Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs

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, 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 spreads out in a blanket against
the ceiling which is fissured by 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 Place to Place,

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 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,

cemeteries on a Sunday,

outings in a car.

Man sitting on a narrow bed,
one Thursday afternoon,

a book open on his knees, eyes vacant.

You are just a murky shadow,
a hard kernel of indifference,

a neutral gaze avoiding
the gaze of others.

Speechless lips, dead eyes.

Henceforth you will be able to glimpse
in the puddles, in the shop windows,

in the gleaming bodywork of cars,

the fleeting reflections
of your decelerating life.

Water drips from the tap on the landing.

Your neighbour is sleeping

The chugging of a diesel taxi emphasizes
the silence of the street.

Your memory is slowly
penetrated by oblivion.

The cracks in the ceiling trace
an implausible labyrinth.

The heat in your room,

like a cauldron,

like a furnace,

the six socks, indolent sharks,

sleeping whales.

in the pink plastic bowl.

That alarm clock that did not ring,

that does not ring,

that will not ring to wake you up.

You stretch out.

You let yourself slip.

You drop into sleep.

Your room is the center of the world

This lair,

this cupboard like garret
which never loses your smell,

with its bed into which you slip alone,

its shelf

its linoleum,

its ceiling whose cracks you have
counted a thousand times,

the flakes, the stains,

the contours,

the washbasin is so tiny it resembles
a piece of doll's-house furniture,

the bowl,

the window,

the wallpaper of which you
know every flower,

these newspapers that you
read and re-read,

that you will read and re-read again;

this cracked mirror has only
ever reflected your face

fragmented into three unequal portions;

the shelved books:

thus begins and ends your kingdom,

perfectly encircled,

by ever present noises, that are now all
that keeps you attached to the world:

the dripping tap on the landing,

the noises from your neighbor room,

his throat-clearing

his coughing fits,

the incessant murmur of the city.

The measured succession of car noises,

braking,

stopping,

accelerating,

imparts a rhythm to time almost as
surely as the tirelessly dripping tap

or the bells of Sainte-Roch.

Your alarm clock

has been showing 5:15
for a long time now.

In the silence of your room

time no longer penetrates,

it is around

a permanent medium,

obsessive

warped,

a little suspect:

time passes, but you never
know what time it is.

It is ten o'clock,

or perhaps eleven,

it's late,

it's early,

the sun rises,

night falls,

the sounds never quite cease altogether,

time never stops completely,

even if it's now only the imperceptible:
a hairline crack in the wall of silence,

a slow murmur

forgotten, drop by drop,

almost indistinguishable from
the beats of your heart.

Your room is the most beautiful
of desert islands,

and Paris is a desert that
no-one has ever traversed.

All you really need is your sleep,

your own silence,

your stillness,

the rising and falling of your rib-cage,

evidence of your continuing
and patient existence.

To want nothing.

Just to wait, until there is
nothing left to wait for.

To wander, and to sleep.

To let yourself be carried along
by the crowds, and the streets.

To follow the gutters, the fences,
the water's edge.

To walk the length of the embankments,
to hug the walls.

To waste your time.

To be without desire,
or resentment, or revolt.

In the course of time your life
will be there in front of you:

a life without motion.

without crisis,

without disorder,

day after day, season after season,

something is going to start
that will be without end:

your vegetable existence,
your cancelled life.

Here, you learn how to last.

At times, you are the
master of time itself,

the master of the world,

a watchful little spider
at the hub of your web,

reigning over Paris:

you command the North by
Avenue de I'Opera,

the South by the Louvre colonnade,

the East and west by Rue Saint-Honore.

You have everything still to learn

everything that cannot be learnt:

solitude,

indifference,

patience,

silence.

You are alone,

and because you are alone you must
never look to see what time it is.

You are letting yourself go, and it
comes almost easily to you.

You allow passing time to erase
the memory of the faces,

the addresses, the telephone numbers,

the smiles and the voices.

You forget that you learnt
how to forget,

that, one day, you forced
yourself to forget.

You no longer enter the cafes,

checking the tables with a worried
expression on your face,

going into the back rooms in search
of you no longer know whom.

You no longer look for anyone in the
queues at the cinemas in Champollion.

You are alone.

You learn how to walk like a man alone,

to stroll, to dawdle,

to see without looking,
to look without seeing.

You learn the art of transparency,

immobility,

inexistence.

You learn how to remain seated,

or supine,

or erect.

