SARAH (at the doorway to her office, worried): But what’s happening? Gilbert, is everything all right?
MORGAN (fuming): It’s an incredible scandal, Sarah, you haven’t heard yet? Brace yourself! What an affront for the society of scholars! What ruin for literature!
SARAH (swaying, frightened, voice pinched): Good God, I fear the worst.
MORGAN (happy to be able to share his pain): You won’t believe it: they’ve just expelled Germain Nouveau from the Pléiade.
SARAH (flabbergasted, incredulous): No! How can that be? You can’t expel someone from the Pléiade! Not Germain Nouveau!
MORGAN (appalled): Yes. They just did. Exit Nouveau. Adieu. The second edition will only reprint Lautréamont, all alone, without Germain Nouveau. It’s a debacle.
SARAH (mechanically tugs at the pencil holding up her bun; her hair tumbles loose down to her shoulders; she looks like an ancient mourner): We have to do something, get together a petition, mobilize the scholarly community . . .
MORGAN (grave, resigned): It’s too late . . . The Lautréamont came out yesterday. And the editor says there will be no solo Germain Nouveau in the years to come.
SARAH (indignant): How horrible. Poor Nouveau! Poor Humilis!
FRANZ (observing the scene from the door to the guest researchers’ office): Is something serious happening? Can I be of any help?
SARAH (inflicting her bad mood on the poor intruder): I do not see how Austria or even Germany could be of any help at all to us at this precise moment, thanks all the same.
MORGAN (idem, without the slightest touch of irony): You find us in the midst of national mourning, Franz.
FRANZ (not a little annoyed, closing the office door): You have my condolences, then.
I had absolutely no idea who this Germain Nouveau could be whose deposition was hurling scholarship into suffering and affliction: I found out quite quickly, through Sarah obviously, who gave me a complete seminar on the subject, a seminar and some reprimands, since obviously I had not read her article “Germain Nouveau in Lebanon and Algeria” published in Lettres françaises, the title of which, to my great shame, was however vaguely familiar. Half an hour after the national mourning she invited me over for funereal tea “upstairs,” in the living room of the guest apartment, to rebuke me: Germain Nouveau was a travel companion of Rimbaud (whom he had followed to London) and Verlaine (whom he had followed into drunkenness and Catholicism), without the fame, admittedly, of either of his companions, but an excellent poet and someone who had also lived an extraordinary life, as unusual as the lives of the other two. A man from the South, he had arrived in the capital very young, very young but old enough to frequent the bars in the Latin Quarter and Montmartre. He wanted to become a poet.
This idea is entirely surprising today, that you could leave Marseille in 1872 and go to Paris hoping to become a poet, with two or three sonnets in your pocket, a few gold francs, and the names of the cafés where bohemians went: Tabourey, Polidor . . . Imagine a young man from Innsbruck or Klagenfurt setting out these days for Vienna with only a missive from his German teacher and his poems on his iPad, he’d have quite a bit of trouble finding comrades — Czech absinthe and drugs of all kinds to disturb his senses, definitely, but poetry, no way. It is (fortunately for poetry) likely that I don’t know my city well at all, given that I don’t frequent cafés at night, poets even less, who have always seemed suspicious seducers to me, especially in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Germain Nouveau was a real poet, he sought God in asceticism and prayer and went mad, attaining “melancholy delirium with mystic ideas” according to his doctors in Bicêtre where he was first committed, for six months. As Sarah noted in her article, Nouveau’s first fit of madness corresponded exactly with Rimbaud’s coming down from Harar, and lasted until Rimbaud’s death; Nouveau left the asylum when Rimbaud died, in November 1891. Of course Germain Noveau was unaware of the sad fate of his former travel companion but after the failure of his move to Lebanon and after long wanderings in France, Germain tried an Oriental adventure again, in Algiers; from there he wrote a letter to Arthur Rimbaud, addressed to Aden, to confide his plan to him: he wanted to become a painter and decorator, in Alexandria or Aden, and asked Rimbaud, in the name of their old friendship, for “tips.” “I haven’t seen Verlompe in almost two years,” he wrote. Sarah found this letter to a dead man very moving; Verlompe-Verlaine might have told him about Rimbaud’s death, which took place precisely two years earlier. A whisper in the night. It’s pleasant to think that even today, researchers try to demonstrate, making up for lack of proof with sheer stubbornness, that Germain Nouveau was the author of Illuminations and not Rimbaud the sailor — we’ll likely never know.
