The First Man

  V.V. We men and women of that time, of this city, in this country, we embraced each other, rejected and took each other back, and finally parted. But through all that time we never stopped helping each other to live, with that marvelous complicity of those who have to fight and suffer together. Ah! that is what love is—love for all.

  At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.

  Free oneself from any concern with art and form. Regain direct contact, without intermediary, thus innocence. To give up art here is to give up one's self. Renouncing the self, not through virtuousness. On the contrary, accept one's hell. One who wants to be better prefers his self, one who wants to enjoy prefers his self. The only one who renounces his self, his I, is one who accepts whatever happens with its consequences. Then this one is in direct contact.

  Regain the greatness of the Greeks or the great Russians through this distanced innocence. Do not fear. Fear nothing. But who will help me!

  That afternoon, on the road from Grasse to Cannes, where in a moment of incredible rapture he discovers, suddenly, after

  an affair lasting years, that he loves Jessica, that at last he loves her, and that the rest of the world becomes like a shadow beside her.

  I was not in any of what I said or wrote. It was not I who married, not I who was a father, who ... etc ...

  Many documents about sending foundlings to settle in Algeria. Yes. All of us here.

  The morning trolley, from Belcourt to the place du Gou-vernement. In front, the motorman with his levers.

  I am going to tell the story of an alien. The story I am going to tell...

  Maman and history: She is told about sputnik: "Oh, I wouldn't like it up there!"

  Chapter going backwards. Hostages Kabyle village. Emasculated soldier—roundup, etc., step by step to the first shot fired in the settlement. But why stop there? Cain killed Abel. Problem in technique: a single chapter or in countermelody?

  Rasteil: a settler with a thick moustache, graying sideburns.

  His father: a carpenter from Faubourg Saint-Denis; his mother: a fine-linen laundress.

  All the settlers were Parisian anyway (and many were forty-eighters). Many unemployed in Paris. The Constituent had voted fifty million to send a "colony":

  For each settler:

  a dwelling

  2 to 10 hectares

  seeds, cultures, etc.

  food rations

  No railroad (it only went as far as Lyon). From there canals—on barges hauled by draft horses. "Marseillaise," "Chant du Depart," benediction by the clergy, flag to take to Mondovi.

  Six barges 100 to 150 meters each. Cooped up, on straw mattresses. The women, to change underwear, undress behind bedsheets they hold up one after the other.

  Almost a month journey.

  In Marseilles, at the big Lazaret1 (1,500 people), for a week. Then loaded on an old paddlewheeler: the Labrador. Leave in a mistral. Five days and five nights—everyone sick.

  Bone—with the whole population on the dock to greet the settlers.

  Things piled up in the hold that disappear.

  From Bone to Mondovi (on the army's gun carriages, to leave room and air for the women and children) no road. By guesswork in the swampy plain or in the brush, under the hostile eyes of the Arabs, accompanied by the howling pack of Kabyle dogs—12/8/48.2 Mondovi did not exist, some military tents. During the night the women were weeping—8 days of Algerian rain on the tents, and the wadis were overflowing. The children relieved themselves in the tents. The carpenter put up light shelters draped with sheets to protect the furniture. Hollow reeds cut on the banks of the Sey-bouse so the children could urinate from the inside out.

  Four months in the tents, then temporary wooden huts; each double hut had to lodge six families.

  1. hospital—Trans.

  2. Circled by the author.

  Spring 49: untimely hot season. They are roasting in the huts. Malaria then cholera. 8 to 10 deaths a day. The carpenter's daughter, Augustine, dies, then his wife. His brother-in-law also. (They bury them in a layer of tuff.)

  The doctors' prescription: dance to heat the blood.

  And they dance every night to a fiddler between two burials.

  The land grants would not be distributed until 1851. The father dies. Rasine and Eugene are left alone.

  To go wash their laundry in a tributary of the Seybouse they needed an escort of soldiers.