You learn how to look at paintings as
if they were bits of wall or ceiling,

the walls, as if they were paintings
whose thousands of paths you follow,

merciless labyrinths,

texts that no-one will ever decipher,

decaying faces.

You plunge into Ile Saint-Louis,

you take Rue Vaugirard

and head towards Pereire,
towards Chateau-Landon.

You walk slowly,

and return the way you came,

sticking close to the shop fronts.

You go and sit on the parapet
of Pont Louis-Phillipe,

and you watch an eddy forming and
disintegrating under the arches.

Barges pass by,

eventually shattering the play
of water against the piers

Motionless anglers sit,

their eyes following the drift
of their floats.

You walk round the gardens, children
clattering a ruler against the palings.

You sit down on the benches with green
slats and cast-iron lion-paw ferrules.

Ageing park-keepers pass the time with
nannies of a different generation.

With the tip of your shoes you trace
circles, squares, an eye on the ground,

or your initials.

You walked round and round near
the entrance to the Catacombs,

you went and stood beneath
the Eiffel Tower,

you went up a few monuments,

crossed all the bridges, walked the
embankments, visited all the museums,

the Decouverte and the
Aquarium du Trocadero,

you saw the rose gardens, Montmartre
by night, les Halles at first light,

Saint-Lazare station in the rush-hour,

Concorde at midday on August 15.

In the Luxembourg Gardens you
watch the pensioners playing cards.

On a bench, an old man stares into space
for hours on end; he is mummified,

perfectly still, with
his heels together,

his chin leaning on the walking-stick
that he grips tightly,

gazing into emptiness,

for hours.

You marvel at him.

You try to discover his secret,
his weakness.

But he appears to have no weak point.

He doesn't even dribble,

or move his lips,

he hardly even blinks.

The sun describes an arc about him:

perhaps his vigilance consists
solely in following its shadow;

he must have markers
placed long in advance;

his madness, if he is mad,

consists in believing
that he is a sundial.

You would like to look like him,

but - and this is probably due to your
inexperience in the art of being old -

you get restless too quickly:

in spite of yourself, your foot
starts scuffing the sand,

you let your eyes wander,

you are continually crossing
and uncrossing your fingers.

Sill you keep walking where your feet
take you. You get lost, go in circles.

Sometimes you set yourself
derisory goals:

Daumesnil,

Clignancourt,

Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr

or the Postal Museum.

You wander into bookshops and leaf
through books without reading them.

stopping in front of every painting,
leaning your head to the right,

stepping back to get a better view.

You sign the book with large illegible
initials and a false address.

You sit at a table at the back of a cafe

and read Le Monde, line by line,
systematically.

It is an excellent exercise.

500, 1000 pieces of information passed
in front of your attentive eyes.

But your memory has
avoided retaining any of this.

You read with lack of interest that
Pont-a-Mousson was weak

whilst New York remained steady,

that one may have complete confidence
in the oldest credit bank in France

and its network of specialists,

that the damage by typhoon Barbara would
cost three billion to repair,

that Jean-Paul and Lucas announce the
arrival of their little sister Lucie.

You are still capable of being amazed
by the way in which the combination

of 30 or so typographic signs can
generate these thousands of messages.

But why should you eagerly devour them,

why should you bother deciphering them?

All that matters is that time passes and
nothing should get through to you:

your eyes follow the lines,
one after the other.

Indifference to the world is neither
ignorance nor hostility.

You do not propose to rediscover
the joys of illiteracy,

but rather, not to grant a privileged
status to any one thing you read.

Or propose to go naked, but to be clad,
without implying elegance or neglect.

nor propose to let yourself starve to
death, but simply to feed yourself.

You eat,

you sleep,

you walk,

you are clothed,

let these be actions or gestures,

but not proofs, not some
kind of symbolic currency.

Your dress, your food, your reading
matter will not speak in your stead.

Never again will you entrust to them the
mortal burden of representing you.

you ingest, once or twice a day,
rarely more,

a calculable compound
of proteins and glucosides,

in the form of a piece of grilled beef,

strips of potato quick-fried
in boiling oil,

a glass of red wine.

In other words it's a steak,

but it is definitely not a tournedos,

and chips that no-one would dignify
with the name French fries,

and a glass of red wine of uncertain,
not to say dubious origin.

But your stomach can no longer
tell the difference.

