The Shattered Sky

by Bernard Uzan

  “So you still have all these illusions? Fine but I believed that you had let go of illusions, that you preferred to see things clearly, that you wanted to face life. You can’t reject life.”

  “Mother, I never thought you could say such things, I always saw you so absent, so clearly outside life and incapable of acts of courage and unable to think.”

  “Look, I’m just a Jewish woman from Tunis, from another era; in my day we didn’t stand a chance. With an abusive father, a mother just like myself, I resigned myself, I pretended I didn’t exist, I accepted and that kind of acceptance is worse than anything. Don’t fall in that trap. I just wanted peace and a semblance of happiness. All I wanted was to be a woman who was happy with her husband who would love and respect me.

  “Dad didn’t love you?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know…”

  “Well, what was it then?”

  “He sold me.”

  “Sold you?”

  “Yes sold, he knew about Carmelo.”

  “What do you mean, he knew?”

  “When he went into bankruptcy Carmelo was his only way out, so he sold me for money, but I didn’t want that, I didn’t want to. Carmelo bought part of the business and me with it.”

  So then my father had no balls—it can’t be, it can’t be true.

  “Don’t judge your father; he was a victim as well, like me, like you, like all of us. It’s life that is guilty, not us, not us.”

  She is crying and I feel one hundred years old. My father was capable of doing something like that. He died like a hero and lived like an empty bag, empty of life and emotion. I’ll never have those memories of you again, I’ll never wrestle with you, ever again, I won’t ever do anything else, not take naps, or wait on the balcony, I won’t become a great actor for you, I won’t buy you pistachios, nothing anymore, nothing. I’ll dance through the sky like Peter Pan, but not for you. You are a bastard! I’m ashamed for you, I’m ashamed of you, I’m dying of shame, I’m ashamed of being your son, the son of a bastard.

  You betrayed me you lied to me…

  “Daddy, mother is cheating on you!”

  “You must not judge your parents, later on you’ll understand.”

  “I know that you must not judge your parents but mother is cheating on you! She has no right.”

  “Later on…”

  Now I understand, you had sold mother, you’re nothing but a garbage pale full of shit! And I hate you, I despise you, you dirtied up what remained, you destroyed my life, I despise your memory now that you have been dead for six years.

  No, no it’s life that is to blame not him, not us, not us. He was destroyed like I was and even more… He lost his soul, his heart, his courage. No! No! They stole his soul his heart, his courage…. He was castrated, chopped up, emptied of all life, deprived of his humanity… He wasn’t anything anymore…life is to be blamed, not him…

  She’s still asleep and I ask myself all these questions, I remember and I forgive.

  I have to get out of this place, I have to flee, I must fly away, I have to disappear, like Rimbaud, become a merchant in guns and slaves… But then I am not Rimbaud; nevertheless I must leave. I’m going to go and seek shelter in a blue and white silk corner; I have to spill my guts somewhere else and drag my legs along with me as I had done twelve years before when they had died on me.

  “Dad, I must leave.”

  “Very well, but you’re coming back for dinner?”

  “No Dad, I’m leaving, I’m leaving...”

  “You’re going to the country to one of your friends?”

  “No, Dad I’m going away.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know precisely. I’m leaving.”

  “Have you thought this through?”

  “Yes I must leave, I must. I have been walking for six months now and as I live again I feel that I’m going to die. You understand, you understand.”

  “You want to go to France? To see your cousins.”

  “Yes, that’s it, my cousins in France.”

  “You will keep in touch and let me know where you are?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I know I can trust you.”

  “Thank you, thank you.”

  “Are you leaving because of your mother?”

  “No, yes…maybe, now that I have my legs back I have to fly, you understand. It took my twelve years of relentless exercising to finally be able to cross the street without holding on to a helping hand…the kids don’t laugh anymore when they see me, I am finally in one single piece…”

  “Yes, yes, you’ll tell me where you are, promise me?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I’ll let your mother and brother know that you’re leaving. When are you going?”

