Compass

by Mathias Enard

  Sarah was strolling at random, letting herself be guided by the names of the past, without consulting the map obtained at the welcome desk — her footsteps led us naturally to Marie du Plessis the Lady of the Camellias and to Louise Colet whom she introduced me to, so to speak. I was surprised by the number of cats found in Parisian cemeteries, companions of dead poets as they always were during their lifetimes: an enormous tomcat, bluish-gray, was lazing on a handsome nameless statue, whose noble drapery seemed to care neither about the affront of the pigeons nor the friendliness of the mammal.

  Everyone lying down together, the cats, the bourgeois, the painters and pop stars — the mausoleum with the most flowers, visited by the most tourists, was that of the singer Dalida, the Italian from Alexandria, right next to the entrance: a full-length statue of the artiste, surrounded by round boxwood shrubs, advancing with one foot forward, in a transparent robe, toward the onlookers; behind her a brilliant sun projected its golden rays on a black marble plaque, in the center of a gray marbled monumental arch: one would be hard-pressed to guess what divinity the singer worshipped during her lifetime, aside perhaps from Isis in Philae or Cleopatra in Alexandria. This intrusion of the Oriental dream into the resurrection of the body no doubt pleased the many painters enjoying eternal rest in the Montmartre cemetery, including Horace Vernet (his sarcophagus was very sober, a simple stone cross that contrasted with the exuberant paintings of that martial Orientalist) or Théodore Chassériau, who combines the erotic precision of Ingres with the fury of Delacroix. I imagine him in an animated confab with Gautier, his friend, on the other side of the cemetery — talking about women, the bodies of women, and discussing the erotic merits of the Alexandrine singer’s statue. Chassériau traveled to Algeria, lived for a time in Constantine, where he set down his easel and painted the chaste, mysterious beauty of Algerian women. I wonder if Halil Pasha owned a painting by Chassériau, probably: the Ottoman diplomat friend of Sainte-Beuve and Gautier, future Minister of Foreign Affairs in Istanbul, owned a magnificent collection of Orientalist paintings and erotic scenes: he bought The Turkish Bath by Ingres, and it’s pleasant to think that this Turk originally from Egypt, descendent of a great family of servants of the State, collected by preference Orientalist canvases, the women of Algiers, nudes, harem scenes. There would be a fine novel to write about the life of Halil Pasha of Egypt, who joined the diplomatic corps of Istanbul instead of the one in his native country because, he explains in the letter he writes in French to the Grand Vizier, “there are ocular problems caused by the dust of Cairo.” He began his brilliant career in Paris, as Egyptian commissar of the World’s Fair of 1855, then the next year took part in the congress that put an end to the Crimean War. He could have met Faris al-Shidyaq the great Arab author dear to Sarah’s heart, who was submitting his immense novel to be printed in Paris at the same time, at the printing house of the Pilloy brothers, located at 50 boulevard de Montmartre, a stone’s throw from these tombs we were visiting so religiously. Halil Pasha is buried in Istanbul, I think; one day I’d like to go put flowers on the tomb of that Ottoman of the two shores — I have no idea whom he visited here in Vienna, between 1870 and 1872, while Paris was experiencing a war and then another revolution, the Commune that would force his friend Gustave Courbet into exile. Halil Pasha met Courbet during his second stay in Paris, and commissioned paintings from him — first the tender Sleepers, bought for twenty thousand francs, an evocation of lust and lesbian love, two sleeping women, nude, intertwined, a brunette and a blonde, whose hair and complexions contrast wonderfully with each other. I would give a lot to have a transcription of the conversation that gave rise to this commission, and even more to have been present at the next one, the conversation during the commission of The Origin of the World: the young Ottoman treats himself to a close-up of a woman’s sex, painted by one of the artists most gifted at the realism of the flesh, an absolutely scandalous painting, direct and straightforward, which would remain hidden from the public for decades. One can imagine Halil Pasha’s pleasure at owning such a secret jewel, a brown vulva and two breasts, which the small format makes easy to conceal, in his bathroom cabinet, behind a green cloth, if we are to believe Maxime Du Camp, who hated Courbet as much as the whims and wealth of the Ottoman. The identity of the owner of this deep brown pubic hair and these marmoreal breasts remains still to be determined; Sarah would very much like it to be the sex of Marie-Anne Detourbay alias Jeanne de Tourbey, who died as the Comtesse de Loynes, who aroused Gustave Flaubert’s passions, and was the mistress — the muse — of a good part of the literary Tout-Paris of the 1860s, including possibly the dashing Halil Bey. The tomb of Jeanne de Tourbey was somewhere in that Montmartre cemetery, not far from the graves of Renan or Gautier whom she had received in her salon, at a time when she was given the terrifying name of demimondaine; we couldn’t find that grave, either because vegetation was hiding it, or because the authorities, tired of sheltering such scandalous pelvic bones, had decided to remove the sarcophagus from the concupiscent gaze of passersby. Sarah liked to imagine, under the chestnut trees of the great avenue bordered by mausoleums, that for Halil Bey this slightly parted sex was the memory of a desired woman, whose face he had asked Courbet to hide out of discretion; he could thus contemplate her intimacy without risking compromising the lady.

