CHAPTER FIVE

While the car rolled on, I thought again about the absurdity of my situation. But I did not succeed in making the decision to put an end to it. This obstinacy of mine surprised me. I blamed myself for it, all the while complacently enjoying it. The interest that I harbor for Djinn could not be its only cause. There also had to be, quite certainly, curiosity. And what else yet?

I felt pulled along in a chain of episodes and encounters, in which chance probably played no part at all. I was the only one who did not grasp its profound causality. These successive mysteries made me think of a sort of treasure hunt: one progresses from clue to clue, and discovers the solution only at the very end. And the treasure, it was Djinn!

I wondered, as well, about the kind of work the organization expected of me. Were they afraid to tell me openly about it? Was it so disreputable a job? What was the meaning of these endless preliminaries? And why did they leave me so little initiative in the matter?

This total absence of information, I hoped just the same that it was only temporary: perhaps I was first supposed to pass through this initial phase, where I would be put to the test. The treasure hunt thus became, in my romantic mind, like a journey of initiation.

As for my recent transformation into this classic character of a blind man led by a child, it was meant no doubt to arouse people’s sympathy, and thereby put their suspicions to rest. But, as for passing unnoticed in the crowd, as I had been sternly instructed to, it seemed to me a very dubious way.

Beyond that, a precise subject of concern kept coming back to preoccupy me: where were we going now? Which streets, which boulevards were we following? Towards which suburbs were we thus driving? Towards what revelation? Or else, toward what new secret? Was the trip to get there going to be long?

This last point above all—the length of the car ride—nagged at me, without a specific reason. Perhaps Jean was authorized to tell me? Taking a chance, I asked him about it. But he answered that he had no idea himself, which seemed even stranger to me (inasmuch, at least, as I believed it).

The driver, who could hear all we were saying, then intervened to reassure me:

“Don’t worry. We’ll get there soon.”

But instead, I perceived, in these two sentences, a vague threat I couldn’t explain. In any case, it didn’t mean much. I listened to the sounds of the street, around us, but they provided no indication of the sections of town we were driving through. Perhaps, however, the traffic here was less intense.

Next, Jean offered me a mint lozenge. I answered that I would take one. But it was rather out of courtesy. So, he touched my left arm, saying:

“Here, give me your hand.”

I offered it to him, my palm extended. He placed in it a piece of half melted candy, sort of sticky, like all children carry in their pockets. I really didn’t feel at all like it anymore, but I dared not confess it to the donor: once I had accepted the candy, it became impossible to return it.

So I put it into my mouth, quite against my will. I immediately thought it had a weird taste, flat and bitter at the same time. I felt very much like spitting it out again. I abstained, once more to spare the kid’s feelings. For, unable to see him, I could never know whether he was not precisely watching me at that very moment.

I was discovering here a paradoxical consequence of blindness: a blind person can no longer do anything secretly! Those poor people who can’t see constantly fear being seen. In order to escape this unpleasant feeling, in a rather illogical reflex, I closed my eyes behind my black glasses.

I slept, I am sure of it; or, at least, I dozed off. But I don’t know for how long.

“Wake up,” said the kid’s voice, “we’re getting off here.”

And he was shaking me lightly, at the same time. I now suspect that mint lozenge, with its suspicious flavor, was drugged with sleeping medicine; for I am hardly in the habit of falling asleep this way in cars. My friend Jean has drugged me, that is most likely, just as he must have been ordered to. This way, I won’t even know the length of the trip we have just taken.

The car has stopped. And my youthful guide has already paid the fare (if, however, it is really a cab, which seems to me to be less and less certain). I no longer sense any presence in the driver’s seat. And I have the confused feeling that I am no longer in the same car.

I find it hard to regain my wits. The darkness in which I am still steeped makes waking even more difficult, and also leaves it more uncertain. I have a feeling that my sleep continues, while I dream that I am coming out of it. Furthermore, I no longer have the slightest idea of the time.

“Hurry. We are not early.”

My guardian angel is growing anxious and lets me know straightaway, in his funny voice that goes off-key. I extract myself with difficulty from the car, and I stand as well as I can. I feel quite woozy, as though I had been drinking too much.

