The Shattered Sky

by Bernard Uzan

  “Very well then, but not ‘The Three Little Pigs’ or ‘Mr. Seguin’s Goat.’ I’ll recite whatever I choose!”

  My father looks at me and is smiling. Fabien stops laughing and my mother says: “But of course, sweetheart.”

  I take a deep breath, I put on a deep frown, and I recite the poem by Boris Vian that begins with something like:

  “Our father who art in heaven… why don’t you please stay there!”

  There was total silence, they all look at me disapprovingly; clearly Boris Vian is not among their best-loved poets. So then I smile and add:

  “Would you like to hear something else, you shit heads! Something that will amuse you and educate you perhaps? An excerpt from Mein Kampf? A passage from Sodom and Gomorrah? An erotic poem? A few lines from the Marquis de Sade that I have memorized?”

  Huge scandal, amazement on every face, stunned looks, bobbing heads, hands that are shaking, then everyone starts talking all at once to express their troubled feelings. Fabien quickly leaves the room and mother is about to burst into tears; only my father is laughing out loud, choking up with uncontrollable laughter and hilarity.

  My dear, my dear father, I spent so many hours waiting for you to return from work, you were the only joy in my desert deprived of love.

  As soon as you were ten minutes late, I used to wait on the balcony of our “beautiful big house” crying and imploring the “Good” God to make your car appear at the corner of the street… Tears would flow and when I would finally see your car arriving I would cry out “There’s Daddy!” and I would laugh and dry up my tears. I was relieved until the next day at the same hour. From the balcony I see you parking your car in the street, the black Citroën Traction Avant that you loved so much.

  You get out with your hat on, look at me smiling from the street and saluting me with your hand at your temple as if to say “Hello, General.” It was as if I always felt you were going to disappear forever from my life, suddenly, much too quickly, without excusing yourself, without respecting the accepted rule that a father doesn’t die without warning you.

  It’s now four in the afternoon and the street is filled with people who seem to have lots of things to do and who are pushing each other without any consideration. There’s an incredibly thick crowd around the Odéon today! People must really have nothing to do! Everybody complains and nobody does any work; they’re all penniless and the stores are always full; they all have their worries; they call them money problems that bunch of bums! Four times a year they only discuss one thing: their vacation. Their vacation, where they are bored to tears, they quarrel, cheat on one another, dream of being elsewhere with other bums that are not part of the family, spend one month pissing each other off and come back to Paris full of extraordinary memories they share with their friends, with their asshole colleagues. Their vacation!

  All right, well, enough with the bitter ironic statements; each one has the right to like whatever it is they want to do and to do whatever they like.

  Maybe I’m the sick one, the moron, the anti-social denier of life and the world. Maybe it’s me, maybe I’m the asshole who doesn’t like anything, believes in nothing, who walks around the streets of Paris like a ghost denying everything and despising everyone.

  “Julien, is that you?”

  “…”

  “Julien, is that you?”

  “…”

  “Julien, it’s me!

  “…?”

  “You don’t recognize me? Nicole.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I do, excuse me, I was thinking of something else.”

  “I see you haven’t changed much, you’re always thinking about something else.”

  “Are you being critical?”

  “Not at all, I was just joking, what are doing now? Do you have some time? Can we have a cup of coffee?”

  “If you like, what time is it?”

  “Five minutes to three.”

  “I’ve got about one hour.”

  I can’t really tell her that I have nothing to do.

  “I have nothing to do. We can sit there. I like that little cafe. I often go there to dream and wait.”

  “OK, if you like.” But what were you waiting for in that café?

  “So Julien, tell me! It’s so long that we haven’t seen each other. It’s must be a whole year.”

  “Yes, about one year. You look much more attractive, you know.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, no, it’s true. I think you have really blossomed.”

  “You know something? You’ve also changed; you’ve become more of a man.”

