“Each plows his hard bow through the torrent, a figurehead of his loneliness, and gazes with stony eyes at whatever drifts past: that was you, that was what I was for you, a smashed bureau with gaping drawers between a hat and a collar, half a roof and perched upon it a cat that fled up the chimney between a shock of hair and an ascot, a mouth flitting past like a weary butterfly, unhappy, angry, obstinate, earnest, dreamy, disappointed, passionate, sensitive, whining, closed upon the soundless shriek for self-realization . . . And these too, as you see, are merely art-historical reminiscences.
“Let us pass them by. We are not attached to them, we are not sentimental—at least not in the long run. This too dissolves, everything dissolves into swatches, color strips, structures, patterns. It eventually turns monochrome: gray, the color of madness . . . And don’t tell me it doesn’t make you feel as happy as a pig in shit.
“But, of course, this is no vacation at a health spa to buoy up your soul so that you can go home to Hamburg fortified and endure life there for another six months. On the contrary: this place visibly sucks the marrow from your bones. It puts you into a different state of matter, as though you were still yourself but vaporized, as it were. Instead of being made of skin and fat and flesh and bones all welded into your Jockey shorts, you are just a tiny cloud, the astral phenomenon Schwab . . . But that is an elevation, believe me! The transubstantiation of ourselves into the abstract is an elevation. And how proud you should be that you, friend, are capable of such an elevation, such a transubstantiation of yourself—without the aid of writing, without having to commit yourself to paper! The others who write, and whom you so greatly admire—what are they if they do not realize themselves on paper? For example, your friend Nagel, our friend Nagel, if you insist. He’s a delightful fellow, after all, and a great one, isn’t he? But he’s important only on paper. Tolstoy was a creep, Proust a fop, Joyce a stigmatized petit bourgeois—if you take off his glasses and comb his hair to the side, he looks like Hitler. But on paper, oh my! What demigods they are! Do you follow me? Or am I too muddled—this wine is far stronger than one thinks. Also, I’m alone so much here that I’m not used to talking, especially in German. If you think my words are swarming like flies on the dung heap of my thoughts, then please tell me so, I’ll shut up . . . No? You’re much too kind! Well, as I was saying—an abstruse notion, you will think: the crystalline hardness of the French, their quality of being formed, their capacity for form . . . all this must be due simply to this abstraction and transubstantiation into a different state of density. . . Perhaps a human being first truly realizes his potential in pure abstraction. After all, the most forceful human image is, no doubt, that of the man at Hiroshima whose silhouette was burned into the stone by the atomic flash. . .
“Be undaunted then! Walk on with your senses alert, wander with your senses open through this beautiful bright underworld that is Paris, or rather this overworld . . . You know, the thing that has always made photography (the invention most expressive of the zeitgeist) dear to me is the dialectics of the positive and negative image—don’t you agree?—whereby the latter is surprisingly more informative. For instance, I heard a little story here that articulates the terror of a certain German past in the negative, so to speak. The story was told to me by a tiny homosexual Jew who managed to escape from Berlin in 1939 just before the war broke out. He was sixteen years old at the time. Well, just before he fled, he went into a pissoir in Charlottenburg with a big Jewish star on his jacket, which he tried to conceal, as best he could, beneath his lapel. A moment of twofold relief—gratefully enjoyed—but then a tremendous shadow suddenly falls on him. He looks up: next to him, a gigantic SS man in uniform was unbuttoning his fly. The SS man looks down at him and said: ‘You’re a Jew, huh?’ Our little homosexual can only nod. The SS man: ‘Well, then, c’mon, gimme a kiss!’. . . But I forget why I wanted to tell you the story—ah yes, of course: because you presumably wish to write about Paris; you have to make literary use of your Paris experience. Could you do so, fairly and honestly, knowing about such events and realities, as if the things you saw around you here were still real? . . .”