Sarah had patiently retraced the adventures (or rather misadventures) of Germain Nouveau in Beirut and Algiers. He too had dreamed of the Orient, and had even tried to settle there as a teacher in a Greek Catholic high school in Beirut. Sarah had visited all the Greek Catholic institutions in Lebanon to try to find, in archives scattered by time and wars, the correspondence surrounding his appointment, and especially the reason for his dismissal, a few weeks after his arrival, from his post as teacher — without any success. Only a legend survives, according to which Germain had an affair with the mother of one of his students. But given his French professional records and the many appalled reports of his superiors in France (“This man is anything but a teacher,” said one headmaster) Sarah thought it was rather his incompetence that got Germain Nouveau fired. He stayed in Beirut, penniless, jobless, until autumn, trying to claim his wages. They say he fell in love with a blind young woman he sent begging for two in Bab Idriss; it could be the woman (blind or not) he describes in one of his sonnets from Lebanon, which are so many Orientalist paintings:
Oh! To paint your hair with the blue of smoke,
Your golden skin with a tone that might almost make one see
A burnt rose! and your fragrant skin,
In great robes of an angel, as in a fresco.
He may finally have won his case and some compensation, or else was repatriated to Marseille by the French Consul, on the liner Tigre of the Messageries Maritimes, which stopped over in Jaffa — the very Christian Germain Nouveau couldn’t resist the proximity of the Holy Sites and went on foot to Jerusalem, then to Alexandria, begging his way; he embarked again a few weeks later on La Seyne which landed in Marseille and he found Verlaine, absinthe, and Parisian cafés at the beginning of 1885.
I open this Pléiade that gathers together Nouveau and Lautréamont, Germain’s Orient with Isidore’s Uruguay, this Pléiade in which today Ducasse de Lautréamont reigns alone, rid of his accidental rival — that’s the fate of Humilis, the name Nouveau chose for himself; the humble, the beggar poet, the fool for Christ never wanted to republish the little there was of his published work, and today (at least this is Sarah’s conclusion) it shines, Stella Maris, like a star hidden behind the clouds of oblivion.
And it’s mad that I will die,
And yes, Madame, I am sure,
But first . . . from your slightest gesture,
Mad . . . from your heavenly passing by
That leaves a fragrance of ripe fruit,
From your alert, open appearance,
Yes, mad from love, yes, mad from love,
Mad about your sacred . . . curve of hip,
Which drives into my heart white . . . fear,
More surely than the roll of a drum.
The poor man did in fact die mad, mad from love and mad from Christ, and Sarah thinks, perhaps rightly, that his months in Beirut and his pilgrimage to Jerusalem (as well as his “encounter” with Saint Benedict Labre, his and Verlaine’s patron saint) were the beginnings of this melancholy disturbance that led to the crisis of 1891: he traced signs of the cross on the ground with his tongue, muttered incessant prayers, rid himself of his clothing. Prey to auditory hallucinati
ons, he stopped answering external solicitations. He was committed to an asylum. And either because he took it upon himself to hide the signs of his holiness as well as he could, or because the effect of the absinthe passed, a few months later they let him go — then he picked up his bag and stick and went to Rome on foot, like Saint Benedict Labre in the eighteenth century:
It’s God who led to Rome,
Placing a staff in his hand,
The saint who was just a poor man,
Swallow on the great way,
Who left his whole corner of Earth,
His solitary cell,
And the monastery soup,
And his bench that’s warming in the sun,
Deaf to his century, to its oracles,
Welcomed only by tabernacles,
But clothed in the gift of miracles
And coiffed with the vermilion halo.
