He grabs a tube, unscrews the cap. The scent of fresh melon and cut grass fills the air in the bathroom. He presses lightly and a thick, greenish cream oozes out. It’s a mask that Alice used on Friday nights. Why Friday? Antoine wasn’t curious enough to ask his wife about the secrets of her beauty regimen. He tolerated them, made no comments, didn’t laugh at them. He coats his face with the cream, breathes deeply, and goes back to bed. He notices a spider on the ceiling. Imagines what it must be like up there, with eight eyes and eight legs. Would he be lonely? Would he spend the night lying in wait for prey? Gradually the herbal mask hardens on his face. He closes his eyes. A mild fear, unnamed, sweeps over him like a breeze announcing a distant storm. He thinks about his son.
Antoine is dazzled by Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Describing the first years of her life and her feverish discussions with her classmates, Simone de Beauvoir stimulates his desire to be different, too. In those pages he sees for the first time the name of Jean-Paul Sartre. Spurred by young Simone’s infatuation with the École normale student whom she refers to at the end of her autobiography, he brings home an impressive haul of Sartre: Being and Nothingness, The Wall, Nausea. The last book delivers a lasting shock to him. Especially since Sartre called Antoine Roquentin his alter ego. Antoine slips behind the eyes of that other Antoine over the course of the pages. Overnight, he identifies with Sartre’s hero. He no longer lives, he exists. He signs up for existentialism without suspecting that the school of thought, which had also become a fashion, no longer interests anyone in the place where it was born. Who in Saint-Germain-des-Prés casts a nauseated glance at the windows of cafés? Down the streets of Chicoutimi strides Antoine, a long-haired Roquentin. He doesn’t need to follow a fashion. He smokes hash and reality opens before him like a brightly coloured fruit. He is loath to declare himself happy. Happiness is too banal, something that’s good for others.
Wanting henceforth to be responsible for his acts, he attempts to flush out in himself any trace of bad faith, at the risk of becoming a salaud, the term used by Sartre to describe individuals fleeing the truth of their being by becoming set in inauthentic behaviours. That will never happen to him. He will ward off the stagnation of his ego, the self-inflicted blindness regarding himself. That Sartre did drugs also reassures him. The philosopher didn’t hesitate to take mescaline to understand how the imagination works. His exploration nourished the writing of Nausea, a novel of heightened awareness, irritated by a reality on the brink of being transformed, of losing its outlines, of liquefying. He, Antoine, will not lose his outlines, he’ll keep a cool head. He swears that above all, he will seek the truth about himself and about others. In particular he will be pitiless toward himself. Like Sartre, he won’t hesitate to think against himself. Never will he become a salaud.
Elated, he loses himself in the abundance of Being and Nothingness, a tome more than seven hundred pages long. He reads it with the feeling that he is a diver, inexperienced and ill-equipped, disappearing into the depths of a dark and glaucous ocean. After three weeks of frenzied reading he comes up to the surface of the everyday, transformed. Thousands of words crash together in his head. Their meanings change constantly. Antoine has the impression that his bones have switched places. Something has moved in him, disturbing the routine of his blood. What a man thinks modifies him as much as what he eats, if not more, he thinks to himself. And Antoine thinks without counting. But he hasn’t understood a tenth of this tremendous philosophical essay. He gives himself the illusion. Force-fed with what he has read, he trains himself to dissect the world, to scratch its varnish, update its inner workings. In his apartment on rue du Havre, an uninsulated basement where hot-water pipes run across the ceiling, drying the air and making his nose bleed, he plays at being Jean-Paul Sartre, thinking that he possesses the man’s lucidity and his authenticity. He merely masks the weakness of his being through a philosophical system that he uses as a screen. Under the sinuous effect of hash, he is on the lookout for nothingness in his apartment. He struggles to see it at work, imagines it as a sewer, a hole that swallows the present, transforming it at once into the past. Settled comfortably in his scruffy armchair, he observes the river of time flowing from his eyes, his ears, from the motions of his head, directing it like a spotlight that casts an astonished light on the living-room wall with its flaking paint. The shadow of a smile appears on his lips. He is listening to The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.” Each note stands out like a drop of water. It is certain that Jim Morrison’s lyrics are addressed only to him.
He itemizes the walls, the windows, the furniture. Each object has its own meaning that comes not from an omniscient god but from his own gaze that is projected endlessly forward. Without awareness of his being, the music he is listening to just now would be reduced to a series of disconnected notes. No melody, only noise. He would not associate his perceptions and sensations with an ego. He would not be capable of saying “I.” He would be a new person every second, operating like an existential dotted line, with no possibility of past or future, condemned to live in the cold shell
