The Attraction of Things
Page 1
The Red G&T from Saint Petersburg
August 15 – October 11, 1980
The Find of a Life
May 26–28, 1982
Duino
June 12, 1982
La Argentina
February 1980 – February 1982
Alexandre Brongniart
May 1982 – April 1983
The Pearl
April 27 – May 11, 1983
The Orient of a Pearl
.
The oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, notably consulted by Oedipus, was known as the oblique oracle. The oblique is the shortest path of destiny, the direction of a life that places itself outside straight lines, which the oblique crosses in the manner of a short circuit, quick as a flash. The Attraction of Things is the story of a being who lets himself go toward what attracts him, toward what he attracts — beings, works, things —, and who, through successive encounters, finds the way out of the labyrinth, to the heart, where passion strikes. This is the story of a letting go toward that passion.
—ROGER LEWINTER
August 15 – October 11, 1980
The Red G&T from Saint Petersburg
ON AUGUST 15, 1980, while sending out express, registered, by airmail the third book of Groddeck’s Lectures, I was hoping for a sign, to mark the end of four years’ labor: if I found something particular, rare, impossible to find, Groddeck was satisfied and my obligation, in any event on this point, had been fulfilled; imagining a G&T — the first gramophone records, with the recording angel on the label, red or black according to the prestige of the artist, recorded in Europe between 1902 and 1907, of which there remain only occasionally a few copies —; a red G&T from Saint Petersburg in this case: in twenty years, I had never found one at the flea market; and I was thinking, too, of the magic of the call: it took an impulse of the heart for it to come; without my realizing that two months earlier, I had experienced it, in relation to singing: on the sleeve of an album of rereleases of Félia Litvinne — born in Saint Petersburg —, I had read a sentence taken from her memoirs that, affecting me, had finally opened me up to her voice, of which, starting out again at the flea market, I had found a recording — my first red G&T, from Paris: the “Prayer” of Marguerite, from Faust —, which I had bought simply because, in its form, it was out of the ordinary: a twelve-inch, cut on a width of two inches; and, wanting to read her book now, while in Zurich for a few days I had gone to a specialized bookseller, but since he didn’t even know the name, I wrote “Félia Litvinne” for him on a ticket: two weeks later, in Geneva, at the flea market, at Leuba’s, for fifteen francs, prominently displayed — so much so that if it hadn’t drawn my attention, I wouldn’t have seen it —, there was Ma vie et mon art, the memoirs of Félia Litvinne, with, written vertically across the flyleaf in violet ink, her signature; so that now, from “J-Sonic,” who had lately been carrying old opera recordings, partly under my influence, I bought the collection that Rubini, in London, had just published of the voices of Imperial Russia, whetting my appetite on the off chance.
It was in May 1975 that I had discovered the 115 Lectures, which had never been published, and, their significance having appeared to me crucial for understanding Groddeck, with whom I had been preoccupied since 1963, when I had read The Book of the It, I had resolved to devote myself to them as soon as I had finished the essay in which I identified, in theory, the function of death in all creation; throwing myself into them in the spring of 1976, without knowing how to go about reproducing in French a text that, improvised on each occasion in a state of concentration, was a simple verbal process; and, disoriented in the immersion, I constructed, by exploring the impasses, at least the labyrinth from which to find the way out; at the same time reanimated by a project that I had had, fifteen years earlier, when, beginning a degree in the humanities, I had attended courses in theater, only to abandon them six months later: to stage A Door Must Be Either Open or Shut; being drawn now to directing; and if Anne-Lise, whom I had met in those courses — she had lent me the two rooms, in the old city, in which I lived for ten years —, would still play the marquise, for the count I thought of Neury, whom I knew from the flea market: a collector of old opera recordings, my rival in Geneva, through whom I had discovered that realm, an actor by profession.
