The Naked Eye (New Directions Paperbook)

by Yoko Tawada

  If a policeman thought me suspicious, he might stop me and ask to see my passport. I always carried my passport with me, but I had no visa for France. Fortunately my Asian features did not make me conspicuous. This city was full of Asian-looking women. Most of them were in the habit of glancing into shop windows to check the quality and prices of handbags and dresses for sale. Sometimes, to my surprise, I caught a glimpse of my own mirror image, which always horrified me. You could tell from my body language that I had no intention of buying anything in the display window. Whenever a saleswoman looked at me through the glass door, trying to figure out what brand name might be of interest to me, I would hurry away. In my eyes, these brand names were simply crooked letters, pictograms whose meaning I could not discover. Anyone could see at a glance that I had no right to be here.

  To escape the agitation of the streets, I sought refuge in movie theaters. One could linger here for hours for little money. In the dark there was no danger of being observed by a policeman. My first film was Polanski’s Repulsion. On the poster for this film I discovered the name of the actress printed on the old flyer for Zig zig. This was why I could walk right up to the ticket window and courageously pronounce the film’s title. Repulsion had been made twenty years before, and so my very first time seeing you was at a temporal remove.

  The movie theater was even darker than the basement, though there was something reassuring about the space. On the screen strangers played out their lives for me to see. I couldn’t imagine myself as a character living in Paris. For the first time, however, I could truly picture my own body in various positions. For instance, the first time I lay in bed in Bochum staring at the walls. I learned this from the bedroom scenes in Repulsion. It wasn’t just me lying in bed, it was you.

  Marie usually returned to the basement much later than I did. When I came back from the theater, I would rewind an invisible roll of film inside my head to watch the movie again from the beginning. My mental cinema boomed with a dull percussive sound. The characters fell silent. I saw the protagonist hurrying somewhere with long strides. Her fingers kept trying to remove something invisible from the wing of her nose. A skinned rabbit was stuffed in her handbag. Behind her armoire, a crack opened in the wall. A strange construction site in the middle of the busy street might have been a pedestrian island. An old neighbor woman wearing so many layers of clothing she appeared spherical stood at the door of the building with a hat and a dog. Three street musicians the size of children were playing accordion, clarinet, and drum. As they played, they slowly walked backward.

  When I heard Marie’s footsteps, all the images in my head vanished and I would greet her at the basement door. She would turn her face away from me as if in embarrassment, murmuring a few words I couldn’t understand. Once I placed a delicate-scented rose I’d stolen in the city in the place where she slept. Marie ignored both me and the rose, her strong perfume stinging my nostrils like the scent of lilies in sickrooms that irritate the patients’ mucous membranes and cause nightmares. A perfume war between the lily and the rose. Marie hid behind the scent of the lily. Since the night of the misunderstanding we hadn’t touched each other. I felt that Marie was trying to keep me at a distance from her profession and had nothing else to offer me.

  One day Marie came home with a book which she pressed into my hand while saying a few words in an encouraging tone of voice. The book was yellow with a large black-and-white photograph on the cover. At first I didn’t recognize the woman in the picture. The word Ecran was printed in round letters on the cover next to two mysterious numbers: “78” and “73.” Had Marie bought the book from a peddler on the street, or had a customer given it to her? I was surprised to discover a scene from Repulsion in the book: the main character, Carol, in the process of writing something on the surface of a mirror.

  I remembered a situation I’d almost forgotten. I was standing outside, leaning against the cinema’s wall as if drunk when Marie walked by and looked at me questioningly. I pointed to the poster I was leaning against. With the seriousness of a child learning to read, Marie read aloud each of the names on the poster: director, actors, actresses. When she read your name, I nodded.

