Free The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett Page B

matters. Why don’t they wash their hands of
     me and set me free? That might do me good. I don’t know. Perhaps then I could go silent,
     for good and all. Idle talk, idle talk, I am free, abandoned. All for nothing again.
     Even Mahood has left me, I’m alone. All this business of a labour to accomplish, before
     I can end, of words to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end,
     of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before
     I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it
     would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a
     road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting
     lost, but somehow in the long run making headway. All lies. I have nothing to do,
     that is to say nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having
     nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No one compels
     me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact. Nothing can ever exempt me from
     it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to recover, nothing that can lessen
     what remains to say, I have the ocean to drink, so there is an ocean then. Not to
     have been a dupe, that will have been my best possession, my best deed, to have been
     a dupe, wishing I wasn’t, thinking I wasn’t, knowing I was, not being a dupe of not
     being a dupe. For any old thing, no, that doesn’t work, that should work, but it doesn’t.
     Labyrinthine torment that can’t be grasped, or limited, or felt, or suffered, no,
     not even suffered, Isuffer all wrong too, even that I do all wrong too, like an old turkey-hen dying on
     her feet, her back covered with chickens and the rats spying on her. Next instalment,
     quick. No cries, above all no cries, be urbane, a credit to the art and code of dying,
     while the others cackle, I can hear them from here, like the crackling of thorns,
     no, I forgot, it’s impossible, it’s myself I hear, howling behind my dissertation.
     So not any old thing. Even Mahood’s stories are not any old thing, though no less
     foreign, to what, to that unfamiliar native land of mine, as unfamiliar as that other where men come and go, and feel at home, on tracks they have made themselves,
     in order to visit one another with the maximum of convenience and dispatch, in the
     light of a choice of luminaries pissing on the darkness turn about, so that it is
     never dark, never deserted, that must be terrible. So be it. Not any old thing, but as near as no matter. Mahood. Before him there were
     others, taking themselves for me, it must be a sinecure handed down from generation
     to generation, to judge by their family air. Mahood is no worse than his predecessors.
     But before executing his portrait, full length on his surviving leg, let me note that
     my next vice-exister will be a billy in the bowl, that’s final, with his bowl on his
     head and his arse in the dust, plump down on thousand-breasted Tellus, it’ll be softer
     for him. Faith that’s an idea, yet another, mutilate, mutilate, and perhaps some day,
     fifteen generations hence, you’ll succeed in beginning to look like yourself, among
     the passers-by. In the meantime it’s Mahood, this caricature is he. What if we were
     one and the same after all, as he affirms, and I deny? And I been in the places where
     he says I have been, instead of having stayed on here, trying to take advantage of
     his absence to unravel my tangle? Here, in my domain, what is Mahood doing in my domain,
     and how does he get here? There I am launched again on the same old hopeless business,
     there we are face to face, Mahood and I, if we are twain, as I say we are. I never
     saw him, I don’t see him, he has told me what he is like, what I am like, they have
     all told me that, it must be one of their principal functions. It isn’t enough that
     I should knowwhat I’m doing, I must