Language has proved more resistant:

it took a while for your meat
to stop being tough,

your chips to stop being greasy,
the wine vinegary,

for these adjectives, which evoke
the sad fare of the soup-kitchens,

to lose little by little their meaning,

and for the sadness, the misery,
the poverty, the need,

the shame that has become inexorably
attached to them - this fat-come-chip,

this hardness-come-meat,
this bitterness-come-wine -

stop hitting you,

stop leaving their mark on you.

No explanation marks
punctuate your meals.

You drink your red wine,

you eat your steak and fries.

You devise complicated itineraries,

bristling with rules which oblige
you to take long detours.

You go and see the monuments.

You count the churches,

the equestrian statues,

the public urinals,

the Russian restaurants.

You look at the major buildings
works on the river banks,

and the gutted streets that
resemble ploughed fields,

the pipe laying,

the blocks of flats being
razed to the ground.

You go back to your room and collapse
onto your too-narrow bed.

You count and organise
the cracks in the ceiling.

You often play cards all by yourself.

You deal out four columns
of thirteen cards on the bed,

you remove the aces.

The game consists in arranging
the 48 remaining cards,

by using the four spaces left
by the removal of the aces,

if one of the spaces happens
to be the first in a column,

you are allowed to put a two there;

if it follows, say, a six,

you can insert the seven
of the same suit,

a seven can be followed by an eight,

an eight by a nine,

a jack by the queen;

if the space follows a king,

you may not lay anything
and the space is dead.

Chance has virtually no role
to play in this patience.

You can foresee the moment when the four
spaces bring you up against kings,

and failure, if you were
to play them in order;

you don't have to:
you can use one space,

then a different one, come back to the
first, jump to the third, the fourth,

back to the second again.

Nevertheless, you rarely succeed;

there always comes a point
when the game is blocked,

when, with half or a third
of the cards in order,

you can no longer fill a space without
turning up a king every time.

In theory, you have the right
to two more attempts,

no sooner does the game appear lost
than you scoop up all the cards,

shuffle them, and deal them out
again for another attempt.

You shuffle, deal them out, remove
the aces, take stock of the situation.

You begin more or less at random,

taking care only to avoid
laying bare a king too soon.

Gradually, the games
starts to take shape,

constraints appear,
possibilities come to light:

there is one card already
in its proper place,

a single move will allow you to
arrange five or six in one go,

over there a king that is in
your way cannot be moved.

You hardly ever get the patience out.

You cheat sometimes, a little, rarely,

increasingly rarely.

Winning doesn't matter to you,

for what would winning
mean to you anyway.

But you play more and more often,

for longer and longer,

sometimes all afternoon,

as soon as you get up,

or right through the night.

There is something about
this game that fascinates you,

perhaps even more than the game with
the water under the bridges,

or the imperfectly opaque twigs
which drift across your cornea.

Depending on where it is,
or when it crops up,

each card acquires an almost
poignant density.

You protect,

you destroy,

you construct,

you plot, you concoct
one plan after another:

a futile exercise, a danger that
entails no risk of punishment,

a derisory restoration of order:

48 cards keep you chained to your room,

and you feel almost happy when
a ten happens to fall into place

or when a king is unable to thwart you,

and almost unhappy as your calculations
lead to the impossible outcome.

It's as if this solitary silent strategy
were your only way forward,

as if it had become
your reason for being.

It's dark.

You close your eyes,

you open them.

Viral, microbial forms, inside your eye,
or on the surface of your cornea,

drifty slowly downwards,

disappear,

suddenly reappear in the center,

hardly changed,

discs or bubbles,

twigs, twisted filaments, which, when
together, are like a mythological beast.

You lose track of them,

then find them again;

you rub your eyes

and the filaments explode,

proliferate.

Time passes,

you are drowsy.

You put down the book beside
you on the bed.

Everything is vague,

throbbing.

Your breathing is astonishingly regular.

As the hours, the days, the weeks,
the seasons slip by,

you detach yourself from everything.

You discover, with what almost
resembles exhilaration,

that you are free,

that nothing is weighing you down,
nothing pleases or displeases you.

Life exempt from wear and tear and no
thrill in it other than these moments,

an almost perfect happiness,

fascinating,

occasionally swollen by new emotions.

You live in a parenthesis, in a vacuum
of promise, and you expect nothing.

You are invisible, limpid, transparent.

