Sphinx

by Anne Garréta

  When we finally found ourselves side by side, smoking the inevitable cigarette, I said to A***, after a moment of silence and reflection, that it felt as if we had never, before this day, truly made love. For an entire year we had only endeavored to reach a very crude form of ecstasy. After the subtle sensuality we had just shared, all the other times seemed like a laborious peccadillo. I concluded that making love without laughing was as bad as gifting a book written in a language the recipient does not know. The obscurity of my metaphor perplexed A***; already my more serious side was feeling neglected. I leapt out of bed and proposed we go for a walk.

  It was one in the morning, the air was cold but not freezing. We walked up Fifth Avenue. When we reached the edge of Central Park, there was silence: it had begun to snow. Horse-drawn carriages were still stationed before the Plaza. Our eyes were shining; I wondered whether A***’s body and heart felt as light as mine did. A*** was humming a song that I often put on at the Apocryphe toward the end of the night: “La Ville Inconnue.” I laced our arms together and began to sing along. Our two breaths condensed upon contact with the cold air and formed a cloud, as if the song was materializing before us.

  By the time we got back to the hotel, the sidewalks were covered with a fine layer of snow violated only by our footprints. We lay down in the immense bed, shoulder-to-shoulder right in the middle, leaving a large white border on each side.

  I know essentially nothing of white, Anglo-Saxon, Puritan America. My own America is of black origins—the music, the voices, the food. There’s a term for that in the black community: soul. Soul music, soul food. The nourishment of the soul?

  Accompanying A*** to family reunions and meals during the season’s festivities, I found myself lost in the heart of a neighborhood where white people rarely ventured—some remote suburb of Long Island or New Jersey. For two days the women had been preparing a Southern-style meal, paying tribute to the family’s roots.

  I hardly know the names of these dishes, let alone how they’re prepared. I lived among this family only the length of brief visits and, from one year to the next, I ate these dishes over and over again, without ever seeking to educate myself about them. I didn’t feel the need. It sufficed simply to be there, as if I had always belonged to their world. Others in my place would probably have tried to play the explorer and make curious inquiries, as an anthropologist or a traveler greedy to understand how or why. But what did I care? I felt at home there, so much did they make me feel like a part of their family, effortlessly forgetting our differences in race, color, culture, class—everything that one might cite as possible traits of alterity. It was as if the language they were speaking and the food they were cooking had always been familiar to me.

  And the old black mommas laughed with delight to see that I had such an appetite. A***, who was used to seeing me bored or indifferent when faced with earthly sustenance, was astonished and overjoyed. I was forgetting to repine, I was finally tasting life, savoring each bite without the table-talk that, in Europe generally, and in France particularly, constitutes the essential component of meals.

  Even now, the taste of sweet potato melts into the taste of iced tea in my mouth. Is there anything more vertiginous than gustative reminiscence? For it upends completely the conventional workings of memory. When I recall this meal, something appears without being summoned, something that does not serve as a witness to anything, that does not help me to follow the thread of my memory. But this something returns—not under the guise of a phantom, of an immaterial representation of an object now vanished, of a perception swallowed up and designated to a bygone past, coming from the imagination to reincarnate itself feebly in the present. Instead, it crystallizes, taking on an intense, fugitive form, a carnal presence—the rebirth of a sensation whose former source has long ago disappeared. A vivid hallucination, a tangible reliving that invades the mouth and spreads down the back of the throat, taking on body, flesh, and warmth: the flavor itself, still intact, of this long-gone nourishment.

  Then the taste that surfaced on my tongue is erased, mutated in the caress of this persistent flavor that I feel melt and travel to the bottom of my throat. Even as the pure gustatory reminiscence that surged up in me at the evocation of tea and sweet potatoes fades and dissolves, the sensation of gooiness comes back to me: those melting granules that coat the epithelium as far back as the glottis in a soft, thick veil, as would honey. I silently revel in this sweetness descending in me, fearing that with words I might tear the surface of this veil, both fragile and protective, like a second skin.

  My English still bears the stigmata from the time spent among an almost exclusively black community. Imperceptibly, the expressions and characteristic improprieties of their speech slipped into the tissue of the academic English I had been taught in high school. The language I speak is a monstrous hybrid, mingling Oxford and Harlem, Byron and gospel. To the point of caricature, I pronounce these African American utterances with a rather British accent, and sometimes swallow up to half of the syllables of a too perfectly constructed sentence.