  At the time I didn’t know that Ecran was a magazine and not a book. The books I’d read as a schoolgirl had been similarly bound and were as thin as this journal. Ecran became my first language textbook. All night long, my hot temples refused to sleep. With the help of this book, I would learn the language, then I’d study philosophy at the university, join the Party and rise among its ranks. Eventually the Party would come to power and I would become a leader. I would give an apartment to every person who lived in a basement, and I too would move into such an apartment, perhaps together with Marie. We would look out our big window at a big walnut tree in which spirits liked to linger. Fresh water free of bacteria would flow out of the faucets at any time of the day. The water might smell a little like a swimming pool, but even the odor of the chlorine would seem pleasant to me as it would remind me more of my summer vacations as a child than of a hospital. In the mornings, Marie would use the subway pass distributed free of charge at the factory to ride comfortably to work, where she would don a blue uniform that she didn’t have to wash herself but could simply drop off at the laundry department after work. In the evenings she would always come home on time since working overtime was illegal. Without a care in the world, she would hop in the bathtub. Of course, it would be much more fun to bathe in a large bathhouse with all our friends. But it would be fine with just the two of us as well. We would no longer eat with plastic forks and knives from plastic plates held on our laps, but instead would sit at a table and use bamboo flatware. The rats and mice that tormented us in the basement would not be found in our new apartment. They would willingly go live in the forest. Then again, I wasn’t quite sure whether they did in fact come from forests or had always lived in basements. If the latter, public basements would be created for the rodents so they wouldn’t have to live out in the wild.

  When the sunlight shone past the window bars the next morning, I caught the glimmering light in the open book in my hands. Between pages eleven and twenty-five were sixteen photos of you: four close-ups of your face, and twelve scenes from various movies. This was the day I consciously began addressing you in the second person, although I didn’t know you yet and you remained utterly unaware of my existence.

  Out of your many faces I constructed a single face, and this one face differed from all the others I saw in the city. Other women’s eyes could never quite capture my gaze; their noses appeared to have been artificially constructed, their mouths randomly affixed. Incidentally, I always forgot to include myself when I thought of these “other women.” My person vanished in the darkness of the movie theater, and all that remained was my burning retinas reflecting the screen. There was no longer any woman whose name was “I.” As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.

  Two shop windows, a mirror, a bicycle.

  A piano, a bed, a wheelchair.

  A doll, two wine glasses, an empty sky.

  A dining table, wind, a pistol.

  Three scenes were reproduced on each page as in a comic book, but without any sort of plot connecting them for these scenes were taken from different films. Most of them I hadn’t seen.

  Page fifteen. Top: you are standing in front of a shop window with a woman who is showing off her healthy teeth. Center: you are writing on a mirror in an invisible script that probably isn’t simple mirror-writing any longer for the script has been reversed three times now—first in the mirror, then in the film, then in the photograph. Bottom: you are sitting on a bicycle, about to ride off. An old man is standing beside you, trying to hold you back. In the background one sees a shabby courtyard. Your lush, luminous hair is fluttering in the imaginary wind as if you are already pedaling through the fields.

  Page eighteen. Top: you and a second woman your age who bears a magical resemblance to you are
standing side by side in front of a piano. Both of you are positioned with your hips pointing back behind you, but your faces are turned stalwartly ahead. Perhaps this is part of a dance step that has been fixed in place in the photograph. Both of you are wearing large summer hats. On the piano one sees a large sheet of music and a black metronome. It isn’t clear if this apparatus would also appear black in a color photograph. Center: you are standing with your hair pinned up wearing white undergarments. Behind you stands a man who is no doubt trying to close the hooks of your bra. One can only guess, for the picture has cut off both people at the chest, transforming them into two torsi. The man’s tight-fitting shirt looks like a thin skin through which one can feel the warmth of his flesh. Bottom: you are seated in a wheelchair surrounded by two men and a woman. You are wearing a wool jacket and a long skirt, and a striped blanket lies on your lap. A scarf frames your pale face. Have you been frozen, or are you just frustrated?