You no longer exist:

across the passing hours,
the succession of days,

the procession of the seasons,
the flow of time,

you survive, without joy
and without sadness,

without a future and without a past,

just like that: simply, self-evidently,

like a drop of water on a drinking tap,

like six socks soaking
in a pink plastic bowl,

like a fly or a mollusc,

like a tree, like a rat.

In the course of time your
coldness becomes awesome.

Your eyes have lost the last
vestige of their sparkle,

your silhouette now slumps perfectly.

Serenity without bitterness
plays at the corners of your mouth.

You slip through the streets,
untouchable,

protected by the wear and tear
of your clothing,

by the neutrality of your gait.

Now, your movements are
simply acquired gestures.

You utter only words which are
strictly necessary.

You never say please, hello,
thank you, goodbye.

You do not ask your way.

You wander around.

You walk.

All moments are equivalent,
all spaces are alike.

You are never in a hurry, never lost.

You are not sleepy.

You are not hungry.

You let yourself go, you allow
yourself to be carried along:

all it takes is for the crows to be
going up or down the Champs Elysees.

all it takes for you to turn off
suddenly down a grey street;

or else a light or an absence of light,

a noise of an absence of noise,

a wall, a group of people, a tree,

some water, a porch, a fence,

advertising posters, paving stones,
a pedestrian crossing,

a shop front, a luminous stop sign,
the name plate of a street,

a haberdasher's stall, a flight
of steps, a traffic island...

You walk or you do not walk.

You sleep or you do not sleep.

You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.

You eat or you do not eat.

You sit down, you stretch out,
you remain standing,

You slip into the darkened auditoriums.

You light a cigarette.

You cross the street,
you cross the Seine,

you stop, you start again.

You pall pinball or you don't.

Indifference has neithe
beginning nor end:

it is an immutable state,
an unshakeable inertia.

All that remains are
elementary reflexes:

when the light is red you
do not cross the road,

you shelter from the wind
in order to light a cigarette,

you wrap up warmer on winter mornings,

you change your shirt,socks, underpants
and your vest about once a week.

Indifference dissolves language
and scrambles the signs.

You are patient and you are not waiting,
you are free and you do not choose,

you are available and nothing
arouses your enthusiasm.

You hear without ever listening,
you see without ever looking:

the cracks in the ceilings,
in the floorboards,

the patterns in the tiling,
the lines around your eyes,

the trees, the water, the stones,

the cars passing, the clouds
that form... loud shapes in the sky.

Now, your existence is boundless.

Each day is made up
of silence and noise,

of light and blackness,

layers, expectations, shivers.

You slide, you let yourself
slip and go under:

searching for emptiness,
running from it.

Walk, stop,

sit down, take a table,

lean on it, stretch out.

Robotic actions:

get up, wash, shave, dress.

A cork on the water:

drift with the current,

follow the crowd, trail about:

in the heavy silence of summer,

closed shutters, deserted streets,

sticky asphalt,

still deadlyl leaves of a green
that verges on black;

winter in the cold light
of the shop-fronts,

the street lights, the little clouds of
condensing breath at cafe doors,

the black stumps of
the dead winter trees.

It is a life without surprises.

You are safe.

You sleep, you walk,
you continue to live,

like a laboratory rat abandoned in its
maze by some absent-minded scientist.

There is no hierarchy,

no preference.

Your indifference is motionless: a grey
man with no connotation of dullness.

But insensitive, but neutral.

You are attracted by water,
but also by stone;

by darkness, but also by light;

by warmth, but also by cold.

All that exists is your walking,

and your gaze, which lingers and slides,

oblivious to beauty, to ugliness,
to the familiar, the surprising,

retaining models of shapes and lights,
which form and dissolve continuously,

all around you, in your eyes,

on the ceilings, at your feet,
in the sky,

in your cracked mirror, in the water,

in the stone, in the crowds.

Squares, avenues,

parks and boulevards,
trees and railings,

men and women, children and dogs,

crowds, queues,

vehicles and shop windows,

buildings, facades,

columns and capitals,

sidewalks, gutters,

sandstone paving flags glistening
grey in the drizzle.

Silences, rackets, crowds
at the stations,

in the shops, on the boulevards,

teeming streets, packed platforms,

deserted Sunday streets in August,

mornings, evenings,

nights, dawns and dusks.

Now you are the nameless
master of the world,

the one on whom history
has lost its hold,

who no longer feels the rain falling,
does not see the approach of night.

All you are is all you know:

your life that continues,
you breathing, your step,

You see people coming and going, crowds
and objects shaping and dissolving.

