The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  14. My Life at the Moment (I Think)

  No, my life at the moment has nothing to do with that. I am in a whirlwind of words—strong nouns and rich adjectives and breathing verbs; drugging metaphors and orchestral polysyllabic rhythms, too—and I have been blown from wherever I am on a balcony above Avenue de Paris clear to a raucous Punic feast being held in ancient Carthage’s luxuriant palatial gardens, organized for the soon-to-revolt mercenaries who have been recruited from every far-flung corner of the ancient world, gathered now to be honored for their victories abroad. Until that is interrupted by a door at the adjoining palace opening on a high terrace above, and entering the gardens is a wraith of a heartbreakingly lovely young woman almost powered by the milky moonlight itself; she marches into the feast as followed by two lines of pale eunuch priests hauntingly chanting low a hymn to the deities of Carthage. The woman is Salammbô, General Hamilcar Barca’s daughter, and her priests are also from that noble Barca family, all descended from (this gets wild) the original conger eel that hatched the mystic egg in which the goddess Tanit, moonlight-charged herself, had long lay hidden.

  15. OK, Even If You Don’t Understand a Goddamned Word of French, Read this Aloud Yourself Wherever You Are and Tell Me What Happens, Because Here Is the Scene in the Novel of Princess Salammbô Entering that Feast:

  Sa chevelure, poudrée d’un sable violet, et réunie en forme de tour selon la mode des vierges chananéennes, la faisait paraître plus grande. Des tresses de perles attachées à ses tempes descendaient jusqu’aux coins de sa bouche, rose comme une grenade entr’ouverte. Il y avait sur sa poitrine un assemblage de pierres lumineuses, imitant par leur bigarrure les écailles d’un murène. Ses bras, garnis de diamants, sortaient nus de sa tunique sans manches, étoilée de fleurs rouges sur un fond tout noir. Elle portaint entre les chevilles une chaînette d’or pour régler sa marche, et son grand manteau de pourpre sombre, taillé dans une étoffe inconnue, trâinait derrière elle, faisant à chacun de ses pas comme une large vague qui la suivant.

  Do you see what I mean? Is it possible there is an occasion when the mot juste can become so juste that it transcends even the ridiculous boundaries of different tongues, to the degree that, no matter what language you speak, an understanding is automatic? Are those words in themselves a creation that goes beyond all such, well, babbling difference, the confusion thrown up by different tongues, and glides clear into a zone of pure beauty and significance well beyond different tongues? Is a paragraph like that quite possibly a major achievement in the entire course of the human endeavor— and then some?

  I read and read. And once I touch back down again to my chair (borrowed from the white vanity table in the hotel room and brought out here to the balcony), sip another long sip of the lemon Virgen soda (pretty sugary), I chide myself for being lazy in the first place and previously rereading the book in translation—three different ones in the past, including Krailsheimer’s—which do no justice whatsoever to the achievement of what is before me, the quintessential power in the original French.

  I leave Tunis a couple of days later, wishing I had more time there (isn’t that a given for the best travel?—just when you get comfortable, you take out your computer-printed slab of a light-green-and-white airline ticket and reluctantly stare at the day and the hour when you have to depart), and out at the rather gaudy Tunis airport, a new terminal done up in what could be labeled as glitzy Las Vegas/Mosque kitsch, if that makes any sense, I remain unaware of what is about to happen to me back in Paris.