  More of a man! More of a man! Just wait and she’ll ask me to lunch like my aunt with the laughing thighs. It’s always the same thing: you can skip generations, you can skip months and years, but you always repeat the same clichés. Why do I balk so much? I want to meet someone I know to pass the time and now I’m complaining about it.

  “Are you still living on that hill of yours?”

  “Oh! That’s right I haven’t told you: it’s all over with Jean-Pierre. Now I’m living in a studio around here in the rue St. Sulpice… All alone like a big girl. It’s such a cute place. If you like later on we can go there and you can see for yourself.”

  “We’ll see; it depends.”

  “It depends on what?”

  “On you, on me, on what we’re going to say or rather not say and if we can still say something.”

  “I see you’re still the same simple person you used to be. I hope you’re not still angry with me. You know we met at a time when I wasn’t available. I loved Jean-Pierre and I’m the faithful type. I liked you very much but you crowded me and with Jean-Pierre it was quieter. I’m sure you can understand.”

  I can’t remember any of that; neither Jean-Pierre nor our meeting even or her lack of availability. This shitty conversation is boring me. What the hell am I doing here with this silly bitch drinking awful coffee in the middle of the afternoon on a week day that feels strangely like a Sunday after attending mass?

  “Julien, you must be thinking about something else. What is it?”

  “No, nothing, you can’t understand.”

  “Why don’t you come out and say that I’m dumb and that I’m not at the same level as you are.”

  “How can you imagine that I can be thinking such a thing?”

  “Well, all right. Now I know I was wrong. But you were bothering me, you were making me feel uncomfortable in my way of life, the way you lived, your endless silences and your craziness and your reputation and …”

  and…

  and…

  Yeah sure, my ass! The way I live? She would have been better off saying my way of dying, which would have been more original and closer to the truth…

  Does she intend to bother me even more by putting my persona on trial? She’s seeking explanations for her attitude, she’s constructing a whole legend, a storybook romance, a cheap novel, a graphic novelette, a photo novel featuring men who are wearing their shiny hair slicked back just like Sicilians, just like Carmelo.

  Her story slowly comes back to me but she should have figured out that I never did give a damn about her and Jean-Pierre and I still don’t give a shit about either one of them. I have and have had other problems to tackle, other issues that are infinitely more important than her sexual liaisons and her little suburban romances.

  She attempts to prove from A to Z that I was in fact in love with her and that she hadn’t wanted me, while that’s not at all the case...it’s actually so far removed from reality that it makes me laugh or rather smile, she was probably a passing fancy in my life, another girl with whom I spent a few evenings listening to her lofty ideas about relationships between couples and all that stupid stuff until I would finally screw her or she got on her knees in front of me… actually

  Actually I remember that she … did give me a blow job in the toilet of the Select Café, while Jean-Pierre, the love of her life, was pontificating with Nicolas
on Hindu art.

  But it’s true that she does look much more beautiful, her mouth is fuller, her eyes now have little creases around them, her tummy looks wider. Actually I think I will go and visit her studio.

  “Julien, you know that I never stopped thinking about you. You look good with a mustache; you look like a Tatar. You even look more savage than before.”

  Now I look like a Tartar; well why not a steak tartare? She’s an idiot. I look even more savage! She’s really ready for anything and doesn’t hesitate to hand out compliments, or indulge in any kind of humiliation. She has only one thought on her mind, and that’s to get screwed. She must need it bad and I’m going to be used as a corkscrew for some bottle of cheap local wine.

  “You see, Julien, there you go again, you’re no longer listening to me.”

  “On the contrary I’m listening to everything you’re saying. I’m drinking in your words; everything you say is so true.”

  “I can never tell when you’re serious and when you’re joking.”

  “But that does have a certain charm don’t you think? Well, let’s stop talking and go to your place so you can show me your studio.”

  “Oh! Really? That makes me really happy, you know. So let’s go right away.”

  “If you wish.”