5
I am going into such detail about these not exactly edifying incidents because, as I have said, I am in possession of some notes about them. These notes were penned by S., whom you encounter in these pages as Schwab. This is not the place to explain how I obtained them, nor do I wish to go into the matter of which varying or even contradictory descriptions of particulars are closer to the truth. Likewise, I need not expatiate on my intentions in contrasting the two notes.
Paris, October 1964. Thanks to alcohol and H.’s new pills, rather blurry impressions. We walk past the Madeleine. We’re no longer speaking. A day of agonizing tensions. I arrived by plane from Hamburg this morning. He didn’t pick me up (even though Schelmie wired the arrival time). Supposedly the telegram reached his hotel too late. I’d like to believe him (but I don’t). Trying to explain my embitterment to myself. Childish reason: I’d been looking forward to riding in his new car. Also, I lost my baggage. Tiresome, humiliating language difficulties (yet his fluent assistance would have embittered me even more).
The flight was very hard on me. Right at takeoff, heart problems, which kept on and then worsened unnervingly when the plane landed. Throughout the flight, the roaring PA system right by my left ear: “Ladies an’ zhentlemen, Capitaine Malfichu and his crew welcome you aboar’ our Caravelle Seine-et-Oise.” PR vulgarity. The ass’s language drill: “At your left an’ below you, ladies an’ zhentlemen, you may look now on ze town of Fulda” (pronounced Faldeh). And the icy droning of the turbine, which presses toward the bull’s-eye, over the backs of the herding cloud lambs as one wing rises ominously . . . Fear, malaise, claustrophobia. I want to get up, and drop back in the seat, fettered: I forgot to unfasten the safety belt. All very ridiculous, very embarrassing. I couldn’t get rid of the droning in my ears. It remained there all day long. (Hertzog is probably right; I take too many barbiturates and smoke too much; two and a half packs of Lucky Strikes yesterday—the pack I’d opened was empty by the time we landed. Didn’t sleep last night, of course; tried to dope myself around three a.m. with a bottle of rotgut Algerian wine—no use, just a gush of stomach acid, so I doubled the dose. Only to hover among dreamy states of anxiousness and hallucinate along the brittle ridges of nightmares. Woke up around seven: Pervitin. Hertzog promised me new prescriptions, but he’ll give them to me only if I come back to the clinic for two weeks.)
At Orly, my suitcase was nowhere to be found. After long, torturous fumbling in French, I understood: it had flown to Tangier. Since it had been uncomfortably cool in Hamburg, I’m wearing a thick turtleneck under my jacket. The welcome Paris gives me is still disconcertingly summery. I am sweating like a polar bear. I can’t eat breakfast on the plane (the Montessori kindergarten spoons and the stewardesses’ robust solicitude are too reminiscent of the psychiatric ward). So I have my first coffee at the Deux Magots. Then, parching thirst. The only way I can cope with it lately is a gin and tonic with lots and lots of ice (it doesn’t agree with me, but the immediate effect is beneficial). I’m on my second drink and he’s standing before me. His eyes only graze the glass, but he’s too alert not to notice that I caught his lids narrowing. He therefore says casually, “Hey, that’s a great idea, I’ll have one too.”
Elephant-taming methods. I sense that I’ll have to arm myself with great patience just to endure twenty-four hours in this place. He tries to calm me down about my suitcase. “Are you invited to a reception at the Élysée? Well, then. It makes no difference at all what you run around in. I masquerade as a luxury gigolo just so that nobody will notice how broke I am. You can buy soap cheaply here, and I can lend you a razor. If it’s absolutely necessary, we can stroll over to the boulevard Saint-Michel and spend fifty francs on three shirts and six pairs of catamite briefs.”
I was irritated by his bogus linguistic nonchalance; the cheap freshness, preciously stu
dded with the affectedly correct pronunciation of “ boulevard Saint-Michel” (although I’m grateful to him for not saying “Boul’ Mich’ ” ). Also, I left two manuscripts on the plane, things I’m supposed to read. He doesn’t find this so awful either: Schelmie must have copies she can send me. It makes me furious: Schelmie has no copies; I took the manuscripts precisely in order to spare her such measures of solicitude; now they’re lost for good (this will lead to incalculably tiresome arguments with Scherping).