  Walls built + ditches by the army. Cabins and gardens, they build with their hands.

  Five or six lions roar around the village. (Numidian lion with black mane.) Jackals. Boars. Hyena. Panther.

  Attacks on the villages. Theft of livestock. Between Bone and Mondovi, a wagon bogs down. The travelers leave to get reinforcements, except a pregnant young woman. They find her with her belly slit and breasts cut off.

  The first church: four clay walls, no chairs, a few benches.

  The first school: a shack made of poles and branches. Three sisters.

  The lands: scattered plots, they plow with a gun on their shoulder. At night you go back to the village.

  A column of 3,000 French soldiers passing by raids the village during the night.

  June 51: uprising. Hundreds of cavalrymen in burnooses around the village. Simulating cannons with stovepipes on the little ramparts.

  In actual fact, the Parisians in the fields; many went to the fields wearing top hats and their wives with silk dresses.

  Smoking cigarettes forbidden. Only the covered pipe was permitted. (Because of fires.)

  The houses built in 54.

  In the department of Constantine, 2/3 of the settlers died almost without having laid a hand on a spade or plow.

  Old settler cemetery, immense oblivion.'

  Maman. The truth is that, in spite of all my love, I had not been able to live that life of blind patience, without words, without plans. I could not live her life of ignorance. And I had traveled far and wide, had built, had created, had loved people and abandoned them. My days had been full to overflowing—but nothing had filled my heart like . . .

  He knew he was going to leave again, make a mistake again, forget what he knew. But actually what he knew was that the truth of his life was there in that room ... No doubt he would flee that truth. Who can live with his own truth? But it is enough to know it is there, it is enough to know it at last and that it feeds a secret and silent [fervor] in the self, in the face of death.

  Martian's Christianity at the end of her life. The poor, unfortunate, ignorant woman [ ]2 show her sputnik? May the cross sustain her!

  In 72, when the paternal branch settled, it was following:

  —the Commune,

  —the Arab uprising of 71 (the first one killed in Mitidja was a teacher).

  The Alsatians occupied the land of the insurgents.

  1. "immense oblivion" circled by the author.

  2. An illegible word.

  The measure of the era

  The mother's ignorance in countermelody to all the [ ]1 of history and the world.

  Bir Hakeim: "it's far" or "over there."

  Her religion is visual. She knows what she has seen without being able to interpret it. Jesus is suffering, he dies, etc.

  Woman warrior.

  Write one's [ ]2 in order to find the truth.

  1ST PART: THE NOMADS

  (i) Birth during the move. 6 months after the war.a The child. Algiers, the father in Zouave uniform wearing a straw hat going over the top.

  (2) 40 years later. The son facing the father in the Saint-Brieuc cemetery. He returns to Algeria.

  (3) Arrival in Algeria in time for the "events." Look up. Trip to Mondovi. He finds childhood and not the father. He learns he is the first man.b

  1. An illegible word.

  2. Two illegible words.

  a. Mondovi in 48.

  b. The settlers from Mahon in 1850—the Alsatians in 72-73— 14.


  2ND PART: THE FIRST MAN

  Adolescence: The punch

  Sports and morality

  The Man: (Political activity [Algeria], the Resistance)

  3RD PART: THE MOTHER

  Loves

  The kingdom: the old playmate, the old friend, Pierre, the old teacher, and the story of his two enlistments

  The mother1

  In the last part, Jacques explains to his mother the Arab question, Creole civilization, the fate of the West. "Yes," she says, "yes." Then full confession and the end.

  There was a mystery about this man, and a mystery he wanted to clear up.

  But at the end there was nothing but the mystery of poverty that creates people without a name and without a past.

  Youth at the beaches. After days full of shouting, of sunlight, of strenuous activity, of dull or intense desire. Night falls on the sea. A swift cries high in the sky. And anguish seizes his heart.

  Finally he takes Empedocles as his model. The [ ]2 philosopher who lives alone.

