Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

A little tart at the next table was saying to another: “They can’t fool me that easy. I’ll tell you: the woman is jealous of my style.”

“I think,” Gisors went on, “that recourse to the mind is an attempt to compensate for this: the knowle.dge of a person is a negative feeling: the positive feeling, the reality, is the torment of being always a stranger to what one loves.”

“Does one ever love?” “Time occasionaHy causes this anguish to disappear, ^rne alone. One never knows a human being, but one occasionally ceases to feel that one does not know him. (I am thinking of my son, of course, and also of. another lad.) To know with one’s intelligence is the futile attempt to dispense with time. "

“The function of intelligence is not to dispense with things."

Gisors looked at him:

“What do you mean by ‘intelligence’?”

“In general?"

“Yes.”

Ferral reflected:

“The possession of the means of coercing things or men.”

Gisors smiled imperceptibly. Each time he asked this question the other person, no matter who he was, would answer by producing the image of his desire. But Ferral suddenly became more intense.

“Do you know what was the torture ^flicted on women for infidelity to their masters in this country during the first empires?" he asked.

“WeU, there were several, weren’t there? The most common one, apparendy, consisted in tying them to a raft, their hands cut off at the wrists, eyes gouged, and in.

While he was speaking, Gisors noticed the growing attention and, it seemed, the satisfaction with which Ferral listened.

“. letting them drift down those endless rivers, til they died of hunger or exhaustion, their lover bound beside them on the same raft. ”

“Their lover?"

How was it possible to reconcile such a slip with his concentrated attention, with his look? Gisors could not guess that, in Ferral’s mind, there was no lover; but the latter had already caught himself.

“The most curious thing about it,” Gisors went on, “is that those brutal codes seem to have been drawn up, until the fourth century, by men who were wise, humane and gentle, from all we know of the private lives. ”

“Yes, they were undoubtedly wise.”

Gisors looked at his sharp face. The eyes were closed; the little lamp cast its light upon him from below, little gleams catching in his mustache. Shots in the distance. How many lives were being destroyed out there in the night mist? He was looking at Ferral’s countenance, tense with bitterness over some humiliation that rose from the depth of his being, defending itself with the derisive force of human rancor; the hatred of the sexes hovered over his h^^^tion, as though the oldest hatreds were being reborn from the blood that continued to flow upon the already gorged earth.

New shots, very near this time, caused the glares on the table to tremble.

Gisors had grown used to those shots that came daily from the Chinese city. In spite of Kyo’s telephone caU these, suddenly, made anxious. He did not know the extent of the political role played by Ferral, but he knew this role could be used only in the service of Chiang Kai-shek. He considered it natural to be sitting next to him-he never found himself “compromised,” even in his own eyes-but he no longer wished to be of help to him. New shots, farther away.

“^What’s going on?” he asked.

“I don’t know. The Blue and the Red leaders have made a great proclamation of union. Things seem to be straightening out.”

“He lies,” thought Gisors: “he is at least as well informed as I am.”

“Red or Blue,” said Ferral, “the coolies will continue to be coolies just the same; unless they have been killed off. Don’t you consider it a stupidity characteristic of the human race that a man who has only one life should be willing to lose it for an idea?”

“It is very rare for a man to be able to endure-how shall I say it? — his condition, his fate as a man. ”

He thought of one of Kyo's ideas: all that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends more or less obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker. But he had no desire to discuss Kyo’s ideas with Ferral. He came back to the latter:

“There is always a need for intoxication: this country has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman. Perhaps love is above all the means which the Occidental uses to free himself from man’s fate. ”

Under his words flowed an obscure and hidden counter-current of figures: Ch’en and murder, Clappique and his madness, Katov and the Revolution, May and love, himself and opium. Kyo alone, in his eyes, resisted these categories.

“Far fewer women would indulge in copulation,” answered Ferral, “if they could obtain in the vertical posture the words of admiration which they need and which demand a bed.”

“And how many men?”

“But man can and must deny woman: action, action alone justifies life and satisfies the white man. What would we think if we were told of a painter who makes no paintings? A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do. Nothing else. I am not what such and such an encounter with a man or woman may have done to shape my life; I am my roads, my.

“The roads had to be built.”

Since the last shots, Gisors had resolved to play the justifier no longer.

“If not by you, then by someone else. It’s as if a general were to say: ‘with my soldiers I can shoot the town.' But if he were capable of shooting it, he would not be a general. … For that matter, men are perhaps indifferent to power. What fascinates them in this idea, you see, is not real power, it’s the illusion of being able to do exactly as they please. The king's power is the power to govern, isn’t it? But man has no urge to govern: he has an urge to compel, as you said. To be more than a man, in a world of men. To escape man’s fate, I was saying. Not powerful: all-powerful. The visionary disease, of which the will to power is only the intellectual justification, is the will to god-head: every man dreams of being god.”

What Gisors was saying disturbed Ferral, but his mind was not prepared to welcome it. If the old man did not justify him, he ceased to free him from his obsession:

“In your opinion, why do the gods possess mortal women only in human or bestial forms?”

As if he had seen it, Gisors felt a shadow settling next to them; Ferral had got up.

“You need to involve what is most essential in yourself in order to feel its existence more violently,” said Gisors without looking at him. n8

Ferral did not guess that Gisors’ penetration had its source in the fact that he recognized elements of his o^n personality in those he spoke to, and that one could have made the most subtle portrait of by piecing together his examples of perspicacity.

“A god can possess,” the old man went on with a knowing smile, “but he cannot conquer. The ideal of a god, I believe, is to become a man while knowing that he can recover his power; and the dream of man, to become god without losing his personality. ”

Ferral absolutely had to have a woman. He left.

“A curious case of elaborate self-deception,” Gisors was thinking: “It’s as if he were looking at himself through the eyes of a romantic petty bourgeois.” When, shortly after the war, Gisors had come into contact with the economic powers of Shanghai, he had been not a little astonished to discover that the idea he had always had of a capitalist corresponded to nothing. Almost aU those whom he met at that time had regulated their love- life according to one pattern or another-and almost always the pattern was marriage: the obsession which makes the great business-man, unless he is just another heir, can rarely adjust itself to the dispersion of irregular sexual experiences. “Modern capitalism,” he would explain to his students, “is much more a will to organization than to power. ”