With my flying carpet and its built-in compass, where would I go? The Viennese dawn in December will be worlds away from the desert dawn: dawn with fingers of soot staining the sleet, that’s Homer’s epithet for the Danube. Weather like this is not fit to put an Orientalist outside in. I am decidedly an armchair scholar, nothing like Bilger, Faugier, or Sarah who were only happy at the wheels of their SUVs, in the lower depths that were the most — how to say it — exalting or simply “on site,” as ethnologists say — I’m still a spy, a bad spy, I probably would’ve produced the same knowledge if I had never left Vienna for those distant, inhospitable lands where they welcome you with hanged men and scorpions, I’d have had the same mediocre career if I had never traveled — my most-cited article is called “The First Oriental Orientalist Opera: Layla and Majnun by Uzeyir Hajibeyov,” and it’s quite obvious that I’ve never set foot in Azerbaijan, where they’re wallowing, it seems to me, in oil and nationalism; in Tehran, we weren’t far from Baku, and during our excursions by the Caspian Sea, we would dip our feet in the same water as the Azeri shores a few dozen kilometers to the north — in short, it’s kind of depressing to think that academia will remember me for my analysis of the relationship between Rossini, Verdi, and Hajibeyov. This computerized tallying of quotations and cross-referencing is leading the university to its ruin, no one today will undertake difficult, costly, lengthy studies, better to publish well-chosen, brief articles than vast works of erudition — I don’t delude myself as to the actual quality of my Hajibeyov article, it is cited in every publication dealing with the composer, mechanically, as one of the rare European contributions to studies on Hajibeyov the Azeri, and all the appeal I saw in this work — the emergence of an Oriental Orientalism — obviously goes by the wayside. No need to go to Baku for that. I should be fair, though: if I hadn’t gone to Syria, if I hadn’t had a tiny, almost chance experience of the desert (and a disappointment in love, let’s admit it) I’d never have developed a passion for Layla’s Majnun the Mad that led me to order (a complicated thing at the time) a score of Hajibeyov’s Layla and Majnun; I’d never have even known that the lover who shouted his passion to the gazelles and rocks had inspired a ton of novels in verse, in Persian or Turkish, including the one by Fuzuli that Hajibeyov adapted — me, I shouted my passion to Sarah, not my passion for her, but for Majnun, all the Majnuns, all the mad lovers, and my enthusiasm seemed to her nothing but high comedy: I can see us again in the leather armchairs at the French Institute for Research in Iran where, without meaning any harm by it (without meaning any harm?), she asked me for news of my “collection,” as she called it, when she saw me returning from the bookshop with a package under my arm, so, she asked, still mad about Layla? And I had to agree, a madman for Layla, or for Khosrow and Shirin, or for Vis and Ramin — in brief a classic love story, a thwarted passion that resolves itself in death. Wickedly, she challenged me with “And where’s the music, in all that?” with a false air of reproach, and I had found a reply: I am preparing the definitive and universal text on love in music, from the troubadours to Hajibeyov, including Schubert and Wagner, and I said that looking her straight in the eyes, and she burst out laughing, a monstrous laugh, the laugh of a djinn or fairy, a peri, a guilty laugh, look, I’m back to Sarah again, there’s nothing to be done. What potion had we drunk, was it the Styrian wine in Hainfeld, the Lebanese wine of Palmyra, the arak of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, or the wine of the dead, strange potion, which a priori works only one way — no, at the Baron Hotel in Aleppo the harm had already been done, what shame, my God what shame, I had managed to get rid of Bilger who stayed on the Euphrates, in the horrible Raqqa with the sinister clock, and brought Sarah (still vibrating from the night in Palmyra) to the delights of Aleppo, where she found, full of emotion, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, her letters to Klaus Mann, and all the melancholy of the androgynous Swiss woman. The description that Ella Maillart gives of Annemarie in The Cruel Way is not one that would arouse passion, though: a whining drug addict, never happy, unhealthily skinny in split skirts or harem pants, clinging to the steering wheel of her Ford, searching in travel, in the suffering of the long journey between Zurich and Kabul, for a good excuse for her suffering: a sad portrait. It was hard to see, beyond the description of that wreck with an angel’s face, the committed anti-fascist, the combatant, the cultivated, charming writer with whom Erika Mann and Carson McCullers fell in love — perhaps because the sober Ella Maillart, the gyrovague nun, was not at all the right person to describe her; perhaps because in 1939, Annemarie was like Europe, panting, frightened, in flight. We spoke of her in that restaurant hidden in the depths of a little stone-paved street, that Sissi House with the waiters in black outfits with white shirts; Sarah told me about the brief and tragic life of the Swiss woman, the recent discovery of her texts, dispersed, scattered, and about her personality, also broken up between morphine, writing, and a probable homosexuality that was hard to live with in the conservative milieu by the lake in Zurich.
