I dropped my cigarette butt and, with the toe of my right boot, snuffed it out on the ground. I stood from the bench and began walking toward the park. There wasn’t a single pigeon in sight.
But, as I approached the stone path, an object lying on the grass began to resolve in my vision. From my perspective, walking toward the tower and the bodega or whatever, the object lay on the stone path’s right side. When I reached it, I saw that it was a dead pigeon. I looked down at it for a moment — what a shame, what a poor little pigeon — and then I looked back toward the bench. I turned and again walked in the direction of the tower, about thirty yards on, the farthest I was ever able to kick a football. Again I turned around and faced the bench.
As I looked on with the same perspective I’d had when originally walking through the park, I noted that the dead pigeon lay on the left side of the stone path. I was absolutely certain that I hadn’t deviated from the path when I’d walked toward her. Therefore, even if I had kicked the pigeon, it would not have landed on the left side of the path, as the dead pigeon in the distance was now lying, on account of my incurable slice as a placekicker.
All remaining doubt flew from me. She was wrong. The choices she should have offered were these: either A, someone else kicked that pigeon to death; or B, the pigeon died of natural causes.
At the airport the next morning, I tried to explain to her about my kickoff slice, and about how the dead pigeon I’d found after she left lay on the left side of the stone path. But, still, she broke up with me on the flight home, before we’d even made it halfway to America.
Celesteville’s Burning: A Work in Regress1
Andrew Gallix
Zut, zut, zut, zut.
— Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu
Sostène Zanzibar was not feeling himself that day; someone else was. A journalist from an English paper. Name of Lauren. Lauren Ipsum. Something along those lines. The interview had gone remarkably well. Such probing questions. Very stimulating, very in-depth. There was no denying that Ms Ipsum was thoroughly a young woman. Hang on, cross that out. Was a thorough young woman. Very thorough indeed.
In a bid to impress her host, she had taken up gesticulation with all the fervour of a new convert. It was a joy to behold. Her impeccably-manicured hands would suddenly flutter away from the warmth of her lap, describing graceful ellipses as if trying to conjure up words that could not possibly exist. Ever. In any language. Even French.
Yet Lauren had struggled to comprehend the answers to some (if not most) of her questions. The fact that the former bore little (if any) relation to the latter did not help. Neither did Zanzibar’s scattergun delivery, nor his baffling habit of peppering his sentences with arcane references to Heidegger and Blanchot. Whenever he switched to pidgin English, he would sound like Jacques Derrida dubbed by Inspector Clouseau, which proved an even greater source of confusion, frankly.
At one point, the ink ran out of her biro, whereupon Zanzibar produced a pencil from his inside pocket with a little flourish. “Men,” he said, “alwez ave two penceuls.” He almost winked, but thought better of it.
*
Published in late 1986, Je suis la Femme Bigorneau was a succès de scandale which took the literary establishment by storm; a cause célèbre that turned Zanzibar overnight into the enfant terrible of French letters. Like Leos Carax’s film Mauvais sang, also released at the end of that year, it seemed to capture the zeitgeist, polarising opinion along a generational fault line. Louis Pauwels, editor of Le Figaro Magazine, claimed the novella was a perfect illustration of the “mental AIDS” afflicting the nation’s youth. “Makes Schopenhauer sound positively chipper,” wrote Josyanne Savigneau in her full-page rave review for Le Monde. “The kind of book that exists on the slippery cusp between pure genius and utter gibberish,” wrote a critic at Le Matin de Paris. “Bof!” Philippe Sollers is reported to have said, when sounded on the subject, mid-pied de porc farci grillé, at Brasserie Lipp. Zanzibar was all over the gossip columns too. He dated Béatrice Dalle (who had recently starred in Betty Blue), wrote a song for Étienne Daho, appeared in a video with Les Rita Mitsouko (playing the glockenspiel), spent his nights at the ultra-hip Bains Douches nightclub and was headbutted by Jean d’Ormesson during Apostrophes, the highly influential TV show. His parents — René and Monique — told Actuel