  16. In a Deserted Library

  In sweltering Paris (temperature records are being broken in the summer of 2003) crammed with tourists, I find a cheap one-star hotel up by the Gare de l’Est. It’s a funky neighborhood now thoroughly hip, vibrant with the busy street life of Sub-Saharan Africans who have immigrated to France, their shops with names like (untranslated) “Homeboys” and “Afro King,” even a standard Parisian café renamed “Motown Lounge.” It does get me away from the noisy tourists, who are present in hoards down around where I stayed earlier, near the Place de la Bastille and in the Marais. I meet a French novelist pal of mine, Michel Sarotte, for dinner at a restaurant behind the Panthéon; besides having written fine novels, one once short-listed for the Prix Goncourt, Michel is the author a first-rate, probably seminal book published in the seventies on the recurring theme of homosexuality throughout the history of American literature. He assures me that even if Edward Said wasn’t a fan of Salammbô (soft-voiced Michel has never heard of Said, yet I try to explain to him Said’s stand, one most definitely based on understandable social concern; regretfully, Said will die a few months hence), despite all controversy, Michel says, the novel has today gradually achieved the status of an indisputable classic in France, even turning up as recently as a year or so ago as one of the texts on the sacred Agrégation exam for certification for teaching French literature in schools and universities. Claude Lévy has left town for the week with his wife who is singing opera in Metz, so I won’t have to lie to him about visiting La Goulette-Vieille—for the time being, anyway. I do have one final chore that involves the unfinished business of closing out a checking account I’ve had with Banque Nationale de Paris for years, something I haven’t been looking forward to; anybody who has dealt with the bureaucracy of French banking and its infamous runarounds and petty authoritarianism knows what I’m talking about. Luckily, the general transit strike is finally solved, and I take the RER train out to Nanterre on the other side of the La Défense skyscraper district, where my branch of the BNP is located and where I taught two times at the relatively new university there. Nanterre is bleak even in the leaf-shimmering June sunshine, the supposedly once futuristic reinforced-concrete university buildings now crumbling and often graffiti-covered, the unkempt campus virtually abandoned for summer break; the bank office is scenically located on a rusted trestle walkway over the rumbling train tracks. Surprisingly, everybody at the bank is quite helpful, and after I am first told I can come back the next week for a cashier’s check covering what’s left in my account, I argue. I am then told I can come back the next day; I argue in French some more. I finally get the three people who are working there to engage behind the counter in a serious, whispering five-minute pow-wow on the problem, and they agree that they can have the check ready that afternoon at two, meaning I have about three hours to kill. I go to the university library—hot and un-air conditioned—thumb through some American literary magazines in the reading room, then figure I might head upstairs to the stacks and see what they have in their holdings on Flaubert and Salammbô.

  The tables are empty, and these second-floor rooms are even hotter. But I hit a genuine platinum mine of texts, several long shelves of works by and about Flaubert, first losing myself in a complete two-volume set of his travel notebooks, containing new info for me on his Tunisia trip. That includes evidence of how he was, in truth, very politically curious, interested in the daily stuff of administration and colonial life in North Africa at the time, F. making voluminous notes with detailed observations on the subject, even if none of that found its way into what he eventually would publish as prose fiction. Then my eye snags on a paperback on the shelf, what should be only a hokey illustrated production, an edition of Salammbô in a series called “Lire et Voir les Classiques”: Read and See the Classics, as stated, and the texte intégral (unabridged version) accompanied by several inserted glossy-page sections with paintings influenced by Salammbô and scenes from a number of operas based on it, even stills from a Cecil B. DeMille-style Italian film adaptation—in lurid movie technicolor, the guys gleamingly muscular, the girls with bulbous sixties hairdos. Thumbing through the book, I decide to read the lengthy critical introduction, and before long I sense that I’m really into something major from its author, Pascaline Mourier-Casile. I jot down her name, because the critical writing here and the argument within are so very good—so forget the crabby opinionating I spouted earlier, cheekily bombing academics for seldom offering
anything important (or forget it for now, anyway). Right off, she makes a most basic point, which disposes of the nitpicking about Salammbô’s historical accuracy in a single deft stroke; she stresses that while it is a historical novel, it is first and foremost an entity beyond that, essentially a novel and a creative work, meaning that questioning it as to historical details, or even reading it as social commentary, really isn’t the issue. In fact, as Mourier-Casile would have it, Sainte-Beuve’s demand of “Why Carthage?”—the civilization about which the modern world knows very little, almost nothing—is precisely the answer to it all. Because, wasn’t the central quest of Flaubert laid out in the famous letter to his mistress Louise Colet while laboring over—and temporarily dissatisfied with his progress on—Madame Bovary at Croisset?:

  What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to write, is a book about nothing, a book with no attachments to the outside world, which would be self-sustaining, thanks to the internal force of its style, as the earth holds itself in the void without being supported, a book that would have almost no subject, or one at any rate in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible?

