Our driver searches for a nearby shop and buys some bread and cheese for his dinner. His fare continues to keep him waiting, though it’s already ten at night. All of a sudden, a frantic woman runs down the house’s front stairs shouting for help. The coachman leaps down.
“Dead!..Dead!” the crazed woman cries and disappears into the shadows at the end of the street. And that’s it.
No sound, no door creaking on its hinges, no other voices. The house is numb with death. Our driver leaves the snack he’s just started, along with his life after excommunication, spent over the coachbox, and begins to climb the stairs.
On the second-floor landing, a door opens. He enters and continues down a hallway covered with the scattered clothes of a person who was in a hurry to disrobe and at last reaches a lit room. Here there’s a bed and a stiff on the bed, his shirt half-opened, his stockings still on: the Monsignor in his final sleep. The room is full of fabulous colors — red, white, violet in all its splendor, the green of the bishop’s stockings, and just above the stockings an array of mixed-tone sores that run like buckles along the holy man’s disreputable calves. On his red and gray chest — gray from all the pale hair covering it — a string of silver medallions and gold gypsy coins. The terrible light of a single candle puts a halo of light over the bishop’s amethyst episcopal ring and a warm glow over the skin of his sex. Vomit, uneven in color, sullies the corpse’s head. His cassock would’ve fallen to the floor but has been held in place with a silvery rope. His skullcap sits on the night table with his pocket watch inside. Somehow, thanks perhaps to a trick of the light, everything around the corpse looks just as dead as he.
“Then, you see, from behind the drapes, came a sound like a cat that’s fallen asleep on a newspaper, changing its position. The bed creaked. The organdy curtains trembled. A slim woman emerged from between their bright damask pleats. My presence scared her out of her wits and she fled the room, clutching her breast, running right past me and down the corridor, letting out a startled scream: Mama!
“Her voice carried up through the house. I heard someone else running — the steps seemed to be coming from the ceiling. An older woman with a decisive air appeared then in the doorway. In one look, she took in the scene. No hesitation. She knew perfectly well what had to be done in difficult situations such as these, as though she’d already had a troupe of daughters inducted into Paris Opéra Ballet (excellent training, then as now, since — as I’m sure you know! — the Opéra is absolutely the last word in upper-class bordellos)…
“‘Help me,’ she said.
“We tossed the body onto the carpet next to the bed and then dragged the bishop into the living room. We began to dress him there, putting on his skullcap just so and placing his pocket watch at his side. With great effort, we managed to get the corpse seated in the armchair next to the piano.
“The cadaver still hadn’t stiffened. He yielded gallantly to our efforts, as though apologizing for the disaster, while we did with him whatever seemed best. The mother, whose features to my now fairly sympathetic eyes were becoming more and more aristocratic by the minute, picked up a musical score and placed it in the bishop’s hands. When we propped him back against the headrest, the departed released one final mouthful of minced chard he’d been saving in his stomach, and it spattered all over the music.
“The Curia, to which the young maid had run when she bolted from the house, sent three novices in black. Improvising, they entered skinny and solemn into the Louis Philippe-styled salon. One of them stayed to guard the door. Another headed to the right to get a good look at the scene of the crime. The third went straight to the cadaver.
“‘Could you please go over the sequence of events?’ this inquisitive one asked, like a detective.
“‘It’s all quite clear,’ the lady of the house replied — her performance almost stage-worthy. ‘My daughter was at the piano,’ she said. ‘Monsignor wanted to sing for us. He took the score, and just as he was about to sing the first note, he doubled over. His head fell against his chest, and stayed that way.’
“And that’s what went down on record. But deep in my heart, down where we all still have a little honesty, where we judge ourselves without mercy, without making excuses, I could never abide by those ‘facts.’ In our magnificent mise — en — scène, we’d committed one notable error: my accomplice had planted the musical score upside down…”
The coachman began to brood after this, as if truly upset. A moment later he touched my hand and said: “We’re there! See you tomorrow! Time to get down.”
JANUARY 2, 18—
To live is the victory of the fetus. Being born is its only end. During its nine months of reflection, death doesn’t seem at all the tragedy the Christian philosophers make of it. One doesn’t think in the waiting room. For the fetus, just seeing the light is a triumph. It’s everything. Think how long it’s had to avoid the machinations of abortion, its various run-ins with all those methods enumerated by the penal code as excuses for depriving a citizen of her civil rights: the freezing shower to make the ovaries shiver; later, the crude, perfumed infusion; and then, later still, when it’s clear there’s no hope, the probing iron in some menopausal matron’s hand, wielded with all the skill of a novice butcher or an ever-so-proper gentleman who considers it quite enough to expectorate near the spittoon, so as not to offend passersby. But in the end, at last, the fetus, triumphant, can exclaim: Toute la lyre!
