Abel and Cain

by Gregor von Rezzori

  Douglas Fairbanks Jr. style: just in town for the game, café-society denizen on studio lots; a gentleman with graying temples but crisply suntanned, racing driver and record-album expert, Playboy Club member and St. Tropez yachtsman: elk-leather coat and gold-buttoned Dunhill blazer, Battistoni shirt, Hermès necktie, Gucci shoes.

  Dressed like a hack and writing like a hack.

  A stroll through the Faubourg Saint-Honoré: swimming through display windows: the smoky reflection of the sentries at the Élysée:

  (Petit Larousse heroism: in the rouge et noir of the uniforms the symbol of the hasard of politics.)

  Viewed through their transparent astral phenomena in a different dimension (permeating theirs), the harvest festival of de luxe clothing:

  feuilles d’automne in silk and velvet; over the hair-tips of fair mink the brilliance of ripe grain; bucolics in the tortoiseshell inlays of Boulle furniture; abundance of fruit petrified in rock crystal and rose quartz; oxblood in the gold-embossed leather of old bookbindings (and everything else besides) . . .

  Interspersed: the bright, smoky-marbled evergreen of malachite: La vieille Russie: hunted around for Fabergé writing paraphernalia: Monsieur collects.

  •

  (to Schwab, in a parody of Nagel:

  “—in the insatiable hamster-bustling of the battened and fattened, whose hunger grows as their larders fill, as though they knew instinctively that soon they will face a winter that knows no mercy . . .” )

  Next: lunch at Prunier’s:

  surrealist food (the corpse flesh and vaginal forms of mollusks; the barbed armors, nippers, pincers, antennae of crustaceans: horror-movie material) . . .

  the afternoon outdoors, to mull over the treatment.

  Versailles (the castle in the glass coffin of autumn air: Disneyland)

  or Fontainebleau (park landscape in Technicolor: the foliage colorfully discolored—pretty much the only thing that, along with the breasts of aging international stars, still fills the word “resplendent” with substance);

  occasionally, a quick and useless visit to the Boulogne studios to view the newcomers: new faces inspire new ideas . . .

  sometimes, scribbling a few notes on some café terrace, for instance Fouquet’s—for sentimental reasons—if the tables are still out. (I don’t know if they really are. I’ve been locked up here too long, and it’s October);

  once, at most twice, a week, dinner with Nadine, a chat and some fornication to avoid creative differences about the movie;

  and in the very last week, a week of unleashed, unreflected writing (it wouldn’t be the first time, God knows);

  in short, living the life.

  •

  After which, to be sure, I would reach the far end of never-never land: where you have to eat your way out through the enclosing mountain, and it’s not made of rice:

  for six solid weeks: critical objections from the piglets (compared with whose artistic empathy Nadine’s is a gift of the Muses); at least six more weeks: changes from the distributor (it is not true that man is descended from the ape: the ape is a man who has imagined himself returned to nature out of shame of his humanity);

  another six weeks: changes from the director (who, soon united with Nadine in spirit and in bed, has a dreadful say in the matter)—

  summa summarum: four and a half months of coprophagia.

  But that’s the normal steep cost of doing business: I have to take it into account.

  •

  I had taken it into account when planning to do what I had originally intended to do: misappropriate four of the eight weeks from the movies (and from cineastic existence) and write in monastic isolation through the blue-gold days and the quietly misty evenings—

  not the agreed-upon screenplay, but my book . . .

  I had pegged all my hopes on being able to do it. Finally to put together a part of this book large and lucid enough to convince Scherping that I was still worth another advance. That way I could have sent the piglets and their goddamn cinema to hell and I’d have been free for my book—

  if my dream had not come to haunt me—and with it Schwab. I’ve squandered the last seven days and nights with the two of them—and thereby all the hope I set in my book.

  •

  My rotten experience in these past few days and nights (a morass of one hundred and ninety-two dream- and trauma-choked hours of powerless fury, disappointment, and despair over the contents of a half dozen suitcases, bags, and cardboard boxes full of disordered papers) teaches me that I cannot be precise enough in my notes:

  I write this in Room 26 of the Hôtel Épicure on the rue du Roi Philibert, a filthy little side street off the avenue des Ternes, veering acutely from the end of the last line of houses on the avenue and forming a sharp angle with the place des Ternes.