“Now,” I say, “give me back my cane.”

The kid places it in my right hand, and then he grabs the left one to pull me vigorously along.

“Don’t go so fast. You’re going to make me lose my balance.”

“We’re going to be late, if you drag your feet.”

“Where are we going now?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m not allowed to tell you. And besides, it doesn’t have a name.”

The place is, at any rate, quite silent. It seems to me that there is no longer anyone around us. I can hear neither voices nor footsteps. We are walking on gravel. Then the feeling of the ground changes. We step over a threshold and we enter a building.

There, we follow a rather complex course the kid seems to know by heart, for he never hesitates when changing direction. A wooden floor has replaced the stone of the entryway.

Possibly, there is someone else, now, who is walking beside us, or rather ahead of us, to show us the way. Indeed, if I stop for a second, my young guide, who holds me by the hand, stops also, and I seem then to detect, just ahead, a third footstep that continues for a few seconds more. But it is difficult to say for sure.

“Don’t stop,” says the kid.

And a few feet farther:

“Pay attention, we’re coming to some stairs. Take the banister in your right hand. If your cane is in the way, give it to me.”

No, instinctively, I prefer not to relinquish it. I can sense a danger of sorts closing in on us. So I grasp, with the same hand, the iron banister and the curved handle of the cane. I stand ready for any eventuality. If something too disquieting happens, I am getting ready to suddenly pull my black goggles off with my left hand (which the kid holds rather loosely in his own), and to brandish, with the right, my iron tipped cane to serve as a defensive weapon.

But no alarming event occurs. After having climbed one floor, up a very steep staircase, we soon arrive at a room where a meeting, it seems, is in progress. Jean has warned me before walking in, adding in a whisper:

“Don’t make any noise. We are the last ones. Let’s not get ourselves noticed.”

He has softly opened the door, and I follow him, still led by the hand, like a small child. There is a crowd in the room: I can tell right away because of the very faint—but numerous—assorted sounds, breathing, suppressed coughing, the rumpling of fabric, slight impacts or furtive sliding sounds, soles imperceptibly scraping the floor, etc.

Yet, all these people remain motionless, I am convinced of it. But they have probably remained standing, and they move a little in place, that can’t be helped. Since I haven’t been shown a seat, I remain standing, too. Around us, no one says anything.

And suddenly, in this silence quickened by many attentive presences, the long-awaited surprise comes at last. Djinn is here, in the room, her lovely voice rises a few feet from me. And I feel, suddenly, rewarded for all my patience.

“I have gathered you here,” she says, “in order to give you some explanations, henceforth necessary. . . .”

I imagine her at a podium, standing as well, and facing her audience. Is there a table in front of her, as in a classroom? And how is Djinn dressed? Is she still wearing her raincoat and her felt hat? Or else, has she taken them off for this meeting? What about her dark glasses, has she kept them on?

For the first time, I am dying to remove mine. But nobody has yet give me permission; and this is not after all the right moment, with all these people nearby who can see me. Not counting Djinn herself . . . I must therefore be satisfied with what is offered me: the delicious voice with its hint of an American accent.

“. . . clandestine international organization . . . partitioning the tasks . . . great humanitarian enterprise . . .”

What great humanitarian enterprise? What is she talking about? Suddenly, I become aware of my frivolity: I’m not even listening to what she says! Charmed by her exotic intonations, quite busy imagining the face and the mouth from which they come (is she smiling? Or else is she putting on that phony gang-leader look?), I have forgotten the main thing: to pay attention to the information contained in her words; I am savoring them instead of registering their meaning. And all the time, I claimed to be so anxious to learn more about my future work!

But now, Djinn has stopped speaking. What has she just said, exactly? I try in vain to remember. I have the vague idea that they were only words of greeting, of welcome into the organization, and that the most important part remains yet to come. But why is she silent? And what are the other members of the audience doing in the meantime? Nobody moves around me, nor evidences any surprise.

I don’t know if it’s emotional, but a bothersome itching is annoying my right eye. Vigorous blinking does not succeed in getting rid of it. I try to find a way to scratch discreetly. My left hand has remained held in the kid’s, and he is not letting go, and the right one is encumbered with the cane. Yet, unable to stand it any longer, I attempt with that right hand to rub at least the area around my eye.

