Paper Conspiracies

by Susan Daitch

  “I won’t tell anyone.” Maryse’s face was red with the effort of tearing through boxes, looking through pockets, and from being caught.

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “How do you get out? Where do you go at night?”

  Aurelie, with the air of someone who didn’t like to waste time, sat on her bed smoking stolen cigarettes and fanning the air to disperse the smell. Maryse could hear their mother sighing on the stairs, but they both knew that she’d been beaten and wouldn’t resume the fight with Aurelie for a day or two.

  “I have a key to the apartment. I can let myself out, lock the door, and come back again. What’s so sneaky about that?”

  “So what’s all this?” Maryse jerked her head in the direction of the pile of clothing.

  “The idea is not to look like yourself, but some idea of yourself.”

  These things had to be hidden from her mother who, even if she found only the trousers and nothing more, would have had Aurelie locked up. Once she was on the street, Aurelie’s guide was a former classmate whose independence had been the envy of the school they had long since left. If she could manage to slip away from her guardian at night, so could Aurelie. It would still be relatively early in the evening when she met her friend on boulevard Saint Germain, still filled with people. Wet iron grills, slick sidewalks, steamy windows, horses blinkered and slavering, snatches of conversation flew by as they made their way north past what were known as kebab joints, though she’d never actually seen the few Algerians said to run them, and boarded-up shop fronts toward the Café des Truands and Café des Assassins. Her friend was only a guide who over time became lost in the crowd and forgotten, but in trying to look like her, Aurelie acquired a closet full of long capes, high boots, and clothes their mother would have identified as the dress of a prostitute.

  Her mother wasn’t the only person who had to be avoided; Aurelie didn’t realize domestic watchdogs took many forms. One night Maryse overcame fear and inertia and did follow her. Block after block, keeping her distance in case her sister looked back, being careful to stop short when Aurelie turned to check her reflection or have a conversation with an acquaintance she might run into, especially if the chance encounter was with someone who knew Maryse as well. Under the terms of this awkward surveillance Maryse learned her way down streets she’d never seen before, but once she followed Aurelie into the cafés, she no longer knew exactly what to do. She become conscious of wearing the childish clothes of someone who rarely left her mother’s house, and she wore them without irony. A few people stared at her. She pretended not to notice.

  From a rat’s-eye view, each room at the Café des Assassins was a forest of chair legs and smoke. She eavesdropped on conversations that made reference to subjects she didn’t understand, and in her initial impression of the crowd, its character was only one of belligerence, its members critical of presidents and bishops, colonial wars in Haiti, Tangiers, Algeria, and most of all they derided the academy, moldy and somnambulant, fortress of the sentimental and the nostalgic. As nights wore on and she thought about her mother sleeping alone in an empty house she believed to be safely occupied by her daughters, the small rooms of the cafés gradually revealed not only compelling and explosive qualities, but an escape from her mother’s restrictions, her insistence on the appearance of buttoned-up virtue. In contrast, nothing was sacred in rooms that smelled of tobacco and spilled drinks and where every rectitude was subject to parody. Logic was suspended, women dressed as sans culottes, Marie Antoinette clowned with Quasimodo on the way to the guillotine, impostors claimed responsibility for bombings committed by the anarchist, Ravachol, and were laughed off the stage. Soon she went out all the time. Maryse listened to the constant hum of voices: nasal voices, metallic voices asking her to participate in stagings of all kinds in rooms kept so dark only faces lit from below as if by solitary torches were visible. She kept watch for Aurelie who, if she discovered the invasion of her territory, would have her thrown out on the street, and although Aurelie would be furious, Maryse had no doubt her sister would also enjoy her humiliation, and so she tried to keep her secret not only from her mother, but from her sister as well.