  1. The author drew a box around this whole passage.

  2. An illegible word.

  I want to write the story of a pair joined by the same blood and every kind of difference. She similar to the best this world has, and he quietly abominable. He thrown into all the follies of our time; she passing through the same history as if it were that of any time. She silent most of the time, with only a few words at her disposal to express herself; he constantly talking and unable to find in thousands of words what she could say with a single one of her silences ... Mother and son.

  Freedom to use any style.

  Jacques, who until then had felt himself at one with all victims, now recognizes that he is at one with the executioners. His sorrow. Definition.

  You would have to live as an onlooker to your own life. To add to it the dream that would complete it. But we live, and others dream your life.

  He looked at her. Everything had come to a standstill, and time passed with a sputter. As at the movies when, the picture having vanished through some malfunction, you hear nothing in the darkness of the hall except the sound of the machinery going on ... with an empty screen.

  The jasmine necklaces sold by the Arabs. The scented string of yellow and white flowers [ ].1The necklaces quickly fade

  1. Six illegible words.

  [ ]1 the flowers turn yellow [ ]2 but the odor lingers, in the poor room.

  Paris days in May when the white pods of the chestnut flowers are floating everywhere in the air.

  He had loved his mother and his child, everything that it was not up to him to choose. And after all he, who had challenged everything, questioned everything, he had never loved anything except what was inevitable. The people fate had imposed on him, the world as it appeared to him, everything in his life he had not been able to avoid, his illness, his vocation, fame or poverty—in a word, his star. For the rest, for everything he had to choose, he had made himself love, which is not the same thing. No doubt he had known the feeling of wonderment, passion, and even moments of tenderness. But each moment had sent him on to other moments, each person to others, and he had loved nothing he had chosen, except what was little by little imposed on him by circumstance, had lasted as much by accident as by intention, and finally became necessary: Jessica. The heart, the heart above all is not free. It is inevitability and the recognition of the inevitable. And he, in truth, had never wholeheartedly loved other than the inevitable. All that was left for him was to love his own death.

  aTomorrow, six million yellow people, billions of yellow, black, and dark-skinned people will pour onto the shore of

  1. Two illegible words.

  2. Two illegible words.

  a. he dreams it during his siesta:

  Europe . . . and at best would [convert her]. Then everything that had been taught, to him and to those like him, also everything he had learned, on that day the men of his race, all the values he lived for, would die of uselessness. Then what will still be worthwhile? His mother's silence. He lay down his arms before her.

  M. at 19. He was 30 then, and they did not know each other. He realizes we cannot set the clock back, prevent the loved one from having been, and done, and experienced, we possess nothing of what we choose. For we would have to choose with the first cry at birth, and we are born apart—except from the mother. We possess only what is inevitable, and we must return to it and (see preceding note) submit to it. And yet, what nostalgia and what regrets!

  One must relinquish. No, learn to love what is imperfect.

  To conclude, he asks his mother's forgiveness—Why you've been a good son— But it is because of all the rest she cannot know or even imagine [ ]1 that she is the only one who can forgive (?)

  Since I've inverted it, show Jessica old before showing her young.

  He marries M. because she has never known a man and he is fascinated by that. In short, he marries for what is wanting in himself. Then he will learn to love women who have been used—that is—to love the awful necessity of life.

  A chapter on the war of 14. Incubator of our era. As seen by the mother? Who knows neither France, nor Europe, nor

  1. An illegible word.

  the world. Who thinks shells explode of their own volition, etc.

  Alternate chapters would give the mother's voice. Commenting on the same events but with her vocabulary of 400 words.

  In short, I wanted to speak of those I loved. And of that only. Intense joy.

  aSaddok:

  (1) "But why get married that way, Saddok?"

  "Should I marry the French way?"