  No, I don’t have that Flaubert quote in front of me in the library and Mourier-Casile doesn’t reproduce it, but I have close to memorized it over the years. And what Mou-rier-Casile suggests becomes the catalyst, because something suddenly hits me, and I tell myself:

  Punic Carthage was for Flaubert, and most everybody else, no doubt, a lost civilization, a ruined land all gone, Carthage in a way was an object of contemplation free of any ties to the corporeal, the limitations of the material—in other words, Carthage for Flaubert was rien, nothing, it was nearly an abstract concept, as that haunting premise of his letter would have it, an item of airy contemplation to allow the master to create without restraint a book where literary style itself was the issue of paramount importance, for him to compose his breathtaking sentences that beat Time in a way that no simple plastification of documents, if you will, ever could, that rendered inconsequential, too, all the accompanying sadness brought about by Time passing—because a Work of Art can go beyond that, become as concrete and overwhelmingly important as whatever saving force that does actually sustain the earth, keep it suspended in the void, and with the abundance of sadness in the world is there ever a void, all right.

  The idea deals me a rush of vertigo—it’s my Big Realization, what I know full well right then and what has made the entire trip supremely meaningful at last.

  And then there’s what happens next.

  17. Baudelaire Pipes In

  Strangely, as I sit alone hunched over the strewn books at the table, somebody else is, in fact, sitting only a few feet away from me, having shown up very quietly.

  Or, I heard some shuffling of books nearby, but I avoided making any show of observation after looking over quickly, noticing it was a young woman and not wanting to be caught ogling (“gazing?”), which can be embarrassing, a problem for a guy my age. (You know, I hope my current romantic interest of suitable age for me doesn’t read this and see so much talk about young women sometimes half my age. On the other hand, it’s all laudably in the name of literary honesty, right?—that being my sole ready defense.) But I do sneak a better glimpse now, and, man oh man, what a lovely young woman at that, seated on a low metal-legged round stool she has pulled up. Apparently, she is going through a few of the lower shelves in the “B” section next to where I had been picking at the shelves in the “F” section. Delicate features and long, lustrous auburn hair falling like flames to the shoulders of a black-velvet riding jacket, tapered at the waist; a lot of purple lipstick, Gothish, and strikingly amber eyes to match the auburn hair. Her jeans are tastefully faded and, the very best touch, her slipper-like shoes, again black velvet, have the tops of them decorated with tiny mirror inserts, what you might see on some twirling Hindustani dancer. She either consciously ignores, or is completely oblivious to, an older party like me, and this isn’t any case of my sentimentally telling myself in middle age how in long-gone former days I might have struck up a conversation with her. This girl is a rare beauty, and any honest male learns his limitations in that arena by sixteen or so: while I might have stood a chance in striking up something when younger with a young woman like the weary German grad student, and while I did successfully meet and have fun traveling with a pudgy, buck-toothed Swiss girl in Mexico, the giggling secretary from a Geneva cop station years ago, this is a beauty who would have been way out of my league even when at the top of whatever my bungling sexual game reportedly ever was in my better years. (Ah, again such honesty!)