  Page twenty-one. Top: in your arms you are holding a bald baby doll with hollow eyes. Your throat is encircled by a piece of jewelry that reminds me of a collar for dogs. Have you ever been a dog? Center: you are standing beside a dark-haired woman and clinking glasses with her. Your makeup draws the outside corners of your eyes and lips slightly upward. Only at this point did I notice that to the right of each picture the title of the film was indicated. Zig zig: this still was from a film I’d never seen. I only knew that in this film you were called Marie. Bottom: you rest your cheek against the shoulder of a man wearing a dark sweater.

  Page twenty-four. Top: two transparent water jugs, four glasses of white wine, two plates. You are sitting at a table with a young man whose face is repeated in a mirror. The man is holding a fork in his hand and is looking at you while you intertwine your fingers and lower your eyes. Center: you are standing out-of-doors with a man. In front of you, the shoulders of other people are visible. A strong wind is blowing from the front, shaping your hair into a mane. Bottom: with both hands you are holding a pistol in front of you. Your blouse clings to your skin. Behind you is a wall with cracks in it.

  Between the pages of photographs there were other pages with a text in two voices. The voice printed in boldface said little, and almost always ended with a question mark, so this person must have been filled with despair during the conversation. The other voice never asked a question and spoke in larger blocks of text.

  If only I had a dictionary! A few days later I saw a man in the city wearing a Russian shirt, a rubashka, offering yellowed books for sale. I stopped short, catching a glimpse of the Cyrillic characters on his table. Between Bakunin and Kropotkin lay a French-Russian dictionary. When I saw the price penciled inside its cover, no higher than the price of a crepe, I couldn’t help laughing in delight. The man looked at me angrily as though I’d insulted him.

  My life and Marie’s intersected only once a day. During the daytime I studied my textbook Ecran in the basement, which protected me from the sun’s brutal spotlight. Marie slept until noon, got up silently and then went to buy us two crêpes, bananas, or Chinese food from a snack bar. In the late afternoon, I would make my way to one of the cinemas while Marie hurried off to work.

  I looked up every single word in the dictionary as I read the dialogue in Ecran. So my progress was slow. The voice printed in boldface: “Ask—very—original—for—begin: how—are—you—begun—in—cinema? You—?—fifteen—years—, I—think.” This annoyed me. I discovered that the bold voice often said “you” but spoke the word “I” only once in nine large pages, while the voice printed in large blocks of delicate script very often began a sentence with “I.”

  When I happened to walk past a stationers and saw pens, envelopes, and glue in the window, I would imagine writing a letter to my parents. In the letter I would write that I was studying at a university in Paris and therefore couldn’t come back home yet.

  A long time had passed since I’d given Jörg my letter. Had he really sent it?

  I lacked the opportunity, courage, and expertise to make serious inquiries as to how one went about getting admitted to the university. Instead of taking steps in this direction, I continued to stay curled up like a shrimp on a piece of cardboard in the basement, waiting for it to be late enough for me to go to the movies once more. Perhaps one could tell just by looking at me that I had thought too long and hard about becoming a student: One time I was given a student discount at the theater box office without even having asked for it.

  C h a p t e r T h r e e

  T r i s t a n a

  The first time I saw the film Tristana, I exited the movie theater onto the dark sidewalk and saw a young, Vietnamese-looking woman about ten meters away. She was accompanied by a white-haired man, a Frenchman no doubt. I stepped to one side to keep the streetlight from illuminating my face, intending to wait there a moment until the two had passed. But the woman came right up to me and seized me by the elbow, talking like a sudden downpour. Caught off guard, I shook my head, trying to get away from her, or from her words. Her grip on my arm tightened; she kept trying to look into my eyes. Her mouth opened and closed like the mouth of a carp. Then her voice flooded into my ears—this was painful—and the meanings of the words stumbled behind, shamelessly taking hold of me. It was Ai Van, the woman with whom I'd shared the compartment on the night train to Paris. I wanted to explain why I hadn’t gotten in touch with her, but she didn’t let me speak. “So you’re still in Paris! What splendid news! How have you been? Look how thin you’ve gotten.” She took my hands, shaking them with each question. “Are you still just sightseeing? No, probably not. What have you been up to?” “I’ve been trying to find a way to study at the university, but it hasn’t been working.” “Where are you staying?” “With strangers.” “Then you might as well come live with us. Perhaps we can find some way for you to receive a scholarship.” Ai Van explained something in French to the white-haired man, who had been silent all this time. The man gave me a paternal nod. “Let me introduce you to my husband, this is Jean.” Then she fell silent, obviously unable to remember my name. Maybe I’d never told it to her. Suddenly I felt uneasy about pronouncing my own name and gave a false one; “My name is Anh Nguyet.”

