«Ser» a través de un crimen

A stretch of platform at the Temperley station was faintly lit by the light spilling from a door of the telegraph operators' office.

Erdosain sat down on a bench beside the levers for the track switches, in the dark.

He was cold and perhaps feverish.

Moreover, he had the impression that the criminal idea was a continuation of his body, like the man of shadow he might cast in the light.

A red disc glowed at the end of the signal's invisible arm: beyond it other red and green circles were nailed into the darkness, and the curve of the rail, electroplated by those lights, sank its bluish or crimson roundness into the gloom.

At times the red or green light descended.

Then everything stayed still, the chains ceasing to grind on the pulleys and the wires no longer rasping against the stones.

Why do I stay here?

Is it true that I want to kill him?

Or is it that I want to have the will to feel the desire to kill him?

Is that necessary?

Right now she must be rolling around with him.

But what do I care?

Before, when I knew she was alone at home while I was at the café, I suffered for her, suffered because she was unhappy at my side... now—of course... they will have fallen asleep by now, she with her head on his chest.

Name of God!

And this is life?

To be lost, always lost!

But am I really the one I am?

Or am I someone else?

The sadness!

to live with strangeness!

This is what happens to me.

The same as to him.

When he is far away I picture him just as he is, a scoundrel, a wretch.

He almost broke my nose.

But how astonishing!

It turns out now, when all is said and done, that the cuckold who got the beating is him and not me!

Me!...

Truly, life is a buffoonery!

And yet, there is something serious.

Why does he disgust me when he is near?

What does this matter to me?

Does killing him matter to me?

Let's be honest.

Does killing him matter to me?

Or is it that nothing matters to me at all?

That it's all the same to me whether he lives?

And yet I want to have the will to kill him.

If a god came now and asked me: Do you want to have the strength to destroy humanity?

Would I destroy it?

Would I be the one to destroy it?

No, I would not destroy it.

Because being able to do it would take all interest out of the matter.

Besides, what would I do all alone on the earth?

Watch how the dynamos rusted in the workshops and how the skeletons astride the boilers crumbled away?

It's true that he slapped me, but does that matter to me?

What a list!

What a collection!

The captain, Elsa, Barsut, the Man with the Boar's Head, the Astrologer, the Ruffian, Ergueta.

Where can so many monsters have come from?

I myself am off-center, I am not the one I am, and yet I need to do something to have awareness of my existence, to affirm it.

That's it exactly, to affirm it.

Because I am like a dead man.

I do not exist for the captain, nor for Elsa, nor for Barsut.

To everyone I am the negation of life.

I am something like non-being.

A man is not, as action, and so he does not exist.

Or does he exist in spite of not being?

He is and is not.

There are those men.

Surely they have a wife, children, a house.

Perhaps they are wretches.

But if anyone tried to break into their house, to snatch a cent from them or to lay a hand on their wife, they would turn into wild beasts.

Who can answer this question for me?

I myself cannot.

And when I say all these things to myself I am not sad; rather, my soul falls silent within me, my head empty.

Then, after that silence and emptiness, the curiosity of murder rises in me from the heart.

That's it exactly.

I am not mad, since I know how to think, to reason.

The curiosity of murder rises in me, a curiosity that must be my last sorrow, the sorrow of curiosity.

Or the demon of curiosity.

To see how I am by way of a crime.

That, that's it exactly.

To see how my conscience and my sensibility behave in the act of a crime.

It is as if I were not the one thinking the murder, but someone else.

Another who, like me, would be a flat man, a shadow of a man, in the manner of the cinema.

He has relief, he moves, he seems to exist, to suffer, and yet he is nothing more than a shadow.

He lacks life.

Let God say whether this is not well reasoned.

Well then: what would the shadow-man do?

The shadow-man would perceive the deed, but would not feel its heaviness, because he lacked the volume to contain a weight.

He is shadow.

I too see the event, but I do not contain it.

This must be a new theory.

What would a Criminal Judge say if he came to know it?

Would he realize how sincere I am?

But do those people believe in sincerity?

Outside of me, beyond the limits of my body, movement exists, but to them my life must be as inconceivable as living at the same time on the Earth and on the Moon.

I am nothingness to everyone.

And yet, if tomorrow I throw a bomb, or murder Barsut, I become the whole, the man who exists, the man for whom endless generations of jurists prepared punishments, prisons, and theories.

I, who am nothingness, will suddenly set in motion that terrible mechanism of cops, clerks, journalists, lawyers, prosecutors, jailers, prison vans, and no one will see in me a wretch but rather the antisocial man, the enemy who must be cut off from society.

Now that is curious!

And yet, only the crime can affirm my existence, just as only evil affirms the presence of man upon the earth.

And I would be the Erdosain foreseen, feared, defined by the legal code, and among the thousands of anonymous Erdosains who infest the world, I would be the other Erdosain, the authentic one, the one who is and will be.

Truly, all this is curious.

Infinitely sad.

But life cannot be like this.

An inner feeling tells me that life should not be like this.

If I were to discover the particular reason why life cannot be like this, I would prick myself, and like a balloon I would deflate of all this wind of lies, and out of my present appearance there would remain a brand-new man, strong as one of the first gods who breathed life into creation.