Compass

by Mathias Enard

  “I’m interested in the history of music.”

  “Are you a musician?”

  (Embarrassed) “No. I . . . I study musicology. I’m a . . . a musicologist.”

  (Surprise, interest) “How great, which instrument do you play?”

  (Keen embarrassment) “I . . . I don’t play any instrument. I just study. I listen and write, if you prefer.”

  (Disappointment, disappointed surprise) “You don’t play? But you can read music?”

  (Relief) “Yes, of course, that’s part of my job.”

  (Surprise, suspicion) “You read, but you don’t play?”

  (Shameless lie) “Actually I can play several instruments, but poorly.”

  Then I launched into a long explanation of my research, after a pedagogical detour through the plastic arts (not all art historians or critics are painters). I had to admit that I wasn’t too interested in “modern” music (or rather, technically speaking, I must have lied and invented a passion for Turkish pop, I know myself too well) but rather music from the nineteenth century, Western and Eastern; the name of Franz Liszt was familiar to her, but Haci Emin Effendi meant absolutely nothing to her, probably because I was pronouncing it terribly. I must have shown off by telling her about my investigation (which I found fascinating, breathtaking even) into Liszt’s piano, that famous “grand piano, the large A-E-A model, with seven octaves, triple-strung, a mechanical piano with Érard double escapement, with all the improvements, in mahogany, etc.” on which he had played for the Sultan in 1847.

  In the meantime the other guests had also taken seats and helped themselves to more beers, and Faugier, who till now had been lavishing his attention on another girl, began to focus on the young woman to whom I was painfully telling, in my English (which is always laborious, I didn’t know how to pronounce “mahogany” for example, so like Mahagoni in German), about my pathetic little studies: in the blink of an eye and in Turkish, he made her burst out laughing, at my expense I’m sure; then, still in the same language, they talked about music, at least I think so, I understood Guns N’ Roses, Pixies, Nirvana, then they left to dance; for a long while I contemplated the Bosphorus shining through the window, and the ass of the Turkish girl undulating almost under my nose, as she swayed against that smug fop that was Faugier — it’s better to laugh about it now, but at the time I was pretty annoyed.

  Obviously I knew nothing of the reality of the rift, the crack in Faugier that would become a rift — it wasn’t until years later in Tehran that I discovered what was hiding behind this seducer’s façade, the sadness and somber, solitary madness of this frequenter of the lower depths.

  It was of course thanks to Faugier that I smoked my first opium pipe — he had brought back the passion and technique from his first stay in Iran. Smoking opium in Istanbul seemed to belong to another age, an Orientalist’s whim, and precisely for that reason I let myself be tempted — I, who had never touched any illegal drug or any vice — by this opium, this “thebaic”: very moved, frightened even, but with a fear filled with pleasure, the fear of children facing the forbidden, not that of adults facing death. Opium was, in our imagination, so strongly associated with the Far Orient, with faded color prints of Chinese men stretched out in opium dens, that one almost forgot it came from Turkey and India and had been smoked from Thebes to Damascus to Tehran, which, in my mind, also helped allay my apprehension: to smoke in Istanbul or Tehran was to rediscover a little of the spirit of the place, to take part in a tradition that we were not familiar with, and to bring back to light a local reality that colonial clichés had moved elsewhere. Opium is still traditional in Iran, where teriyakis, opium smokers, number among the thousands; you see stick-thin grandfathers, gesticulating and vindictive, mad until they smoke their first pipe or dissolve a little of the residue burned the day before into their tea and then they become gentle and wise again, wrapped in their thick cloaks, warming themselves near a brazier whose coals they use to light their bafours and soothe their souls and their old bones. Faugier told me all this during the weeks preceding my initiation, which would bring me closer to Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, and even to poor Heinrich Heine, who found in laudanum and especially in morphine a remedy for his ills, a consolation in his endless agony. Faugier had used his contacts among the brothel-keepers and nightclub bouncers to get a few balls of the black resin that left a very particular odor on your fingers, an unknown perfume that reminded you of incense, but as if caramelized, sweet and bizarrely bitter at the same time — a taste that haunts you for a long time, returns to your sinuses now and then and to the back of your throat, on certain days; if I call it up now, this taste, I can find it again by swallowing my saliva, closing my eyes, as I suppose a smoker must be able to do with the horrible burnt-tar stench of tobacco, much different, for unlike what I thought before I had the experience, opium doesn’t burn, but boils, melts, and gives off a thick vapor upon contact with heat. No doubt it’s the complexity of the preparation that saves the European masses from becoming Iranian-style teriyakis; smoking opium requires traditional savoir-faire, it is an art, some say, which is much slower and more complex than injection — Jörg Fauser, the German William Burroughs, describes in Rohstoff, his autobiographical novel, the hippies in Istanbul in the 1970s who spent all the blessed day injecting themselves, on filthy beds in the countless pensions in Küçükayasofia Caddesi, with raw opium they dissolved in a rush in every possible kind of liquid, incapable of smoking it effectively.