  When she leaves with a pile of books—is she ever lithe, too, runway-model tall and strutting gracefully toward the overhead Sortie sign—I push my chair back, get up to investigate what she has been browsing. And, wouldn’t you know it, it is the section containing the work of, and commentary on, that dark-eyed, rhapsodically tortured, consummate poetic master, Baudelaire, a contemporary of Flaubert; as explained earlier, while Baudelaire didn’t know F. very well personally, he was a great admirer of the man’s work. (Did you ever stop and think of how flat-out amazing it is that both Les Fleurs du Mal, which changed the look of world poetry forever, and Madame Bovary, which did the same for the look of world fiction, came out in the same city and in the same year, 1857, and both—to make the marvel of it more amazing—were hauled through near-identical court trials for offending public mores, as if to emphatically illustrate the never-ending battle between the play-it-safe, uptight bourgeois world and that of the True Artist?) The girl gone, I return to reading the rest of Mourier-Casile’s commentary, which isn’t quite as good for the remaining few thin paperback pages. But I know I have already experienced the kind of message I hoped for on this trip, Mourier-Casile’s observation on that rien business galvanizing so many things I’ve been thinking about lately. And in an odd way it almost has been an understanding delivered, I now like to think, by the Baudelaire Girl, a news-bearing angel who herself already doesn’t seem all that real in retrospect (did I see her? but I did see her), as what lingers about the encounter is how ethereally beautiful she was and also how damn good it is to see an obviously curious and intelligent young person like her—overdone purple Goth lipstick notwithstanding—immersed in Baudelaire.

  I don’t want to get carried away with it, but she could even have been Salammbô—not just her beauty, but also something about the undeniably exotic slipper-like shoes with the sparkling mirrors dotting them.

  18. Sleeping

  After his trip to Tunisia, a journey of several weeks all told and a stop in Constantine in Algeria included, Flaubert wrote to a friend in Paris that he was so exhausted on his return to Croisset that he slept for three complete days.

  He soon buckled down to work on Salammbô, and, several years following its publication, he published what could be a masterpiece even more significant than Madame Bovary, the novel L’Education Sentimentale, which appeared in 1869. But after that there followed gradual decline: his beloved niece’s husband, on the verge of bankruptcy with failing business ventures, wrangled from Flaubert his own family inheritance (Flaubert’s father, a renowned Rouen surgeon, had left considerable money), and Flaubert’s ongoing ill health (including the complications of syphilis) turned worse, as his reputation as a writer seemed to be evanescing. Having been only a writer his entire life, toward the end he was disillusioned, broke, and reduced to enlisting the help of friends to try, unsuccessfully, to land the sinecure of a second-rate librarian’s job at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenale in Paris; however, even then he always kept writing, with some critical approval of his trio of long stories Trois Contes in 1877 and then his prophetically postmodern final work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, being published posthumously. He was just fifty-nine when he died in 1880.

  Back at my family’s summer house in Narragansett, alone there again, I sit down at the wobbly oaken desk in the small bedroom I’ve had since a kid, amid junk like old swim fi
ns and tangled fishing gear; on the green walls are photos of me on sports teams when young and dented license plates from cars I’ve owned in various states over the years. I start going through my own notebooks from the trip. And if I don’t continually sleep for three days, I pay tribute to my jet lag with some big-league napping off and on throughout the day for about a week, dreaming maybe of Tunis and Carthage, probably the barefoot kid under the stars limpingly running in happy, aimless circles with that holder sprouting the sprigs of jasmine making for his own lucky star, waving it around, or my maybe dreaming of the couscous restaurant on Rue du Caire and the Tunisian guys watching—silently, very seriously—the troubling TV news reports from Iraq there. I suppose I also dream of the Baudelaire Girl, though the sleep logged on the living room sofa or on the made bed of any of the different bedrooms I successively try for a nap, sort of Goldilocks fashion, true, the sleep is so deep—gulls squealing in the salty sunshine outside, power mowers rumbling now and then from neighboring houses and offering a snoring of their own, the summer season in full swing—that I honestly don’t remember what I dream about.

  All I know, or at least know now, is that it was, yes, deep sleep.

  19. And Inevitable Decay

  Maybe even the kind of sleep where you dream of nothing, let’s say, not anything, ne...rien, as the construction would have it.

  I tell myself there will be plenty of time for writing all of this up when I return to Austin, where, surely being able to use the extra cash this particular year, I’ve signed on to teach the second term of the summer session.

  And repeatedly, when I wake up from such daytime napping, I feel refreshed and relaxed, and with great resolve, I start calling around to local workmen to line up some repairs. The place needs a new back gutter, plus the oven unit of the bulbous old white stove hasn’t worked right for years, and it’s time I did something about the paint outside that’s peeling from the shingles in veritable sheets—high time I did something about all such inevitable decay.