A Void by Georges Perec Read Free Book Online Page B

fragrant
    blooms to accompany it.
    "O hark my words, Monsignor," God booms out at His
    Cardinal. "Thou now hast that Vicar of Christ that thou sought
    in vain. I, thy all-knowing King of Kings, do appoint Aignan as
    My apostolic missionary — Aignan, who hast, in that corporal
    nudity and purity which was My birthday gift to him, for so long
    stood upright upon a rock and for just as long withstood without
    flinching My tidal attacks upon him."
    "O Lamb of God, O Lamb That is God, O God That is Lamb,"
    His adoring Cardinal croaks, words stumbling out any old how,
    "I will do as Thou commandst!"
    Thus an official inquiry tracks down this Aignan who calls
    God's wrath upon him with truly Christian humility (and a hint,
    too, of pagan stoicism); and at long last, following many trials
    and tribulations, a commission of Cardinals stands in front of that
    woodman's hut from which Aignan, so long ago, was brought to
    his island prison. To start with, though, its occupant is in a
    slighdy noncommittal mood, mumbling:
    "Aignan, y'say? No . . . don't know any Aignan. Don't know
    any island. No island as I know of in this part of world."
    Finally, with a tidy sum of gold coins to coax him out of his
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    mutism, Aignan's oarsman talks. A boat sails forth chock-a-block
    with Cardinals who start laboriously climbing that rocky promon-
    tory on which, through thick and thin, Aignan is living out his
    martyrdom. On top of it, though, no martyr, no Aignan, nobody
    at all is found (proof that Our Lord is occasionally wrong, a
    notion that brings about a profound diminution of faith in His
    flock) - just thin air, nothing, a void. So God, too, alas, is only
    human.
    Thomas Mann notwithstanding, such was my story's only con-
    clusion, murmurs Anton Vowl, writing "finis" on his manuscript,
    his rough draft, I should say, or synopsis, as, with his chronically
    vivid imagination now running riot, Vowl simply cannot bring
    his task to what you might call authorial fruition, jotting down
    25 or 26 random notations, amplifying 5 or 6 crucial points,
    drawing a portrait of Aignan that's both thorough and scrupu-
    lously fair, ditto for Aignan's Burgundian rival ("a tall thug of a
    man, with short hair and long auburn muttonchops": it's obvious
    that his inspiration was his own Dr Cochin, who had brought
    him back to tip-top physical condition), coining (though only in
    a short paragraph) an amusing nautical-cum-Scotch patois for
    that wily old bumpkin who was willing to row Aignan out to
    his island limbo ("Avast an' ahoy! All aboard who's going! Oh,
    but it's a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht th'nicht, an' that's a fact!")
    and portraying his and Sibylla's tragicomic imbroglio with a
    touch so tactful that a Paul Morand, a Giraudoux or a Maupassant
    would not disown it.
    But that's as far as it got: in his diary Vowl would try to justify
    his procrastination on slighdy unusual grounds. If (is his a priori
    postulation) I could finish my story, I would; but if it truly had
    a conclusion, would it not contain a fund of wisdom of such cold
    hard purity, of such crystal clarity, that not any of us, just dipping
    into it, could think to go on living? For (Vowl scrawls away) it's
    a quality of fiction that it allows of only a solitary Aignan to rid
    us of a Sphinx. With Aignan put out of action, no triumphant
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    Word will again afford us consolation. Thus (signing off) no
    amount of prolix circumlocution, brilliant as it may sound, can
    abolish flip-of-a-coin fortuity. But again (adding a wistful post-
    script) it is our only option: all of us should know that a Sphinx
    might assail us at any instant; all of us should know that, at any
    instant, a word will do its utmost to thwart that Sphinx - a word,
    a sound, an if or a but. For - as Zarathustra might say - no
    Sphinx is living that inhabits not our human Mansion . . .
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    1
    Which, notwithstanding a kind of McGuffin, has no
    ambition to rival Hitchcock
    It's on All Saints Day that Anton Vowl would