The Incident at Antioch Read online

  PAULA: I had a son by him, named David—remember that name.

  VILLEMBRAY: So go take care of him!

  PAULA: Who’s David, my son? Who’s that man named Mokhtar? I told him: “Forget about the armed plot and its orders of the day. It’s that old obscurantist mindset2 that’s feeding your obsession with attacking. Come with me into the equality of people as they think and inspire them to carry on, which is something worthy in itself.”

  But he, under Cephas’s influence, like a man who looks instead of listening, got all fired up and rushed off to the military gate in as many fortresses as he could.

  As our paths diverged, I left him, and have come here to the source, to speak to Cephas.

  Hey you, come out from under your rock! Come on! You’re enough of a nihilist to cheerfully acknowledge political consistency. You’ve been searching for it in a vacuum. But its fullness is at hand. No one will turn you away.

  VILLEMBRAY: Then who will fry my little fish? I’m the artisan of the miniature, I’m not the priest of the great cosmic Whole.

  PAULA: Forget about everything having to be small! We’ve changed all that. Under our influence this country is becoming all about inventing a politics. Everyone will make the spread of illegality the law here.

  VILLEMBRAY: I don’t believe it. Let me just be an old ox tied to a yellow cork float.3 Why have you come looking for me? Do you need my downfall to trip up Cephas? I’m the forgetting of an older city.

  Up the streets of this other city surrounding us, as black as from a failing fire, processions of people file by all day long. Is it you? Is it the others? Is it Cephas? I keep my distance from everyone coming here. Mindlessly elated, they’re taking up their future position of command. Law is dead in the city, where everyone tightly clutches the anxiety, hidden from their own view, that drives them.

  PAULA: Come with me in the rapture of a new day! Come and I’ll love you still! Come, and be what results from yourself!

  SCENE 2: In the place of truths.

  CEPHAS: Workers of the factory, now is the winter of the Other.4

  The city in the old men’s hands is freezing its pipes. Everywhere there’s the sound of the rivers’ solid surface cracking. The gasoline shortage is keeping all but some very green buses5 from gliding over the frozen puddles.

  If you look through the slit in my eyes, you’ll see, superimposed over the world’s glaciers, a crowd of people running and shouting.

  MOKHTAR: True, the masses are turning toward our impending victory. What are our orders?

  CEPHAS: The total disruption of everything is continuing. In the absence of Villembray, the government’s efforts are all in vain.

  At night, the streets disappear from themselves and are no more than trenches. The police slink around in search of their lost shadows.6

  The money’s so worthless that people warm themselves by the fires they light with it.

  Waiting is spreading an empire of necessity over everyone.

  Meanwhile, winter has the city in its grip, and we’re debating the right moment to force something that has already come to an end by itself to give up.

  CAMILLE: It’s wrong to wait, in thrall to the present moment. Because it’s the long haul that matters.

  CEPHAS: I loathe it when things drag on! Anything that lasts only deteriorates. Not the whole body, just the joints, which can snap from a sudden movement.

  Our task, informed by an all-consuming obsession, is to turn the long process of dying into destruction. To whack the dying old fool, and to hell with him!

  MOKHTAR: And then what? The old world keeps on stinking up whatever it’s replaced by. The odor’s so strong that to protect yourself from it you have to put back up as many walls, cubicles and air conditioners, and private offices as the corpse itself contained.

  CEPHAS: Our people’s minds are as deadened as can be. The expensive trappings of Empire don’t cheer them up, nor do the songs that are poured into their ears. The unlimited opportunity for sex, although exciting at first, leaves them secretly wishing for the laws to be restored.

  I was born from that engrossment in any brief debauchery. I danced far into the night under the troops’ shelling. I’d whisper in the ears of the best-looking women, their breasts bare under their mesh camisoles, though I couldn’t hear the obscene things I was saying to them.

  Today, all the poetry of hearts uniting, all playfulness and spontaneity have been taken away from us.

  Our only objective now is to keep on with the decline, and to drag it out, day after day, by making it feel endless.

  Nothing has any merit other than being published in the millions of requisite copies, then quickly disappearing in the general confusion.

  You and I, however, unconcerned about number, have regard only for our truth and our mission.

  The content of all our thought is intent on destroying whatever keeps it from spreading.