  One night in the back, near the bar, she saw a small figure dressed in white from head to foot like a kind of drunk Pierrot, feet hooked around chair legs. The figure resembled Aurelie, but in the smoke and with her vision partially blocked by the crowd Maryse couldn’t be sure it was her sister. She had no one to talk to, or perhaps didn’t know how to talk to the knots of people on either side of her. A man grabbed her arm, you in the boots, write on my shirt. She put her hand on his back as she prepared to write. His shirt was made of white paper, but he sighed deeply at her touch, clearly enjoying her surprise and the rustling noise the paper garment made as he shrugged his shoulders or twisted his waist. The pen he handed her was sharp and pricked his skin when the surface was pierced. She could think of nothing to write and so pretended to form script, tracing loops, dotting nonexistent i’s and crossing absent t’s, drawing oversized swooshing accents. She could feel the movement of small muscles. If the weirdly gummy shirt was going to stick to him in jabs of ink and blood she didn’t want to be the one to peel it off. He seemed to enjoy it when she stabbed him. From across the room she saw Aurelie leaning back in a chair, then her sister got up abruptly, left the room, and went out into the street. Maryse was stuck. She wanted to leave but couldn’t risk running into her sister. The man in the paper shirt had moved on, and she inched to the door, thinking in the smoke it might not have been Aurelie at all. When she got to the street there was no sign of her sister.

  In the morning she looked for traces of white powder on Aurelie’s clothes, finding streaks of unknown origin which smelled salty when she pressed a dirty stiffened seam to her nose. Aurelie slept late. Her sister appeared to have shape and substance, but for Maryse she had begun to evaporate. A few days later Aurelie moved out of the house to live with a man who acted in films.

  Her mother didn’t understand what the man did for a living. A doctor, a lawyer, a shopkeeper, these were professions she understood, but her image of a man who performed in cheap entertainments was one of irresponsibility: a man who went to bars, who wore bright colors, who didn’t wash.

  “What are films?” Their mother screamed. “Bits of nothing with no future. Never mention your sister to me even in passing. Never say her name.”

  Left alone with her mother Maryse kept going to the cafés which offered her a promise of inclusion; she would do whatever anyone asked her to, but nobody read the pages she wrote furiously week after week in her journal. The hum of Truants’ voices kept up, and her interpretation of their intent was a construction of fraternity: us against them, us against them. Maryse thought she was part of us, but as the nights passed she felt increasingly excluded from us, although she knew she wasn’t them, and so she floated in a pronoun limbo not of her devising. The sympathy us felt for one another left her pushed to the margins, writing on paper-covered bodies, sticking pens into them, if that’s what they wanted of her. She participated in spectacles but never initiated one herself. She saw Apollinaire, Satie, Marie Laurencin, and their many shadows. She recognized not only Alfred Jarry in the costume of a bicycle racer, tight trousers tucked into bright yellow shoes, but a few of his imitators as well, and none paid any attention to her.

  At night Maryse lay in bed thinking about a riotous woman she might have invented for the sake of writing a story on a paper shirt, a woman who led a double life like herself. She would search the streets and piers for her, and once found, ask her how she managed to do it, to peel in half, as if this woman would even speak to her, a sleepwalker who really needed the comforts of home and hearth, a stray noctambule in funny clothing, who had invented her, after all. She wasn’t a double. The double life was a failure, but it changed her and she learned something from it.

  Maryse recognized the man as he came out of a shop carrying rolls of paper wrapped and bundled toge
ther with twine. Jules had a bottle nose like a fighter’s although he wasn’t a fighter at all. Without the usual beard, only a moustache, his features looked bare and clean. Because he caught her staring, she felt she had to say hello. He didn’t remember her, appeared nervous at being identified, and asked what she wanted of him with more irritation than curiosity. She used to see him sitting against a back wall at Café des Assassins. She was on her way home and didn’t really care whether he wanted to talk to her or not, but in the moments following her anonymous greeting, if it was possible to stumble in place, he did. A short, awkward man, not much taller than she, he didn’t keep walking, and so she stopped also.

