“She’s crying.”
“Yes, she’s crying. At first she thinks she’s crying for her plundered realm, for the terrifying void that awaits her. She remains alive because she is crying. She feeds on her tears. It’s with a knowledge blinded by tears that she claims to love the man from Rome.”
“Could his capture of her have been the cause of her passion for him?”
“Yes. Or rather, I’d say: the discovery of the violent charm of belonging to him.”
“Do you think that if he had been captured by her armies, he would have been able to love her as passionately?”
“I don’t believe so. No.”
Look at her.
Her.
Close your eyes.
You can see that abandonment.
“Yes. I see it.”
A pause. She says:
“She gives herself up to the fate offered her. She very much wants to be a queen. She very much wants to be a captive. It depends on what he desires her to be.”
“Where does that genius buried within her come from?”
“Perhaps from her royal duties. And perhaps from an aptitude she has, like the women in the Gospel, those of the valleys of Jerusalem, to foretell death.”
“How could he have been so unaware of her despair …”
“Because he brought it about, I believe. You know, he believes there is nothing he can’t use in the name of his kingdom.”
Silence. He says:
“Behind him, since the beginning, there has been the black guard.”
“Yes. He doesn’t see it. He no longer sees anything. He cannot see the story he is living.
“What remains in him of the black moor is erased forever when he leaves the bedchamber.”
“The black moor.”
“Yes.”
“Where was it … ?”
“Everywhere, I believe, in the coastal plains of the farthest lands of the North.”
“Does he suffer?”
“He doesn’t weep. No one knows. No. At night he cries out, at night, as when he was a child and afraid.”
“Please, at least grant him some pain.”
“Often the pain is unbearable when he awakens at night, knowing she is still there, and still for so short a time.”
“The time that separates them from the coming of the boat that must take her to Caesarea.”
“At that moment in the story, we see only the interminable reiteration of the prince’s sentence: One day, one morning, a boat will come to bring you to Caesarea, your domain. Caesarea.”
Silence.
“It’s afterward, at that moment in the story, that I clearly see him leaving the bedchamber, stricken by death.”
“And after that?”
“After that I see nothing more.”
Silence.
We could have spoken, you and I, of what happened afterward, when he told her the boat was coming to take her away. We could also have spoken of what would have happened if the Senate hadn’t banished her, how she would have died, alone, on a straw mat in a wing of the Roman palace, one particular night.
We could also have spoken of that interminable death, and also of that love in Caesarea, when he found her. She is twenty years old. He carries her off to marry her. Forever. He doesn’t know that it’s to kill her; to marry her, he says; he doesn’t yet know that it’s to kill her.
We could also have spoken of the discovery centuries later, in the dust of the Roman ruins, of a woman’s skeleton. The bone structure told who it was. And when it had been found, and where.
How can we avoid seeing her, her, seeing her, that queen who is still so young? Two thousand years later.
Tall. In death, she is still tall.
Yes. Her breasts are erect. They are beautiful. They are naked beneath her prison gown.
Her legs. Her feet. Her walk. The slight swaying throughout her entire body … Do you remember …
A pause.
Her body must have passed through deserts, wars, the heat of Rome and the deserts, the stench of galleys, of exile. And after that we know nothing.
She is still tall. She is high. Slim. She has become lean, thin as death itself. Her hair is the black of a black bird. The green of her eyes blends with the black of the Eastern dust.
Are her eyes already drowned by death …
No, her eyes are still drowned in the tears of her now ancient youth.
The skin of her body has separated from her body, her skeleton.
Her skin is dark, transparent, fine like silk, fragile. She has become like the silt around the springs.
Dead, she again becomes the Queen of Caesarea.
That ordinary woman, the Queen of Samaria.
The lights go off in the hotel lobby. Outside the darkness has deepened.
The fountains in the Piazza Navona have stopped flowing.
The man said that he had loved her from the moment he saw her reclining on the hotel terrace.
And then daylight comes.
He also said that she had fallen asleep in front of him and that he had been afraid, that it was then that he’d moved away from her because of the indeterminate fear spreading over his body and his eyes.
The Pure Number
For a long time the word “pure” was co-opted by the cooking oils trade. For a long time olive oil was guaranteed pure, but never other oils, like peanut or walnut.
This word functions only when alone. In itself, by its very nature, it qualifies nothing and no one. I mean that it cannot be adapted, that it is defined in total clarity only from the moment of its use.
