The Naked Eye (New Directions Paperbook)

by Yoko Tawada

  Catherine nods to her friend and with the grace of an athlete slices open her wrists. Her friend shouts for help, as the two of them have planned, and in the next scene the would-be suicide is lying in an infirmary bed. She asks a young janitor who is sweeping the floor beside her bed to accompany her to the bathroom. The young man agrees, and, bored, lights himself a cigarette outside the bathroom door. At the very least he wants to enjoy some nicotine while he is having to wait for the murderer, but she doesn’t allow him this respite. She drags him into the toilet stall.

  The man in the lab coat started to tell me something about the stall. I didn’t understand what he meant. Catherine definitely wanted to have a child in any case; that’s why she seduced the young janitor. The young boy Catherine visits as soon as she is released is the child that was conceived in the bathroom.

  The man in the lab coat said he had to make a quick phone call. He left me alone in the room with the TV screen.

  Catherine is lying in her bedroom. She is being observed through the keyhole by an amorous eye: a situation presumably not so surprising for a woman like her. This eye, however, does not belong to a stranger; it is the eye of her own son. He wants to make his mother into an image he can worship. While the sons of other mothers remain at a distance of only fifty centimeters from them for many years, and therefore forget how to see the entire body of their mother as if she were a painted image, this boy was able to see his mother only in the picture-frame of the keyhole and continues to desire her as on the first day of their reunion, when he kissed the sleeping Catherine on her lips without knowing who she was.

  I picked up the remote control and pressed the pause button. Something happened that I had never experienced before: Catherine came to a standstill, her life-story paused, and for the first time I could see every detail of her face. In a movie theater I was never able to stop the images, and so you were always racing into my retina. Now I had the power to stop your movements. I was shocked and ran out of the room without knowing what I meant to do. The door to the room was not locked. There was no one in the corridor who could have helped me. The front door of the building was open, the reception desk unstaffed. Outside on the street there was a bus stop; a bus was just arriving, and it stopped for me. The bus drove off again after I’d boarded.

  A person who has been arrested is endlessly forced to play the role of prisoner and go on escaping. Every release and every escape are provisional. In all likelihood I was pregnant. If this child were ever to be born, I would have to place it as a sacrificial offering before the screen of a movie theater.

  In Indochina you lost your plantation, the house where you were born, your lover, and your adopted daughter. Only the step-grandchild born to your lover and your adopted daughter remained. Perhaps this child was the price your adopted daughter intended to pay for the revolution. I intended to abandon my child in front of the screen and leave the cinema behind, which meant leaving Paris.

  I sat down on a park bench, leaned forward until my hair touched the earth, and said to my vagina: “I’m going to leave you. You’re staying here. The screen will be your diaper and your milk. I’m leaving, and I’m leaving you here.”

  Tuong Linh’s window was dark. I rang the bell, but there was no response. I imagined him strolling in the sultry night air in Bangkok, thinking of me, unable to figure out a solution since the fragrance of spices and orchids was tickling his nostrils. Then again it couldn’t be night there if it was night here. This fact made Tuong Linh seem infinitely far away.

  I went to the basement where I had lived with Marie. The door wasn’t locked. It smelled familiar. In the corner where Marie had always slept, there was a woolen blanket with a pattern of roses. There were no cobwebs anywhere. I sat down on a wooden crate and waited for a long time, but no one came. My eyelids grew heavy. When a moth flew over my head, I had the feeling that I must immediately give it an answer that would sound plausible but reveal nothing.