that they had always known, deep down, that Sostène was special. “On sentait bien qu’il allait devenir artiste ou écrivain,” said his mum. “C’était vraiment un chieur,” his father concurred. They confided that they had done their level best to make him as miserable as possible throughout his childhood, so as to provide him with a lifetime of neuroses that would feed his future creative endeavours. “N’empêche qu’on a drôlement bien réussi notre coup,” said René, beaming with paternal pride: it was the gift that keeps giving. Zanzibar, however, was overwhelmed by his new-found notoriety. Béatrice Dalle soon left him and he started dabbling in too many drugs. Rumour has it that he could drink the likes of Antoine Blondin, Serge Gainsbourg or Alain Pacadis under the table. His next three books were minor bestsellers, and one of them was even turned into a film with Juliette Binoche (La Bonniche, 1991), but Zanzibar was never able to replicate the impact of Bigorneau, which he always likened to his seminal first orgasm (1979). Each new novel resembled an increasingly faded photocopy of the original blueprint, giving rise to what Sam Jordison recently described in The Guardian as “a sense of perpetual déjà vu on a dimmer switch”. Bref, his work seemed condemned to a gradual, but irreversible, running down; a depletion of vital energy that implied a dismal future of erectile dysfunction, hair loss and growing inertia.
*
The journalist’s black Moleskin notebook lay open, face down, on the coffee table. After an hour or so, weighty topics had been dropped in favour of increasingly flirtatious small talk. Zanzibar got up to refill her glass and, instinctively, she got up too and now they were kissing, deep and slow, their tongues going round and round and round like the ground bass number in the background, and he gently lifted up her summer frock as the melody soared over the looping bassline, and their bodies were grinding, their tongues intertwining, her head spinning and she found herself reclining in a Le Corbusier-style chaise longue. “J’aime quand ça s’incarne,” she whispered, drawing him hither with her long legs that he now sported nonchalantly over his shoulders. Leaning on her forearms, she tilted her head back, closed her eyes and bit her lower lip. A slow intake of breath — like a deep drag on a Gitane — subsided into a faint, low-pitched moan, not dissimilar to the sound a puppy makes when kicked.
“Thanks,” she said, upon leaving. Zanzibar stared at the outstretched hand last seen clasping his erect penis. “For having me?” she added by way of explanation, but the high-rising terminal transformed her statement into a question. A final probing question that she left dangling like one of Fat Pat’s earrings as she departed with a toss of hair and rustle of chiffon. She was marching past Erwin the cat who, curled up on a beanbag, did not even bother to look up. She was making her way down the transparent spiral staircase that seemed — like her — to be wound around nothing. Zanzibar just stood there, in the doorway, buffeted by the fragrant breeze she had generated. With closed eyes, he breathed in a lungful of her absence and just stood there. He just stood there, caught in her slipstream. Winded, he just stood there. He just stood there. “Putain!” he muttered, finally closing the door.
*
The presidential candidate emerged from the sea to spontaneous cries of “Vive la République!”. She was naked save for a tricolor sash — “Un rien m’habille” — that bisected the perkiest pair of Delacrucian tits to have ever stalked Le Touquet Plage. “Tu vois, là,” said a young father to his son, “ce sont les deux mammelles de la France.” As he pointed, tears welled up in his grateful eyes. Everything would be all right now. Everything. The crowd parted and Mme Royal glided by. Majestically. Regally. Eponymously… Photographers had a field day, fireworks were let off, babi
es were brandished, a brass band struck up the national anthem and, just when he was about to get an eyeful, Zanzibar found himself back home in his bathroom. He was standing in front of the mirror, trying to remove his contact lenses, which (as he would discover after plucking out an eyeball) he had forgotten to put in. The eye he was now staring at, and that stared back at him intermittently as he rolled it around in the palm of his hand, resembled a large white egg with a black dot inside — or rather the drawing of a white egg. The black dot alone contained more atoms than all the penceuls in the world.