  I begged A***, who was strongly repelled by the idea, to take me on a walk through Harlem. My wish was finally granted after several entreaties. One afternoon, we went up the main avenue of Harlem on foot, from Central Park up to 125th Street. I exalted in the view of these neighborhoods whose ruin and incredible devastation reminded me, in places, of Berlin: the vestiges of a past splendor, as if swept away by a brutal disaster. People congregated in doorways, busy conducting transactions, and watched us pass out of the corner of their eyes, indifferent. In a run-down building with neither doors nor windows and open to gusts of winter wind, vagrants had lit a brazier to heat their hands over the flames. The snow shoveled into heaps on the sidewalks was turning into ice now that the sun had begun to sink behind the towers of lower Manhattan. We walked slowly; after 110th Street we no longer saw a single white person, nor even a Puerto Rican. Like all who have left Harlem, it repulsed A*** to be back, even temporarily, so disconcerting was the spectacle of abandon and misery plastered on the fronts of buildings. The day was dimming. The more we walked into the heart of this city, the heavier and more pressing was the feeling of affliction. Shadow was eroding the facades, riddled with the holes of what were once windows. Desolation was spread uniformly over this inordinate expanse; the excessive degradation would have been heartrending even for those who tend to savor macabre spectacles. Harlem projected the muffled but poignant impression of the end of the world. This vision haunted me for a long time. I felt as though there, amidst all the abandonment, I had abandoned something of myself, snatched away without my realizing it in the moment and subsequently forever out of reach. I wasn’t able to close the wound that had been opened by this cleaving of my own flesh.

  The effect of this sundering has never left me; sometimes I am forced to relive certain moments all over again, vivid and uncorrupted, when, digressing at random, my thoughts bring old memories back to me. An anxiety wells up and distills in me, the feeling of having lost, of having let this setting swallow up, a fragment of my substance that I can’t place or describe, but whose absence makes itself felt throughout my body, invading and voiding it insidiously. A bitter cold, an abyss full of wind cuts through me, the same wind that cut through me as I walked through the streets of Harlem all those years ago. Harlem’s devastation now resides in me, my body haunted by the soul of this spectral city. It’s a dead body that I carry, lodged in the depths of my own, which is at the brink of death as a result. And Harlem retains something of me, too; I still have visions of this loss. I am forced to remember this place’s existence because of this theft, its resurgence in my memory, the sorrow I feel but cannot define; it doesn’t want to leave me, it refuses to close the door on its misery, instead poisoning the vague wave of my thoughts, invading me, stripping me, emptying me of all that is not it, taking possession of my body, staking itself and taking refuge, overwhelming the physical limits of time and distance, absorbing me into its
elf, turning my body into that city, that abandonment, that devastation.

  When we returned from America, I resumed my position behind the turntables at the Apocryphe, but only on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays—the nights with the biggest crowds. I had resolved to resume my studies and to devote my four days off per week to analyzing metaphysical texts in order to write an essay on the apophatic tradition.

  For too long I had neglected a regular intellectual practice because it had been incompatible with the new mind-numbing nocturnal life to which I had made myself prisoner. I became aware of these constraints and of their consequences once I had had a vacation from them, a pause that suspended the chain of overindulgent nights. It made me realize the bleak inanity of the time I had lost squandering my life in the night, devoting myself exclusively to venal pleasures.

  The Eden had closed—momentarily, so they said—and A***, with neither work nor guaranteed income, moved in with me. Living together seemed only natural following a month of vacation without any drama, and the vastness of my apartment spared us from sharing any awkward propinquity.

  The airy, sweet closeness was not, however, without tension, brought on by the radical difference in our lifestyles. All day we stayed in the house, barely leaving; but while I withdrew to my study to read in peace, A*** would spend most days in front of the television screen watching shows and films, despite my attempts to suggest a less passive pastime. No book or work of art was enticing enough to evoke curiosity. A***’s sole activity was a daily exercise routine to maintain good physical form and bodily suppleness. At the end of each week, we would have dinner together at a restaurant before heading to the Apocryphe, or, when A*** felt the desire (more and more frequently) to meet up with some friends, we would separate at the door of the club, where I would carry out my night’s work.

  In April I took a three-month vacation, which we spent visiting some cities in Europe before continuing on to New York. Venice, Florence, Rome, Munich, Heidelberg, Berlin, Amsterdam, and London: we made a tour of these cities over the course of May and June without spending more than a week in any of them. In the space of a few days, I would visit the museums that I knew had some paintings (by Mantegna in particular) or collections I was hoping to see. I also visited a few universities where I had friends who introduced me to the professors there who might be interested in my research. They were all very welcoming and encouraged me to pursue my studies.

  A*** followed me begrudgingly into the museums in Italy, preferring to enjoy the sea and to tan through long—and, in my opinion, inhuman—sessions. A*** found the cities of the North disappointing and boring, devoid of charm as picturesque as that of the Alps. In Berlin, as in London, we went to the opera as well as to some classical concerts, which for A*** were mere social occasions, failing to incite any profound interest. The only things that provided A*** with an unfeigned pleasure were walks through the streets, from café to café, from fashion boutique to jeweler’s.

  New York was less boring, because it was a familiar city where A*** could demonstrate superiority over me. We experienced an extraordinary resurgence of our passion; the city’s power and excitement infiltrated us just as it had during our first visit. It was summer, and the heat, not too excessive, made for pleasant walks through the streets. The nights, singularly electric, lured us out. The clubs and bars were crowded with vacationing students who had come to New York to revel in the monstrous buzz of the artistic and cultural scene.

  Basking in a renewal of passion for the world, for life, and for our love, we shared secrets, words, and caresses profusely, allowing ourselves to forget all our past hurts and to believe for a moment in an idyll whose state of grace lingered even after we had left its source, that city.

