Andre Malraux - Man's Fate

“And yet,” he went on after a moment, “note this: these men are ready to die for Japan.”

“For how much longer?”

“Longer than I shall lived’

Gisors had been puffing steadily at his pipe. He opened his eyes:

“One can fool life for a long time, but in the end it always makes us what we were intended to be. Every old man is a confession, believe me, and if old age is usuaUy so empty it is because the men were themselves empty and had managed to conceal it. But that in itself is unimportant. Men should be able to learn that there is no reality, that there are worlds of contemplation- with or without opium-where all is vain. ”

“Where one contemplates what?”

“Perhaps nothing other than this vanity. That’s a great deal.”

Kyo had told May: “Opium plays a great role in my father’s life, but I sometimes wonder if opium determines his life, or if it justifies certain forces that make him uneasy. ”

“If Ch’en,” Gisors went on, “had lived outside of the Revolution, don’t forget that he would undoubtedly have forgotten his murders. Forgotten. ”

“The others have not forgotten them; there have been two terrorist attempts since his death. He did not like women, and I therefore scarcely knew him; but I don’t think he would have lived out of the Revolution even a year. There is no dignity that is not founded on suffering.”

He had barely listened to her.

“Forgotten. ” he continued. “Since Kyo died, I have discovered music. Music alone can speak of death.

I listen to Kama, now, whenever he plays. And yet, without effort on my part (he was speaking to himself as much as to May), what do I still remember? My desires and my anguish, the very weight of my destiny, my life. ”

(But while you are freeing yourself from your life, she was thinking, other Katovs are burning in boilers, other Kyos.)

Gisors’ eyes, as though they were continuing his gestures of forgetfulness, looked away, became absorbed in the world outside: beyond the road, the thousand sounds of the port seemed to be setting out with the waves towards the radiant sea. Those noises matched the dazzling Japanese springtime with all the efforts of men, with the ships, the elevators, the cars, the active crowd. May was thinking of Pei’s letter: it was in work pursued with warlike energy, released over the whole Russian land, in the will of a multitude for whom this work had become life, that her dead had found refuge. The sky was sparkling like the sun in the spaces between the pine- trees; the wind which gently stirred the branches glided over their reclining bodies. It seemed to Gisors that this wind was passing through him like a river, like Time itself, and for the first time the idea that the time which was bringing him closer to death was flowing through him did not isolate him from the world, but joined him to it in a serene accord. He looked do^n at the bristling cranes on the edge of the city, the steamships and the sailboats on the sea, the men-black specks-on the road. “All suffer,” he thought, “and each one suffers because he thinks. At bottom, the mind conceives man only in the eternal, and the consciousness of life can be nothing but anguish. One must not think life with the mind, but with opium. How many of the sufferings scattered about in this light would disappear, if thought were to disappear. ” Liberated from everything, even from being a man, he caressed the stem of his pipe with gratitude, contemplating the bustle of all those unknown creatures who were marching towards death in the dazzling sunlight, each one nursing his deadly parasite in a secret recess of his being. “Every man is a madman,” he went on thinking, “but what is a human destiny if not a life of effort to unite this madman and the universe. ” He saw Ferra! again, lighted by the low lamp against the background of the night full of mist. “Every man dreams of being god. ”

Fifty sirens at once burst upon the air: today was the eve of a festival, and work was over. Before any change was visible in the port, tiny men emerged, like scouts, upon the straight road that led to the city, and soon the crowd covered it, distant and black, in a din of automobile horns: foremen and laborers were leaving work together. It was approaching, as if for an attack, with the great uneasy movement of every crowd beheld from a distance. Gisors had seen the dash of animals towards watering-holes, at night-fall: one, several, then all, thrown in the direction of the water by a force that seemed to fall from the darkness; in his memory, opium gave to their cosmic rush a savage harmony, and the men lost in the distant clatter of their wooden clogs all seemed mad, separated from the universe whose heart beating somewhere up there in the shimmering light seized them and threw them back upon solitude, like the grains of some unknown harvest. Very high up, the light clouds passed above the dark pine trees, and little by little became absorbed in the sky; and it seemed to him that one of their group, precisely the one he was looking at, expressed the men he had known or loved, and who were dead.

Humanity was dense and heavy, heavy with flesh, with blood, with suffering, eternally clinging to itself like all that dies; but even blood, even flesh, even suffering, even death was being absorbed up there in the light like music in the silent night; he thought of Kama’s music, and human grief seemed to him to rise and to lose itself in the very song of earth; upon the quivering release hidden within him like his heart, the grief which he had mastered slowly closed its inhuman arms.

“Do you smoke much?" she repeated.

She had already asked this, but he had not heard her. His eyes returned to the room:

“Do you think I don’t guess what you are thinking, and do you think I don’t know it better than you? Do you even think it would not be easy for me to ask you by what right you judge me?”

He looked at her:

“Have you no desire to have a child?”

She did not answer: this always passionate desire now seemed to her a betrayal. But she was contemplating his serene face with terror. It was in truth returning from the deep regions of death, foreign like one of the corpses in the common ditches. In the repression that had beaten down upon exhausted China, in the anguish or hope of the masses, Kyo’s activity remained incrusted like the inscriptions of the early empires in the river gorges. But even old China, which these few men had hurled irrevocably into the darkness of the past with the roar of an avalanche, was not more effaced from the world than the meaning of Kyo’s life from the face of his father. He went on:

“The only thing I loved has been torn from me, you see, and you expect me to remain the same. Do you think my love was not as great as yours-you whose life has not even changed?”

“As the body of a living person who becomes a dead one does not change. ”

He took her hand:

“You know the phrase: ‘It takes nine months to make a man, and a single day to kill him.’ We both know this as well as one can know it. May, listen: it does not take nine months, it takes fifty years to make a man, fifty years of sacrifice, of will, of. of so many things! And when this man is complete, when there is nothing left in him of childhood, nor of adolescence, when he is really a man-he is good for nothing but to die.”

She looked at him, stunned: he was looking at the clouds.

“I loved Kyo as few men love their children, you know that. ”

He was still holding her hand; he drew it towards him, took it between his two hands:

“Listen to me: one must love the living and not the dead.”

“I am not going to Moscow to love.”

He looked out upon the magnificent bay, saturated with sunlight. She had withdrawn her hand.