  MOKHTAR: But what will you say to all the people you call mind-deadened, Cephas?

  CEPHAS: They’ll agree that when it comes to a show, there’s nothing more thrilling than the spectacle of destruction. (MADAME PINTRE laughs.) Why are you laughing?

  MADAME PINTRE: They’re going to love you, Cephas! You’ll be such a brilliant buffoon! Is your way with words only good for performing the play of nothingness?

  CEPHAS: Insurrection is an art.7 We’ve achieved what all prior instances of politics lacked.

  CAMILLE: What’s that?

  CEPHAS: Precision.

  I observe you through our connected bodies; I can see your determination.

  Parliamentary heads of state assess pressures and threats. They scrutinize the unions’ moods and are focused on their colleagues’ attitudes. To check up on their image and allay their doubts, they have the morning editorials brought to them. They take care of the cattle breeders and the engineers, the doctors and the haberdashers, the elderly and the drugstores. They spread the gel of funds and aid all over the head of society. They make decisions only under duress; they do more cutting than commanding.

  We’re not of that ilk. We appeal to a secret prophecy in everyone: the prophecy that leads them, in the legal vacuum, to the crossroads of all or nothing.

  Sure, many people, the ones anxious about not getting a seat, have cold feet.

  But in others, and there are suddenly plenty of them, like the woman alienated from everything by a fickle love and bitter resentment, the mindset of the serious gambler is developing.

  And we can’t allow concern for the faint-hearted to come between us or stand in our way.

  MADAME PINTRE: You’ve explained what you want perfectly. (She laughs.)

  CEPHAS: Why are you laughing?

  MADAME PINTRE: And why don’t you, the leader who decides everything based on knowing how things really are, have a clue as to why I’m laughing?

  CEPHAS: You better watch out! I can drag you off, laughing and raging, into the eye of the storm.

  MOKHTAR: Granted, we’ve known you for a long time, Cephas. You have our trust. But we study you, too.

  Where I come from we say: the free man is more like someone who came in through the window the day before yesterday than like someone who’s had the key to the door for years.

  CEPHAS: Don’t speak so cryptically. Come right out and say Paula, you proverb-loving comrade.

  CAMILLE: Paula’s beautiful. I mean … Paula’s come here among us like a provocation. I know I’m being pressured to stop wanting the attack to happen. Paula’s turning our patience into an endless waiting game. I’ve had it with these freezing barracks of hers.

  MADAME PINTRE: Nothing is so enslaved that the freshness of an idea can’t set it free; nothing is so solemn that factory-based politics8 isn’t surer; nothing is so sure that consistency isn’t better. Paula realizes as we do that power, even if it’s there for the taking, isn’t always the right thing for us to take.

  MOKHTAR: But what if that’s what they all want? And what if they ask us on the shop f
loor when the right time is going to be? And what if that muttering starts to grow, like the wind whipping up behind the hedges, out of the protest against our slowness?

  CAMILLE: Our young people haven’t had so many victories that they should be deprived yet again of such an easy one.

  MADAME PINTRE: Is working-class thought, which the world has been awaiting for two hundred years and having doubts about for the last twenty, just a sick man startled awake from a long sleep by the collapse of the nursing home roof? If I turn my head to the left toward the gate, that ornate construction of plundered iron, I can see that it’s the rebirth of the rally.

  CEPHAS: Didn’t Paula marry Mokhtar? Didn’t she have a son by him?

  MOKHTAR: Did I really marry her? Did I have a son? I can’t remember anymore. Paula doesn’t need me, since my fervor seems trivial to her. She hardly listens anymore, I’ll have you know. She’s like someone who’s walking beside a wall, and, with her eyes shut, detects the blue square of a cranny that no one can follow her into.

  Cephas! Rally us!

  CEPHAS: I’m the most anonymous9 one of you all, and that’s why there’s no need for you either to love or to fear me. (Turning to face MADAME PINTRE:) Why are you using a smile to object?

  MADAME PINTRE: Just what have you suggested that I need to say either yes or no to? I’m a big, weary woman. What annoys you about my take on the disaster is that I think it only changes the mood of the times, not their substance.

  CEPHAS: Haven’t you waited for this moment, like everyone else? Weren’t you one of the people positively elated by the rallying of the forces and numbers?