The practice of poverty: that’s what Sarah calls the rule of St. Germain the New. Witnesses tell how during his last years in Paris, before leaving for the South, he lived in a garret, where he slept on a cardboard box; more than once he was seen, armed with a hook, looking for his food in bins. He begged his friends to burn his works, started proceedings against anyone who published them despite his wishes; he spent the last years of his existence in prayer, fasting more than is reasonable, content with the bread given to him by the hospice: he ended up dying of starvation, from a prolonged fast, just before Easter, on his pallet, with only the fleas and spiders as company. Sarah found it extraordinary that all anyone knows of his great work, The Doctrine of Love, is what an admirer and friend, the Comte de Larmandie, had learned by heart. No manuscript. Larmandie said: Like the explorers of dead cities, I have concealed and hidden in my heart, to restore them to the sun, the jewels of a vanished king. This transmission, with all the shadows of uncertainties it projected onto the work (didn’t Nouveau write to Larmandie when he discovered “his” book pirated in such a way: “You make me say any old thing!”), brought Nouveau closer to the great old texts, to the mystics of the olden days and to the Oriental poets, whose verses were retained orally before being written down, often years later. Sarah explained to me, in those famous armchairs, over tea upstairs, the love she bore for Nouveau, probably because she had the presentiment that she herself, a little later, would in turn choose asceticism and contemplation, even though the tragedy that would be responsible for this choice had not yet occurred. She was already interested in Buddhism, followed the teachings, practiced meditation — all of which I had trouble taking seriously. Do I have Sarah’s “Germain Nouveau in Lebanon and Algeria” somewhere, last night I got out most of the offprints of her articles — it’s in the center of the bookcase, on the Sarah shelf. Set the Pessoa back on its stand, replace Nouveau next to Levet, Sarah’s texts are placed in the middle of musical criticism, why, I don’t remember anymore. Maybe so that her works can be behind the compass from Bonn, no that’s idiotic, so that Sarah would be in the center of the bookcase as she is in the center of my life, that’s equally idiotic, because of the size and the pretty colors of the spines of her books, that’s much more likely. One looks in passing at the Portuguese Orient, the framed photo of the island of Hormuz, a much younger Franz Ritter sitting on the barrel of the old sand-covered cannon, near the fort; the compass in its box, just in front of Les Orients féminins, Sarah’s first book, Désorients, the abridged version of her thesis, and Dévorations, her book on the eaten heart, the revelatory heart and all kinds of holy terrors of symbolic cannibalism. An almost Viennese book, which deserves to be translated into German. It’s true that in French they talk about a devouring passion, which is the whole subject of the book — between passion and gluttonous ingestion. The mysterious article from Sarawak is moreover only a continuation of this little book, a little more advanced in atrocity. The wine of the dead. The juice of the corpse.
This photo of the island of Hormuz is really beautiful. Sarah has a gift for photography. These days it’s a clichéd art, everyone photographs everyone, with mobile phones, computers, tablets — that makes for millions of painful images, disgraceful flashes that wipe out faces that are supposed to be foregrounded, unartistic blurriness, annoying backlighting. In the era of film photography people took more care, it seems to me. But maybe I’m still just mourning ruins. What an incurable nostalgic I am. I must say I look rather charming, in this photo. So much so that Mother framed an enlargement of it. Checked blue shirt, short hair, sunglasses, chin resting firmly on right fist, a pensive look facing the light blue of the Persian Gulf and the cyan of the sky. In the distant background, you can make out the coast and probably Bandar Abbas; to my right, the red and ochre of the collapsed walls of the Portuguese fortress. And the cannon. As I remember it there was another cannon that doesn’t appear in the photo. It was winter, and we were happy to have left Tehran — it had snowed profusely for several days, and then a cold wave had gripped the city in ice. The djoub, those canals by the sidewalks, were invisible, covered in snow, and made excellent traps for pedestrians, and even for cars: here and there you’d see overturned Paykans, two wheels stuck in those little rivers around a bend. North of Vanak, on the Avenue Vali-Asr, the immense plane trees discharged their painful fruits of frozen snow onto passersby whenever the wind blew. In Shemiran a calm silence reigned, in the smell of wood fire and charcoal fire. On Tajrish Square, we took refuge in the little bazaar to escape the freezing blast that seemed to be streaming down from the mountains through the Darband Valley. Even Faugier had given up frequenting the parks; the whole northern half of Tehran, from the Avenue Enqelab, was numb from snow and ice. The travel agency was on that avenue, near Ferdowsi Square; Sarah had gotten the tickets, a nonstop flight straight to Bandar Abbas from a new company with the lilting name of Aria Air, in a magnificent thirty-year-old Ilyushin renovated by Aeroflot where everything was still written in Russian — I was mad at her, what was she thinking, cutting corners like that, you gain a few hundred rials in the price difference but you risk your skin, your penny-pinching, you’ll copy it out for me, you’ll copy out a hundred times “I will never travel again with preposterous companies using Soviet technology,” she laughed, my cold sweats made her laugh, I was scared stiff at take-off, the engine shook everything as if it were about to fall apart on the spot. But it didn’t. For the two hours