  She wondered what made him so awkward, so unsure of what he wanted. Would that make one so hesitant? How could insecurity be expressed so physically, like a stutterer? He didn’t go away, but followed her along the street, finally asking Maryse if she wanted to have coffee with him. She said no thanks, and continued on her way alone, leaving him to catch a carriage by himself.

  A few weeks later they ran into one another again on a train platform, but this time Jules saw her first. Maryse was preoccupied by a journey and was trying to devise some kind of script. Each family member visited the elderly aunt in Montreuil separately with different expectations of how they should behave and what they would find when they arrived. Her mother refused to go at all. The aunt had been her husband’s sister, and the two women hadn’t spoken since their husbands’ deaths. Aurelie had been the favorite and stood to inherit the house if she played her cards right. Maryse almost felt there was no point in going to Montreuil. Even with failing eyesight the aunt appeared to examine her body like a sculptor looking for flaws. It made Maryse very uncomfortable. Convinced there was nothing to be gained by the journey, but as a dutiful, if financially overlooked niece, she bought her ticket early in the morning to get the sorry trip over with.

  Jules watched her at the ticket window, came up behind her, and introduced himself again. Maryse jumped. She wanted to pretend she didn’t remember him, but knew she couldn’t carry it off. Unable to think of any way out of it, she agreed to share a car with him. He changed his ticket to first class in order to travel with her and made a point of telling her he was doing so. His eagerness and gracelessness both pained and annoyed her, but she didn’t offer to change her ticket. There were few travelers leaving the city at that hour. No one else entered their car, and he made no attempt to hide his glee at finding himself alone with her.

  “Do you go to the Assassins often?” she asked, leaning her head against the window.

  He told her he’d given up the cafés full of artists moonlighting as anarchists on holiday. He detested the blaguers who never had a real job.

  Maryse didn’t know what to say to him, and not knowing what to say made her increasingly nervous.

  “It’s not so bad. I entered Café d’Enfer through the gaping open-mouth entrance and left by a back door.” She explained her weariness, her sense that she was excluded from the party no matter how hard she tried to drink until dawn and say things that made no sense.

  He nodded as if he understood her need to at least appear as if she were having a good time.

  They began to meet often. Jules took to her to silent films, and she never told him that she actually preferred the realism of Pathé and the Lumière brothers to the fantastic preconstructions, as they were called, the filmic tricks of Georges Méliès. One evening he asked her to meet him in Montreuil. Intrigued, she told her mother she was going to spend the night with the old aunt, and she took a crowded late train out to the suburb. He met her at the station, and they walked the short distance to the glass structure that housed Star Films. It was dark by the time Maryse arrived; everyone had left for the day. The silent glass building looked ethereal. Jules picked the lock easily and they broke into the studios. They walked through underwater landscapes, castles of pirates, laboratories of madmen. Jules lifted her onto a wooden rocket destined for the left eye of a moon that Méliès himself had painted. Maryse leaned over and, feeling like a figure from a sentimental postcard print, kissed him on the mouth. Jules stepped back, gave the rocket a slight push so it swung gently back and forth for a few minutes, then he lifted her out of it. The two of them spent the night lying in the midst of a lunar landscape, newly painted for a shoot due to begin the next day. In the middle of the night Maryse awoke to the smell of paint, with starkly outlined black and white stars and planets overhead and the sound of heavy, determined footsteps getting closer. They fled through the studio and made their way back to the city.

  “At school I used to carve obscene words into my desk, and, stupidly, gouged my name and the date underneath so everyone knew what I’d done. I was caught and punished, which meant staying late and being caned.”

  Maryse felt a wave of sympathy for the battered boy, exactly the response Jules was banking on.

  “In revenge I made up a play in which I dressed as my teacher and parodied his speech. Stuffing a pillow under my shirt, I made a long nose out of stiff paper, and spoke in circles about astronomy and Napoléon’s surrender at Sedan. The laughter among my classmates was stupendous. I drew cryptic diagrams on a chalkboard set up behind my house, as if I were demonstrating for the class. Everybody howled at them, and in this way other boys were drawn to me. I invented more roles. Everyone, even the most shy, wanted to be part of the parody. So, for me, I’ve learned pleasure can grow out of pain. So I’m willing to wait for you.”

