The Shattered Sky

by Bernard Uzan

  Rather small greenish eyes, with heavy eyelids that carefully trimmed eyebrows attempt to enlarge. But a look, a look that is amused, sad, ironic, desperate, impassioned, burning, yes, all that and more!

  “He has his father’s eyes!”

  “I hope my father had beautiful eyes, madam.”

  “He was the most popular man in town!” she said as she giggled.

  He looked like Rudolf Valentino, so handsome, so distinguished, with that look…that look. So my look must be devastating… A thoughtful crease between the eyes, a large strong forehead and curly black hair around my face… Real Frenchmen look at me with some misgivings, I don’t look like them, I don’t look like an Italian, and I don’t look like an Arab.

  France is unable to label me, I don’t look like anybody, just a bit like a wog.

  I really discovered what France was all about when I was given the grotesque privilege of attending the University of Paris, at Nanterre, to complete my advanced degree in my highly enriching literary studies… What a joke! One more slapstick comedy! One more bit of fraud… I spent three years wasting my time with shitty professors who yawned as they taught us French literature… Thankfully, the shanty town was nearby, at least we had some laughs with all those assholes who were dreaming of restructuring the world and were getting ready for May 1968.

  Nanterre, the new university, a building in the middle of nowhere, that is actually in the middle of a shantytown inhabited by the most wretched children of French society. It looks like a Johannesburg slum. You get off the train and must walk along a makeshift pathway boarded by cardboard and metal shacks to go and hear the geniuses of French culture, and then people wonder why students march in the streets with banners, and burn cars, and throw Molotov cocktails.

  Nanterre, the powder keg of the far left… The Senegalese Mamadou had quietly transformed the Nanterre dormitories into brothels… The female students would get paid for their services and he would grab all the money, like a pimp in Pigalle, all dressed up in a silk suit with a pink shirt and polka dot tie. But those girls were communists, or rather extreme “gauchistes,” and by working as whores for Mamadou they were convinced that they were helping the poor in the third world who were being exploited for decades by their leaders. Actually Mamadou must have also had some unusual masculine attributes that the young ladies at the new university could verify very freely and with undeniable pleasure since all this was done in the name of the “gauchiste” cause.

  Just as the majority of the professors of the great university, who were teaching tomorrow’s leadership had only one idea on their mind, to fuck as many young silly chicks who surrendered for the greater glory of literature… I remember in particular Professor Robert Corbeau, a handsome sixty-year-old novelist who at the end of each master class in the great amphitheater makes a show of such incredible generosity and consideration when he announces on the microphone that he still has space in his car to drive just one person back to Paris. He never mentions that he drives a small sports car with only two seats, and as soon as the young lass sits next to him he immediately slips his hand up her thighs and makes obscene comments thinking that they would be exciting.

  Nanterre, is where I made my debut as an actor and where I discovered that the theater is way of escaping reality, mostly because I love to act in the absurd plays of Ionesco. Nanterre, is the hotbed of modern rejection, and the symbol of the disintegration of a culture and the death of a civilization.

  The dumb antics of Nanterre drive me astray, there’s nothing to gain from rehashing the same old stories. When I walk around Paris, I always take the same itinerary, I must not like surprises. I wear the same jeans, the same black leather jacket, the same turtleneck sweater…

  I dress like a thug because I don’t have the money to be dressed like a lord and it kills me… but I’d love to wear silk shirts and linen suits, and I hate those who actually do wear linen suits. Actually I hate just about everybody! I hate men who are irresponsible, loose women, misbehaved children, abusive grand fathers, sniveling grandmothers, seductive uncles, love hungry aunts, stupid cousins, nosy neighbors, boring acquaintances, unfaithful friends, useless encounters and even those I don’t get to meet, since they don’t exist.

  I almost hate everybody, I almost despise everybody.

  “I don’t want to be loved, I just want to be feared.”

  Either Caligula or Nero. Oh! If only I could play Nero, I’d show them, or if not then Figaro, yes Figaro or Harlequin or Treplev, or Romeo, or Chekhov or Shakespeare. Shit! I’ll show them what real talent is all about!

  I have a kind of special affinity for the word shit. My mother couldn’t stand hearing me say shit, she wanted me to have good manners.

  I can hear her raspy voice:

  “Julien, who taught you to use that word, don’t say it!”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “I will tell your father”

  “Yes, mother”

  “I know he lets you get away with everything, but this is too much, he’s so weak with you it’s awful, he allows you anything, thank goodness I’m around, because otherwise you’d be totally spoiled.”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “What am I going to do with you..? You tell me… Can you tell me what we’re to do with you? You won’t always have everything and when we won’t be around anymore what will you do, tell me? Answer me when I talk to you!”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “I can’t stand it, answer me or I’ll slap you!”

  “Shit! Mother.”

  In Paris, in the early hours, you mostly run into cleaning ladies on their way to work, they look so happy, and without any worries at all. I could be a cleaning lady! Yes, that’s what I should have been! How do you say that about a man? A cleaning man, I guess? I would stay at home all day, empty the ashtrays still filled with the smoke of all that idle chatter, make beds filled with dreams, and above all with frustrations, and serve at the table, Mr. and Mrs.! I have no responsibilities…

  “Julien! You know I like the roast very well done!