  “Now Dad, now right now.”

  “You’re a man and you are sixteen.”

  “Yes, sixteen.”

  “So go then and you’ll tell me where you are.”

  I saw him again on his deathbed. Life is the guilty party, not him… not him… He became the victim of other men, of their cruelty, their madness, he spent twenty years trying to forget but never managed to do so, Dad forgive me for doubting you even for such a short instant.

  You didn’t have a choice. We’d have all ended up in the street and you tried to protect us, all of us…especially me.

  Nicole sighs softly, opens her eyes and looks at me as if she wanted to know something. This is the moment that fills me with fear because she’ll want us to share our impressions.

  “Julien you know it was fantastic. I hope Jacques won’t find out… Oh! Yes it’s true. I haven’t told you that I’m getting married in two weeks to Jacques. He’s marvelous, I’m crazy about him and we have so many plans. We’re going to move overseas for two years, he has to go into the military in the foreign cooperation service, he just finished medical school, we decided all this four months ago. The big day is in two weeks and I’m crazy about him.”

  She turns on her side, wiggles some more and falls into a deep sleep once again. Goya looks at me and is now smiling sardonically.

  I’ve got to get out of here, I’ve got to go… She sleeps with her mouth open like a satiated child who has just quickly digested two chocolate bars she swallowed in great haste. I get up and she doesn’t even move… So now I am officially a whore. Nicole’s handbag is still there on the table, next to the ballerina who looks at me without any kind of expression. I see that the paint on her nose has been erased. My hand slips into her bag, opens her wallet and I take whatever bill I can find. I’m hoping it’s one hundred francs. The ballerina smiles at me. I leave closing the door behind me without looking back.

  The concierge looks at me with an amused and sly expression. I stop in the hall and piss in powerful spurts against the wall to teach her a lesson; it makes me feel better.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself you rotten disgusting man!”

  I’m disgusting, you are disgusting, we are all disgusting; the church at St. Sulpice is ringing seven o’clock and I am back in the street.

  Whatever happened to all my friends? The friends I was so close to and loved so much?

  What friends? Which ones? Where are they if not in my own imagination? Is someone saying of me, “Julien is my friend?” If you exist step forward, don’t hide… All I hear is … “Julien, nobody knows how to take him, he scares me.” But what the hell are they fearful of? I’m doing nothing bad, I don’t speak that much, what are they afraid of? They are wrong to be afraid of me, they are wrong.

  Only dogs are right, they take a shit on the sidewalk where we are walking, where we live; they literally cover us in shit. Winter is the worst moment, it snows over it and the snow covers all the garbage and they start over and it snows again; the layers accumulate and in the spring the snow melts and the refuse quickly reappears.

  Soon, as Lautréamont writes, when we’ll all bathe in an ocean of sperm and shit. There’s a dog in front
of me expelling small darkish nuggets that look as ridiculous as goat turds under the tender and admiring eyes of his master who thinks he’s giving a gift to humanity. Every morning we empty our guts of all that is sordid, the sordid accumulations of an entire day, but there’s always some of it stuck inside you and it winds up killing you.

  People just croak and I don’t want to die. I’ll find some way to not die even though the sky has been shattered. I’ll put that fucking sky back together, I’ll stick it together with my sperm and then I’ll spit in the face of those who doubt me. But no, let’s stay calm and collected, otherwise I’ll do something rash or crack up. Calm down, calm down. Good, well I think I just went through a moment of refusal, of violence, so let me be calm. I almost let myself go, I almost screamed in the street and people turned to look at me, to look at that poor bum who was screaming as he walked alone.

  They were wondering whether I was crazy or if I had been drunk or… I don’t know. I wonder why I’m so angry. After all, I only got what I deserved and on top of it wasn’t such a disagreeable moment to fuck a girl all afternoon; it must be everyone’s dream, the dream of many men and I’m complaining. I complain about everything and I’m never satisfied. I wander on and complain.