This word is neither a concept, nor a fault, nor a vice, nor a quality. It is a word of solitude. It is a word alone, yes, that’s right, a very short word, monosyllabic. Alone. It is no doubt the “purest” of all words, beside which and after which its equivalents are erased forever, and from then on they are displaced, disoriented, floating.
I’ve forgotten to say that it is a sacred word in every society, in every language, in every responsibility. The world over, that’s how it is with this word.
The moment Christ was born, it must have been uttered somewhere and forever. It must have been said by a passer-by, on the road, in Samaria, or by one of the women delivering the Virgin … We know nothing. Somewhere and forever this word remained, until the crucifixion of Jesus. I am not a believer. I believe only in the earthly existence of Jesus Christ. I believe that was true. That Christ and Joan of Arc must have existed: their martyrdom until the moment of death. That existed, too. These words still exist the world over.
I who do not pray, I say it, and some evenings I weep to get beyond the obligatory present—past a television of commercials, now oriented toward the future of yogurts and automobiles.
Those two, Christ and Joan of Arc, said the truth about what they thought they heard: the voice of Heaven. He, Christ, was assassinated like a political deportee. And she, Michelet’s sorceress of the forests, must have been disemboweled, burned alive. Raped. Murdered.
And already, very early in history, far off, there were Jews, the population of dead Jews, murdered and still buried in the German soil of today; those still in the first state of consciousness choked off by death. It is still impossible to confront this event without screaming. It remains inconceivable. Germany, at the place of that murder, has become an endemic, latent death. It has not yet awoken, so I believe. It will perhaps never again be entirely present. No doubt it is afraid of itself, of its own future, its own face. Germany is afraid of being German. They have said: Stalin. I say: Stalin, whatever he is, won the war against them, against the Nazis. Without Stalin, the Nazis would have murdered every Jew in Europe. Without him, we would have had to kill the Germans who murdered the Jews, do it ourselves, what they did, the Germans, do it to them, with them.
The word Jew is “pure” everywhere, but when it is said in truth we recognize it as the only word that can express what we expect from it. And what we expect from it we no longer know, because the Jewis
h past was incinerated by the Germans.
The “purity” of German blood was Germany’s downfall. That same purity caused the murder of millions of Jews. In Germany, and I completely believe this, this word should be publicly burned, assassinated; it should bleed only with German blood, not symbolically collected, and people should genuinely weep to see this ridiculed blood—not on themselves, but on that very blood should they weep. And this would still not be enough. Perhaps we will never know what would have been enough for this German past to stop evolving in our lives. We will never know, perhaps.
I would like to ask the people reading these lines to help me with a project I’ve had for three years, since they announced the closing of the Renault factories in Billancourt. It would be to record the first and last names of all the women and all the men who spent their entire lives in that national, world-renowned factory. Since the beginning of the century, since the founding of the Renault factories in Boulogne-Billancourt.
It would be an exhaustive list, with no commentary whatsoever.
We should reach a figure the size of a large capital holding. No text could counterbalance the fact of that number, of working for Renault, the total punishment, life.
Why should we do what I’m asking?
To see what that would make in all, a wall full of proletariat.
Here, history would be that number: the truth is that number.
The proletariat in the most obvious innocence, that of the number.
The truth would be the as yet uncompared, incomparable figure of the number, the pure figure, with no commentary whatsoever, the word.
The Painting Exhibition
FOR ROBERTO PLATE
The space is large. At the top of a wall, windows. The sky is calm and blue. Only one thick cloud leaves the blue. Very slowly, it moves beyond the windows, the blueness.
There are no books. There are no words printed on a newspaper. There is no vocabulary in a dictionary. Everything is perfectly in order.
In the middle of the space is a low table, beneath which is another, lower table. The two tables are covered with empty tubes of paint, bent, often cut in the middle, often cut and spread open, scraped clean with knife blades.
The open tubes and those still intact are not mixed in with the disemboweled, emptied ones. They are round, full, very healthy, very firm, like fruits that have not quite ripened. They have been placed so that the labels telling their colors can’t be seen. All together they form a supple gray metallic alloy. Under their caps, they are hermetically sealed.
In a jar on that same table are some brushes. There are fifty brushes, maybe even one hundred. They all seem practically destroyed. They have been reduced; they are crushed, flared out, hairless; all are stiff with dried paint, and comical, too. They do not have the tangibility of the paint in the tubes, or of the man speaking. You might think they’d been found in a cave, in a tomb along the Nile.
In the midst of that conglomeration of objects, there is a man. He is alone. He is wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. He is speaking. He points to several cubic feet of paintings, lined up against another wall. He says they are the ones that have been painted, the ones for the exhibition.