“Maiden efforts by promising young talents?” he asks, reaching for my cigarettes. “Or even one of yours?”
For an instant, I’m alert, eager, almost delighted. What is he after? Treating me with numb-fingered caution, the way you treat a paranoiac: you clear anything out of his way that you think might anger him. A moment later, he trips me up from behind. Yet inside, he is so nervous that he trembles. I catch myself thinking, irritatedly, So he’s concerned about me. I make him uneasy. Why does he put up with me? He needs me. I’m necessary to him because I work for Scherping and I can turn the faucet on and off for his advances. His writhing helplessness is poignant. His scattered life grinds him down. One has to protect him.
I compliment him on his suit. I mean it honestly, but it sounds a bit venomous. (My exact words are: “Once again you look almost indecently elegant.”) He smiles sneakily. It amuses me to see him wondering what he can get me with. (I anxiously await the outcome.)
We drink another gin and tonic (my third). Paris begins to collapse upon me. I’ve been here for three hours already and I still have the plane turbines droning in my ears. If I went to my hotel now, I’d tumble into bed and sleep the rest of the day away. So I drink another coffee (and take another Pervitin on the sly). He acts like he doesn’t notice. For the moment (as if he realizes that I don’t want him watching), he wraps himself up in a newspaper. I know that he scarcely ever reads the papers, that nothing in them interests him. So he is only pretending to read; he puts down the paper the instant I swallow the pill. In a chatty tone he asks me about Hamburg. But I interrupt and ask how he found me. A piece of cake: he asked for me in the hotel and was told that I went out right away; the most obvious thing was to check here.
This rankles me. I’m annoyed that I’m so predictable. An unimaginative provincial who arrives in Paris and can’t think of anything better to do than sit on the terrace of the Deux Magots. He actually says as much quite brazenly:
“Nice sitting out here, isn’t it? Especially on such a lovely day. One learns quickly that it doesn’t get any better here in Paris. Nothing is quite what it is. But everything’s bursting with clues to an artificial superreality. That guy over there, squinting so obstinately, is not Sartre, but he could be. And that gay Negro is not Baldwin, but he could be, and why shouldn’t one take him for Baldwin? After all, the wild strawberries at Maxim’s were grown in a hothouse, but that doesn’t ruin the tarte aux fraises. On the contrary, it’s what guarantees perfection. It’s as if the mixture of types here had been very skillfully prescribed by a public-relations firm working for the Ministry of the Interior: not inauthentic—that wouldn’t seem Parisian—but simply artificial. Imagine how gladly you’d have stayed in Hamburg if there too the thugs and loiterers in the whores’ alleys of the Reeperbahn were on fixed salaries, paid by Hamburg’s Cultural Affairs Department.”
These are attempts at needling me—but they are too circuitous to penetrate my skin. I feel much more lucid now: the Pervitin is taking effect. But I can’t stand it here anymore. I suggest a walk. The place de Furstenberg is a few yards away. (“Almost quite genuinely Parisian, especially if you bear in mind that a church tower designed by Buffet casts its shadow upon it . . .” He’s bending over backward now and frazzling my nerves.)
I have to get some fresh air. I want to gaze along the Seine. We wander over to the Pont Neuf. The day is delicious; foggy this morning, it has brightened radiantly. But I’m sweating hard in my heavy clothes. I have to take off my jacket, but I’m so badly soaked that I’m immediately shivering. I get in a desperate rage about my body. I tell him more about my ailments and Hertzog’s therapeutic method than I care to have revealed. I instantly regret it and ask him, more aggressively than I intended, why he’s smiling. He asks me quite cheerfully to please excuse him. He says that our being on the Pont Neuf reminds him of a passage in Proust: Swann, deathly ill, goes out into society once more, knowing it’s the last time. He runs into Guermantes and wistfully tells him that they probably won’t see each other again. Guermantes, about to move on to another reception and only half listening, booms cheerily, “Vous! Vous nous survivrez tous! Vous êtes fort comme le Pont Neuf!”
