The Shattered Sky

by Bernard Uzan

  In any case I like going there; it’s near the Gare de l’Est. And I must walk through the red-light district so that I can rehearse my next part in the movie where I may play the role of a pimp. I cross Pigalle, Anvers, Barbès, I look at the pictures of the porn movies, I try to roll my shoulders and look real tough when I walk to make them think I’m some kind of pimp making sure all his “girls” are working very hard!

  I drag my feet somewhat, smoke one cigarette after the other, I’m here, and I’m alive! In short, I exist! I clench my jaws very tight, I try to look like a tough guy looking for trouble, and cut through the crowd with self-assurance.

  “Hi honey, want to go out?”

  No answer, never answer, just look a bit annoyed or condescending! But my eyes don’t follow my thoughts and roam everywhere on the semi-naked bodies of those ladies. But I don’t go beyond looking, I don’t go upstairs as they say, with one of those ladies, I don’t like whorehouses now and never did like them before.

  “You want to come to the whorehouse?”

  “No I’m doing my exercises!”

  “We’re all going to the whorehouse. We’re all going to the whorehouse; we’re all going to the whorehouse. Tough luck!”

  “When I’m no longer sick I’ll go and screw each and every one of them! I won’t have to go to the whorehouse you bunch of assholes.”

  I did recover, I don’t go to the whorehouse and I fuck them all, the ones I want; so I was right after all.

  I hope I won’t miss the next bus, which bus, where is it going? I don’t know! We’ll see. I’ll wait at the bus stop in any case, with a worried look on my face, my hands in the pockets of my windbreaker. I’m wearing my stern look and my chin is jutting out willfully.

  “Rarely have I seen such a willful child.”

  “He’ll never make it.”

  “I’m not so sure, I think he’ll be able to walk almost normally; you’ll see.”

  “Maybe but he’ll never succeed.”

  “With his kind of willpower he’ll develop his legs and will be able to walk and go to faraway places.”

  “Yes but he’ll never amount to anything.”

  “I don’t agree with you, he’ll walk.”

  “Yes, but never...”

  I would have preferred to never walk and spend my whole life in a beautiful carriage with someone working for me saying “give me this, give me that, bring me this, bring me that.” What a trip! As they say. To be able to ask for everything at all times because you’re a cripple. “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I have to take a piss, I want to jerk off, I want to live.”

  All the pious souls in Tunis spoke of me in kindly Christian overtones. I can still hear them and they didn’t even hide when they talked about me.

  “They say he goes to school in his wheelchair and his driver carries him in his arms from the car to the wheelchair and then…to his pupil’s desk inside the classroom.”

  “It’s awful, he’s so brave. In his place I’d have killed myself or… I don’t know, I would have done…something.”

  “Yes he really deserves so much credit, never a complaint or even a sigh, always smiling.”

  “His parents are the ones you should feel sorry for; they understand, what a terrible life they must have…

  “What does his father do?”

  “He’s really just a merchant, selling olives and olive oil, but he says he’s an entrepreneur because it sounds better.” They live in the wealthy neighborhood far away from the Jewish quarter and even farther from the Arab section. They behave as though they were French when they are actually Jews from here.”

  “You know those people are all the same! You don’t really know where they come from, but they are everywhere and always obvious.”

  “Yes, but with a son who is only half alive they have so much to worry about.”

  “Oh! Yes, he doesn’t really understand what’s going on; he doesn’t realize what he’s putting everybody through, his family I mean, and his classmates.”

  “He’s got to be a bit retarded otherwise it’s inconceivable.”

  “Not at all, he’s very smart, he’s first in his class.”

  No, the nice French and very Christian lady is making a mistake, I was only the second not the first in my class. Many times I used to imagine that the first in the class would disappear or even die. In my mind I tried to ambush him so many times, I tried to strangle him twice, I shot him with guns, I tortured him to death, I blinded him, I poisoned him dozens of times and every morning there he was in the classroom, friendly to everyone, smiling like an idiot who is about to become a politician and who is a real son of a bitch. He could have gone into hiding and let a cripple move into first place, a crippled Jew instead of him that little shitty Frenchy with his flannel shirts and his handknitted sweaters. Besides, I’m three years younger than he is and…I am competing with him.

  They say I am a genius. “He is so young! So ahead of every one else!” And very soon I will skip other classes and be with students who are five years older than I. They are all surprised that I am so young and yet in that class. They do not understand that all a cripple does is read, work, listen to music if he is privileged, if he is lucky, and has some money…

  My parents had money, I feel bad for the cripples who are poor with few chances of making it. I feel sorry for them and yet at the same time I don’t feel that I should be concerned after all; it’s not my fault if they are crippled. They have to attempt to overcome their handicap as I did; it would be too easy to ask society to support you with the excuse that you didn’t have the same opportunities to begin with.

  I am the one the other kids look up to as their leader; they come up to me at recess; I remain sitting at my desk while they all go into the school yard to play, to run after one another and argue… I look at them from the classroom window and often one of them comes up to ask me for my advice about something or other, or how they should organize the next battle and I lay down the law like King Solomon sitting in my chair and they all listen to me, they fear me and laugh at me behind my back.