  Ai Van suggested I come with her at once and spend the night at their apartment. I found myself drawn into the melody of her speech, there was no chance for me to strike another note.

  The room in which I spent this and many additional nights on a sofa was separated from the couple’s bedroom by a thick, white wall. The wall was so white I couldn’t fall asleep. I could hear every sound from the next room: pajamas rustling, smacking lips, soft plastic-slippered footsteps, masculine snoring. When I closed my eyes, I could hear the shadow-men from Repulsion gasping inside the wall.

  Daylight arrived. A machine on the street was making a grinding sound. Something was scraping against hard material. Somewhere someone was opening a shop door with a metal grating. A car’s engine started. A pigeon. Bottles clinking. Slippered footsteps in the hall. The shower. The coffee-maker. The clatter of silverware. A monotonous voice on the radio.

  Ai Van and Jean did not exchange a single word during breakfast. I felt my neck tense up when Ai Van asked how my husband was. “I called him a while ago, and he told me he had a new girlfriend and there was no reason for me to go back.” While I was uttering this lie, my eyes glazed over with tears. Ai Van heaved a sigh filled with pity. She pursed her lips in my direction and promised she would do something to help me. She wanted to arrange a fellowship for me to study at a language school as it was vital to learn the language regardless of what one intended to study.

  I couldn’t get Marie out of my mind. I asked Ai Van to write a letter in French. Ai Van immediately went to Jean’s study to get a Mont Blanc fountain pen and stationery with a watermark in the shape of a swan. “Dear Marie, I am living with a countrywoman of mine who wants to help me find a language school. Thank you for everything you did for me. I will get in touch with you as soon as I have learned the
language.” This was the first and last written correspondence Marie received from me.

  In truth, I didn’t want to have breakfast with Ai Van and Jean. I would have much preferred to sit alone at the table later in the day and eat the hard brown tips of the croissants Ai Van always left behind on her plate, and drink tap water. Instead, Ai Van always woke me up and quickly set the table with three breakfast plates and three large coffee cups for cafe au lait. I felt ashamed that I was incapable of drinking coffee without putting in at least four cubes of sugar. I also felt guilty because Jean would stare off into space, embarrassed, whenever Ai Van told me a long story in Vietnamese. I didn’t feel any need to converse with Ai Van over breakfast. My stomach could no longer endure the language whose meaning I understood. When I was silent and looked away, Ai Van would start chattering even more vivaciously. While she continued talking without pause she observed every movement of my fingers. When I put the croissant down on my plate she would immediately ask if it didn’t taste good to me today. I would quickly respond, “Oh, it’s very good,” and go on eating. Whenever I picked up my coffee cup Ai Van would immediately say, “Careful, it’s hot!” But when I stopped drinking and just listened to her for a while she would say, “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

  Ai Van said she was a film student, but she was actually just trying to prepare for a film school’s entrance exam despite the fact that she scarcely found time to study. Occasionally she would flip through a book with photographs of actors and actresses on its cover. Ai Van’s fingers would lovingly stroke the faces depicted in the book, then she would continue flipping through the pages. Sometimes Jean would stand behind her and touch her hand. Ai Van would stretch her head back, her spine would arch, and her flaming tongue would tremble in the air like the tongue of a lizard attempting to intercept its prey mid-flight. Jean’s tongue would dart out to play with hers. This game could continue for a long time while the forgotten pages of the books upon her desk slowly faded.