  Whatever the actual identity of the model, if they ever discover her, the fact remains that we owe one of the jewels of European erotic painting to the Ottoman Empire and to one of its most eminent diplomats. The Turks themselves were not insensitive to the beauties of Orientalist mirages, far from it, said Sarah — just take Halil Bey the collector-diplomat, or the first Orientalist painter of the Orient, the archaeologist Osman Hamdi, to whom we owe the discovery of the sarcophagi of Saida and some magnificent paintings of Oriental “genre scenes.”

  This stroll through the wonderful world of memory had given Sarah a boost of energy; she forgot about writing her thesis while she traveled from one tomb to another, from one epoch to another, and when the dark shadow of the Caulaincourt bridge (the graves it overlooks are in eternal darkness) and its riveted metal pillars began to invade the necropolis, we regretfully had to leave the past and go back to the turmoil of the Place de Clichy: I had a bizarre mixture of gravestones and female private parts swimming around in my head, an entirely pagan camposanto, sketching in my imagination an Origin of the World as red as Sarah’s hair descending to the big square cluttered with tourist buses.

  Despite all my efforts this desk is as cluttered as the Montmartre cemetery, a frightful mess. I tidy, tidy, tidy, all in vain. The books and papers pile up with the force of a rising tide whose ebb I wait for to no avail. I move, arrange, stack up; the world persists in pouring its truckloads of shit onto my tiny workspace. To put down the computer I have to push aside the clutter every time, like sweeping away a pile of dead leaves. Ads, bills, statements that need to be sorted through, classified, archived. A fireplace, that’s the solution. A fireplace or a paper shredder, the office worker’s guillotine. In Tehran an old French diplomat told us that before, when the prudish Islamic Republic forbade the importing of alcohol even for embassies, the gloomy consular pen-pushers had transformed an old manual shredder into a press and made wine in their basement, in collaboration with the Italians across the way, to dispel their boredom; they would order crates of good grapes from Urmia, press them, make it into wine in laundry buckets and bottle it. They even printed pretty labels, with a little sketch, Cuvée Neauphle-le-Château, from the new name that revolutionary Iran had imposed on the former Avenue de France, Avenue Neauphle-le-Château. These worthy descendants of the monks of the Abbey of Thélème thus offered themselves some small consolation in their cloister, and they say that in the autumn the whole avenue smelled strongly of plonk, whose acid odor escaped through the basement windows and taunted the Iranian policemen on duty in front of the august edifices. The vintages were of course subject to circumstances arising not only from the
quality of the grapes, but also from the manual labor: civil servants were often replaced, and a given oenologist (otherwise accountant, registry agent, or encrypter) was sometimes recalled to the mother country, causing despair in the community if that departure had to occur before the bottling.