  In our case, the preparation was à l’iranienne, according to Faugier; I was able to verify later, by comparing his gestures to the Iranians’, how well he had mastered the ritual, which was more than a little mysterious: he didn’t seem like an opium addict, or at least he didn’t have any of the symptoms one usually associates with drug addicts — slowness, thinness, irascibility, difficulty concentrating — and yet he was a past master in the preparation of pipes, according to the quality of the substance he had in hand, raw or fermented opium, and the material he had at his disposal, in our case an Iranian bafour, whose large clay bowl was gently warmed in a little brazier; with the curtains carefully drawn, like my heavy curtains now in cloth from Aleppo, red and gold, their Oriental motifs faded by years of poor Viennese light — in Istanbul we had to resign ourselves to hiding the Strait behind blinds so as not to be seen by the neighbors, but the risks were small; in Tehran you risked much more: the regime had declared war against the drug, the Revolutionary Guards clashed in veritable pitched battles with smugglers in the east of the country, and for anyone who might have doubted the reality of this fight, the day before Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, in 2001, when I had just arrived, the judges of the Islamic Republic organized a spectacle of extraordinary cruelty and broadcast its images across the entire world: the public execution of five traffickers including a thirty-year-old woman, hanged from cherry picker trucks, blindfolded, slowly raised into the air, ropes around their necks, legs kicking until death ensued, and their poor bodies dangled at the ends of telescopic arms; the girl’s name was Fariba, she was wearing a black chador; her dress, swelled by the breeze, made her into a terrifying bird, an unfortunate crow who cursed the spectators with its wings, and I took pleasure imagining that the crowd of brutes (men, women, children), who were shouting slogans as they watched these poor devils raised up to death, would be stricken by her curse and experience the worst kinds of suffering. These images haunted me for a long time: they at least had the merit of reminding us that, despite all the charms of Iran, we were in a cursed country, territory of pain and death, where everything — even the poppies, flowers of martyrdom — was red with blood. I hurriedly tried to forget all that in music and poetry, because you still have to live, like the Iranians who are past masters in the art of oblivion — the young people smoked opium that they mixed with tobacco, or else took heroin; drugs were extraordinarily cheap, even in local currency: despite the efforts of the mullahs and the spectacular ex
ecutions, the idleness of the youth was so great that nothing could prevent them from looking for consolation in drugs, parties, and fornication, as Sarah says in the introduction to her thesis.

  Faugier examined all this despair as a specialist, an entomologist of despondency, abandoning himself as well to the most formidable excesses, in a kind of contagion of his object of study, eaten away by a galloping sadness, a tuberculosis of the soul that he tended, just as Professor Laennec tended his lungs, with formidable quantities of narcotics.