I don’t quite know how I’m supposed to take this anecdote, as pointed malice or as sovereign tactlessness. While I think about it, he himself realizes the ambivalence and turns it to his own advantage: he smiles shamelessly, as if he had deliberately led me up the garden path.
I sense that none of this is quite right, but I feel like an oaf. His unimpeachability humiliates me. He is healthy, alert, elegant. He speaks about Guermantes and Swann as if they were part of his daily circle of friends here. He reads his Proust in French. I snort in my bearskins and remember that only two hours ago at the airport, I was humiliated to learn how poor my French is.
My eyes swim as I gaze up the Seine. (I still have my reading glasses on, I couldn’t find the other pair in my pockets, it’s probably flown to Tangier with the suitcase.) His eyes are imperturbable. For him it’s an everyday scene. But, as if to show me that he feels what it means for me to be here, he makes an ironically melancholy remark and then launches into his love story—with an aloofness that is sheer stratagem: he underplays it, reduces his chaotic existence to a microscope slide. It sounds written. The effects are precisely worked out. And with that he arouses my curiosity. I want to find out what the truth is. I offer to go with him to the hotel where he speculates the girl is hiding.
We walk halfway across Paris (but I can’t think of any other way to tire him out). At the Madeleine, we wander into the stalking grounds of whores who roam the area in daylight. A redhead with provocative breasts sizes us up at a glance. She spots the john in me. It doesn’t elude him. He jokes: “One can smell your solidity, and my disreputableness. I’m too mean for a big spender and not authentic enough for a good pimp.”
This too makes me feel clumsy and awkward. I am moving crudely and ponderously through a light world. The air here is light; the people walk more lightly, speak more vivaciously; the colors shine effortlessly and lie upon things more lightly. I love this lightness, which I do not possess. (The remedy that Hertzog gave me, without letting on what it was, put me into this lightness. I have to get H. to at least give me a hint about the pharmacological, or rather toxological, makeup: I am well on the way to systematically poisoning myself.)
But the thought of it makes me light now too. My mood lightens. I feel hungry. He knows a restaurant not far from the hotel we are heading toward. A year ago, an extremely embarrassing scene with an Indian doll took place there. Incidentally, I think I remember the restaurant too: its name is Laget.
In half an hour, we are there. The food is marvelous though much too heavy. The wine is heavy too. I feel numb after the first glass. But I can still see well enough to observe how embarrassing it is that I slip off my jacket but refuse to let the hat-check girl take it. He says a few words to her that I don’t understand, but she leaves with a smile. I have the impression it was a joke at my expense. He now quite bluntly makes fun of me; he quips his way through a distasteful tirade about his religious upbringing, full of allusions that again I don’t understand. (Apparently he thinks I want to propose that he write his book about theodicy, even assumes I intend to write something similar myself.) Again, I drink more than I can take. And I have to pay the bill too. It’s dismayingly high, and I have trouble concealing my shock. (I do so by announcing that I want to dine here every day; anyway, I’m in a very good mood; I order more wine and two fram
boises with the coffee.)
As we get up, an irritating mishap occurs. I want to say, jokingly, “Allons, enfants de la patrie!” (one of the few French phrases I recall from school), but I bellow out the words. I’m so startled that I almost knock the table over. The wine bottle tumbles from its basket, the remaining wine spills across the tablecloth. We walk to the hotel. He shows me the room where he lived and wrote while waiting for the girl (in a different room, one flight up) to ask for him: three o’clock at night or seven in the morning, depending on her whim or mood. If he went out, he gave the porter the most detailed information for her on where she could reach him, when he planned to return, and when he’d be at her disposal again. (With a smile, he says, “Discreetly at your service any hour of the day or night, the perfect nurse,” as if he wants to recommend himself to me.)
Abel and Cain Page 9