  “No let me pay for the coffee, my treat. You’re my guest to celebrate our reunion.”

  “Fine, OK, but next time it’ll be my turn.” She doesn’t suspect that there will not be a next time. I can’t be wasting my time with loose chicks of her kind.

  “OK, let’s go… You’ll see my home is not that big but I tried to make it look as cozy as possible, a real little love nest. You’ll love it.”

  Shit, so that’s what I have to hear now! A little love nest! I feel like laughing and screaming at the same time.

  “Julien, are you still in the theater?.... Ah! Now that’s a profession I’d have loved to be in as you know my job is not at all that much fun; to listen all day to people who come to complain and tell you how unhappy they are or because their....”

  Won’t she shut her mouth? She asks questions and doesn’t wait for the answers. She’s into her job, good for her; at least I don’t need to talk that much, it’s going to last for one hour at the rate she’s going. I can remain silent all the way from the cafe to her place; she’s taken my arm and I can feel her breast brushing against me, and that’s beginning to get me very excited. She keeps on talking of this and of that, another useless and boring speech.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “But of course, certainly, that’s very good, huh, excellent really.”

  “The workers are convinced that by going on strike they’ll achieve their goals. But that’s not the case at all, the issue is completely different; look at the socialist countries…they don’t have the same problems, yet they have found solutions or at least try to make changes and instead in this country we…”

  Pseudointellectuals have no idea how much they bore me with their shitty ideas. What the hell am I doing in the rue Mabillon anyway with such an idiotic cow who insists on telling me her life story. What the fuck do I care about the fucking socialist countries, about Karl Marx, the workers, building skyscrapers, the fact that Paris is being disfigured, the Vietnam war and the nonintervention into the politics of other countries? What do I care about all that? I don’t even know who I am. And she talks and talks….

  “The French government just gave ten thousand francs to a group, a club, an association of Canadians to set up in Black Africa a small French Canadian Club of people who speak French in front of the little Africans. Don’t you think it’s great?”

  Great? Little Africans who are dying of hunger and don’t give a damn about hearing French Canadians speaking French? But they must really not care less about all that and it doesn’t interest me one bit.

  I’m impatient to get to her place, and caress her maybe, screw her surely, and get the hell out.

  “Here we are, this is the place. It’s on the fourth floor. I’ll go first to show and you the way.”

  “Yes, please go first. It’ll be a much nicer view to watch.”

  She’s really very beautiful, a round ass, two independently moving globes, thin hips, enough to give a hard on to a corpse, as they say… I want to touch her ass, all right, let’s do it.

  “Julien, what are you doing?”

  “I’m touching your ass, mmmmmm, it’s hard, very hard. I am caressing it.”

  “You’re really crazy! You’re impossible! I don’t know anyone else like you. You’re one of a kind.”

  Ah! Ah! One of a kind! If she only knew! She really hasn’t the faintest bit of imagination but I forgive her. A woman with an ass like hers must be forgiven everything and is forgiven everything.

  Phew!

  At last we made it upstairs but you’re not out of breath; are you still doing your exercises?”

  “Yes, always. I want to stay in shape!”

  “I hope so!” she answers with a hungry smile. “But sit down. Do you want something to drink?”

  “Yes, thank you, what do you have?”

  “Whiskey, cognac, vodka.”

  “Whiskey, no water, with some ice.”

  “Here you are. Excuse me for a minute.”

  “Are you going to powder your nose?”

  “Yes, precisely!”

  Good, Nicole leaves the room and disappears into the bathroom. I finally have a few minutes of peace and quiet, far from her and her absurd babbling. I feel like I’m in a high-class brothel when the hooker goes off to wash between two customers.

  I sip my whiskey slowly, barely touching the liquid in the glass with my lips and imagine myself as Humphrey Bogart sitting in the only armchair in the room, which I inspect carefully. The room looks like a million other rooms inhabited by single young women in Paris who are, as they say, trying to “get ahead” before they give up and marry a bank clerk.