Time closed in around us; the restaurant with its wicker chairs, the delicious and timeless food — Ottoman, Armenian — in those little glazed ceramic dishes, our recent memory of the Bedouins and the desolate shores of the Euphrates with ruined fortresses, all that sheltered us in a strange intimacy, as welcoming, enveloping, and solitary as the narrow, dark streets lined with the high palace walls. I looked at Sarah with her copper hair and brilliant gaze, her illuminated face, her coral and mother-of-pearl smile, and that perfect happiness, barely dented by the discussion of melancholy in the guise of Annemarie, belonged as much to the 1930s as to the 1990s, as much to the sixteenth Ottoman century as to the heterogeneous world — without place or time — of The Thousand and One Nights. Everything around us took part in this décor, from the unusual lace doilies to the old objects (Biedermeier candlesticks, metal Arabic pitchers) placed on the ogive window sills looking out onto the covered patio and at the angle of the steep steps of the stairway, with beautiful wrought iron balustrades, leading to the mashrabiyas framed in black and white stones; I listened to Sarah speak Syrian with the headwaiter and with the Aleppo ladies at the table next to us, and I was lucky, it seemed to me, to have entered this bubble, this magic circle of her presence which would become my daily life since it was absolutely clear to me, after the night in Tadmor and the battle against the Swabian knights, that we had become — what? A couple? Lovers?
My poor Franz, you’re still deluding yourself, Mother would have said in her so-gentle French, you’ve always been like that, a dreamer, my poor little boy. But you have read Tristan and Iseult, Vis and Ramin, Layla and Majnun, there are forces to be conquered, and life is very long, sometimes, life is very long, as long as the shadow over Aleppo, the shadow of destruction. Time has reasserted its power over the Sissi House; the Baron Hotel is still standing, its shutters closed in a deep sleep, waiting for the throat-slitters of the Islamic State to make it their headquarters, transform it into a prison, a fortress, or else blow it up: they’ll blow up my shame and its ever-burning memory, along with the memory of so many travelers, dust will settle again over Annemarie, over T. E. Lawrence, over Agatha Christie, over Sarah’s room, over the wide hallway (geometrically patterned tiles, walls painted in high-gloss cream); the high ceilings will collapse onto the landing where two great cedar chests rested, coffins of nostalgia with their funereal plaques, “London–Baghdad in 8 Days by Simplon Orient Express and Taurus Express,” the debris will swallow up the pompous staircase I climbed on a sudden impulse fifteen minutes after Sarah had decided to go to bed around midnight: I can see myself knocking on her door, a double wooden door with yellowing paint, my fingers right next to the three metal numbers, with anxiety, determination, hope, blindness, the tightness in the chest of one who is undertaking a great endeavor, who wants to find the being guessed at under a blanket in Palmyra in an actual bed and pursue, hang on, bury himself in oblivion, in the saturation of the senses, so that tenderness will chase away melancholy and greed
y exploration of the other opens the ramparts of the self.
None of the words come back to me, no speech, everything has fortunately been erased; only her slightly serious face remains and the upwelling of pain, the sensation of suddenly becoming an object in time, crushed by the fist of shame and thrust toward disappearance.
2:50 A.M.
I’m angry at myself for being so cowardly, cowardly and ashamed, fine I’ll get up, I’m thirsty. Wagner read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in September 1854, just when he was starting to imagine Tristan and Isolde. There is a chapter on love in The World ais Will and Representation. Schopenhauer never loved anyone as much as his dog Atma, a Sanskritish dog with the name of the soul. They say that Schopenhauer named his dog as sole heir, I wonder if that’s true. Gruber might do the same. That would be amusing. Gruber and his mutt must be sleeping, I can’t hear anything upstairs. What a curse insomnia is. What time is it? I don’t much remember Schopenhauer’s theories on love anymore. I think he separates love as illusion linked to sexual desire on one hand and universal love, compassion, on the other. I wonder what Wagner made of it. There must be hundreds of pages written on Schopenhauer and Wagner and I haven’t read any. Sometimes life is hopeless.