  At the point where it crosses the avenue, a couple of vegetable carts supply Parisian coloring: the color splotches that we (not unversed in art history) experience as Impressionistic; and, in the spider-legged spokes of the cartwheels, that certain French filminess of all kitsch practitioners since Dufy:

  —a piece of so-called genuine and typical Paris, which, in folkloristic sentimentality, we ramble after, seeking it in more and more hidden, more and more remote corners, in order to feel the melancholy of watching it disappear here too—whereas it is no longer so much Parisian as just suburbanly colorful and provincially contemplative and characteristic of a vanished era that has produced a similar atmosphere everywhere in the once not yet metastatically proliferating metropoles and that survives most tenaciously where the dreadful development is slower, so that sporadic impressions caught today in Copenhagen or Turino often seem more Parisian than Paris itself—

  A so-called picturesque nook, then. During the day, garbage is dumped on the sidewalk. Once in a blue week, a pack of Chaplinesque slapstickers in baggy overalls shows up, municipal street cleaner’s caps on their curly hair, cigarette butts behind their ears, and gigantic, cumbersome brooms like halberds under their arms. They turn the hydrant on at one corner of the street and send the filth swimming to the other corner. At night, a couple of cheap whores come roaming around from the place des Ternes, withdrawing into doorways at any sign of police. After midnight (like now: it must be close to one a.m.), the area is perilously quiet and empty except for occasional car tires whimpering around the dead square—spookily, as though ghosts were having a drag race.

  •

  I’m well concealed here from my piglets and Nadine: isolated in the dense, close square of the walls of this room, deep in the narrow-chested, box-like structure of the shabby hotel, whose fire walls stick to the half-timber gables of the houses behind: former stables converted into petit bourgeois homes, presumably; their yards—with mangy geranium window boxes, atrophying jasmine bushes, and oleander saplings in weathered tubs—preserve the defoliating poetry of the horse-and-buggy world, the autumn efflorescence of mankind, already preparing for its journey of no return.

  From the wallpaper’s sharp floral pattern (once a playground for bedbugs, repeated in the bedcover and the slipcover of the upholstered chair), a thousand round eyes peer at me—wondering whether I can muster the patience to remain by myself . . . they too steal away when I glance up to catch them unawares, and all I see are insignificant roses badly printed on bad paper and cheap cretonne in the tight-meshed tangle of their thorny twigs. (And no prince will break through them to stagger back in disappointment upon finding me here instead of Sleeping Beauty.)

  Here, I am finally at home: nestling in my murderer’s den like a fetus in its swollen womb, lovingly depicted by Professor Leblanc’s freckled hand: a ghastly little creature cozily curled up for the somersault of life from the mouth of the womb into the crouched burial position of Stone Age people, woeful little legs drawn up to its blistered forehead, webbed little fists furiously clenched against its blind pug face . . .

  In general, there’s a lot of homey secrecy here, in Leblanc’s terms: the brutal ir
on coat hook on the door (clinical white enamel) is waiting for cattle to slaughter, as if a halved woman were hanging from it, meticulously prepared by the professor’s artistic, carrot-haired hand:

  Gaia’s splendidly fleshy, exotic leg (slightly bent at the knee, the foot in the high-heeled shoe of society whores), testifying to the humanity of the fallow anatomy above it:

  over the massive thigh (in the evening-shadow tones of the shiny mulatto skin, pouring, as if smoked, from the tender, mucus-glistening constriction of the silk stocking), the elegant arc of the abdominal-wall cross section curves into the intensely downy parabola summit of the vagina, tipping inwardly into the blossom pistil of the uterus—

  “Et je vous assure, mon cher ami: c’est pareil chez les noires comme chez les blanches—d’ailleurs, ne me dites pas que vous avez senti la moindre différence”—

  over it, the concave red-white-red stripes of the rib cage—

  “Et voyez-vous: l’intérieur du thorax est tout à fait—mais tout à fait égal chez les unes comme chez les autres: bien entendu à l’extérieur il y a quand même des variantes . . .”

  and from the throat, as if blown by the pipe of an art-glass blower: a wolf-toothed grin, forcing its way like cigarette smoke through the labyrinth of the frontal sinus and nasal cavity.

