A Void by Georges Perec Read Free Book Online Page A

with
    Sibylla.
    Sibylla, praying daily, not to say hourly, for God's pardon, has
    a hospital built in which a crowd of filthy waifs and strays stay
    for nothing, with not a limb, not a dirty hand or a stinking foot
    or a gamily aromatic armpit, that its nursing staff will not lovingly
    wash.
    Aignan, donning a ragamuffin's rags, a hairshirt worn out of
    mortification, with a stick in his hand, but without a vagrant's
    rucksack or tin can, slips away at dusk from a mansion in which
    an illusory and, alas, mortally sinful form of conjugal intimacy
    lay almost within his grasp - slips far, far away, going hungry
    and thirsty and living rough and tough, and pays for his infamous
    conduct by asking God to vilify him, to damn him outright.
    So pass four long and hard days of wayfaring, culminating in
    his arrival at a poor woodman's hut. Aignan timidly knocks at
    its door. In an instant its occupant is standing inquiringly in front
    of him.
    "Would you know," Aignan asks him, "of a Locus Solus not
    far off in which, till Doomsday, God might punish my Sin
    of Sins?"
    "That I would, my lad, that I would," growls this doltish wood-
    man (who is in fact as thick as two of his own planks). "Tis an
    island, no, no, I'm wrong, 'tain't that at all, 'tis just a rock, sort
    3 2
    of a crag, look you, with an awful sharp drop down t' bottom
    o' loch. Tis just th' spot, I'd say, for a man with drink or dam-
    nation on his mind!"
    "Oh woodman, do you own a boat?"
    "That I do."
    "And will you row it out to your island, your rock?" Aignan
    asks him imploringly. "For my salvation!"
    Though caught short by this proposal, his saviour concurs at
    last, with a warning that Aignan will rot on such a solitary crag
    - rot till his dying day.
    "I wish only for God's will," says Aignan piously.
    At which his rustic Charon murmurs a (slighdy incongruous)
    chorus: "And so say all of us!"
    So our young pilgrim sails forth to this Island of Lost Souls on
    which his companion, almost throttling him, binds him to a rock
    with a hangman's tight collar. A nourishing mould or humus
    oozing by night out of a cavity in his rocky crucifix is his only
    form of nutrition; a storm or a cutting blast or an icy south wind
    or a burning simoon or a sirocco swirling about him his only roof;
    a typhoon or a tidal flood his only wall; and his only clothing (for
    his poor, worn, torn rags rot away as fast as crumbling old wood)
    is his birthday suit, soon just as poor and worn and torn as his
    rags. Not cold but glacial, not hot but roasting, Aignan stands
    thus, a living symbol of contrition, a human incarnation of purga-
    torial pain.
    Now half-starving for want of food, now wholly fading away,
    notwithstanding that mouldy humus that God in all His wisdom
    and compassion has put his way, Aignan gradually grows thin,
    his body physically contracts from day to day, from hour to hour,
    it slims down and narrows out until unimaginably gaunt and
    scrawny, until as small and insignificant as that of a dwarf, a
    pygmy, a homunculus, until Aignan is nothing at last but a
    shrimp of a man, a Hop-o'-my-Thumb . . .

    * * *
3 3
    18 springs pass. In Roman Catholicism's sanctum sanctorum Paul
    VI is dying. Vatican City is in a tizzy: it must now swiftly appoint
    a Paul VII and affirm papal continuity. But six polls go by - and
    no Paul VII! This cardinal submits a proposal for an idiot and
    that cardinal for a glutton, a third opts for a psychopath and a
    fourth for an ignoramus. Corruption is rampant: anybody willing
    to put down a cool million in cash can practically buy his nomina-
    tion as pontiff. Things look bad. Faith is vacillating. Nobody
    thinks to pray to his patron saint.
    It's at this point that black clouds start forming in Abraham's
    bosom, bolts of numinous lightning shoot down from on high
    and Almighty God in all His wrath pays an unusual visit on a
    Cardinal - unusual in that His outward form is that of a lamb,
    a lamb with stigmata of blood on its flanks and a couch of