  "The French or any other way! Why subject yourself to a tradition you believe is foolish and cruel?"1'

  "Because my people are identified with this tradition, they have nothing else, they stopped there, and to part with that tradition is to part with them. That is why I will go into that room tomorrow, and I will strip a stranger of her clothes, and I will rape her to the sound of gunshots."

  "All right. In the meantime, let's go swimming."

  (2) "So what?"

  "They say that for the time being the anti-Fascist front must be consolidated, that France and Russia must join in self-defense."

  "Can't they defend themselves and at the same time establish justice at home?"

  a. All this in a [not-true-to-life] style that is lyrical and not exactly realistic.

  b. The French are right, but their rightness is oppressive to us. And that is why I choose Arab madness, the madness of the oppressed.

  "They say that will come later, that we have to wait for that."

  "Justice can't be delayed here, and you well know it."

  "They say if you don't wait, objectively you'll be aiding Fascism."

  "And that's why prison is the right place for your former comrades."

  "They say it's too bad, but they can't do otherwise."

  "They say, they say. And you say nothing."

  "I say nothing."

  He looked at him. It was beginning to get hot.

  "So, you're betraying me?"

  He had not said: "you're betraying us" because betrayal concerns the flesh, the single individual, etc . ..

  "No. I'm leaving the Party today . .."

  (3) "Remember 1936."

  "I'm not a terrorist for the Communists. I'm one against the French."

  "I'm French. She is too."

  "I know. Too bad for you."

  "So you are betraying me."

  Saddok's eyes shone with a kind of fever.

  If I finally choose chronological order, Madame Jacques or the doctor will be descendants of the first settlers in Mondovi. Let's not feel sorry for ourselves, said the doctor, just imagine our first ancestors here, etc . ..

  (4)—And Jacques's father killed at the Marne. What remains of that obscure life? Nothing, an impalpable memory—the light ash of a butterfly wing incinerated in a forest fire.

  The two Algerian nationalisms. Algeria 39 and 54 (rebellion). What bec
omes of French values in an Algerian sensibility, that of the first man. The account of the two generations explains the present tragedy.

  The holiday camp at Miliana, the barracks' trumpets morning and evening.

  Loves: he would have wanted them all virgin, with no past and no men. And the only one he ever met who actually was, he vowed his life to her but could not himself be faithful. So he wanted women to be what he himself was not. And what he was sent him back to women who were like him and whom he loved and possessed with anger and passion.

  Adolescence. His drive to live, his faith in life. But he is spitting blood. So that is what life will be, a hospital, death, solitude, this absurdity. Hence the parting. And in his very depths: no, no, life is something else.

  Inspiration on the road from Cannes to Grasse . . .

  And he knew that even if he had to go back to that barren cold where he had always lived, he would dedicate his life, his heart, the gratitude of his entire being, which had enabled him once, perhaps only once, but once, to yield . . .

  Begin the last part with this scene:

  The blind donkey who for years patiently turns his wheel in a circle, enduring beatings, the ferocity of nature, the sun, the flies, still enduring, and from that slow circular motion, seemingly fruitless, monotonous, painful, water endlessly flows . . .

  1905. L.C.'s1 war in Morocco. But, at the other end of Europe, Kaliayev.

  The life of L.C. Entirely involuntary, except his will to be and to keep on. Orphanage. Farm laborer obliged to marry his wife. Thus his life evolves despite him—and then the war kills him.

  He goes to see Grenier: "Men like me, I've conceded it, have to obey. They need a guiding rule, etc. Religion, love, etc.: impossible for me. So I have decided to vow obedience to you." What follows (news).

  After all, he does not know who his father is. But who is he himself? 2nd Part.

  The silent movie, reading the subtitles to the grandmother.

  No, I am not a good son: a good son is one who stays put. I've traveled far and wide, I've betrayed her with trivialities, fame, a hundred women.

  "But, you loved no one but her?"

  "Ah! I've loved no one but her?"

  When, by his father's grave, he felt the time go out of joint— this new course of time is that of the book.