  The next day, while the sun kept shining, I remained in the basement. In the evening I went back to Tuong Linh’s building. The window continued to display a dead rectangle of lightlessness. My stomach was aching with hunger, but I had no money. I spied a half-opened Styrofoam container and a newspaper in a garbage can. Pretending I was interested in the headlines, I picked up the plastic container together with the newspaper. In a park I carefully opened the packaging and found one third of a hamburger. I could see traces of lipstick on the white bread. This was a premiere for me; I hesitated for a moment, then resolutely bit into the hamburger and found even the slightly acidic taste of this stranger’s lipstick unnaturally tasty. I knew this taste from somewhere. Perhaps I had eaten the lipstick of a strange woman before. Or was it the taste of ketchup and mayonnaise that was greeting my tongue with familiar disgustingness? A dog was running around in the park, ignoring me and my meal. I wanted to return to the basement, and as I got up and started to walk, a wave of dizziness washed over me. The entrails in my abdomen began to burn. I squatted down beside a streetlamp. The blood was leaving my head. A tall African man stood in front of me, watching. This was my last image before the blackout.

  The white rectangle was not a screen but the ceiling I lay beneath on a bed. The sheets smelled of strong disinfectant. In the room were several beds; I was surely in a hospital for the poor, maybe even a dungeon. I have to run away, I thought, but I couldn’t even get up. A deep nausea emanating not, as was usually the case, from my stomach, but from deep within my abdomen. A dull heartbeat in the distance. My body felt like the body of another person. It had nothing to do with me—the only thing connecting us was pain. “What’s the matter?” There was an old man lying beside me. “I have to go home.” “Why?” The man, bedded in wrinkles, was calmness personified. From his mouth, even the word “why” sounded reassuring. The two other beds in the room were unoccupied. “Why am I here?” “Don’t be sad.” Then the old man said a long sentence I didn’t understand. Since I didn’t react, he repeated the news in a simpler way: “Your child is dead.” The old man showed me a slip of paper. “A young man from Senegal saw you lose consciousness on the street. He carried you here on his shoulders. An enormous fellow. This note is from him.” I lifted myself up to take the paper from him. My legs were still limp as noodles. On the paper was written “Diop” and a telephone number. I folded up the note carefully, wanting to tuck it away somewhere, but I had neither a purse nor pockets.

  When I woke up again, it was pitch black in the room. I no longer felt nauseated. The old man was asleep, one further bed was occupied, and the fourth was still smooth. You couldn’t see whether the new, tall person with short hair was a man or a woman. In any case this person was sleeping soundly, and the old man slept as well. A chance to escape. I was wearing white pajamas. Where had they hidden my clothes? Next to the old man’s bed stood a chair, and on its back hung a brown cardigan that probably belonged to him. I put it on and buttoned it. Maybe it would look as if I was wearing a wool dress. Shoes were still missing. My naked soles felt the cold linoleum floor. In the hallway, the green signs for the emergency exits were glowing. There was no one at the reception desk. Perhaps the person on duty had left for a moment. There was a small portable television showing a soccer game. I felt ashamed of my naked feet. The buildings around me looked elegantly clothed, whereas I had naked legs and feet. I had to get away from here. The cold asphalt street whipped the soles of my feet with every step. “I have no shoes, no shoes, no shoes,” I repeated as I walked, as though this were the only worry I had in life. “Barefoot and uncombed, no roof over my head, no visa in my passport, no passport in my purse, no purse in my hand, no name in my head,” I sang quietly to myself. I felt better. The soles of my feet grew warm from walking, and in the sky a few faint lights appeared that might have been stars. Countless rooftops separated people from one another, the illegal from the legal, the sick from the professionally active, the voiceless from the lawmakers, but the great roof of the Parisian sky was something we
all had in common. I found this almost impossible to believe, that even you were probably sleeping somewhere beneath this sky. It no longer seemed unbearable to me to be wandering around in the nocturnal city. Why should I always squeeze myself in between a roof and a pair of shoes when freedom was not yet outlawed? My head suddenly felt as free as my feet. I surely looked exhausted, sick, and dirty, but I walked on in good spirits, waiting for the next film that might be shown on the enormous screen of the nocturnal sky.