  “Very well, madam!”

  That’s my kind of responsibility! My life will be about eating and drinking well, going for a walk on Sundays on the avenue de Wagram or the Place de la Muette, with the Spanish maid servants and perhaps manage to pick up one of them from time to time. Nice life that of a maid, or a flunky.

  I’m going to consider it seriously…

  Unless that is the kind of woman I truly want to meet…a sweet, understanding and tender cleaning lady, someone who makes no mistakes, and excuses those made by everyone else! People will say about her:

  “It’s great, she can get everything done, her work, her house, and her husband, who is not such an easy person to deal with on a daily basis, she’s really the perfect woman.”

  One day, just like that, on some street corner, where else? I’ll find the woman of my life, the one I met so often in my dreams. I often have this strange and wonderful dream of a woman I love, and who loves me, and as we look into each other’s eyes we’ll dance with castanets and cleated shoes, and we’ll go far, very far away, to a country that resembles me, and we’ll never leave each other. I still have childlike dreams, I’m a real loser! I can’t look at myself in a mirror, or a window, or even catch my reflection in a puddle, without breaking out in hives, thinking about how horrible I look and how I wish I could disappear forever... I’m in a panic…a panic…

  The panic that I can never shrug off is how they make me feel; the horror of being a Jew, a kike, a sheeny, a Juden, Juden Raus, death to the Jews, dirty Jew, fucking Jew…Jew or rug peddler. I can’t tell, it’s probably the same thing…. I don’t know, I don’t know anymore, I never knew… A poor Jew… A poor Jew. Come on! There is no such thing as a poor Jew as they all say, even the Mexicans say so.

  I am proud to be a Jew but nobody wants to allow me that luxury.

  JUDEN RAUS… We’ll burn them, castrate them, decapitate them, gas them, chop them up
, turn them into lampshades, hang them, rape them, humiliate them, those fucking rich Jews, and the poor Jews as well, they’re all the same.

  My father never talked to me about it, he never discussed it, never said anything, he kept quiet…Speak up! Say something! A conspiracy of silence…I keep quiet, you keep quiet, they keep quiet…He wouldn’t talk about it, and it remained taboo despite my insistence, despite the usual questions repeated again and again.

  Dad, please tell me how it was.

  “What?”

  “How was it inside that camp? Were you really there?”

  “Yes, I was there.”

  “How was it?”

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know, tell me, I want to know, tell me.”

  “I forgot.”

  He’s either lying, or he’s fearful, or he wants to protect me because that’s one thing you don’t forget, I don’t in any case, do I?

  No, I don’t forget, it’s there always in my head, always there in my heart, in my belly, in my balls… So please stop saying so smugly…he’s a Jew.

  I happen to know many poor Jews, many stupid Jews, many Jews of little or no consequence…

  The panic…the panic that came before…and the panic even now. Maybe to disappear is the solution. To…disappear… Then I return, as an invisible man to see if people are sad after I’m dead and I would say:

  “Don’t cry, I’m not dead, look, here I am…”

  To be able to comfort, to have the ability to comfort someone, that’s all I ask for.

  I don’t want to fail, I’m too frightened, a terrible fear, terrifying, obsessive, paralyzing. I don’t want to die without having known what true beauty is, without having seen something big and powerful, or else I want to die immediately to have the excuse of having run out of time! I don’t wish to live without creating something that will change the world! I feel so much untapped energy within myself! I could lift up the whole world! I don’t want to feel the days drifting by, just melting away; my hair falling out; my skin having deeper wrinkles; my belly growing larger; my life seeping away; getting old! I don’t want to get older without having done anything! I don’t give a damn about wisdom, maturity and that whole menagerie.

  I want things to happen, now.

  I’m going to write a book and once it gets published I’ll kill myself.

  I shall write a book and if they don’t publish it I’ll kill myself… I’m going around in circles, ring around the rosy, but I have no lamb, little red riding hood, red like the kitchen, like the ants I burn to death, like the blood of the bulls, I can’t wait to go to sleep tonight.

  I hate sleeping by myself so I just pick up anyone along the way, a girl who is lost just like me, who also hates to sleep alone, and we spend the night together, alone even more alone, and the next morning we part, alone, even more alone once more, and awfully sad, sad enough to cry, and the assholes tell me that I’m a Casanova, what a joke! I, Casanova? A sad loser still looking for himself without ever finding out who he is and that’s what is killing him! That’s the truth!

  I, Casanova? A noble master, and a mean individual?

  Rather, an ugly little shit head! Yes, that’s more like it! That’s the truth!

  And now here I am walking, walking in Paris twenty years later. I’m walking constantly to find my legs, to find the life that had been taken away from me a long time ago.

  Tunis is so far and yet so close… You never really become someone else, just another part of yourself, the part that was denied and forgotten.

  I’m fed up with walking and I feel like a cup of coffee! It will cost me 80 centimes… So what, I’ll see, I’ll walk home instead of taking the metro, it’ll be good exercise. Exercise, my obsession, to always exercise all the time, all my life, at every turn, at every moment those fucking exercises, every day for fourteen years, nothing else…But why me? Why?