  CAMILLE: To us, in the breach of youth, it feels like the night before a big battle.

  Chosen to fire the first shot, we can’t sleep and keep peering around in the dark for the flame of a cigarette lighter out there.10

  SCENE 3: In the place of the war reserves.

  An ever-more disheveled VILLEMBRAY is stretched out on a crate. Next to him is A LITTLE DOG. ENTER MAURY and MAURY.

  JEAN MAURY: Mr. Villembray?

  VILLEMBRAY (without moving or looking up): The parliamentary humanist has come to pay me a visit. De Gaulle! Here are the disciples of Man-in-himself. Say hello to Man this instant.

  (THE DOG wags his tail.)

  PIERRE MAURY: We’ve come …

  VILLEMBRAY: … to bow and scrape before me. I know Man, gentlemen: he never stops blaming himself for having been thoroughly inhuman. Gentlemen of Man, go ahead and entertain me with your latest outrages.

  JEAN MAURY (to PIERRE MAURY): Should we go?

  VILLEMBRAY: De Gaulle, my nice little fox terrier, if Man, the Frenchman, the most precious capital,11 makes a move to leave, bite him!

  (DE GAULLE comes down off the crate.)

  PIERRE MAURY: Watch out for the mutt; he looks vicious.

  VILLEMBRAY: He’s absolutely ferocious. De Gaulle, show Man-in-himself how ferocious you are. (THE DOG barks just once.) De Gaulle is sparing with the evidence of his fury. As soon as you see Man, show him just a tiny bit of your power, so as not to have to use it. Man is naturally fearful.

  PIERRE MAURY: Let me take the plunge, I …

  VILLEMBRAY: Don’t—you’ll drown. Man can drown in his own toothbrush glass.

  JEAN MAURY: Your jokes12 are offensive, sir. We have our dignity …

  VILLEMBRAY: … Your human dignity! Absolutely! Your human dignity!

  JEAN MAURY: And the dignity of democratically elected representatives, sir. We represent lots of people, keep that in mind.

  PIERRE MAURY: Better yet, we represent the movers and shakers in society, youth, cutting-edge technicians, free women. Just think about that.

  VILLEMBRAY: I’m thinking about it all right! We’re always saying as much, my dog and I. Whatever would we do without the representatives of humanity as a whole? Shouldn’t we salute the non-force and non-thought in you? The cheerful gurgling? With your smug attitude, quiet republican force13 continues on its merry way. I see the millions of whiny fools behind you that all power is based on. What good is cynicism without the idiots it enthralls? Would there be the least bit of pleasure in power if pompous asses weren’t endlessly griping about it? The world’s hardly a barrel of laughs. Nothing eases the mind more than seeing you sprinting behind our wagons today, with your pants rolled up to your knees and your pipes between your teeth, to beg the drivers to obey the rules of the road and not run over self-respecting Man at some bend in the road. Because self-respecting Man, Man with his recharged batteries, well-adjusted, consciousness-raised Man, Man the caretaker of his miniscule difference, he walks, chin up in the sun, his knapsack on his back.

  JEAN MAURY (to PIERRE MAURY): Aren’t those insults? Shouldn’t we leave?

  PIERRE MAURY (to JEAN MAURY): Think about what’s at stake. Villembray’s a crafty one. He’s testing us. Let’s not fall for it. (To VILLEMBRAY:) Sir, I’ve been appointed by the Democratic Socialist Party and the Confederation of Salaried Employees to request your signature on a new appeal to people of good will in this country.

  VILLEMBRAY: Ha, ha! I’m chewing parsley soaked in vinegar, I’m rolling around in Charles de Gaulle’s doghouse, gnawing on the wood the way he does on an Egyptian sheep bone pilfered from the tomb of a god! I’m frolicking around with the kite of Good Will.14

  (VILLEMBRAY and his DOG jump high up in the air, very gracefully, over the heads of the other two, almost right up to the flies, defying gravity.)

  VILLEMBRAY (from up above): The wind in my wings, unfettered from everything deliberate! Hey, you democrats, cootchy-cootchy-coo! Don’t be shy; give it a try!

  (DE GAULLE barks furiously, jumping higher and higher.)

  JEAN MAURY: The poor bastard!

  PIERRE MAURY: Claude Villembray has lost his mind! Let’s go tell the left-wing papers.