  “C’est ça, mon cher: ce que vous avez aimé!”

  •

  I sit here like a maggot in the heart of night.

  The glow of the lamp on the dresser where I write (I’ve covered the mirror) peels a slanting hollow cone of yellow light from the darkness:

  in it, I huddle over my papers (caught in my own web).

  The light gathers around my feet in an elliptical puddle; in it, I suck in my shadow.

  Here I dwell in the core of nocturnal stillness. The telephone at the switchboard (two floors below me) futilely bores into the stillness with its dull buzzing. It is doomed to be ignored. The handsome Pole is asleep, or reads, with world-remote ardor, one of his detective stories. (Or is he with some woman somewhere in one of these rooms stacked like boxes one atop the other? It doesn’t concern me anymore.) The silence is too thick for this buzzing thread to penetrate. The sound merely sews it thicker, a small-stitch quivering of desperate patience, pausing only to resume, like the stickily entangled murmur of a fly on sized paper:

  (the buzzing fly is surrounded by the cringing black corpses of its fellow flies that have buzzed away their lives into the unrepentant nights of the Hôtel Épicure:

  corpses of souls: when I was a child, I thought of flypaper whenever I saw the glow of candles in the old honey-gold of the effigies of saints: it had grown black with the souls that stuck to it—)

  •

  And I try to picture the nights when it was my patience that let the buzzing of the switchboard telephone bore across a thousand leagues into the night stillness of the sleepers here and vainly shrill away against the vicious despotism of their dreams.

  •

  Back then, I was assaulted by a different madness from my present one: love.

  •

  I loved Dawn.

  I was far away from her: in Hamburg, in the apartment I had set up for us in a lover’s petit bourgeois world-embracing yearning for happiness—

  at number 9 Heilwigstrasse:

  —as if the address were an incantation conjuring up that self-effacing bourgeois happiness that both of us knew would never be granted us—could never be granted us, because of fate: not admitted by the story set down for us: because we would thus have lost what had driven us to each other: the other yearning inside us, unresponsive, without a model, making us susceptible to any insanity, a yearning beyond ourselves, steering our lives toward each other in a different way: like two parallel lines meeting at infinity, in the beyond of a story worth telling—

  I loved—and as if in this state not only did the primal motifs of nature have to keep sounding but also, along with the leitmotif of personal fate, its full theme, so in this love story there was a cool-jazz repetition of what had been a trumpeted marching song of my love for Christa (and was to be an atonal valse musette with Gaia): from building the nest to devouring the mate, from the blissful isolation à deux to the desperate effort to reattain someone who had become unattainable.

  THE APARTMENT

  (this time):

  A model shell of insulated coupledom in the immediate nearness of the present, a spaceship for the icy spheres of absolute earthly happiness. We live in style, the ordinary style of the era: in splendid isolation, which screams to be published in all the relevant widely circulated magazines on the arts of living and interior decoration (Oeil, House and Garden, House Beautiful, Schöner Wohnen): the home of the successful screenwriter and his enchanting companion on this stretch-of-the-road-of-life (a star model from New England, to be seen repeatedly in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Grazia). Hence, the fragrance of the great big world even in the space-saving kitchenette: Chinese spices, hand-forged iron pots for Indonesian rice specialties, shashlik skewers, Swedish designer flatware, health foods (Bauhaus style of nutrition culture: purely functional wheat germ, soybean extract, sea salt, brown sugar). A yoga board for bathroom gymnastics. The house bar is a Hammond organ of luxury consumption: Drambuie and Izarra, Passover wine, tequila, raki. A record collection with early English church music, Vivaldi, Earl Garner, Strauss (Ariadne), Boulez. The furniture (two rooms plus sleeping alcove) showing cultural growth in fast motion: English walnut (Queen Anne) combined with Finnish pieces (mass-produced). The knickknacks: pre-Columbian, Gold Coast, Tang Dynasty, Dada. On the walls: samples of Arabic script, ancient Coptic woven fragments, and the works of masters in whose names Tarzan’s gurgling jungle shriek is abstracted into the flashing, smashing, crashing of the spaceship when it shatters against the satellite: BRAQUE! ARP! WOLS! . . .