  To wander is not such a bad thing; after all, at least I can walk and that’s something useful, don’t you think?

  I’m walking,

  I made it. Period…

  “Dad, I have to leave.”

  “Go, my son. Go.”

  Had I known I wouldn’t have left. I escaped the hell of a prison for the other hell of freedom. I spent six years wandering in Paris, London, Istanbul, Madrid, Venice, Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Dakar, Tananarive, Djibouti, St. Martin de La Réunion. etc. …

  Six years of conditional freedom, conditioned by my upbringing, my taboos, my hang-ups. Six years to get rid of all that; my first woman in a sordid brothel in Seville on a binge with some sailors I had just met, sixteen years old and thirty seconds of pleasure of having a naked woman in my arms who after ten seconds says: “Come on, be quick about it!” while I had dreamed of becoming a romantic poet.

  Next! Next!

  I wander the streets of Seville, still searching for the worse neighborhoods, the most rotten and shittiest places. I’m proud of myself because with my looks the Spaniards think I’m a gypsy and the kids in the street yell after me “Mira al Gitano.” I finally find the most disgusting café in Seville, an unbearable smell of frying, urine, crud and vomit. I am happy. I’ll be able to wallow in mud. Seventy-year-old hookers with no teeth, obese and slimy are yakking away without ever catching their breath as they chew on fried calamari while sailors drunk on rotten beer and their accumulated sorrows smile at the world, spitting their rancor with self satisfaction; at the center of the café a rusting zinc urinal crisscrossed with dirty words, without a door for protection, a urinal set up right smack in the center of the place, and I see guys who go one after the other to piss out their vinegar as they snigger. They piss with a kind of joy and everyone laughs and the sordid hookers make sordid jokes about their sordid penises as they look at me and call me Guapo. On the floor there is sawdust to absorb the piss and the vomit that the very thick smoke can’t even cover up.

  And me, I’m with them and I sing and laugh with my new friends. I feel I’m part of the family and I drink beer and get up to go and piss as I laugh and dance a few steps to the tune of flamenco music.

  Travel is the greatest education when you’re young. Go my son, go and discover your brothers, your peers, travel is enriching, you’ll see so many beautiful things in all the countries you shall visit.

  Flamenco… A short time later a group of gypsies, real ones, not cheap imitations like me, asked me to join their life. So here I am, the little Jew from Tunis. I have become a gypsy in the Barrio Cruz in Seville; I share their life for six months, I share their joys and their sorrows and at night I give shows for dumb tourists who come to play at being gypsies for a few hours… They scrape their guitars and dance for hours in smoke-filled cafes and the American girls think they’re so lucky and privileged to be there and literally have an orgasm at the idea of being in danger in that subterranean and hidden world.

  I pour two-bit cheap red wine, I’m wearing a red scarf around my neck, I adopt a sinister appearance, I keep my jaws perpetually clenched my act is perfectly rehearsed, I am a gypsy of the Barrio Cruz. And I regularly leave this place of debauchery for tourists seeking cheap thrills, in the company of a frustrated and hungry female about to spend the night of her life and who will later have something to tell her girlfriends when she returns to Idaho. I learn how to love the guitar and the long lament of the Flamenco mood, and the sensuous dances of the gypsies… And one day I get tired of that circus and I disappear without a word, without a farewell…

  Travel is the greatest education when you’re young.

  But what youth? My fucked-up youth?

  Until what age are we young?

  Fifteen years old, twenty years old, thirty, sixty?

  I have been an old man since birth, so travel brought me nothing, it just turned me into a first class pain in the ass, a conceited ass who thinks he knows it all.

  It’s hard at first and then you learn how to survive in every single city of the world, the same intellectuals, the same artists, the same rich; the same poor can be found everywhere but they dress differently and speak a different language. From time to time you run into unusual people or you experience unique moments.