A curtain rail in the tiny window
of a haberdasher's,

which your eye is suddenly caught by,

you continue on your way,

you are inaccessible, like a tree,
like a shop window, like a rat.

But rats don't spend hours
trying to get to sleep.

Rats don't wake up with a start,
gripped by panic, bathed in sweat.

Rats don't dream and what can you do to
protect yourself against your dreams?

But rats don't bite their nails,

for hours on end unti their claws are
little more than a large open sore.

You tear off half, bruising the spots
where it's attached to the flesh;

tear away the cuticle until
beads of blood start to appear,

until your fingers are
so painful that...

the slightest contact is unbearable

and you have to immerse your
hands in hot water.

But rats, as far as you know,
do not play pinball.

You hug the machines for hours on end,

for nights on end, feverishly, angrily.

You cling, grunting, to the machine,

accompanying the rebounds of the
ball with thrusts of your hips.

You wage warfare on the springs,

the lights, the figures, the channels.

Painted ladies who give an electronic
wink, who lower their fans.

You can't fight against a tilt.

You can play or not play.

You can't start up a conversation,

you can't make it say what it will
never be able to say to you.

It is no use snuggling up against it.

painting over it,

the tilt remains insensitive
to the friendship you feel,

to the love which you seek,

to the desire which torments you.

You drift around the streets,

you enter a cinema;

you drift around the streets,

you enter a cafe;

you drift around the streets,

you look at the trains;

you drift around the streets,

you enter a cinema, you see a film which
resembles the one you've just seen,

you walk out;

you drift around the over-lit streets.

You go back to your room, you undress,

you slip between the sheets,
you turn out the light,

you close your eyes.

Now's the time when dream-women, quickly
undressed, crowd in around you,

when you reread books you've read
a hundred times before,

when you toss and turn for hours
without getting to sleep.

This is the hour when, your eyes
wide open in the darkness,

your hand groping
in search of an ashtray,

matches, a last cigarette,

you calmly measure the sticky
extent of your unhappiness.

Now you get up in the night.

You wander the streets,

you go and perch on bar-stools
and there you stay, for hours,

until closing time.

with a beer in front of you or a black
coffee or a glass of red wine.

You are alone and drifting.

You walk along the desolate avenues,
past the stunted trees,

the peeling facades, the dark porches.

You penetrate the bottomless ugliness
of Les Batignolles, and Pantin.

Your only encounters are with Wallace
fountains which long since ran dry,

tacky churches, gutted building sites,

pale walls.

The parks whose railings imprison you,

the festering swamps near
the sewer outlets,

the monstrous factory gates.

Locomotives pump out clouds of smoke
under the walkways of Saint-Lazare.

On Boulevard Barbes or Place Clichy,

impatient crowds raise
their eyes to the heavens.

Unhappiness did not swoop down on you,

it insinuated itself
almost ingratiatingly.

It impregnated you life, your movements,
the hours you keep, your room,

it took possession of the
cracks in the ceiling,

of the lines in your face in the cracked
mirror, of the pack of cards;

it slipped furtively into the
dripping tap on the landing,

it echoed with the quarter-hour chimes
from the bell of Saint-Roch.

The snare was that feeling which, on
occasion, came close to exhilaration,

that arrogance,

that sort of exaltation;

you thought that the city was all you
needed, its stones and its streets,

the crowds that carried you along,

you thought you needed only
a front stall in some local cinema,

you thought you only needed your room,

your lair, your cage, your borrow.

Once again you deal out the
fifty-two cards on your narrow bed.

Your powers have deserted you.

The snare: the dangerous illusion
of being impenetrable,

of offering no purchase to the outside
world, silently sliding, inaccessible,

just two open eyes looking
forward, perceiving everything,

retaining nothing.

A being without memory, without alarm.

But there is no exit,

no miracle,

no truth.

Your legs dangling above the Seine.

You withdraw the four aces
from you fifty-two cards.

How many times have you
repeated the same gesture,

the same journey's that lead nowhere?

All you have left are your
tuppeny-halfpenny boltholes,

your idiotic patience,

the 1001 detours that always lead
you back to your starting point.

From park to museum,

from cafe to cinema,

from embankment to garden,

the station waiting-rooms,

the lobbies of the grand hotels,

the supermarkets,

the bookshops,

the corridors of the metro.