  I lay in the Le Corbusier armchair (an abstract warrior of steel, fur, and leather), holding the telephone (enameled in clinical white) to my ear:

  from it I was drinking in the vast space of night: mythical: like a man who has to drink the ocean in order to reach an island where his happiness is exiled:

  the space of night that separated me from Dawn.

  She was in Paris in the Hôtel Épicure. Why didn’t she answer? Was she ill? Cheating on me? Was she wandering in a daze through the streets of the bright underworld? I believed that my voice had the power to call her back to me—Orpheus (Schwab had found this image; and I reveled in the way he flinched when I then quoted that line from Cocteau’s Orpheus with which the lovers are sent back to their lives:

  “Go on! Go back home to your mud!”)

  During the day, it was easy to get through on the telephone. I was then told: “Mademoiselle vient de sortir. Non, m’sieur, elle n’a pas laissé de message” (the hated snail-fed indifference in Madame’s voice). “Et vous-même? Vous allez bien? . . . Non, j’en sais rien, m’sieur. D’habitude, elle rentre assez tard” (d’habitude a syntactical formation of perfidious smugness). “Non, m’sieur, elle était à la maison hier . . . Oui, elle a passé toute la journée dans sa chambre” (and wouldn’t take my calls . . . and why this gloating note in Madame’s thick throaty voice? Is she, too, jealous of the handsome Pole? Her hatred of Dawn is obvious). “Certainement, m’sieur: le moment où elle rentrera . . . Oui, oui, j’ai votre numéro. Non, je n’y manquerai pas. À bientôt, m—”

  I waited until midnight. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed the phone like an alcoholic grabbing a bottle. (Schwab: how greedily he interrogated me about my futile attempts to resist.

  “You seriously mean”—a puff on the cigarette in his trembling fingers, smoked to a dark brown like an old meerschaum pipe—“you seriously mean that these are self-imposed drills? Compulsory soul-testing exercises, as it were—to test our powerlessness? Do we not know it precisely enough already?”)

  I was practicing (so to speak anthracite-gray) magic:

  By combining letters and numbers in a circle of myster
ious correspondences, I summoned into the telephone receiver the voice of a servant of the spirits:

  “Hello, this is long-distance operator four.”

  Language of pure poetry: a code word for the universe—

  I uttered a magic formula of words and numbers, and the locks to astral space burst open:

  The rustle of the vast expanse of night

  In its echo the world was dissolved. Like charring paper, the shadows crackled across the earth, melting in the smoke of sounds. Mystery flew in flitting signals from continent to continent: sounds flashed like quick silverfish swallowed by the leviathan of darkness. Twittering voices slipped like white mice into the enormous hole of the darkness. . .

  Then, far, far away, the broken line of a repeated fluting came filtering through: flickering and fading like a will-o’-the-wisp, flickering and fading, it sewed the tiny stitches of its seam into the moor of the celestial expanses:

  —ancient yearning prophecy of doom—tadpole of the Word:

  in the embryonic liquid of the umlaut to the unborn consonants—In the great maternal belly of night, space-time was conceived

  —tape measure of my patiently stretched impatience—

  The voices of spirits were startled. They fluttered in chaos like pale birds (the powdering of gulls in the headlight beams when I drove through the night to my son in Holland):

  One voice close by:

  “Are you still speaking?”

  Another, half-remote:

  “You still don’t have a connection?”

  One very far:

  “Paris, hello, Paris?”

  Far, far away, another coming toward me:

  “Le numéro ne répond pas, m’sieur.”

  Again, the half-remote one:

  “Hamburg, can you hear me? The party in Paris is not answering!”

  The close voice, lunging:

  “The party in Paris is not picking up.”