In January I was in Brussels, in the suburbs, in a room above the railroad tracks. The trains made my room shake. Christmas was over. Something had vanished, something ingenuous I could have counted on. Perhaps hope. I had no money no books and no cigarettes. No work and no leisure either, because I was desperate. So I spent all day and night in my room. On the railroad down below trains that were perhaps going to Antwerp would whistle and creak. I thought of God when the trains trembled on the tracks and whistled at such close range. When they were possibly on their way to Antwerp. I thought about the trains as others think about God: with a desperate lack of faith. And I also thought about God--a train: something that undoubtedly exists but is absurd, with an uncertain destination: Antwerp--an idea that was possibly (evidently) erroneous.
Sometimes I would go to the window and look through the glass panes at the railroad. But before reaching the tracks my eyes would meet a strange tree--timidly but stubbornly alive--in a nearby yard. This tree frightened me: it was like my hope in myself, or like a still more ambitious gamble: my painfully contradictory faith in mankind. In mankind? I have in me all the virtues of trust, but I'm desperate. I'm also, in spite of everything, a man. I have the capacity for love. I love my likeness to all men, but I despair in that love. I'm shut up in a room. And I can't smoke. I can't relax. I imagine that it's possible to leave Antwerp after arriving there in one of those creaking trains. Antwerp is not a final destination. It's a city like any other: with bars and fog, silence, people, voices, the impenetrable mathematics of its multiplications and divisions, and the ebb and flow of its images. In Antwerp there are prostitutes, a decadent human warmth, drunkenness. There people also die. Perhaps someone once resurrected in Antwerp. I don't know.
The place I'm thinking of is difficult, forever difficult. To the north lies the Scheldt River. It leads to the sea. I've been told that people who are born and live near the sea are purer. I think the sea gives a special quality to fantasy, desire and trust. It is a mysterious property of the spirit that teaches us not to have hope or to lose hope in anything. Perhaps this is innocence. Perhaps only in the sea is it given us to die, really die, as no man can.
My life here is circular and I'm suffocating, with no way of getting out, with this god that exists in it, with God, with God.... Trains that never stop creaking and whistling. Trains that depart. I often wake up during the night to the sound of God whistling. But in the morning my lack of faith seems even greater, and I realize that I'll never leave this room and that the trains are mere thoughts, like Antwerp, a hazy and confused inspiration.
I might hear steps next to the door of my room, light steps that would stop short while my life, my entire life, suddenly hung in suspense. Then I would vaguely exist, sustained by the violence of a hope, held fast by the obscure breathing of that unmoving, unknown person. The trains would continue to go by. And I would be thinking about words of love, about what can be said when utter solitude endows us with an inconceivable talent. My talent would be human talent at its best and would succeed, merely by virtue of its silent power, in keeping that person in front of my door, a few yards away, as close as a simple friendly gesture. But at that moment the spirit's fundamental cruelty would be revealed to me. I think I would desire only the unknown and solitary presence of that person behind the door. Better that he or she not knock, ask, or inquire.
"Can I talk? Can we talk?"
Despair is my only sustenance. And it's from a sterile heart that I derive all my power: I have faith that God is in this room, waiting for the usual, tumultuous passing of the trains.
My thinking alludes to the north, to the idea that associates the north with the pure cold and dramatic happiness of snow and very low temperatures. And it alludes to the journey without faith or consequence, made of the inexplicable warmth of those who start out in eternity.
But I don't even have any cigarettes. I'm possessed by the infernal gifts that enable one to create a style without time or place, a lonely solidarity, a love forever in transit.
My fondness for accuracy already knows the times of the trains that are possibly (evidently) not even going there.
God is beginning to inspire terror in me. Particularly where my unity is concerned. My closed and immobile unity. The universe doesn't need me, and terror is a flawless inspiration, within the limits of what it can accomplish.
No, there's no one behind the door.

(Translated by Richard Zenith)