Inconvenienced by the curved handle of the cane, I make a clumsy gesture, and the thick frame of the glasses slides upward, to my eyebrows. As a matter of fact, the goggles have barely moved, but the space created between my skin and the rubber rim is still enough to allow me to glimpse what is directly on my right. . . .

It leaves me stupefied. I had hardly guessed anything like this. . . . I slowly move my head, in order to sweep a wider angle through my narrowed field of vision. What I see, on all sides, only confirms my initial stupefaction: I have the feeling that I am in front of my own image, multiplied twenty or thirty-fold.

The entire room is, in fact, full of blind men, phony blind men as well, most likely: young men my own age, dressed in various ways (but, all in all, pretty much like me), with the same heavy black goggles over their eyes, the same white cane in the right hand, a kid just like mine holding them by the left hand.

They are all turned in the same direction, toward the stage. Each pair—a blind man and his guide—is separated from the others by an empty space, always about the same, as if one had taken care to arrange, on carefully marked squares, a series of identical statuettes.

And, suddenly, a stupid feeling of jealousy tightens my heart: It isn’t me then that Djinn was speaking to! I did know she was addressing a large assembly. But it is quite something else to see, with my own eyes, that Djinn has already recruited two or three dozen guys, who are little different from me and treated in exactly the same way. I am nothing more, to her, than the least remarkable among them.

But just at that moment, Djinn resumes speaking. Most strangely, she picks up her speech right in the middle of a sentence, without; repeating the words that came before so as to preserve the coherence of her remarks. And she says nothing to justify this interruption; her tone is exactly the same as if there had not been any.

“. . . will allow you not to awaken suspicions . . .”

Having abandoned all prudence (and all obedience to the orders that I suddenly can’t bear any longer), I manage to turn my head sufficiently, by twisting my neck and raising my chin, so as to place the center of the stage in my visual field. . . .

I don’t understand right away what’s going on. . . . But soon I must surrender to the evidence: there is a lecturer’s table all right, but no one behind it! Djinn is not there at all, nor anywhere else in the room.

It is just a loudspeaker that is broadcasting her address, recorded I know not where nor when. The machine is placed on the table, perfectly visible, almost indecent. It had probably stopped, following some technical trouble: a technician is just now checking the wires, which he must have just plugged back in. . . .

All the charm of that fresh and sensuous voice has disappeared suddenly. No doubt the rest of the recording is of the same excellent quality; the words continue their lilting song from beyond the Atlantic; the tape recorder faithfully reproduces its sonorities, the melody, down to the slightest inflection. . . .

But, now that the illusion of her physical presence has vanished, I have lost all feeling of contact with that music, so sweet to my ears a moment before. My discovery of the ruse has broken the magical spell of the speech, which has then become dull and cold: the magnetic tape now reels it off with the anonymous neutrality of an airport announcement. So much so that, now, I no longer have any trouble at all listening to its words nor discovering meaning in them.

The faceless voice is in the process of explaining to us our roles and our future functions. But she does not divulge them entirely, she gives us only their broad outlines. She elaborates more on the goals to be pursued than on the methods: it is because of a concern for efficiency that she prefers, she says again, to divulge to us, for the moment, only that which is strictly necessary.

I have not followed well, as I said, the beginning of her expose. But it seems to me however that I have grasped the essentials: what I am now hearing allows me in any case to assume that I did, for I can find in it no major obscurities (except those intentionally worked in there by the speaker).

We have then, she informs us, been enlisted, the others and I, in an international movement of struggle against machinism. The classified ad that led me (after a brief exchange of letters, with a post-office box) to meet Djinn in the abandoned workshop, had already led me to assume it as much. But I had not fully fathomed the consequences of the slogan being used: “For a life more free and rid of the imperialism of machines.”

In fact, the organization’s ideology is rather simple, simplistic even or so it seems: “The time has come to free ourselves from machines, for they, and nothing else, oppress us. Men believe that machines work for them. While men, on the contrary, hence-forth work for machines. More and more, machines command us, and we obey them.

