standing as straight as a candle, her arms hung down, her little head with its tousled hair twisted slightly to the side—such was her habit—and on her face that fleeting smile of a sorrow whose principal distress was in how to put on that it was a simple smile and nothing more. She was standing there like a puppet they were bargaining over, who knows she’s being bargained over, but does not know how to express it, or cannot. All she knows is fear, a slightly theatrical fear, for she is a puppet who is counting on the fact that, should the worst happen, her famously powerful queen, Puppenfee, will intervene. Giggles spotted me, recognized me, but didn’t stir. Fine; but she smiled, she smiled as though shorthand for her customary “Well, come closer, don’t be shy!”
Giggles likes me, but Mutig, her man, despises me with a simmering disdain. He expressed this in the coquettish crossing of his leg and his affable smile, whose evil and untimely wrinkle he hastily wiped from his lips; he expressed it by laying his hands on the table, as if they were suddenly overcome with boredom. Fuld also made it clear that he had seen me, but only in that he bent his head ever so slightly lower, and his fingers, braced against the table, buckled. His knuckles collapsed and clattered.
All of this was in greeting. Here they were as if on stage, each with his assignment and in his appointed place. They were acting. A new act had begun with my entrance, they had known about it from their past rehearsals, they’d been expecting me. I understood right away that I, too, was acting, and I settled into it quickly. As if at the instruction of an invisible director I headed without hesitation for the far side of the table, where Mutig was sitting at one end, Fuld at the other. Thus I had my back to the window, with Giggles opposite me. She was standing back, but in such a way that one would know that she, too, belonged to the group. I mention this because the four of us were not alone in the place. From my position I had a perfect view. It was a spacious hall, with a vaulted ceiling, at the same time it called to mind a subterranean chapel (I thought of La Sainte-Chapelle de Paris, Assisi, and the Gypsy church in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer), the beer cellars of Munich, and a knightly hall. It would surely have been echoing were it empty, but now it was full of people. They were sitting at white-clothed tables. You might say they were the spectators at the Théâtre des Variétés, with their obligatory refreshment, yet these spectators had agreed not to order anything. For the tables were bare. This gave a solemn impression and was a bit unsettling. They were mainly men. It was as if our table were the stage they’d come to see, but it was apparent they were paying us no mind at all. They spoke, they clamored—literally, the same kind of din as on the street just a moment ago—as if we weren’t there, though I had no doubt that they were mostly talking about us, that they were like the chorus of the play that the four of us were now acting out; that is, they were gesticulating about our every movement, about our every word, though somehow on the sly. It was discreet, and I found it excruciatingly annoying. Those people had a complexion that was at least olive, though often black, but only a few were of a genuinely Negro sort. As it happens, I don’t know how I even arrived at any certainty as to this circumstance, since most of them had a sort of double-sided hood over their head.
What is just now transpiring, and what is soon to come, is a sort of one-off script.
Having described the “auditorium,” I will depict the general situation on the stage. Each of us was, roughly speaking, as if fixed in the position he was occupying when the curtain went up. I don’t know the cause for the relative motionlessness of my fellow actors, but I well know the cause of my own lethargy, which is to say that as soon as I had arrived at my place at the table (I’ve said that I had retired there as if at the instruction of an invisible director), it was clear to me beyond all doubt that I hadn’t so much wound up somewhere as frozen into something. (And I apologize for that frightful, but unavoidable, turn of phrase, which is the only one that fits.) I knew that I was with the other three in a closed system—as if we had grown into a transparent cube, cut off from the ordinary, phenomenal world. The slightest individual attempt at a turn, a step, a movement was in communication with the entire construct, which would then swing (for it was suspended). In other words: we had not been completely deprived of the ability to move, but whatever any of us undertook, his position relative to the others remained unchanged and was as it had been initially, that is, when “I took up my role.” This is just to explain why, for example, I had no luck in seeing Fuld and Mutig other than in profile, and it follows from this finding that these two were invariably face-to-face. – Giggles is no exception: not for a moment did she cease to be that puppet I’d spotted when I came in, a puppet incapable of expressing whether she was suffering or rejoicing, an awfully timid puppet, yet counting on the power of her queen, Puppenfee. All I want is for the reader to picture it like she was constantly, if almost unnoticeably, swaying, like she was charmingly floating, like she was in the grip of some music that no one else but she could hear, though she might not be able to say who was playing it for her, whether it be the words, the atmosphere, or my own unconscious desire. I would want the reader to picture Giggles a bit like a leaf that submits to the will of waves just a hair before it has circled down upon them, perhaps in the naïve hope that they would have mercy upon it for its having “obliged” them.
The supernumeraries—that is, the guests of this sanctuary, which is both a tavern and a knightly hall—won’t let us out of their sight for a moment, though they’re careful not to make a show of it. I don’t know how it was for the other three, but as far as I was concerned that circumstance contributed decisively to the impression that we were acting before what one calls fate, which also likes to pretend that it’s a disinterested observer.
Once I had assumed the place indicated by the invisible director, Mutig—as if issuing an initial rejoinder—grabbed something from the table and tossed it lightly; it fell like a heavy object, let’s call it a Browning; I looked: it was the rubber girl from the Folies-Bergère; it was as if all holes, patches, and stitches.
Mutig: . . . were we then to eliminate duration . . .
Fuld: Pardon! Let’s be precise: eliminate, or refute it?
Mutig: Eliminate it. As a concept. Naturally, as a concept. By refuting it we would pose the question of its reality, and the question of its reality doesn’t enter into it, for what matters to us, let’s say, is ethics. After all, you understand what negating the concept of duration would mean in an ethical system! Don’t you?
Fuld: Perhaps an effort to furnish responsibility with an alibi?
Mutig: Responsibility! A nasty word, and less than a word: the utilitarian formula of moralists. A hindrance to emancipation.
Fuld: But a concept that does not rule emancipation out.
Mutig: Naturally, for we are opportunists. How does that strike you? To exclude the notion of emancipation from the ethics that is its foundation? Which is therefore the ethics of the strong. Who then take precedence . . . Are you laughing?
Fuld: Pardon. On the contrary. That’s just how I look . . .
Mutig (tossing his head carelessly): But someone here is laughing. (Which is to say, I had smiled.) Not only is emancipation my right; it is my duty. It is my duty to come into being. (Pause.) Our adversaries don’t understand a whit of our ethics. To them it’s irresponsibility, self-will, the unleashing of a fundamental evil! But we are not evil, we’re just simple . . . . – Giggles, am I evil?
Giggles: Oh, you and your evil! You’re merely awful.
Mutig: We’ve eliminated duration. First implication: the act has no genealogy. The act is independent of what precedes it; it is free, alone; thus it does not know; it does not diminish. Only he who pays duration no mind can submit to what he encounters unreservedly, can serve it unreservedly . . .
Fuld: Serve at this moment . . .
Mutig: Naturally, at this moment. (His beautiful hands flickered over his head like white flames.) At this moment, naturally. How then, I ask you, to submit unreservedly, if not to what things there are in this moment, and nowhere else? Where else, if not in this moment, would you seek that which is? – Giggles, aren’t you happy?
Giggles: Oh!
Fuld: Are you really happy, Giggles? Despite . . .
Giggles: Oh!