  “Are you going to play soccer?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Are you going to play tennis?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Are you going to the movies?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Are you going to the whorehouse?”

  “I can’t I’m exercising.”

  “Are you going to a surprise party?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “You....”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Are you coming to my house tomorrow?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Are you coming to the country this Sunday?”

  “I can’t, I’m exercising.”

  “Do you want to play marbles?”

  “No, I’m exercising.”

  “Do you...”

  “No, I...”

  “Do you...”

  “No, I...”

  “Do you...”

  “No, I...”

  I have fourteen years to catch up! Do you know how long that is, fourteen years, you bunch of assholes, and losers. For fourteen years I would hear and repeat, panting four hours a day, one…two…three…four.

  “So, today we’re feeling a bit better, right my boy, you’ll see we’re going to get there. In three months, in four months you’ll be doing much better.”

  Three months, four months?... It went on for fourteen years. You rotten doctor, with your kindly ways, you’re a liar, but such a bad liar that it makes me heartsick.

  “Okay, let’s go. One, two, three, four.”

  It hurts, it hurts so much.

  “Are you ok, my boy?”

  “Yes, I’m feeling fine!”

  “It doesn’t hurt?”

  “No, no, not at all.”

  It hurts, it hurts so much.

  “Let’s measure you now, okay my boy?”

  “If you wish.”

  I really hate it when that man calls me ‘my boy.’ It hurts so much…my legs hurt, my heart hurts and my soul hurts too. Why me? Why? What did I do to deserve all this…

  “In life you get what you deserve.”

  “You reap what you sow.”

  And you Dad, did you get what you deserved? The camp, a son who dies at age 26, another son, me, who is a cripple, an ugly invalid, and finally you, dying like a penniless bum in a hospital bed in Asnières at age 59…

  What did you do for fifty nine years? You idiot.

  “All right, so let’s take your measurements…

  Well now… That’s very good, you have increased by half a centimeter around the thigh in four months, that’s great.”

  “Great?”

  “Why sure, that’s good, very good, you’ll see, we’ll get there.”

  Half a centimeter in four months, at this rate it’ll take me twenty years to make it and he thinks it’s great. If I could I’d punch this doctor, I may be a cripple and a truly pathetic sight but I’m not stupid.

  “You know something doctor, you’re nothing but an asshole!”

  He left without saying a word and I could hear him repeating everything to my mother, not only did I have a lousy disposition but I also hadn’t the slightest chance of recovering, the slightest chance of walking, or the slightest chance of leading a normal life.

  Not a chance? But you don’t know who I am, you shitty doctor, you’ll see, I’m going to make it. Let’s go Julien “my boy,” go at it again on your own, once “the scientist” leaves every morning after four hours of exercises you keep on going by yourself, you take yourself to the limit, the minute you’re alone. You know the exercises by heart after all this time, so go for it again and again and again instead of burning the ants to death and wasting your time.

  “One, two, three, four.”

  Oh, god, it hurts. I want to do more!

  “One, two, three, four.”

  I can’t take it. One more time.

  “One, two, three, four.”

  I’m sweating, I’m all wet,
drenched to the bone and they’ll keep on repeating that I tried to jerk off once again.

  “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.”

  “Dad, do you think I’ll be able to walk someday?”

  “One, two, three, four.”

  “That I’ll be able to run, dance, dance in the sky like Peter Pan?”

  “One, two, three, four, more, more.”

  “He won’t be able to lead a normal life.”

  “One, two, three, four.”

  “But he will, you’ll see.”

  “One, two, three, four.”

  All day I will do my exercises and I’ll get there through sheer willpower just to prove to them that they are wrong. They’ll all die of spite but I will walk, I’ll dance and one day I’ll get married and I’ll have a son who won’t be like me, he’ll be big and strong, an athlete, a champion, and he’ll run the marathon.

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  “I’ll try…”

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  To find a woman…

  “1,2, 3, 4”

  Who’ll love me…

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  Whom I’ll also love…

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  Not like mom and Dad…

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  Who cheat on each other and don’t play by the rules…

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  Who hate each other…

  “1, 2, 3, 4”

  As much as I hate them.

  Okay, I’ll go have that cup of coffee and spend the 80 cents. I enter the café. There should always be someone waiting for me! I have an appointment? With whom? Oh, I’ll end up finding someone to have an appointment with, I have until this evening, to find, invent or dream someone up. How strange, I don’t see anyone I know inside… All the well-bred Frenchmen, even the lowliest down-trodden slobs, look at me as though I had just arrived from another planet…

  But why do they look at me like that, what’s so different about me? I’d like to meet someone so badly, someone who knows me, but nobody knows me in this fucking town except for other actors who are just as lonely as I am. No one knows me. Where am I? Who wants me? I’m in Paris alone, walking around in search of friendship, of something…and then nothing, no one, but why me? I’ll still go and have a cup of coffee at the counter and pretend to be waiting for someone who will not show up so that the people around me will not think I am alone.