“Machinism, above all, is responsible for the division of work into tiny fragments devoid of all meaning. The automated tool demands the performance by each worker of a single gesture, he must repeat from morning to night, all his life long. Fragmentation is evident then in manual work. But it is also becoming the rule in any other branch of human activity.

“This, in all cases, the long-term product of our work (manufactured goods, service, or intellectual study) escapes us entirely. The worker never knows either the form of the whole, or its ultimate use, except in a theoretical and purely abstract way. No responsibility accrues to him, no pride can he reap from it. He is nothing but an infinitesimally small link in the immense chain of production, bringing only a modification of detail to a spare part, to an isolated cog, that have no significance in themselves.

“No one, in any domain, any longer produces anything complete. And man’s conscience and awareness have been shattered. But mark my word: it is our alienation by the machine that has brought forth capitalism and Soviet bureaucracy, and not the contrary. It is the atomization of the entire universe that has begotten the atomic bomb.

“Yet, at the beginning of this century, the ruling class, the only one to be spared, still kept decision-making power. Henceforth, the machine that thinks—that is to say, the computer—has taken these away as well. We are no longer anything more than slaves, working toward our own destruction, in the service—and for the greater glory—of the Almighty God of the Mechanical.”

On the subject of the means for raising the consciousness of the masses, Djinn is more discreet and less explicit. She speaks of “peaceful terrorism” and “dramatic” actions staged by us in the midst of the crowd, in the subway, in city squares, in offices and in factories. . . .

And yet, something disturbs me about these fine words: it is the fate meant for us, we, the agents of the program’s execution: our role is in total contradiction to the goals that it proposes. Up to now at least, this program has hardly been applied to us. We, on the contrary, have been manipulated, without any regard for our free will. And now still, it has been admitted that only partial knowledge of the whole is permitted us. They want to raise our consciousness, but they start out by preventing us from seeing. Finally, to top it all off, it’s a machine that talks to us, persuading us, directing us. . . .

Once again, I am filled with mistrust. I sense some unknown, obscure danger floating over this trumped-up meeting. This roomful of phony blind men is a trap, in which I have allowed myself to be caught. Through the narrow slit, which I have carefully maintained under the right edge of my cumbersome glasses, I glance at my closest neighbor, a tall blond guy who wears a white leather windbreaker, rather chic, open over a bright blue pullover. . . .

He has also (as I suspected a moment ago), man-aged to slip by a fraction of an inch the tight-fitting contraption that blinded him, so as to glimpse the surroundings on his left; in such a way that our side-long glances have crossed, I am certain of it. A slight tightening of his mouth gives me, besides, a sign of connivance. I return it, in the form of the same grimace, which can pass for a smile in his direction.

The kid who accompanies him, and who holds his left hand, has noticed nothing of our carryings-on, it seems to me. Little Jean hasn’t either, certainly, for he, he is clearly located outside this limited exchange. Meanwhile, the harangue goes on, calling out to us in no uncertain terms:

“The machine is watching you: fear it no longer! The machine gives you orders: obey it no longer! The machine demands all your time: surrender it no longer! The machine thinks itself superior to men: prefer it over them no longer!”

At this point, I see that the character in the white zippered jacket, who has like me kept his blind man’s cane in his right hand, slips it discreetly behind his back, toward his left, so as to bring its sharp tip closer to me. With that iron tip, he noiselessly draws complicated signs on the ground.

Indeed, this colleague of mine, as rebellious as I, is trying to communicate something to me. But I can’t seem to understand what he wants to tell me. He repeats several times for me the same series of short, straight lines and intertwining curves. I persist vainly in my attempts to decipher them; my very limited view of the floor, distorted furthermore by the excessive angle, doesn’t help, that’s for sure.

“We have discovered,” the recorded voice goes on, “a simple solution to save our brothers. Make them aware of it. Put it in their head without telling them, almost without their knowing it. And turn them themselves into new propagandists . . .”

At this point, I sense a sudden agitation behind me. Hurried footsteps, very near, break the silence. I feel a violent shock, at the base of my skull, and a very sharp pain. . . .