  It’s the house of an aging doll with paper flowers, tinsel trinkets, an orange colored bedspread and a green carpet.

  The stuffed teddy bear of her childhood on the bed is looking at me with a complicit smile as if to say: I’ve seen them all.

  A little figurine of a ballerina on a round box is resting on the dresser; she looks sad, dances no more; she is tired and rather ashamed of having become a music box.

  A mirror that time has deformed reflects my own image, the image of a poor bastard trying to be somebody, a small time gigolo who thinks he’s a high-class pimp.

  Behind me I can see in the mirror a bad imitation of a Goya painting, a man with his face contorted by a bitter smirk; my face replaces his in the mirror. There! I’m now Goya waiting for the Duchess of Alba. I get out of the armchair and imitate Goya’s heavy gait. I can easily imagine myself using a cane. I have the proper references.

  I get closer to the mirror and look at myself. I can see Goya in the midst of the war in Spain against Napoleon’s armies, columns of refugees are attempting to flee, execution squads in the whiteness of the morning light, and in my head I paint three new masterpieces. I take the ballerina and open the box: a sad little Italian-sounding music filters out; the ballerina doesn’t even turn anymore, the poor thing is broken, but the sad music of the box is mixed with the sounds of water coming from the bathroom, the noise of the faucet dripping, the noise of water gushing and splashing over her face….

  The music, the music that Pina, my nanny, used to listen to every day some twenty years ago. Now I hear it once more.

  Let’s go, Julien, it’s time for your bath… It’s Wednesday and it’s seven. The bath once a week is almost worse than taking a nap. Pina gives me my bath, she undresses me, it takes forever, she lifts me and puts me into the water, my lifeless skinny legs float, my little peanut floats, my sac filled with hollow balls floats, I float just like a plastic duck and I’m sweating and I’m red and I feel ashamed. She turns me over on my stomach to wash my back, the soap in my hair is dripping down and burn
s my eyes, the water is either too hot or too cold; I feel miserable. She pinches my cheeks in a sign of affection and laughs and speaks to me in her Sicilian dialect. I understand nothing. And she talks and talks; from time to time she’ll say some French words to make a specific point that is totally unimportant.

  I believe she’s talking to me about her family who are all coachmen of horse-driven buggies and who left Palermo during the war. They have recreated a little Sicily right here, living just like Arabs in their own Casbah, without running water but with electricity; they go to Mass every Sunday and the husbands are coachmen, the women cook pasta and the girls work as maids in the homes of the Jews whom they despise because they are Jews and fear as their bosses at the same time.

  The bath continued until age twelve when one day my peanut got bigger while she was washing my stomach… I looked at it, at my peanut, and I was surprised and almost pleased. I would have liked to get up and show myself in my entire splendor; she turned around to grab a towel or out of modesty and I did attempt to stand up but then fell magnificently on my ass like a wet noodle. She came back toward me and smiled and said looking at it:

  “Dio mio! Un vero uomo.”

  I was feeling proud of being a man and full of shame of being what I was. I could get hard but my legs stayed flabby.

  The baths with Pina were over… I washed myself alone as best I could. Rather poorly actually but no one was allowed into the bathroom from then on. I stayed there for hours attempting to do what was required, the most difficult being to reach my feet but I had sworn that never again would anyone see me as a half-man.

  Nicole comes out of the bathroom and she must have rubbed perfume all over her body. Now she’s wearing a black bathrobe with brightly colored Japanese drawings; she must see herself as a geisha in one of Ishihara Yujiro’s old movies. They all do the same thing: it’s like a ceremony to go into the bathroom before getting skewered: when you think about it, there’s something moving about the need they have to always be so desirable. I wonder what color panties she’s wearing, and whether her bra has a flower between each cup? She must have fantastic thighs, full hips and an obedient tongue…