  Argun Hackman, for example, who welcomed me in his house in Floria, in the suburbs of Istanbul. Argun, the Turk whom I met in a nightclub and who took me in the early morning to a small village thirty kilometers from Istanbul for an unusual show. The show takes place once a week: a young girl, almost a child actually, copulates with a designated donkey.

  She holds on to the donkey’s neck from underneath and stays suspended on him; the child says nothing, doesn’t cry, doesn’t seem to be in pain, the entire village has gathered around, women and children included. Argun looks at it jaded, he’s a man of the world… I ask him if this is part of some kind of rite. An initiation rite perhaps? He looks at me and smiles at such monumental naiveté; he shrugs his shoulders and introduces me to his mother, his sisters, his father, then invites me to spend a few days at his house.

  Argun is an English professor at the university but thinks he’s a painter and an artist. He has covered the inside walls of his house with multicolored faces and impressionist landscapes that vaguely imitate Monet. He explains his painting at length and in great detail and his choice of colors; he wants my opinion but I don’t volunteer it, since I know nothing about painting. Later that night, under the influence of hashish, he smashes the walls by hitting them with a pickaxe to erase his paintings as he screams that it cannot even create emotion in a Frenchman…

  The next evening he paints another wall and two nights later he’s back with his pickaxe obsession and the wall crumbles. After a few nights of this craziness the house is almost destroyed and I pack my bags.

  My friend André asks me to accompany him to East Berlin, just to visit the city, he says. What he doesn’t tell me is that he’s going there to deliver some secret documents to someone—I never found out to whom or why. So here we are suddenly near the Brandenburg Gate… we’re walking in the Berlin night, a black and throbbing night, there is no one in the streets when suddenly three men jump out of nowhere and surround both of us. André draws a revolver, a fucking revolver. Where did it come from?

  They all begin to run and as they take off. As if to leave some kind of souvenir one of them slashes me in the stomach and it hardly hurts but leaves me with a gash for the next ten years. I used that scar for a very long time to surprise and seduce, as I invented a long story that was much more colorful that what had really happened. The gash was well worth it.

  My friend André later became a translator at the UN and had used me as decoy for his James Bond style games. A true friend. />
  The museums of all those cities of all those countries make me sick with their preserved beauty, their canned talent, their post-card type genius. I’ll never return to those halls filled with the vestige of other times that attempt to make all those who are willing to listen that it is man’s fate to create beauty… I eat German sausages, Turkish tajin, Italian ravioli, Spanish peppers, shark from Madagascar, Greek souvlaki, peanuts from Djibouti, frogs in the island of La Reunion, crickets in Dakar, Polish soup, Malagasy zebu meat…this…that….the other….

  Walter takes me to a nightclub where I’m delighted to pick up a truly magnificent blonde with a pair of aggressive tits. I brush up against her as we dance as the other merry makers smile wondering no doubt why in the world such a beautiful creature would go with that young jerk. I’m almost in love. I take her to a hotel where I quickly find out that Blondie has a cock that’s much bigger than my own and I run away at full speed back to the night club and discover Walter with ten other guys who are bursting with laughter and I join in of course...

  I cross the banks of the Volga River in a boat, I take a barge from Brindisi to Igoumenitza, I sleep in the public gardens of Athens. I think I’m Don Quixote in Spain and an ivory trafficker in Djibouti.

  Pietro takes me to every transvestite nightclub in Venice, Vladimir shows me the old Cossack encampments, I go bear hunting with Wojciech, I wash dishes in restaurants, serve drinks in bars, I sleep on park benches, in the beds of all the ladies and finally six years later, tired of wandering and travel, I’m back in Paris my home base, my starting point and decide to finish my studies and begin my new calling: I shall be an actor…

  And for a few years I use all this to my own sordid ends and people would say about me: He’s an exciting young man, he’s experienced so many things!

  I’ve become a living encyclopedia: as soon as anyone says anything it’s as if they were playing a record entitled: “The Living Encyclopedia” that talks and tells stories with interesting details, and displays his knowledge to smug women and men who are foaming with jealousy.