Love Potion, Death Potion, Mort d’amour, dead of love.
Maybe I’ll make myself a little herbal tea.
Goodbye sleep.
Someday I’ll compose an opera that will be called Schopenhauer’s Dog — it will be about love and compassion, Vedic India, Buddhism, and vegetarianism. The dog in question will be a music-loving Labrador its master takes to the opera, a Wagnerian dog. What will the dog’s name be? Atma? Günter. That’s a nice name, Günter. The dog will be a witness to the end of Europe, to the ruin of culture and the return of barbarism; in the last act Schopenhauer’s ghost will rise from the flames to save the dog (but only the dog) from destruction. The second part will be called Günter, the German Dog and will recount the dog’s journey to Ibiza and its emotions upon discovering the Mediterranean. The dog will talk about Chopin, George Sand, and Walter Benjamin, about all the exiles who found love or peace in the Balearics; Günter will end his life happy, under an olive tree, in the company of a poet whom he will inspire to write beautiful sonnets about nature and friendship.
So that’s what it is, I’m going crazy. I’m going completely crazy. Go make yourself a herbal tea, a muslin sachet that will remind you of the dried flowers of Damascus and Aleppo, the roses of Iran. Obviously the rejection that night in the Baron Hotel still burns after several years, despite how tactful she was, despite everything that occurred afterward, despite Tehran, and all the journeys; of course I had to confront her gaze the next morning, her embarrassment, my embarrassment: you were thunderstruck, you fell from the clouds, she had uttered the name Nadim, and the veil was torn apart. Selfishly, I cold-shouldered him during the following months and even years — jealous, jealous, it’s sad to say, wounded pride, what a stupid reaction. Despite my veneration for Nadim, despite entire evenings spent listening to him play, listening to him improvise, learning to recognize, with great difficulty, one by one, the modes, the rhythms and typical phrases of traditional music, despite all the friendship that seemed to develop between us, despite Nadim’s generosity I closed myself around my wounded pride, I retreated into my shell, like Balzac. I followed the road to Damascus on my own and now here I am on my feet looking for my trousers — I look for my trousers while whistling Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, feet on the bedside rug, that prayer rug (without a compass) from Khorassan bought at the Tehran bazaar that belonged to Sarah and that she never reclaimed. I seize my bathrobe, get tangled in the overly wide sleeves of this Bedouin emir’s cloak embroidered with gold that always sparks sarcastic or suspicious comments from the postman and the people from the gas company, find my slippers under the bed, tell myself I’m very stupid for getting so upset for so little cause, walk over to the bookcase, drawn by the spines of the books like a moth by the candle, caress (for lack of a body, of skin to caress) the poetic works of Fernando Pessoa on its stand, open at random for the pleasure of feeling the Oxford India paper glide under my fingers, obviously I land (because of the bookmark) on “Opiary” by Álvaro de Campos: “It’s before I take opium that my soul is sick. / To feel life is to wilt like a convalescent, / And so I seek in opium’s consolation / An East to the east of the East.” One of the great odes of de Campos, that creature of Pessoa’s — a traveler, “Suez Canal, on board ship, March 1914”: they think that signature is antedated, Pessoa cheated, he wanted to create with Álvaro de Campos a “French-style” poet, an Apollinaire, lover of the Orient and ocean liners, a modern man. “Opiary” is a magnificent imitation, which becomes more authentic than an original: Campos needed to have a “childhood,” poems of youth, spleen, opium, and travels. One thinks of Henry Jean-Marie Levet, poet of spleen, opium, and ocean liners, one looks through one’s bookshelf (not very far away, on the “forgotten French poets” shelf, next to Louis Brauquier, maritime poet, employee at the Messageries, another one of Sarah’s “stars”) and finds his Cartes postales, a tiny book: the complete works of Levet can be held in the palm of your hand, you can count his texts on your fingers. He died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two in 1906, a budding diplomat, sent on assignment to India and Indochina, consul at Las Palmas and whose poems we sang, in Tehran: I remember having written a few songs to his verses, frightful jazz tunes to amuse one’s comrades, regretting that no real composer ever turned his attention to these texts, not even Gabriel Fabre, friend of the poets, a musician even more forgotten than Henry Levet himself — the two men were neighbors on the rue Lepic in Paris, and Levet dedicated his Port Said Carte postale to him:
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