Trees, stones,

water, clouds,

sand, brick,

light,

wind,

rain:

all that counts is your solitude:

whatever you do, wherever you go,

nothing that you see has any importance,

everything you do, you do in vain,

nothing that you seek is real.

Solitude exists, when you're confronted,
when you face yourself.

You stopped speaking
and only silence replied.

But those words, those thousands,

those millions words that
dried up in your throat,

the inconsequential chit-chat,
the cries of joy,

the words of live, the silly laughter,

just when will you find them again?

Now you live in dread of silence.

But are you not the most silent of all?

The monsters have come into you life,

the rats, your fellow
creatures, your brothers.

The monsters in their tens, their
hundreds, their thousands.

You can spot them from
almost subliminal signs,

their furtive departures,

their silence,

by their shifty, hesitant, startled eyes
that look away when they meet yours.

In the middle of the night a light
still shows at the attic windows.

Their footfalls echo in the night.

But these faces without age,

these frail or drooping figures,

these hunched, grey backs,
you can feel their constant proximity,

you follow their shadows,
you are their shadow,

you frequent their hideouts,
their pokey little holes,

you have the same refuges,
the same sanctuaries:

the local cinema which
stinks of disinfectant,

the gardens, the museums, the stations,
the metro, the covered markets.

Bundles of despair sitting
like you on park benches,

drawing and rubbing out
the same circle in the sand,

readers of newspapers
found in rubbish bins.

They follow the same circuits as you,
just as futile, just as slow.

They hesitate in front
of the maps in the metro,

they eat their buns sitting
on the river banks.

The banished,

the pariahs,

the exiles.

When they walk, they hug the walls,
eyes cast down and shoulders drooping,

clutching at the stones of the facades,

with the gestures of a defeated army,
of those who bite the dust.

You follow them, you spy
on them, you hate them:

monsters in their garrets,

monsters in slippers at the fringes
of the putrid markets,

monsters with dead fish-eyes,

monsters moving like robots,

monster who drivel.

You rub shoulders with them, walk with
them, make your way amongst them:

the sleepwalkers, the old men,

the deaf-mutes with their berets
pulled down over their ears,

the drunkards,

dotards who clear their throats and try
to control the spasms of their cheeks

the peasants lost in the big city,

the windows, the slyboots, the old boys.

They came to you,

they grabbed you by the arm.

As if, because you're a stranger, you
could only meet other strangers;

as if, because you're alone, you
had to watch the other loners.

Those who never speak,

those who talk to themselves,

The old lunatics, the old lushes,

the exiles.

The hand on to your coat tails,

the breathe in your face.

They slide up to you with
their wholesome smiles,

their leaflets, their flags,

the pathetic champions
of great lost causes,

the sad chansonniers out
collecting for their friends,

the abused orphans selling table-mats,

the scraggy widows who protect pets.

All those who accost you, detain you,

paw you, ram their petty-minded
truth down your throat,

spit their eternal
questions in your face,

their charitable works
and their True Way.

The sandwich-men of the true
faith which will save the world.

Sallow complexions, frayed collars,
stammerers who tell you their life story

tell you about their time in prison,
in the asylum, in the hospital.

The old school teachers who have
a plan to standardize spelling,

the strategists, the water diviners,
the faith healers, the enlightened,

all those who live
with their obsessions,

failures, dead beats, the harmless
monsters mocked by bartenders

who fill their glasses so high that they
can't raise them to their lips,

the old bags who try to remain dignified
whilst kicking back the Marie Brizard.

The others who are even worse, the smug,
the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied,

the fat men and the forever young,
the dairymen and the decorated;

revelers on a binge, Brylcreem-boys, the
stinking rich, the dumb bastards.

The monsters who address you without
further ado, call you to witness,

Monsters with big families, monster
children and monster dogs,

the thousands of monsters caught
at the traffic lights,

the yapping females of the monsters,

monsters with moustaches,
and waistcoats, and braces,

monsters tipped out by the coachload
in front of the hideous monuments,

the monsters in their Sunday best,
the monster crowd.

You drift around, but the crowd no
longer carries you nor protects you.

Still you walk on, ever onwards,
untiring, immortal.

You search, you wait. You wander
through the fossilised town,

the intact white stones
of the restored facades,

the dustbins, the vacant chairs
where concierges once sat;

you wander through the ghost town,
scaffolds abandoned in gutted apartments

bridges adrift in the fog and the rain.

Putrid city, vile, repulsive city.