  At the edge of the road I spotted three plump garbage bags. I opened each of them in turn and discovered papers that smelled of beef envelopes that had been written on and then torn up, a small, elegant hat for a doll, cigarette butts, aluminum foil from prepackaged coffee, a ballpoint pen, a banana peel, and hair of different colors. Patiently I looked for something for my feet and finally dug out a pair of plastic sandals. The soles were worn down, but they were still serviceable. Suddenly I was weary and didn’t want to walk another step. I crept into the courtyard of a building and made myself small and round between the bicycles to sleep.

  The next morning I had no desire to remember who I was. My legs automatically moved in the direction from which the sounds of cars were streaming. The street sign said “rue des Pyrénées.” My legs immediately knew that they should simply walk down this street to the south and then turn right at the large intersection to return to Marie’s basement. Instead I shunned this and the other larger thoroughfares to avoid the gaze of strangers. I trudged through little alleyways, trying not to lose my sense of direction, which wasn’t easy as these narrow alleys never ran parallel to the major streets.

  Once again my eyes fell upon a partly eaten hamburger. My belly growled. I no longer felt any nausea, even though the food tasted of ketchup and mayonnaise. And I no longer felt any pain in my abdomen. Still, the song of mourning that refused to become a melody covered my skin like damp netting.

  In the evening I arrived at the familiar entrance to the basement. When the door creaked, a hoarse female voice asked something from inside. Before me appeared a gaunt woman with silver hair. Though I could see I was disturbing her, she didn’t seem as dismissive as I feared. “I’m looking for Marie. Marie and I lived here together six years ago.” The woman’s face changed as quickly as shrimp crackers in hot oil. “It’s me! I’m Marie!” she cried, taking my hands. Her palms were rough but warm and somewhat moist. In her face I discovered many new lines that hadn’t been there before. But when I called her name again, only the old lines remained on the surface, and the new ones vanished.

  C h a p t e r N i n e

  L e s v o l e u r s

  In the basement I dreamed a great deal. In one dream I was a child, and the city I lived in was a harbor town. An orphan has no right to hide. Look, look, look at her! How cute! How thin! How sweet! How sickly! Hair like a bird’s nest, legs like brown asparagus! Look, look, look at her! This girl has been abandoned, she is free—free to anyone who wants her!

  Only in the darkness of the movie theater was I protected from the eyes of others. My cinema was a “Ma,” she wrapped me in her mucous membranes. She shielded me from the sun, from the force of visibility. Life was being played out on the screen, a life before death. People fought there, or else slept together. They cried and sweated, and the screen remained dry. The cinema, its stage, had no depth, but it did have its own light source.

  Your name is Marie and this time you aren’t a prostitute—you’re a professor of philosophy. With a book in your hand you speak to the students in the lecture hall. The microphone inclines toward your mouth like an insectivore. The lecture hall is packed to bursting; the students sit shoulder to shoulder. One is constantly moving his pen, another is trying to shake the pebbles out of his brain, a third is observing the speaker’s beauty with dreamy eyes.

  I envied these students, and my old dream occurred to me once more: I wanted to study at the university, to study philosophy, something I had wanted to do even back before I learned to blow my own nose properly.

  Instead of studying, I wandered around the city all day long: no roof over my head, illegal and unemployed, a mute creature devoid of language skills, unwashed and lethargic. In the rue des Écoles I discovered a book by Plato in a shop window. I didn’t know anything about him, but his name had been familiar to me since childhood. A school friend whose parents owned a pension in Saigon once gave me the paperback edition of The Symposium, which one of the French guests had left behind in a room. I put the book on my desk and looked at the title every day. “Le banquet”—I knew exactly what the word meant, and imagined a large ballroom with chandeliers. Translucent noodles, red prawns, bean sprouts, cilantro, and lemongrass were spread across a large, round table. Delicacies in the shape of rolls and little balls filled white porcelain bowls and large silver platters. A ball, a huge ball the size of my head or even bigger keeps growing, a dangerous ball. Suddenly a chef appears and slices the ball in two with his knife.