  My first opium pipe brought me closer to Novalis, Berlioz, Nietzsche, Trakl — I entered into the closed circle of those who had tasted the fabulous nectar Helen served Telemachus, so he could forget his sadness for a while: “Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, had another thought, and right away, she poured into the wine they were drinking a balm, nepenthe, which makes one forget one’s ills. Whoever drank this mixture could shed no tears for a whole day, even if his mother and father had died, even if his brother or beloved son were killed in front of him with a sword, and he saw this with his own eyes. And the daughter of Zeus possessed this excellent liquor that had been given her by Polydamna, wife of Thon, in Egypt, fertile land that produces many balms, some salutary and others deadly. There all doctors are the cleverest of men, they are of the race of Paeon,” and it is true that opium chased away all grief, all pain, moral or physical, and cured, temporarily, the most secret ills, even the very perception of time: opium induces floating, opens up a parenthesis in awareness, an inner parenthesis where you feel as if you are touching eternity, as if you have conquered melancholy and the finitude of being. Telemachus enjoyed two kinds of drunkenness, the one caused by contemplating Helen’s face, and the other from the power of the nepenthe, and I myself, once, in Iran, while smoking by myself with Sarah, since she had no taste for hard or soft drugs, had the luck of being caressed by her beauty when the gray smoke emptied my mind of all desire of possession, all anguish, all solitude: I could see her truly, and she gleamed like the moon — opium didn’t disturb the senses, it made them objective; it made the subject disappear, and it’s not the least of the contradictions of this mystical narcotic that it draws us out of ourselves, all the while making awareness and sensations keener, and projects us into the great calm of the universal.

  Faugier had warned me that one of the many alkaloids that composed opium could cause vomiting, and that a first opiated experience could be accompanied by violent nausea, which was not the case for me — the only side effect, aside from strange erotic dreams in mythical harems, was a healthy constipation: another advantage of the poppy for the traveler, always subject to more or less chronic intestinal irregularities that number, along with worms and various amoebas, among the travel companions of those who journey through the eternal Orient, although they’re rarely mentioned in their memoirs.

  Why opium has disappeared today from the European pharmacopeia, I do not know; I gave my doctor a good laugh when I asked him to prescribe me some — he knows, though, that I have a serious disease, I’m a good patient, and that I wouldn’t abuse it, if in fact (and that’s obviously the danger) it’s possible not to abuse this panacea, but Faugier assured me, to dissipate my last fears, that you didn’t develop a dependency by smoking one or two pipes a week. I can see his gestures now, as he was preparing the bafour, whose clay bowl had been warmed in the embers; he would cut the hard black paste into little pieces, which he would soften by bringing them closer to the heat of the brazier, before grasping the warm pipe — the waxed wood, ringed with brass, looked a little like an oboe or shawm without reed or holes, but with a gilded mouthpiece that Faugier would put in his mouth; then he would delicately pick up one of the burning coals with the help of a pair of tongs and would press it against the upper part of the bowl; the air he inhaled would make the ember turn red, his face would be covered in bronze glints; he’d close his eyes as the opium melted, producing a tiny crackling noise, and a few seconds later he’d spit out a light cloud, the excess his lungs hadn’t managed to hold in, a breath of pleasure; he was an ancient flautist playing in the half-light, and the perfume of burnt opium (spicy, bitter, sweet) would fill the night.

  My heart is beating as I await my turn; I wonder what effect the black gum will produce; I’m afraid, I’ve never smoked anything, aside from a joint in school; I wonder if I’ll cough, vomit, faint. Faugier utters one of his horrible phrases, “What the fuck, sure doesn’t suck,” he hands me the pipe without letting it go, I support it with my left hand and bend over, the metal tip is warm, I discover the taste of opium, remote at first, and then, when I breathe in as Faugier brings close to the bowl a white-hot coal whose heat I can feel against my cheek, suddenly powerful, more powerful, so powerful I can no longer feel my lungs — I’m surprised by the almost watery sweetness of this smoke, surprised by the ease with which it can be swallowed, even if, to my great shame, I feel nothing but the disappearance of my respiratory apparatus, a grayness inside, as if my chest were blackened by a lead pencil. Faugier watches me with a fixed smile, he becomes worried — So? I make an inspired face, I wait, I listen. I listen to myself, I look inside myself for new rhythms and accents, I try to follow my own transformation, I’m very attentive, I’m tempted to close my eyes, I’m tempted to smile, I smile, I could even laugh, but I’m happy to smile because I feel Istanbul around me, I hear it without seeing it, it’s a very simple, very complete happiness that settles in, here and now, without expecting anything but absolute perfection from the suspended, dilated instant, and I suppose, at that instant, that the effect is there.

