienation,

the workers,

modernity and leisure.

about white-collar workers or about automation,

about our knowledge of others,

about Marx as rival to de Tocqueville,

about Weber as an opponent of Lukacs.

In any case, you wouldn't have said anything,

because you don't know a great deal and you think nothing at all.

Your seat remains vacant.

You will not finish your degree,

you will never start your diploma.

You will study no more.

You make , as you do everyday, a bowl of Nescafe;

you add, as you do everyday, a few drops of sweetened condensed milk.

You don't wash,

you hardly bother to dress.

In a pink plastic bowl you place three pairs of socks to soak.

You don't go and wait for the candidates to come out of the examination hall

to find out what questions were devised to test their perspicacity.

You don't go to the cafe

as custom would have demanded

like everyday to join your friends.

One of them, the following morning

will climb the six flights of stairs that lead to your room.

You will let him knock at your door.

Wait.

Knock again.

A little louder.

Wait again.

Knock gently.

Call your name quietly.

Hesitate.

Then stamp back down again.

Others came, the day after, the after that,

knocked, waited, and called to you,

slipped you messages.

You stay lying on your narrow bench,

your hands crossed behind you back, your knees up.

You don't want to see anyone,

or to talk, or to think, nor to go out, or move.

It is on a day like this one,

a little later, a little earlier,

that you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong,

that you don't know how to live and that you never will know.

The sun beats on the sheet metal of the roof.

The heat in your room is unbearable.

You are sitting, wedged between the bed and the bookshelf,

with a book opened on your lap.

You stopped reading it long ago.

You are staring at a whitewood shelf,

at the pink plastic bowl in which rots six socks are rotting.

The smoke from your cigarette, abandoned in the ashtray, rises,

in an almost straight line, and then spreads out

in a blanket against the ceiling which is fissured by minute cracks.

Something has broken.

You no longer feel

some thing which until then fortified you until then,

the feeling of your existence, the impression of belonging to

or being in the world, is starting to slip away from you.

Your past, your present, and your future merge into one:

they are now just the heaviness of your limbs,

your nagging migraine,

the bitterness in your Nescafe.

This converted cubbyhole that passes for your bedroom,

this hovel two metres ninety-two long

by one metre sixty-three wide,

that is to say, a little over five square metres,

this attic from which you have not stirred for several hours,

for several days.

You are sitting on a bed which is too short

for you to be able to lie on it,

too narrow for you to be able to turn over on it without precaution.

You are staring, almost fascinated now,

at a pink plastic bowl which contains no fewer than six socks.

You stay in your room, without eating.

without reading,

almost without moving.

You stare at the bowl,

the shelf, your knees,

you gaze in the cracked mirror,

the coffee bowel, the light-switch.

You listen to the sounds of the street,

the dripping tap on the landing,

the noises that your neighbour makes,

clearing his throat,

coughing fits.

the whistle of his kettle.

You follow across the ceiling the sinuous lines of a thin crack

the futile meandering of a fly,

the progress - which it is almost impossible to plot - of the shadows.

You are 25 years old, you have 29 teeth,

three shirts and eight socks,

55 francs a month to live on,

a few books you no longer read,

a few records you no longer play.

You don't want to remember anything else.

Here you sit, and you want only to wait,

just to wait until there is nothing left to wait for.

You do not see your friends again.

You do not open your door.

You do not go down to get your mail.

You do not return the books you borrowed from the library.

You do not write your parents.

You only go out after nightfall like the rats, the cats, and the monsters.

You drift around the streets,

you slip into the grubby little cinemas on the Grand Boulevards.

Sometimes you walk all night,

sometimes you sleep all day.

You are an idler, a sleepwalker,

a mollusc.

you do not really feel cut our for living, for doing, for making;

you only want to go on,

to go on waiting and forget.

You reject nothing, you refuse nothing.

You have ceased going forward,

but that is because you weren't going forward anyway,

you're not setting off again, you have arrived,

you can see no reason to go on any further:

all it took, practically,

on a day in May when it was too hot,

was the untimely conjunction of a text of which you'd lost the thread,

a bowl of Nescafe that suddenly tasted too bitter,

a pink plastic bowl filled with blackish water in which six socks were floating,

this was all it took for something to snap,

to turn bad,

to come undone,

and for the truth to appear in the bright light of day,

as sad and ridiculous as a dunce's cap.

You have no desire to carry on.

Only the night and your room protect you:

the narrow bed where you lie and stretched out,

the ceiling that you discover anew at every moment;

the night in which, alone amidst the crowds on the Grands Boulevards,

you occasionally feel almost happy with the noise and the lights,

the bustle and the forgetting.

You are the wave that ebbs and flows, from the Place de la Republique to Place de la Madeleine,

from the Madeleine to Place de la Republique.

The dead hours,

empty passages,

the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more,

to see no more,

to remain silent and motionless.

Crazy dreams of solitude.

An amnesiac wandering through the Land of the Blind:

wide, empty streets, cold lights,

faces without mouths that you would look at without seeing.

It's as if, beneath the surface of your calm and reassuring history, the good little boy,

as if, running beneath the obvious, too obvious, signs of growth and maturity -

scribbled graffiti on bathroom doors,

certificates, long trousers, the first cigarette,

sting of the first shave, alcohol,

the key left under the mat for your Saturday night outings,

losing your virginity, the baptism of air, the baptism of fire -

as if another thread had always been running,

ever present but always held at bay,

and which is now weaving the familiar fabric of your rediscovered existence,

the bare backdrop of your abandoned life,

veiled images of this revealed truth,

of this resignation so long deferred,

of this appeal for calm -

hazy lifeless images,

over-exposed snap shots,

almost white, almost dead,

almost already fossilized:

a street in a sleepy provincial town, closed shutters,

dull shadows, the buzzing of flies in an army post,

a lounge blanketed in grey dustsheets,

dust particles suspended in a ray of sunlight,

bare countryside,