  I didn’t give any credit to these stories until the diplomat exhumed in front of our astonished eyes one of these divine phials: despite the dust, the label was still legible; the level of liquid had lowered by a good quarter and the cork, covered in mildew, half out of the bottleneck, was a bulbous bubo, greenish and streaked with purple veins that didn’t at all encourage you to tug it out. I wonder if the shredder in question is still in a basement in the French Embassy in Tehran. Probably. An instrument of that kind would work wonders in my office — no more papers, transformed into thin strips, into skeins easy to ball up and throw out. “Students in the lineage of the Imam” had patiently reconstituted, in Tehran, all the cables and reports of the American embassy, for days on end; boys and girls had tackled the huge puzzle in the Yankee baskets, carefully gluing back together the pages that had been fed through the shredder, thereby proving that it was much better, in Iran, to use these machines to press grapes than to destroy secret documents: all the confidential telegrams had been published by the “Students in the lineage of the Imam” who had stormed the embassy, that “nest of spies”; a dozen volumes had been published, and the black lines on the pages showed, as if that were necessary, the marvels of patience that had been evinced to place end-to-end these three-millimeter-wide strips of paper with the sole aim of embarrassing Uncle Sam by making his secrets public. I wonder if these days the destroyers of paper still function in the same way or if an American engineer has been ordered to improve them to prevent a cohort of Third-World students from deciphering, armed only with magnifying glasses, the best-kept secrets of the State Department. After all, WikiLeaks is only the postmodern version of the glue sticks of Iranian revolutionaries.

  My computer is a faithful friend, its bluish light a moving painting in the night — I should change that image, that painting by Paul Klee has been there for so long I don’t even see it anymore, covered by the desktop icons accumulating there like virtual pieces of paper. One has one’s rituals, open the email, chuck out the undesirables, the spam, the newsletters, no actual message from the fifteen new ones in the inbox, just dregs, residue from the perpetual avalanche of shit that is the world today. I was hoping for an email from Sarah. OK, I’ll have to take the initiative. New. To Sarah. Subject, From Vienna. Dearest, I received this morning — oops, no, yesterday morning — your offprint, I didn’t know they were still printing those . . . Thank you very much, but how horrible, that wine of the dead! I’m worried, all of a sudden. Are you doing well? What are you doing in Sarawak? Here it’s everything as usual. The Christmas market has just opened in the middle of the university. Atrocious odors of mulled wine and sausages. Do you plan on coming back through Europe soon? Send me news. Much love. Sent without thinking at 4:39. I hope she won’t notice, it’s a little pathetic to send messages at 4:39 a.m. She knows I go to bed early, usually. She might think I’m returning from a night out. I could click on her name and all her emails would appear at once, arranged in chronological order. That would be too sad. I still have a folder called Tehran, I don’t delete anything. I’d make a good archivist. Why did I tell her about mulled wine and sausages, what an idiot. Much too relaxed to be honest, this email. You can’t get a message back once it’s thrown into the Great Mystery of electronic streams. That’s too bad. Oh look, I had forgotten what I wrote after I got back from Tehran. Not its blood-curdling contents. I can see Gilbert de Morgan again in his garden in Zafaraniyeh. That strange confession, a few weeks before Sarah left Iran so hurriedly. There is no such thing as chance, she would say. Why did I insist on writing down the story of that afternoon? To rid myself of that sticky memory, to go over it again and again with Sarah, to embellish it with all my knowledge about the Iranian Revolution, or for the pleasure — so rare — of writing in French?