Thus, despite its notable success, the face of a newborn reveals something about the precariousness of our life on earth. The womb was an uninterrupted series of threats. The triumph of the fetus can never be more than melancholy; see its wide forehead, as though its tiny frontal lobe has already begun to consider, despite itself, the likelihood of its eventual death by stroke…
FEBRUARY 24, 18—
I hate the great boulevards invented by Haussmann. The people who toil and bore themselves to exhaustion along those streets remind me of the words of Saint Paul: “the wages of sin is death.” Yes, they are the whited sepulchers: gorgeous women who flit through life like butterflies, uncertain of whether there’s any beauty under their makeup; men who’ve prolonged their stay in their mothers’ wombs by way of these gorgeous women, continuing to live off their maternal blood and pus; wrongheaded men who bend down to retrieve a tiny piece of green paper in case it might have a coin inside, or perhaps an entire fortune; and then, getting in these transients’ ways, a waiter who comes out carrying a flowerpot by its handles and places it on the edge of the sidewalk, as though this were the road to Damascus…
FEBRUARY 28, 18—
Nothing spreads sadness like popularity. It knows how to make us bitter, how to cause the same resentment that oppresses us after possessing a woman. Popularity is this: to take a woman into your arms, to feel pleasure approaching, and then, the very next instant, after a brief rest, to have your umbilical cord cut all over again, and find yourself once more with the sadness of a newborn — with their wide foreheads, rheumy eyes, grimaces of pain, wrinkled genitalia. I’ve experienced popularity, as I think I’ve already mentioned. I’ve been quite proud of myself ever since I was a small child, after having discovered no less than five cadavers in the sluice gates of our mill.
That’s how precocious children get old before their time. Seven-year-old violin prodigies are old by twenty. All the applause tires out their souls. They get increasingly effeminate. By the age of thirteen, their managers have to work hard to keep their protégés’ curls looking properly childish. Beards are plucked. At night, women come to kiss these children like they’re sheep — and men come to kiss them like they’re women. Such prodigies know all the pleasures but the sensual ones; their childhoods must be eternal. Once they’ve served out their contracts, they’re left to the tender mercies of critics, those deflowerers of knowledge, who put up one makeshift dam after another, hoping to keep any freak floods of intelligence from getting too rapidly disseminated…By sixteen, the once precocious child r
esembles a wealthy fifty-five-year-old businessman, valuing nothing more than pleasure now, surrendering himself without compunction to common soldiers in their fortifications and the peasants who ride the cargo wagons at night, rolling down dead roads.
APRIL 4, 18—
Even the greatest skeptic can nonetheless catch a glimpse of happiness in a woman’s smile…happiness, which, as the Arabs say, treads upon golden heels. I knew, as a child, a woman whose look had a certain sweetness to it. Her beauty came from her being nearsighted.
I used to pass by a house where a few of my female relatives lived. At the time, they’d given shelter to an orphan girl who’d committed a terrible sin: well, she’d gone to bed with a man…
I’ve never seen the pain of innocence so intensely reflected in a human eye. Maria Luisa, the orphan, looked at me as one might a passing angel. I was the only man who ever came into her new home since her fatal fall. She’d already spent a week in the darkness of the attic with nothing to eat or drink but hard bread and water mixed with soap, as a punishment for her weakness. My aunts were rigorous moralists — spinsters.
Into this improvised convent came Maria Luisa’s Fairy Godmother, hoping to rescue her, and taking on, for this purpose, the form of tuberculosis — saying: “Your deliverance is at hand.” This lady who herself looked at me with the eyes of an angel en route to heaven, this woman who’d aspired to the grand title of “mother”—like the little girls who stick pillows under their skirts and say they’re pregnant — died at dawn in the care of my religious aunts, who were “certain” that this was for the best. When it was over, they sighed with relief. “God’s will has been done,” my Aunt Javiera said, whose breasts had never grown and who wore grayish housecoats that pleated in a puff over her chest.
APRIL 10, 18—
Living in our needle hole of the Seine valley, near the river, by its endless flow, where the wind often pulls trees up by their roots and the sun roasts the fishermen’s skin; by that road unencumbered by any city, along those routes where tramps still chew over their songs of revolution, I’ve never felt the guiding hand of authority, nor the least hint of a hierarchy controlling my life. My solitude has never had any confidant save my own instincts. Today, however, having joined the rest of the world in that courtyard outside the army fort, I’ve suffered in a way none of my comrades can comprehend. They just complain about the discipline — and they have no trouble finding the words to complain. I can’t find the words. I swallow my pain. There is only one way I can think of to sublimate this experience. Vengeance. Together with my friend here, who speaks in a low, earnest voice, I’d like to scream out my horror at the way men destroy all the beauty in the world by killing children.
I sing my childhood in these pages that no one will ever read since they are written only for me. Nobody ever gave me toys to sap away my manhood, to teach me to be docile and, sadder still, simply ordinary. No. I’ve never had the tinplate and cardboard gendarmes children play with in the city. Justice is a painted gendarme whose colors rub off in our hands. A gendarme that’s been painted, carved, encrusted in the foods we ingest. The trademark of our moribund society, of a nation unhinged, of men who don’t know how to hold on to the elegance they possessed as children, when man—that obese monster — happily slept.
APRIL 24, 18—
I was a good geometry student. I loved straight lines. Perpendicular ones above all. These are lifelines, I told myself.