  One day I tell them they all must, as they enter the classroom, kiss the side of the door as though there were a mezuzah… They all do it, even the non-Jews…The teacher who is another Frenchy doesn’t understand and with his real French accent that we love so much says: “Gentlemen what does this circus mean?” …I laugh so hard that he turns to me sternly and adds:

  “Mr. Nessachar, I suppose I must thank you once again as the originator of this charade? Well then is that the case?”

  So off I go into an explanation that in the Jewish religion, you must place a Mezuzah on the right side of every door except for the toilet and bathrooms. I add that the Mezuzah is the symbol of the Jewish faith: the love of a single God, the importance of study and the teaching of the Torah and the commitment to obey the laws of God. What I don’t mention is that I don’t really know any of this and that I had prepared for the “charade” the day before by doing some research. The teacher looks at me and says:

  “Thank you for the lesson in the Jewish religion Mr. Nessachar. I’m sure we shall all benefit from it.”

  And him, the little Frenchy, the first in the class looks at me and is smiling as if to say:

  “You can invent all you want it won’t change anything: I’m still the first in the class.” He also had the gall, the nerve, the obscene achievement of also being the first at gym! Well… shit! Spread some of it around! Be a little more generous, please!

  Now, in Paris twenty years later I have my revenge… It’s my turn…I’m sure that the first in class, the little Frenchy is today an excellent young company manager, an executive director with a great future, that he must have married Miss Beatrice Goduchon—the sister of Anne and the niece of the famous attorney at law Maurice Pommard.

  He lives in the sixteenth arrondissement, and has one child.

  He works for his family from morning to night until he’s totally exhausted. As a boy my
legs were dead while now the first in the class has a limp prick every night and Mrs. Young Manager’s wife, née Beatrice Goduchon, quenches her thirst two or three afternoons a week with unemployed actors, with would be artists, exotic Jews, in one word with guys more or less like me.

  Maybe I even screwed the wife of the top student in my class. I think about it, I am ecstatic and I smile. An artist, the magic word that opens every door! Even the one between the legs of the ladies Goduchon of this world! And in the evening, relaxed, pleased and fulfilled she talks about future projects with the Young Manager, the managing director, who is convinced he has made her happy and falls into a deep sleep thinking that fortunately his wife is neither too sexual nor demanding.

  He sleeps with a big angelic smile as he thinks of his coming brood and wakes up the next morning still smiling happily!

  Sometimes life can be so beautiful!

  When I think that sometimes I dream about that kind of life: a stable job, an apartment, a wife.

  For sure after some time I would certainly become an important man, a Young Manager, who also screws around once a week with a secretary, a sales girl, an artist while regretting that his own wife doesn’t feel more sexy.

  To dream the impossible dream!

  People only really want whatever escapes their grasp, and they only love what they don’t possess. If you live with the same person for too long boredom sets in. We still love each other, we respect and understand one another, we have tender gestures, we cuddle, but where did the passion go?

  The passion is gone and you’re bored to death. Actually after making love to the same person all the time, you don’t know what to do, you forget how to make love, you look at one another gaga with love and you just fall asleep with quiet beatitude and a self-satisfied smile on your face.

  Everyone seeks to be quickly reassured by carrying on a life useful to society, as a good citizen and a good mate that limiting relations with the same person all your life shall truly provide the greatest form of pleasure. One more lie eagerly repeated by our fathers and religious leaders.

  For me having something new has always been the rule in my relationship with women and then even that became boring and I retreated to a monk’s life, a masturbatory life, where pleasure is my only responsibility and comes only from me.

  And yet André Breton’s crazy love must really exist… to live only for one single person and to feel that that person also lives only for me.

  To be brave enough to tell someone everything, everything you resent, everything you hold against her or him, everything you do not like, to endure hearing the same silly stories be repeated at various parties where he or she is attempting to impress the audience. To spend days waiting to see that person again, to breathe her in, finally to be able to live and not need anyone else, no more pride, no more prejudice, no more self esteem, no more secrets, but only exclusive love, crazy love, a dream come true to be double and in two places at once through someone else who becomes the center of the universe.

  Something like that is too good to be true, you must leave it to those who dream about crazy love, that heartbreaker. I much prefer a new conquest that becomes disappointing too… Furthermore you can dazzle someone new, make her believe this…and that…while a woman you live with will immediately see through the device, everything is based on fraud and a disguise one uses or rather on the meaningless instant of sincerity that appears too rarely and doesn’t mean anything anymore. Love is just a ludicrous sideshow.

  “Excuse me sir, is this the right stop for bus number 92?”

  “…”

  “Excuse me but, sir, is this the right stop for bus number 92?”

  “I couldn’t care less about your bus stop, can’t you understand that?”

  “Please excuse me then, sir.”

  But why must she be so polite? Is she pulling my leg or what? “I must ask you to be so kind as to excuse me” she’s really funny! I don’t understand most women, they are so different from us! Léo Ferré said on television the other day, with his sunny southern French accent, “Women just screw you up, they only have uterine reactions” and he told how he ran after his wife with a hatchet to make her keep quiet. Their sense of humor is completely different from our own.