  A few women wore traditional dresses, áo dài of supple silk, while others wore elegant French evening gowns. They circled about, moving from one point to another as if dancing a ronde whenever they wished to find new conversation partners or wineglasses. That was the banquet, and I wasn’t there; I was standing outside in the street, the light of the chandeliers was seeping through the window, casting my shadow on the paving stones.

  I couldn’t follow your lecture. All I recognized was the word “aggression.” Aggression, agronomy, agricultural technology—an uncle of mine had studied agricultural technology in the GDR—culture, agriculture, angry, agreement. I had always thought I couldn’t speak a word of English, but I had only imagined this. A soldier once asked me on the street in Saigon: “Do you agree with me?” I was just a child. Should I agree with my not being invited to the banquet and remain docile, or should I fly into a rage and smash the ballroom window?

  I knew the word “aggression” because it was one of the French words Ai Van sometimes used to incorporate into her Vietnamese sentences. I rarely thought of Ai Van, but this word brought her voice back to my ear.

  Juliette doesn’t look like a student, but she is studying at the university. She is taking one of Marie’s classes. Someone must have told her where to get an application form, how to pay the tuition fees, which books to read, and with what casualness or reserve one speaks with the professors.

  Juliette, a wildcat in heat, takes a bottle of perfume from a shelf, quickly puts it in her handbag and leaves the shop without paying. Juliette is being dragged off by three policemen; she’s biting their hands, juicy police hands, smoked male hands, crunchy meaty hands. Juliette thrashes around on all fours on the floor, the three policemen trying to hold her down. While the sympathetic policeman Alex is interrogating her, she observes him with the intelligence of an untamed beast, calculating her chances of survival down to the last millimeter. She asks him for a cigarette—an impertinent, flirtatious request as she knows perfectly well the man feels drawn to her. He takes care of the formalities and the wildcat is free to go. “Do you really want to let her go?” one of his colleagues asks in surprise. “Yes, let her go,” he replies.

  Alex, the little brother of a car dealer who works at night, Alex, the son of an important Mafia boss, Alex, the ascetic policeman who hates criminals, not because he’s Catholic but because he hates his brother.

  Juliette lies in wait for Alex. He ignores her and gets into his car. Juliette quickly slips in through the other door and sits down in the passenger seat. Alex reaches for the gear shift, and she reaches for his trousers and the object within them. His eyes are like the eyes of a hare looking down the black hole of a rifle barrel. An exchange of words between them like an exchange of money, one bad currency in exchange for another. Then the two are already in a bedroom. In a film one can land in bed so quickly. Out the window one sees a bit of suburban landscape with highway signs. Juliette is wearing a summer dress, Alex a white shirt—only from the waist down are they naked. They have sex with power
ful thrusts, a painful, frantic coupling full of rage. They do not fully undress, they do not kiss, they do not smile, caress one another, or speak. A cockfight of the sexual organs, pure, unadulterated intercourse with no gourmet digressions, as if they’d both confessed to being nothing more than pure, holy, sexual beings.

  Juliette is sitting with Marie in the bathtub, smiling like a helpless girl. In warm water, bodies forget all the constraints of buttons, elastic bands, belts, and zippers. The two bodies lose their contours, dissolve. They are no longer touching, though they are still connected through the element of water. Water: the language of the unconstrained.

  Juliette turns her back to Marie. Marie’s hands embrace Juliette from behind. Marie takes the showerhead and rinses Juliette’s hair. A baptism for a nameless religion without beliefs. Juliette shuts her eyes and luxuriates in the warm flowing-away that leaves nothing behind. She believes in nothing.

  It wasn’t the first time your name was Marie. You revived the girl in the bathtub. This is the same bathtub in which you once, as Carol, laid the corpse of the man you had murdered.

  Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey. This brother knows how to transport money from another pocket to his own, never the other way around. His suit is made of soft fabric, sumptuous permanent press, his neckties are flowery, his men jump to open the door for him. I have everything I take everything I have you and many other women I have money I give you a lot of this money I give you not everything but many of the many things you stay here you cannot leave you know too much you must come deeper inside until you can no longer return.