  This story was almost identical to Alfred Jarry’s well-known schoolboy parodies, but Maryse pretended she didn’t know this.

  “Do you still write plays?” She drained her glass, hoping to turn the conversation elsewhere.

  “No. When my parents died I was sent to Paris to live with my uncle and his family. I no longer had an audience, nor did I have a subject to parody. It’s difficult to make things up out of the blue.”

  Jules talked in a stream that give her no possible entry. Noticing she wasn’t paying close attention, he asked her a question that caused her to snap back to earth.

  “You need cash and you’re unhappy. Would you like to make a lot of money, Maryse?”

  She moved her chair slightly away from him.

  “I want you to work for me. My uncle used to say that the boulevards of Paris are paved with blocks of cash but we’re all standing on our heads in the middle of a street and can’t get to any of it, but if you’re clever, you can pry one of those bricks loose with only one hand. I can do it, believe me, but I need someone to help me, someone with brains, dexterity, flexible hands.”

  He took one of her hands in his and studied her palm, stroked her fingers. Too much time passed, and she withdrew it in order to finish her second drink.

  “You have beautiful hands.”

  He used words like verité with a kind of hardness, but Maryse hadn’t, she was certain, ever hear the word fraude. She would have remembered. Again he offered her a lot of money, and she agreed to his terms, although she had missed the word collusion.

  Jules hadn’t told her that at school he had been called Gasconade, meaning blather, and that the name had stuck for many years. Every action he took came with an explanation, but the explanations had ways of veering into terrain that had only tangential connections to the original subject, but Maryse remained interested. As she walked from room to barely furnished room in his apartment, she said nothing about the house she’d left behind, while he discussed the history of his business, how he inherited it, what he did when he arrived in Paris from the provincial town where he had been orphaned. He spoke as a kind of distraction, as if he didn’t want Maryse to look too closely.

  “To most people my uncle seemed the picture of concern: a solid citizen, a salesman of ship engines who also worked as a notary public, penning signatures for illiterate workers, a man who went to mass and whose opinions were as square and conventional as paving stones, yet this image couldn’t have been more false. His children drove him mad. One was
a chronic petty thief, but because of his father’s position he was generally treated with some lenience. As he grew up he turned into a layabout. His wife was a fountain of aphorisms and banalities,” Jules said as if trying out the phrase.

  “One trivial remark followed the next until anyone would feel he or she would go mad. I used to fall asleep at the table as soon as she opened her mouth. The discussion of inanities, the price of X or Y, were, I suppose, a bulwark against the disorderly life of his son, the deadbeat brother, yet my uncle couldn’t stand the flood tide of talk coming from his wife and police reports about the other, so he began to lead a double life. At first I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be doing with this family so I would sit around drawing caricatures of anonymous citizens: a man from the Bourse, a woman observed window shopping across the street. I was bored, too. Seeing I was quick with a pen my uncle began to take me with him to the shipyards. As I proved curious and a good listener he confided in me rather than in his lazy son. At this time he was working out a scheme to back the pirating of ships on little-known straits, and to have the ownership papers changed while still at sea, so the ship, then transformed, became his. During the day he appeared the same as he ever was, stolid and patient, but his family drove him to seek another identity. Like his ships, he adopted another name, began to work out of a second office, kept nocturnal hours and, in secret, married another woman. At night he dressed in expensive but worn clothes, and used a combination of populist, slangy, and arcane figures of speech. He leered and rolled his eyes as no one ever saw him do in daylight.”

  “Perhaps his wife led a double life also.”

  “No, she didn’t live long. The shipping venture made him a lot of money but became too risky, and he had to retire from it. In his later years he developed a quieter occupation. The rare book business provided traffic on little-known straits as well. Books, like ships, could be disguised, and again I was enlisted to help him out in the trade.”