  “Have you been waiting for the 92 for a long time?”

  She’s waking me up from my all important daydream with an absurd question

  “Shit!” I answer imitating Léo Ferré’s accent.

  “Oh! You’re really vulgar… I love it!”

  “Bitch!” (Using the same accent).

  “Oh, I can tell you’re from the south, I can see it in your eyes!”

  No, I’m from Tunis, you poor idiot, I’m a Tunisian Jew, I’m not from Marseilles.

  “Listen, why …don’t you …just go fuck yourself!”

  “Well here’s my bus, are you taking it as well?”

  “No!”

  “Well then, see you soon perhaps, you are a charming man, so rough, almost brutal, Oh! You remind me of my brother, I just adore my brother, he’s so different.”

  “My brother?” Why are you talking about your brother?

  Am I talking about my brother? Am I saying his name?

  Fabien…Fabien… My brother …

  I never even knew you, or I didn’t want to know you. I hated you because you were so tall, because you had blue eyes and a straight nose. You were six years older than I when you died, you were almost the same age I am now…How can you die at 26, how obscene. Six years older than I…you were hoping to get closer to me and I ignored you… I was jealous of you…

  Fabien… I never understood a thing about you…while you admired my intelligence but you were ashamed of me…

  Who wouldn’t have been ashamed of such a human wreck, a stunted leftover of a child, with a ridiculous and battered body? You thought other people couldn’t understand me or would laugh at me so you didn’t want to show me to other people because you were so ashamed.

  I wanted to be able to go out with you so much, to hold your hand, to look at you and be proud of you and proud to be with you and laugh, laugh out loud… You could have taught me how to say things girls love to hear, how to play billiards that you liked so much and tell me all about your Saturday nights at the “jazz club.” Maybe even let me drive your sports car…

  My brother, my brother, how I’d love to have someone I’d be able to call like that now, my brother, my brother…You see that even when I try to talk about you I’m actually talking about myself, I have such bad habits.

  “He’ll never make it.”

  “In my opinion, he’ll be able to walk normally.”

  “Maybe, but… he’ll never make it.”

  It’s been six years since you died, Fabien…

  …Six years…the telephone rings and startles me out of a deep sleep that night. … I was asleep, I who never sleep…

  How could I be asleep on the night you were going to die? Have I no sense of my responsibilities?

  “Hello, Galvani 9073, is this Mr. Julien Nessachar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your brother died in an automobile accident.”

  “Excuse me, what did you say? “Your brother died in an automobile accident.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Midnight.”

  It’s midnight Dr. Schweitzer, midnight the “witching hour.”

  My brother has been murdered.

  The phone becomes a huge terrifying object in my hand like a secret weapon that seems to swallow my fingers and my hand, I look at it dumbfounded…Wake up, but wake up?

  “Hello, Mr. Nessachar, hello, hello…”

  The poet is dead. Death in Venice. To Die in Madrid. Rendezvous with death… Six million dead…now its six million and one… one more!

  “Hello, Mr. Nessachar? “

  “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I couldn’t feel better, my brother is dead…everything’s just fine.”
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  “I’m sorry to have been so brutal.”

  “Don’t worry about it…as you know we all have to die at one time or another, right?”

  “Yes, of course. You are right. Monsieur Nessachar. Yes. And he didn’t feel any pain!”

  “Oh! Yes… well, that’s even better, all is well that ends well. Good bye. Have a good evening.”

  “Yes, you know, whiplash…the “rabbit punch”…smack, his neck was broken in a single blow… Smack!”

  “Smack?”

  “Yes and on top of it the other occupants of the car actually don’t even have a scratch…nothing…”

  “Fantastic! What luck!”

  “They have no injuries at all, his wife was spared, everyone else is fine, only him…Fate, bad luck, the wrong seat, the death seat.”

  “Only my brother, then? The death seat? The others are all right? Well that’s lucky, a miracle.”

  “I’m really sorry, good night Mr. Nessachar.”

  Whiplash, the “rabbit punch” …but he hated the taste of rabbit…the rabbit’s revenge… Smack… smack… Not even a scratch…Smack…

  Now every time I eat rabbit I throw up on the carpet.

  I never saw him again, I never saw his body alive or dead, I didn’t go to his funeral nor anywhere else, he disappeared forever, he vanished, he doesn’t exist, he’s dead.

  Period.

  He is buried with the rest of the family, my father is dancing in the street, my mother became an old woman in two days, my brother’s wife is free and I’m wondering who I am and where I am and whether life goes on even though he is dead. Life does go on for everybody even though my brother is dead.

  A long, long time ago I used to have a brother and he died. My father said it was normal, that my brother was a rose and that god calls the most beautiful flowers in his garden to be near him…

  A rose? Where does he find all that crap?

  And then he added, “I hope he was wearing red socks, he looked so good in red,” and he went into the street yelling: “Red socks, red socks! Red socks, red, red, red! God called him to his side.”