  JEAN MAURY: And the right-wing ones too. This is some event! Some headlines this will make!

  (THE MAURYS take out a camera and try to snap a shot of VILLEMBRAY and his flying dog. At that very moment, though, VILLEMBRAY and DE GAULLE drop back to earth with a thud.)

  THE MAURYS (in unison): Missed the shot! Damn it!

  VILLEMBRAY (all out of breath at first, then increasingly vehemently): Answer me! Why? Two unremarkable guys like you, unremarkably equipped to pass unnoticed by anyone here on earth. What good does it do you to think you’re involved in politics? Running on the sidewalk in track suits over your hairy legs, nimbly avoiding trashcans—with talents like yours you could do anything.

  PIERRE MAURY: Man should be involved in public affairs. Man is only fulfilled by being a responsible citizen.

  VILLEMBRAY: You brothers with your April hair15 and frizzy beards! Is there anything you see that doesn’t seem foreign and brutal to you? Shadowy Muslims are bound with chains of steel. Their eyes scrutinize you mercilessly. Solitary single-mindedness! Kids with knives, girls with messy blue hair, swathed in leather and cigarette smoke! You hug the walls at their mere approach; you rent body armor and ammo. A few thinkers cling to these modern scraps of hatred, whose words fill you with dread and brutality.

  Behind you, of course, is the vapid office crowd. The relentless coming and going of elevators and briefcases, the head manager flanked by his assistant manager, the wannabe manager with his secretaries escorting him like bodyguards. The lit-up screens of information technology the world over! The bank and the post office! Education and local government! Ministries and newspapers! City halls and social services bureaus! Checks and traffic tickets! Insurance, ranks, suggestions! The horror! Ten million people writing to each other on the correct forms. And all of them living off a few Arabs embedded in the machinery.

  What’s wrong with you, O people scattered by the vitreous vacuity of huge office towers? Door-to-door salesmen’s binders, the furious clacking of keyboards! Timestamps and blind signatures!

  Maury! Maury! Who’s proclaiming through you that nothingness is something? Who’s demanding people’s right to freely pursue th
eir parasitic non-existence? Away with you, you spindly-footed fowls! De Gaulle! Sic the hens! Sic the chickens! Sic the goslings and ostriches! I’m strewing the confetti of the whole wide world all around me!

  (VILLEMBRAY rips to shreds a hundred newspapers that he got from who knows where, covering the whole stage with paper. DE GAULLE runs around THE MAURYS, yelping shrilly. Suddenly everything comes to a halt. VILLEMBRAY just stands there, seeming burned out. A silence ensues.)

  JEAN MAURY: And what might I ask is the point of all this ranting and raving?

  PIERRE MAURY: Do you think you’re scaring us?

  JEAN MAURY: You’re nothing anymore, nothing at all. A piece of shit.

  PIERRE MAURY: Absolutely! You’re not even worth one of De Gau.., one of your dog’s turds.

  JEAN MAURY: You’re through, you’ve had it, you’re all washed up.

  PIERRE MAURY: Nobody talks about you on TV anymore, and the union hasn’t mentioned you in its press releases for the past fourteen months.

  JEAN MAURY: The Unity Party doesn’t give a flying fuck about you.

  PIERRE MAURY: And here’s what the Democratic Socialist Party has to say to you! (He gives him the finger.)

  JEAN MAURY: A politician who’s been put out to pasture …

  PIERRE MAURY: An old parliament rag …

  JEAN MAURY: A ministry mop …

  PIERRE MAURY: No cop would even bother to arrest you in the wee hours of the morning.

  JEAN MAURY: No gossip rag would even bother to insinuate that you’re fond of orgies.

  PIERRE MAURY: No review would even bother to review you.

  JEAN MAURY: Even the conservatives don’t want to conserve you.

  PIERRE MAURY: You’re too old-hat for retrospectives.

  JEAN MAURY: And not inaugural enough for inaugurations.

  PIERRE MAURY: A nobody in the past, a nobody in the present, a nobody in the future.

  JEAN MAURY: And he puts on this big act for our benefit!

  PIERRE MAURY: And he lectures us!

  JEAN MAURY: You blowhard!

  PIERRE MAURY: You loudmouth!

  JEAN MAURY: You informer!

  PIERRE MAURY: You totalitarian!