  Gilbert de Morgan had been speaking in a slightly annoyed voice; the late afternoon was stifling; the ground was an oven tile that sent back all the heat accumulated during the day. Pollution slipped its pinkish veil over the mountains still inflamed by the last rays of the sun; even the dense arbor above our heads seemed to be emphasizing the dryness of the summer. The housekeeper, Nassim Kahnom, had served us some refreshments, a delicious iced bergamot water to which Morgan added generous dashes of Armenian vodka: the level of alcohol in the pretty carafe became steadily lower, and Sarah, who had already witnessed her advisor’s cantankerous tendencies, was watching him, it seemed to me, in a slightly worried way — but perhaps it was just steady attentiveness. Sarah’s hair was gleaming in the evening light. Nassim Khanom was bustling around, bringing us all sorts of sweets, pastries or saffron-scented candied fruit and, in the midst of the roses and petunias, we forgot the noise of the street, the horns and even the gas exhaust from the buses rushing past just on the other side of the garden wall, making the ground shake slightly and the ice cubes clink together in their glasses. Gilbert de Morgan continued his story, without paying any attention either to Nassim Khanom’s movements or to the racket on the Avenue Vali-Asr; sweat stains were growing around his armpits and on his chest.

  “I should tell you the story of Frédéric Lyautey,” Morgan went on, “a young man from Lyon, also a researcher just starting out, a specialist in classical Persian poetry, who was visiting the University of Tehran when the first demonstrations against the Shah broke out. Despite our warnings, he took part in all the marches; he was passionate about politics, about the works of Ali Shariati, about clerics in exile, about activists of every kind. In the autumn of 1977, during the demonstrations that followed the death of Shariati in London (they were sure, at the time, that he had been assassinated), Lyautey was arrested a first time by the SAVAK, the Secret Police, then released almost immediately when they saw he was French; released after a mild beating all the same, as he said, which had frightened us all: we saw him reappear at the Institute covered in bruises, his eyes swollen, and especially, even more terrifying, with two fingernails missing from his right hand. He didn’t seem overly affected by this ordeal; he almost laughed about it and this display of courage, instead of reassuring us, made us worry: even the strongest have been rattled by violence and torture, but Lyautey drew a swaggering energy from it, a feeling of superiority so bizarre that he made us suspect that his reason, at least as much as his body, had been affected by the torturers. He was scandalized by the reaction of the French Embassy which, he said, had made it clear to him that, all in all, he’d got his comeuppance, he shouldn’t get mixed up in these demonstrations that had nothing to do with him and he should consider himself warned. Lyautey had laid siege to the office of the ambassador Raoul Delaye for days, with his arm still in a sling and his hand bandaged, to air his grievances, until he managed to accost him during a reception: we were all present — archaeologists, researchers, diplomats — and we saw Lyautey, his bandages filthy, his hair long and greasy, lost in a baggy pair of jeans, taking the polite Delaye, who had no idea whatsoever who he was, to task — it should be said in the ambassador’s defense that unlike today there were many French researchers and students in Tehran. I remember perfectly Lyautey, red and spluttering, spitting out his rancor and his revolutionary messages in the face of Delaye, until two gendarmes threw themselves on the maniac, who began declaiming poems in Persian, shouting and gesticulating, very violent poems that I wasn’t familiar with. A little concerned we saw how, in a corner of the embassy’s gardens, Lyautey had to prove his status as a member of the Institute for the gendarmes to agree to let him go and not hand him over to the Iranian police.

  “Of course, most of those present had recognized him and some kind souls hurried to inform the ambassador of the identity of the nuisance: pale with anger, Delaye promised to have this ‘furious madman’ e
xpelled from Iran but, moved either by the tortures the young man had undergone or by his surname and the relationship he might have with the late Maréchal of the same name, he did nothing; nor did the Iranians, who might have had other fish to fry, instead of worrying about foreign revolutionaries — they didn’t put him on the first plane to Paris, which they must later have regretted.

  “The fact remains that after this reception, we found him calmly sitting on the sidewalk in front of the Italian Embassy, a few steps from the door of his residence, smoking; he seemed to be talking to himself, or still muttering those unknown poems, like a mystic or a beggar, and I’m a little ashamed to confess that if a colleague hadn’t insisted we bring him back to his place, I’d have gone up the Avenue de France in the other direction, abandoning Lyautey to his fate.