*
Zanzibar was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l’Europe. He had opted for the last row, furthest away from the road, with the steps leading up to the theatre right behind him. He was the only one there now, a couple of German tourists having just departed. The sun was shining; birds were chirping in the nearby Luxembourg Gardens: summer was in the air. A waiter — as stylish as he was young — brought over an espresso and a glass of water, which he placed gingerly beside Zanzibar’s copy of Le Monde. They had devoted a whole page to l’affaire Zanzibar. It was all over the papers, blogs, social networks, podcasts, and news bulletins — both radio and television, local and national. There was no escaping it, and that was precisely why he was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l’Europe.
A 58 bus turned into Rue de l’Odéon. Zanzibar followed its slow progress past the clothes shop where the original Shakespeare and Company once stood. It stopped outside the pharmacy at the other end, on the other side, where an attractive woman he vaguely recognised — but could not quite place — alighted before walking back in his general direction. As she crossed the road, he identified the one-night-stand graphologist who, a few months back, had publicly pooh-poohed his cunnilingus technique, describing the result as a series of “indecipherable chicken-scratch squiggles”. Name of Amélie. Or possibly Emilie. Something along those lines. It was she too, he now realised, who had played the part of the presidential candidate in that strange dream that was still haunting him. Thankfully, she had not noticed Zanzibar and picked a table in the second row, next to an olive tree in a square metal pot. With an uncanny sense of apropos, she ordered a kir royal. No sooner had the waiter scuttled away than she proceeded to hitch up her maxi dress until vast swathes of tanned, toned thigh were exposed to the warm rays. She completed this pre-prandial routine by crossing her legs and lowering, visor-style, the designer sunglasses that had been perched on her head, like a tiara. Zanzibar’s beady eyes darted from the rear view of the graphologist to the restaurant facing him on the left, back to the graphologist’s signature legs, and on to the Flammarion building facing him on the right. He repeated this circuit many times with meticulous, almost obsessive, care until the person he was waiting for finally emerged from the building.
Théodule Meuniaire was a thirty-something publishing whizz-kid with rock star good looks, who — it was an open secret — was largely responsible for reviving Zanzibar’s flagging career. He lingered for a few minutes outside Flammarion, talking to someone on his mobile, apparently in a foreign language (probably franglais), then walked over to his car (a grey Porsche) that was parked only a few metres away. He opened the door, removed his jacket and hung it on a hook inside. Before closing the door, he hooted twice in brief succession while looking over at the pavement café. He waved. Zanzibar quickly unfolded his paper and hid behind it. Peering over his crumpled copy of Le Monde, he saw the graphologist lift up her sunglasses with one hand and wave back with the other. A broad smile had now lit up her face. She sprinkled a few coins on the table and skipped across the road to join her date.
They kissed like models in a Doisneau picture and walked, hand in hand, to La Méditerranée, the plush restaurant with its blue exterior and Cocteau decorations. Once they had disappeared from view, Zanzibar called the waiter and whispered something in his ear. “Bien entendu, Monsieur, au-cun souci,” he said. Zanzibar got up and ran over to examine the grey Porsche. Lauren Ipsum’s horn-rimmed glasses (which, as he recalled, she had removed just before shaking her long hair loose) taunted him from the leather dashboard where they had been conspicuously displayed. With closed eyes, he breathed in a lungful of absence and just stood there. He just stood there, in front of the grey Porsche with the horn-rimmed glasses on the leather dashboard. For a minute or so, he just stood there. He just stood there. “Putain!” he muttered, before making his way back.
The waiter smiled at him and Zanzibar felt obliged to order another espresso. He checked his emails on his iPhone, then glanced at the latest tweets, most of which revolved around “l’Affaire”. After a brief recap, the article in Le Monde focused on the prime-time television show, to be broadcast live that very evening, during which a confrontation between Meuniaire and himself was to take place. Whether it would or not was a moot point, not least because the programme consisted of a series of announcements for nominally forthcoming — but, in reality, constantly deferred — features, followed by lengthy commercial breaks, themselves followed by further announcements, and so on until the closing credits. Although quite taken with the concept of a show that was forever in the process of becoming, Zanzibar had no intention whatsoever of being party to this masquerade. He was equally determined to ensure his rival did not make it to the studio either, and that was — more precisely — why he was seated at one of the little round tables dotting the semicircle of cobbled stones outside the Théâtre de l’Europe.
