Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

Outraged, he left the table a moment and went over to the window.

Outside, night. Under the trees, the red tail-lights of the cars. In spite of the window-panes he could hear a great babble of voices, laughter, and suddenly, without being able to make out the words, something said in a tone of anger. Passions. All those creatures who were passing in the haze, what weak, stupid lives did they lead? Not even shadows: voices in the night. It was in this hall that blood flowed fast into life. Those who did not gamble were not men. Was not his whole past but one long folly? He returned to the table.

He staked sixty dollars on even, once more. That ball which was slowing down was a destiny-his destiny. He was not struggling with a creature, but with a kind of god; and this god, at the same time, was himself. The ball started off again.

He immediately recovered the passive turmoil he was seeking: again he had the feeling of seizing his life, of holding it suspended to the whim of that absurd baU. Thanks to it he was able for the firrt time to gratify at once the two Clappiques that composed him, the one who wanted to live and the one who wanted to be destroyed. Why look at the watch? He threw Kyo back into a world of dreams; it seemed to him that he was sustaining that ball, no longer with counters, but with his own life-by not meeting Kyo he lost all chance of getting any more money-and with the life of another; and the fact that the other was wholly unaware of it gave to the ball, which was again slowing down, the living reality of conjunctions of planets, of chronic diseases, of everything by which men believe their destinies to be governed. What did that ball, hesitating on the edges of the compartments like a dog’s muzzle, have to do with money? Through its agency he was embracing his own destiny-the only means he had ever found of possessing himself! To win, no longer in order to take flight, but to remain, to risk more, so that the stake of his conquered liberty would render the gesture even more absurd! Leaning on his forearm, no longer even looking at the ball which continued to roll, more and more slowly, the muscles of his calves and shoulders trembling, he was discovering the very meaning of gambling, the frenzy of losing.

5-

Almost everyone was losing; smoke filled the room together with a dismal relaxation of nerves and the shuffle of counters gathered by the rake. Clappique knew he was not through. Why keep his seventeen dollars? He pulled out the ten-dollar bill and staked it again on even.

He was so sure he would lose that he had not played everything-as if to prolong the sensation of losing. As soon as the ball began to hesitate, his right hand followed it, but the left one remained attached to the table. He understood now the intense aliveness of gambling instruments: that ball was not a ball like any other-like those that are not used for gambling; the very hesitancy of its movement lived: that movement, both inevitable and passive, wavered thus because lives were linked to it. While the ball turned none of the players puffed at his lighted cigarette. The ball entered a red compartment, left it, strayed again, entered that of the 9. With his left hand resting on the table, Clappique made an imperceptible gesture of pulling it away. Once more he had lost.

Five dollars on even: the last counter again.

The ball was describing wide circles, not yet alive. The watch, however, distracted Clappique’s eyes from it. He did not wear it on top of his wrist, but underneath, where the pulse is taken. He placed his hand flat on the table and managed to concentrate on the ball. He was discovering that gambling is a suicide without death: all he had to do was to place his money there, to look at the ball and wait, as he would have waited after having swallowed poison; a poison endlessly renewed, together with the pride of taking it. The ball stopped on the 4. Won.

Winning hardly mattered. Yet, if he had lost. He won once more, lost once. Again he had forty dollars left, but he wanted to recover the sensation of turmoil of the last play. The stakes were piling up on the red which had not come out in a long time. This compartment, on which almost all eyes were converging, fascinated him too; but to quit the even numbers would be like giving up the battle. He stuck to even, staked the forty dollars. No stake would ever be worth this one: Kyo had perhaps not yet left: in ten minutes he would surely no longer be able to catch him; but now perhaps he could. Now, now he was playing his last cent, his life and that of another, especially that of another. He knew he was sacrificing Kyo; it was Kyo who was chained to that ball, to that table, and it was he, Clap- pique, who was that ball, which was master of everyone and of himself-of himself who was nevertheless looking at it, living as he had never lived, outside of himself, held spellbound and breathless by an overpowering shame.

He went out at one o’clock: the “club” was closing. He had twenty-four dollars left. The outside air soothed

like that of a forest. The mist was much lighter than at eleven. Perhaps it had rained: everything was wet.- Although he could see neither the boxwood nor the spindle-trees in the darkness, he guessed their dark foliage by their bitter fragrance. “It is r-remarkable,” he thought, “how people can say that the player's sensation is caused by his hope of winning! It's as if they said that men fight duels to become fencing champions. ” But the serenity of the night seemed to have put to flight, together with the fog, all the anxieties, all the griefs of men. And yet. volleys in the distance. “They've begun firing again. ”

He left the garden, making an effort not to think of Kyo, began to walk. Already there were fewer trees. Suddenly, through what was left of the mist, a lusterless moonlight appeared upon the surface of things. Clap- pique raised his eyes. The moon had just emerged from a tattered bank of dead clouds and was slowly drifting into an immense, dark and transparent hole like a lake with its depths full of stars. Its light, growing more intense, gave to all those sealed houses, to the complete desertion of the city, an extra-terrestrial life as if the moon's atmosphere had come and settled in the great sudden silence together with its light. Yet behind that scene of a dead planet there were men. Almost all were asleep, and the disquieting life of sleep was in harmony with the desolation of a buried city, as if this life too had belonged to another planet.

“In the Arabian Nights there are 1-little cities full of sleepers, abandoned for centuries with their mosques under the moon, sleeping-cities-of-the-desert. Which doesn't alter the fact I'm perhaps going to die.” Death, even his own death, was not very real in this atmosphere, so inhuman that he felt himself an intruder. And those who were not sleeping? “There are those who read. Those who are gnawed by their conscience. (Lovely phrase!) Those who make love.” The life of the future trembled behind all that silence. Mad humanity, which nothing could free from itself! The smell of corpses from the Chinese city was borne on the wind which was again rising. Clappique had to struggle for his breath: anguish was returning. He could endure the idea of death more easily than its smell. The latter, little by little, was taking possession of the scene which concealed the madness of the world beneath the appeasement of serenity; the wind still blowing without the slightest murmur, the moon reached the opposite bank, and all fell back into darkness. “Is it a dream?” But the terrific odor threw him back to life, to the anxious night in which the street-lights, just now blurred by mist, formed large tremulous circles on the sidewalks where the rain had blotted out the footprints.

Where now? He hesitated. He would be unable to forget Kyo if he tried to sleep. He was now passing through a street of small bars, tiny brothels with signs written in the languages of all the maritime nations. He entered the first one.