of the flight I was very attentive to ambient noises. I broke out in a cold sweat again when that ancient heap of metal finally landed, as lightly as a hen on its straw. The steward announced it was 26 degrees Celsius at arrival. The sun was scorching, and Sarah soon began to curse her Islamic coat and black scarf — the Persian Gulf was a mass of whitish haze slightly bluish at the base; Bandar Abbas a flat city, which ran alongside a very long beach, where a wide concrete jetty, very high, penetrated far into the sea. We went to drop off our luggage at the hotel, a building that looked quite recent (brand-new elevator, fresh paint) but whose rooms were in complete ruin: old damaged armoires, threadbare rugs, bedspreads pockmarked with cigarette burns, rickety bedside tables with dented lamps. We heard the truth of the matter a little later: the hotel was indeed in a new building, but its contents (the construction must have consumed all its owner’s money) had simply been moved from the previous establishment and, the receptionist informed us, the furniture had suffered somewhat from the move. Sarah immediately saw this as a magnificent metaphor for contemporary Iran: new buildings, same old things. I’d have liked a little more comfort, even beauty, that latter quality seeming to be completely absent from downtown Bandar Abbas: you needed a lot of imagination (a lot) to see the ancient harbor where Alexander the Great passed through on his way to the country of the Ichthyophagi, the former Porto Comorão of the Portuguese, their landing stage for merchandise from the Indies, the port city renovated with the help of the English, named Port Abbas in homage to Shah Abbas, the ruler who reconquered for Persia this port on the strait of Hormuz as well as the island of Hormuz, thus putting
an end to the Portuguese-speaking presence in the Persian Gulf. The Portuguese had called Bandar Abbas “the Port of the Prawn,” and once our luggage was deposited in our horrible rooms we went off in search of a restaurant to try the immense white prawns from the Indian Ocean that we had seen being unloaded, all shiny from the ice, at the fishmonger’s in the Tajrish bazaar in Tehran. Chelow meygu, a chowder made from these swimming decapods, was indeed delicious — in the meantime Sarah had put on a lighter Islamic coat, made of cream-colored cotton, and had hidden her hair under a flowered scarf. The promenade by the water confirmed that there was nothing for us to see in Bandar Abbas aside from a row of more or less modern buildings; on the beach, we could see here and there women in traditional clothing, with the decorated leather mask that made them look slightly disturbing, monstrous characters from a morbid masked ball or a novel by Alexandre Dumas. The bazaar was laden with all sorts of dates, from Bam or Kerman, mountains of dates, dried or fresh, dark or light, which alternated with red, yellow, and brown pyramids of chilies, turmeric, and cumin. In the middle of the jetty was the passengers’ port, a landing stage that advanced straight into the sea for a hundred meters or so — the sea floor was sandy and very gently sloping; the heavily loaded boats couldn’t approach the shore. The curious thing was that there were no heavily loaded boats, just little ferries, rather slender motorboats, equipped with enormous outboard motors, the same kinds of vessels that the Guardians of the Revolution, I seemed to remember, used during the war to attack oil tankers and cargo ships. To board a boat, then, you had to climb down a metal ladder from the landing dock to the motorboat waiting below: the dock actually served no purpose except to gather potential passengers. At least for those who wanted (and there weren’t many of them) to go to the island of Hormuz: the travelers going to Kish or Qeshm, the two large neighboring islands, took their seats on comfortable ferries, which made me insinuate timidly to Sarah, “Listen, why don’t we go to Qeshm instead?”: she didn’t even bother to reply and began, helped by a sailor, her descent on the ladder to the tub swaying on the waves three meters below. To give me courage I thought of the Austrian Lloyd line, whose proud vessels left Trieste to crisscross the seas of the globe, and also of the daysailers I had skippered once or twice on Trauen Lake. The sole advantage of the excessive speed of our tub, where only the drive shaft and propeller of the motor touched the water, its prow pointing uselessly up to the sky, was to shorten the time of the crossing, which I spent clutching the gunwale, trying not to fall ridiculously backward, then forward, whenever a tiny wave threatened to transform us into a strange kind of hydroplane. Surely the captain and sole member of the crew had once piloted a suicide boat, and the failure of his mission (suicide) still haunted him twenty years after the end of the conflict. I have no memory of our landing in Hormuz, proof of my emotion; I can see again the Portuguese fort, the focal point of Sarah’s gaze — a wide almost square tower, collapsed at the top, of red and black stone, two rather low walls, pointed archways and rusty old cannons, facing the strait. The island was a big dry rock, a rock that seemed deserted — but there was a little village, a few goats and some Guardians of the Revolution: contrary to what we feared, these Pasdaran in sand-colored clothes were not about to accuse us of espionage, on the contrary they were delighted to be able to exchange a few words with us, and to show us the path that led around the fort. Imagine, said Sarah, the Portuguese sailors from the sixteenth century who found themselves here, on this rock, guarding the strait. Or opposite, in Porto Comorão, where all the commodities necessary for soldiers and artisans came from, including water. It’s probably here the word nostalgia was used for the first time. Weeks on the sea to find yourself on this little island, in the scorching, humid heat of the Gulf. What solitude . . .
Compass Page 24