He looked up, squinting into the sun, just in time to see Meuniaire and the graphologist glide past in the grey Porsche with the horn-rimmed glasses on the leather dashboard.
Putain!
*
In 1992, having finally acknowledged that there was little lead in his penceul left, Sostène Zanzibar embarked on an ill-fated prequel to Genesis. Although this grandiose project would occupy him for the best part of two decades, we have precious little to show for it. A few meagre excerpts appeared at irregular intervals in obscure Japanese style magazines whose prohibitive cover prices were inversely proportional to their confidential circulations. The rest of this “work in regress,” as he liked to describe it, was destroyed. One night, in November 2009, the author deleted the computer files containing the typescript and burned all the print-outs — ream upon ream — he had archived over the years. According to legend, he then took a taxi to Denfert-Rochereau, uncovered a manhole and disappeared down the Catacombs where he spent the following fortnight listening to the same album over and over again on a battered old ghetto blaster believed to have once belonged to Don Letts.
Franco-Swiss all-girl band Les Péronelles (think Shangri-Las meet The Slits) always maintained that they had rounded off their first (and last) album (Trois fois rien, 1983) with a hidden track. “L’Arlésienne” was so well hidden, however, that no one had ever found it. With time, it became the Holy Grail of Franco-Swiss rock criticism. An early issue of Les Inrockuptibles contained a six-page feature (“A l’écoute de l’inouï”) devoted to this unheard melody. It included interviews with the producer and sound engineer as well as cultural luminaries such as Patrick Eudeline, Gérard Genette, Jean Baudrillard, John Cage, and assorted roadies.
Listening to this ten-minute stretch of silence over and over again was a Zen-like experience at first. Soon, though, Zanzibar was able to recognise, and even anticipate, every hum, hiss and crackle on the track: its teeny tiny tinny tinnitus quality. The song had to be concealed behind, or perhaps even within, this silence that was not quite silence. It had to. He even thought he could sense its presence in the same, almost physical, way one is always aware of being observed. It was just out of earshot; a mere whisper away.
By the middle of the second week, a melody had emerged from the static and wormed itself into his eardrums. It was the sound of music leaking from a commuter’s headphones on public transport. It was the sound of a dista
nt party carried on the wind of time, ebbing and flowing. It was the sound of mythical monsters plumbing the murky depths of ancient oceans. It was the sound of half a dozen rashers sizzling away like nobody’s business in Lauren Ipsum’s big fuck-off frying pan. Above all, it was the sound of a wannabe troglodyte slowly going out of his mind.
By the end of the second week, the melody had disap- peared. It had never been there in the first place; not really. Zanzibar, now at his wit’s end, had a rare eureka moment. The ghost track was not concealed behind, or even within, the silence — it was that silence itself. He had been listening to it all along, or rather he had not: all along, he had been listening into it for something else. There was, however, nothing else: no behind or within; no depth or beyond. Zanzibar had finally acceded to a heightened sense of hearing. He was now firmly convinced that this recording of real silence — silence that was not quite silence — constituted, en soi, some kind of irreducible message. Communication stripped back to its bare essentials; atomised — degré zéro.
The author’s discovery could not but chime with his long-standing interest in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Whenever he wrestled with the blank page and the blank page won, Zanzibar would shrug it off as being of little import since it meant, ipso facto, that another version of himself was scribbling away in some parallel universe. Although this explanation was offered in jest, the author started thinking of his alter ego — hard at work on the Great Novel he was not working on — with increasing regularity. Some would say that these thoughts even blossomed into a beautiful, full-blown obsession.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 37