  The Eden reopened in September with a brand new show on the billing. A*** was asked to join the new troupe. The rehearsals took up the end of August, with six hours of work a day and up to ten hours in the days preceding the premiere.

  We rarely saw each other. During the day, I stayed in to work in my study without going out, while A***, with renewed professional rigor, met the artistic and physical demands of preparation. In the evening, we would eat dinner together and then go to bed very early. The nights when I was working, A***, who had stopped going out, stayed at the apartment. Returning at daybreak, I would go to sleep in the bed that A*** would soon be vacating.

  I don’t know whether it was A***’s absence or a kind of unhinging, a solitude induced by the disjunction in our lifestyles, that was producing this effect, but clubs were now inspiring only a growing boredom in me, dangerously close to contempt. I was about to turn twenty-three, and for the three years the night crowd had passed before my eyes, I had seen reputations be made and dismantled. I had seen temporary passions transport places and individuals to the apex, and then, burning what they had once adored, those notorious night owls who make up the club scene would abandon them for no apparent reason for other idols destined for a glory just as brief.

  It was a never-ending cycle: a new club would open with flashier décor than ever and resounding, luminous sound equipment more over the top and expensive that anything we had seen before. Always bigger, better, louder, more exclusive and more chichi: the propensity to outdo others governed the cycles of this sparkling microcosm. But behind the circus I discerned only a dreadful repetition; the same shady characters would dominate this market where the figureheads, straw men, and wax mannequins were waltzing to an infernal rhythm. For ages, some thirty individuals, usually vulgar and with unconvincing respectability, would hide behind the scenes and open, close, and resell the clubs, all conceived on the same model. The machine was running on empty, racing, turning out a fortune without producing an iota of delight: no one enjoyed themselves in the least in these clubs, and I started to doubt whether anyone ever had.

  Money, reigning despotically, was reducing these places to nothing more than interchangeable settings for dreary prostitution and, to make up for this disgrace, they were rotten with snobbery. The only people seen there, noisily upstaging everyone else, were the nouveau riche and the horde of thieves that money draws: dealers, prostitutes, gigolos, and crooks of all calibers. For the sake of appearance or photo opportunities, the crowd was sprinkled with a few celebrities, people who were recognized and idolized.

  I could no longer bear the assault of this ambient vulgarity. Behind the simulacrum of festivity and opulence, I witnessed the most sordid trafficking and the seediest machinations, sheepishly disguised. The four months I stayed on in Paris were a calvary for me: the obligatory visits to this cloacum were nauseating. I was being drained by my academic essay whose subject was as far as possible from what I confronted on a daily basis. And finally, I was suffering from the distance I felt growing between A*** and me. We continued to live together, yet we scarcely spent time together.

  Without realizing it, I started longing for my detour via the Eden, those rendezvous from the first days of our relationship, the route that I took every night to the Apocryphe. Disgust at the milieu we now took no pleasure in visiting was gradually surfacing, combining destructively with the loss of substance in our relationship.

  We had sealed within ourselves all the dissatisfaction, resentment, and suffering our surroundings had generated. Side by side, we were incubating our grievances. Our relationship suffered profoundly for it: we gave free reign to our mood swings without any creative effort to break through the distance establishing itself between us. A terrible wound opened from all that was eating away at us.

  Crisis erupted upon our return from a week spent in New York for the New Year, when we fell once again into the hell we had unknowingly emerged from for a moment. Its abrupt, stifling horror filled us with distress, the same distress walling us in through the dissolution of our love, through a distance that was making us practically strangers to each other. All that the outside inflicted on us resulted in a growing tension, which we never let dissolve in a moribund agreement.

  One eve
ning, we turned on each other in the dressing room of the Eden where A*** was getting ready to go on stage. I haphazardly reproached A*** for being cold and uncaring, for being shamefully narcissistic, too. I was reproached in turn for never having asked myself what I really wanted our relationship to be, for never allowing it to run smoothly by fault of never having considered, or taken into account, anything other than an image, other than my singular, and therefore false, vision of A***, with which I had been complacent.

  We reached a point of extreme irritation, throwing in each other’s face absolutely anything that came to mind. I demanded to know what was wanted of me, what need I had to satisfy. We only cut ourselves off when a stagehand entered with A***’s costume. Leaving the dressing room, A***, from the door, turned back and hurled this question at me without waiting for a response: “How do you see me, anyway?”

  After A*** left, I lingered in the dressing room’s usual disorder. My gaze fell upon a large mirror opposite the door, which had slammed shut after the question. I stared at the door’s reflection. A response came to my lips, which I murmured pensively in the silence: “I see you in a mirror.”

  I was waiting for the show to finish so I could deliver that reply—a reply that gave me an odd satisfaction. It was not quite a reply, in fact: it was an enigma, an obscure sentence, a fragment of an aphorism in the tone of an apocalyptic prophesy. I turned it over and over in my mind, on my lips, and before my eyes without diminishing its charm or unveiling its meaning.