There are many of them. They are all turned toward the wall. All the paint missing from the tubes went onto those canvases. That is where it now is, on the canvases whose progress it halted.
The man speaks. He says the paintings are not all the same size. We might take him at his word, but no, they are of different formats. That difference, different each time, poses a mysterious problem for the man. Sometimes one can mix large paintings with small paintings. This time, it isn’t possible. He doesn’t know why, but he knows he must explain this.
He speaks alone, aloud; sometimes his voice quickens and shouts. We do not know if he shouts while paintings are being made. We know that they are always being made, day and night, while this man sleeps or while he is awake.
The man speaks in an idiosyncratic French. Everything he says, he says in this French that only he speaks. He stopped progressing in this language. It took up his time and it wasn’t worth it.
He talks about hanging his paintings. He will do it himself. He talks about that. He says where, in what part of the city, the exhibition will take place: near the Seine, in a former book-binding studio.
The man says he hasn’t shown his paintings in seven years. He has another job in life, which he takes great pleasure in; that isn’t the issue. The desire to show his work suddenly returned to him very strongly, before the spring. He says: Seven years, it’s just that I’m starting over, I think, no?
He speaks more and more quickly; he apologizes; he says it’s because he’s nervous. Seven years. He says: I stopped altogether. I shut myself up in here for four months. At the end of four months the exhibition was ready. He says that what counts is determination.
Eventually he gets where he had to.
He begins to show the paintings for the Exhibition.
One by one he picks them up, and when he reaches the wall opposite the one they were leaning against, he turns them around. Even while carrying them or turning them around, he keeps talking. At times he seems almost hesitant to turn them around; then he does it, he turns them.
He is still speaking about an order he’d like to observe in the exhibition. He doesn’t want any one painting to be highlighted at another’s expense. He’d like a natural order that would put all the paintings on an equal footing on the walls of the exhibition. In no case should the canvases be isolated, dominant, or else lost. They must be together, must almost touch each other, almost—yes, that’s right. They must not be separated the way they are here, you understand?
In bursts, canvas by canvas, the paintings come to light.
The man says these paintings are of the same person, made at the same moment in that person’s life. That is why he wants to hang them all together; he is quite preoccupied by this. He is not saying he wants them all to be one, no, that’s not it at all, not at all; but they should hang next to each other in a true and natural juxtaposition, for which he alone is responsible, whose value he alone should know.
He talks a lot about the distance between the canvases. He says that sometimes there should be almost none. And sometimes perhaps none at all, that they should butt against each other, yes, sometimes. He doesn’t know, really. He is in the same state as we are before these paintings he made, overwrought.
The man reveals his paintings while maintaining a continuous flow of speech. He speaks so that his words will sound while the paintings enter into the light. He speaks so that a discomfort will arise, so that deliverance from pain will finally occur.
In the end, we leave him alone to get on with his drudgery. We leave him to his misfortune, to that infernal obligation that outstrips any commentary, any metaphor, any ambiguity. In other words, we leave him to his own story. We have entered into the violence of the paintings he made. We look at them; we do not look at him, the man speaking, the painter, the man struggling in the continent of silence. We look at them, at them alone. The man speaking is the one who made them without knowing what he was doing, outside of meaning, in a profound distraction.
One can always say that all paintings move at the same speed. Sometimes they pass on wings, as if guided. Sometimes it seems that the force leading them is shown like a wave that buries itself, with its blue-black color.
That above, when one rises toward these forces, in the sky, there might be the face of a sleeping child. It’s barely a child, barely a sky, nothing that can be said. Nothing. But painting in its entirety.
That a white room with a white floor crosses through, open on the void, and at a door flap a piece of white curtain has remained.
That there are also anonymous livestock, bloated pouches, the softness of very ancient paintings that identified them. Signs that look like things. Tree trunks that recede, go away. Sections of sea serpents in the dampness of springs, of foam. Possible cascades, surges
, juxtapositions between ideas, things, the permanence of things, their inanity, the material of ideas, colors, light, and God knows what else.
Born in 1914 in French Indochina, MARGUERITE DURAS was one of France’s most important twentieth-century literary figures. She wrote the screenplay for the French film Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais, and her novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt in 1984 and was also made into a widely acclaimed film. Upon her death in Paris in 1996, Alain Juppe, then prime minister of France, mourned her as “a great writer whose magnificent and disturbing style, the symbol of the nouveau roman, turned contemporary world literature upside down.”
MARK POLIZZOTTI is publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. He is author of six books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, and translator of more than thirty books, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, and Raymond Roussel.
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