I never stopped to look at the lithograph of the Tower of Pisa that hung in our foyer. Its leaning troubled me. I could see it falling. In the paper each day, I looked for news from Italy first. No, it still hadn’t fallen.
But when? My nightmares took full advantage of my concern. The Tower of Pisa eroded spectacularly in my dreams.
I always enjoyed news of such disasters. Were there a lot of fatalities? Oh, not that it really mattered how many citizens were crushed under some wall — what are a few deaths compared to the moral serenity its collapse provided to people like myself, who couldn’t bear not knowing when it would finally come down? Certainly old neighborhoods have their particular poetry, patina, the imprint of time; but I stay away from neighborhoods where the buildings all lean up against each other at the elbow like old women in nursing homes trying not to topple over. It’s not the walls themselves that bother me so much as the stanchions propping them up. They never seem strong enough. Props that aren’t absolutely straight give me goose bumps. My hair stands on end. The same thing happens when I see crooked pictures, and it’s even worse when it’s a landscape painting making use of perspective — a terrible fad I can’t forgive bad painters for indulging. This must explain my excessive love for stereoscopes: a perfectly placed line sweetens my soul. In the Bougival cemetery there was once a truncated pyramid that obstructed my view of the main street. I tipped the monument over. Someone righted it and put even more supports around the thing, but I destroyed it again, repeatedly, until the owners of the plot came to realize the gravity of the aesthetic assault they’d perpetrated upon nature and reduced the height of the tomb. I don’t know if they also shortened the corpse.
Proportion — the source of all beauty in architecture — was nearly the end of me. Bougival is an attractive town, I suppose, in the context of eighteenth-century architecture, but there’s a triumphal arch that the Romans left in Zaghouan which is so stunning that every woman who passes in front of it acquires a beauty frankly terrifying in its perfection. I felt ill before this triumphal arch. They arrested me for desertion, and that arrest was my salvation. Otherwise, I would’ve died like a voluptuous Buddha there on the roadside, contemplating the poetry that the perfect proportions of those architectural lines showered down upon the women of our day and age — just as it endowed the local women with a similar charm two millennia earlier, those same African women who made a temple out of love, in which they lay themselves down to pray.
Love is the most profound aesthetic experience in a person’s life. Faith cannot compete. It and love tend to go their separate ways — though they do often stage reunions on battlefields, taking refuge together, as when they were first born, in men stricken with fear, nothing more than the terrified playthings of God.
MAY 6, 18—
Once, men possessed the sea, the mountains, and the stars. They put them to use in their poetry, in their dreams and deaths. Today, however…
One can see, sometimes, at a distance, along the basin of the Seine, an imprecise something that, given its lovely surroundings, must, one assumes, be a child or a beautiful woman. As one gets closer to the something, though, one finds instead what should be a rather appealing human being is in fact nothing more than a small dog, a camera, or a bicycle.
MAY 8, 18—
The coal merchant’s son, Joaquín, had inherited a cuirass — by way of the continual, chaotic game of blackmail and allegiance played by maids and porters. This cuirass wasn’t ancient, but rather Republican in origin. As Joaquín kept watch over his father’s coal, he entertained himself by adjusting this body armor. Imagine the darkness of the coal pit, and that dirty-faced child encased beneath a breastplate of steel — it’s nothing less than the evocation of a vanished era. No historian could have conceived of a more perfect scene, entirely of a piece: Joaquín, beneath his mesh and plating, as an antique warrior, a statue of Mars hidden beneath the earth, awaiting the shovel that would bring him to light.
As Joaquín couldn’t hide his contentment at feeling himself prisoner in his steel corselet, I became quite jealous, wanting to feel the embrace of something similar…I couldn’t buy a cuirass, no matter how I dreamed of one. So I bought a stiff corset the color of sailcloth instead, and learned then the secret delectation women must feel as they are silently, constantly, shaped.
I’d discovered the sheath of voluptuousness. The Shulamith lying upon Solomon would have no other objective: my corset put pressure upon those same nerve clusters that gave me so much pleasure when alone…
MAY 19,
18—
Mention of Joaquín has brought me to my childhood again. Is this the so-called “blue hour”? Who named it that? There is always a certain sarcasm in people who live within the limits of the law, but were once little delinquents…
A man approached me one day on my way home from school. I was polite as a little girl whose schoolmistress lavishes her with the sort of caresses that would drive an older person wild with delight.
“Do you know where someone could rent a house around here?” he asked.
“There, across the street,” I said.
“Why don’t you go pick up the keys for me so we can take a look?” he asked.
I went to get them and we entered the un-rented house. The doors to all the rooms were open and our footsteps made their way to the center of the building. At the top of the stairs, the friendly man who’d made me his associate gave me some caramels with one hand and with his other unbuttoned my pants.
“How pretty it is,” he said with the forthright smile of a savage, caressing me.
I heard someone calling to me. A distant voice I hadn’t heard since my mother died. Where did it come from? I moved back down the stairs like an automaton. I went toward the voice. The friendly man followed me, and when I’d gotten farther away, running now, trying to make up for the time I’d lost, I saw him close the door diligently behind me, looking at me much as a poor poet might, peeking into the Ministry of Finance.*
On Elegance While Sleeping Page 3