Sad city, sad lights in the sad streets,

sad clowns in sad music-halls,
sad queues outside the sad cinemas,

sad furniture in the sad stores.

Dark stations, barracks, warehouses.

The gloomy bars which line
the Grand Boulevards.

Noisy or deserted city,
pallid or hysterical city,

devastated, soiled city, bristling with
prohibitions, steel bars, iron fences.

Charnel house city: the markets rotting,
the slum belt in the heart of Paris,

the unbearable horror of the boulevards
when the cops hang out:

Haussmann, Magenta - and Charonne.

Like a prisoner,
like a madman in his cell.

Like a rat looking for
the way out of its maze.

You pace the length of Paris.

Like a starving man,

like a messenger delivering
a letter with no address.

Now you have run out of hiding places.

You are afraid.

You are waiting for everything to stop,

the rain,

the hours,

the stream of traffic,

life,

people,

the world;

waiting for everything to collapse,

walls,

towers,

floors and ceilings,

men and women,

old people and children,

dogs,

horses,

birds,

to fall to the ground,

paralysed,

plague-ridden,

epileptic;

waiting for the marble to crumble away,

for the wood to turn to pulp,

for the houses to collapse noiselessly,

for the diluvian rains to
dissolve the paintwork,

pull apart the dowel-joints in
hundred-year-old wardrobes,

tear the fabric to shreds,

wash away the newspaper ink,

waiting for the fire without
flames to consume the stairs,

waiting for the streets to subside
and split down the middle

to reveal the gaping labyrinth
of the sewers;

waiting for the rust and mist
to invade the city.

You are not dead and you are no wiser.

You have not exposed your eyes
to the suns burning rays.

The two tenth-rate old actors
have not come to fetch you,

hugging you so tightly

that you formed a unity which could have
brought all three of you down together.

The merciful volcanoes
have paid you no heed.

Your mother had not put your new
second-hand clothes in order.

You will not encounter for the millionth
time the reality of experience

and forge in the smithy of your soul the
uncreated conscience of your race.

No old father,

no old artificer will stand you
now and ever in good stead.

You have learnt nothing,

except that solitude
teaches you nothing,

except that indifference
teaches you nothing:

You were alone and you wanted to burn
the bridges between you and the world.

But you are such a negligble speck,

and the world is such a big word:

to walk a few kilometres past facades,

shopfronts, parks and embankments.

Indifference is futile.

Your refusal is futile.

Your neutrality is meaningless.

You believe that you are just passing
by, drifting through the city,

dogging the footsteps of the crowd,
entering the play of shadows and cracks.

But nothing has happened:

no miracle,

no explosion.

With each passing day
your patience has worn thinner.

Time would have to stand still,

but no-one has the strength
to fight against time.

You may have cheated, snitching
a few crumbs, a few seconds:

but the bells of Saint-Roch,

the changing traffic lights
at the intersection,

the predictable drop from
the tap on the landing,

never ceased to signal the hours,

minutes,

the days and the seasons.

For a long time you constructed
sanctuaries, and destroyed them:

order or in inaction.

drifting or sleep,

the night patrols,

the neutral moments,

the flight of shadows and light.

Perhaps for a long time yet you
could continue to lie to yourself,

deadening your senses.

But the game is over.

The world has stirred
and you have not changed.

Indifference has not
made you any different.

You are not dead. You have not gone mad.

There is no curse hanging over you.

There is no tribulation
in store for you,

there is no crow with sinister
designs on your eyeballs,

no vulture has been assigned the chore
of tucking into your liver all day long.

No-one is condemning you,
and you have committed no offence.

Time, which sees to everything, has
provided the solution, despite yourself.

Time, that knows the answer,
has continued to flow.

It is on a day like this one,

a little later, a little earlier,

that everything starts again,

that everything starts,
that everything continues.

Stop talking like a man in a dream.

Look!

Look at them.

They are thousands upon thousands,

posted like silent sentinels by
the river, along the embankments,

all over the rain-washed pavements
of Place Clichy,

mortal men fixed in ocean reveries,

waiting for the sea-spray,
for the breaking waves,

for the raucous cries
of the sea-birds.

No,

you are not the nameless
master of the world,

the one on whom history
had lost its hold,

the one who no longer felt
the rain falling,

who did not see the approach of night.

You are no longer inaccessible,
the limpid, the transparent one.

You are afraid,

you are waiting.

You are waiting, on Place Clichy,
for the rain to stop falling.