  I watch Faugier scrape the residue of opium with a needle.

  The brazier becomes gray; little by little the coals grow cold and are covered with ashes; soon we’ll have to blow on it to rid them of this dead skin and find again, if it isn’t too late, the flame that’s still inside them. I listen to an imaginary musical instrument, a memory of my day; it’s Liszt’s piano; he’s playing in front of the Sultan. If I dared, I’d ask Faugier: According to you, what might Liszt have played at the Çiragan Palace, in 1847, before the court and all the important foreigners the Ottoman capital had at the time? Was Sultan Abdülmecit as music-loving as his brother Abdülaziz would be, first Wagnerian of the Orient? Certainly his Hungarian Melodies, and certainly too his “Grand Galop Chromatique,” which he played so often all over Europe and in Russia. Maybe, as elsewhere, his Improvisations on a Local Theme mixed with the Hungarian Melodies. Did Liszt take opium? Berlioz did.

  Faugier shapes a new ball of black paste in the pipe’s bowl.

  I calmly listen to this distant melody, I look, from high up, at all these men, all these souls still walking around us: who was Liszt, who was Berlioz, who was Wagner and all the people they knew, Musset, Lamartine, Nerval, an immense network of texts, notes, and images, clear, precise, a path visible by me alone that links old Hammer-Purgstall to a whole world of travelers, musicians, poets, that links Beethoven to Balzac, to James Morier, to Hofmannsthal, to Strauss, to Mahler, and to the sweet smoke of Istanbul and Tehran, is it possible that opium is still accompanying me after all these years, that you can call up its effects as you do God in prayer — was I dreaming of Sarah in the poppy, for a long time, like this evening, a long, profound desire, a perfect desire, since it requires no satisfaction, no completion; an eternal desire, an endless erection without goal, that’s what opium provokes.

  It guides us in the shadows.

  Franz Liszt the handsome boy arrives in Constantinople from Jasi, city of the bloody pogroms, via Galata on the Black Sea at the end of May 1847. He has just finished a long tour, Lemberg, Czernowitz, Odessa, all the concert halls in Eastern Europe, large or small, with all the noteworthy people, great or small. He is a star, a monster, a genius; he makes men cry, women faint, and it’s hard for us to believe, today, what he writes about his success: five hundred students accompany him, on horseback, to the first relay post when he leaves Berlin; a crowd of young women show
ers him with flower petals when he leaves the Ukraine. There is no artist who knows Europe so well, down to its most remote borders, west or east, from Brest to Kiev. Everywhere he goes he sets off rumors, gossip that precedes him to the next city: he has been arrested, he’s gotten married, has fallen ill; everywhere people wait for him and, the most extraordinary thing, he actually arrives everywhere, heralded by the appearance of his Érard piano, at least as indefatigable as he, which the Parisian manufacturer sends by boat or coach, as soon as he knows the destination of his best representative; hence the Journal de Constantinople publishes, on May 11, 1847, a letter from Paris, from the manufacturer Sébastien Pierre Érard himself, announcing the imminent arrival of a grand piano, in mahogany, with all possible improvements, shipped from Marseille on April 5. So Liszt is on the way! Liszt is coming! Despite extensive research, I can’t find many details about his visit to Istanbul, aside perhaps from the name of the woman who was supposed to accompany him there:

  And that poor Mariette Duplessis who is dead . . . She is the first woman with whom I fell in love, who is now in who knows what cemetery, abandoned to the worms of the grave! She did tell me fifteen months ago: “I will not live; I’m a singular girl and I won’t be able to cling to this life that I don’t know how to lead and can no longer bear. Take me, lead me where you like; I won’t bother you, I sleep all day, in the evenings you can let me go to the concert and at night you can do what you like with me.” I had told her I’d take her to Constantinople, since that was the only sensible trip possible I could have her make. Now she is dead . . .