Neury had accepted, without, however, absolutely committing himself; and when, in May, he had to make up his mind, he withdrew — wanting to become an assistant director himself, he would begin an internship in the fall —, proposing as a replacement one of his friends, whom I didn’t know, who was returning from a two-year stay in Milan, where he had worked with Strehler; if he was still free, the project might interest him; and, telephoning immediately, he put Moriaud on: the conversation was long — I was kept in suspense — and singular — although he accepted right away, he kept repeating to me, laughing, that it must be a joke and that I undoubtedly wanted to talk about something else —, filling me with a lightness that hadn’t dissipated when, a few days later, I met him, fascinated then by the presence of a certain light he could have about him; so that, if the Lectures remained unresolved, the Musset rapidly took shape: in July, after a meeting with the team we formed, Anne-Lise, Moriaud, and me, the Théâtre de Carouge accepted the project, for two series of performances, in October and March; on the evening of the meeting, however, a fever like an electric charge attacked me, condensing, in the early morning hours, into a chill in which the back of my throat was unimaginably painful, and resolving itself, after a few days, into a state of overload from which I didn’t recover; while, in contrast to my overexcitement, Anne-Lise was, by instinct, unfailingly wary; a gulf thus opening up between us, which made a break with her, since Moriaud had my complete support, unavoidable; when, having reached the twenty-ninth lecture, dated March 7 — my birthday —, at the passage where Groddeck, in reference to the Tales of Hoffmann and Dr. Miracle, for the first time explicitly approaches the theme of death, my right thumb dislocated, I had stopped.
For two weeks, shooting pains now radiated, at night, through my right wrist; and, in the morning, I would have dizzy spells; when, on Monday, August 30, in the late afternoon, the crisis exploded, reaching a paroxysm — unable to move, I had stayed at my parents’, stretched out on the sofa in the living room, a spectator to the growing swells of my panting — : around one in the morning, I suddenly had a vision at my feet of a sheet of flames, which was going to overwhelm me and would kill me if it reached the top of my head; reflexively I touched the floor with my right hand in order to divert the current, but just as I was executing the movement, in a flash that dissipated its charge, the sheet of flames had reached the top of my head, only to vanish, snuffing itself out; calmed then, but knowing, having been smashed to pieces, that I would have to put myself back together bit by bit — in the morning, my knees and wrists were swollen and stiff, and my right hand remained frozen for three months, evidence of the struggle in which I had had to let go —; Anne-Lise now being replaced by Leyla, Moriaud’s ex-wife, herself an actor; and the play was presented, on the appointed date, at the tempo originally hoped for — without any suspicion of what this entailed —, not a curtain raiser but a folly, an improvisation born of a concentration in which all the anticipated characters took shape in an unanticipated combination, a momentary encounter: through the Musset, I had found what I was missing for the Lectures and had been searching for but unable to capture, since this captured it — allowing me, beginning in January, without involving myself any further in theater, to commit myself to them — : the fluid movement of a voice falling into place, the phrasing.
The voice had spoken to me when, the first time I had see
n her — it was in 1969, a late afternoon in November, in London, she was returning from a ballet rehearsal —, Svetlana, in welcoming me, had imbued my name with a softness that was foreign to me, making me wish to be this self, since it seemed that it could have some softness in it; and her voice searched for me in limbo, three years later, when I saw her again in London — in June, when she had come to Geneva, on tour, to dance The Lady and the Fool, a ballet set to themes by Verdi, in which she had the starring role, I had undertaken to find her again — : the entire week I spent there, in August, taken up with her rehearsals — someone was also offering her a play, which she hesitated to accept —, not having had the time, on Saturday she arranged to meet me at six thirty at Kardomah, near Knightsbridge — as a child, in Paris, on Thursday afternoons, over a period of three years, I would meet my mother at Kardomah, on the rue de Rivoli, to tell her about my exploration of the Louvre, where I would stop each time in front of The Virgin of the Rocks, fascinated by the smile of the angel —, preparing myself for it all day, only to arrive a half hour late — from Lancaster Gate, taking the underground, I had automatically detoured through Holborn —, without being surprised either by my lateness or by Svetlana’s absence, returning, around nine o’clock, to the hotel, where I asked that they wake me at six o’clock — the plane was leaving, on Sunday, August 27, at eight thirty —; and I went to bed, having taken my usual mix of sleeping pills, sinking then into an unconsciousness from which I was pulled, at half past midnight, by the telephone: Svetlana excused herself for not having come — she had sent a friend to inform me, but no one had matched my description —; and, since I repeated that I had come only to see her, she suggested to me, since we still had the night, that I come now; so that, in an altered state, ten minutes later, I stood before Svetlana, who took me to visit, by candlelight, the apartment which, that afternoon, she had decided to buy — it was the reason she hadn’t come —; and, at dawn, as I was leaving her, we agreed that I would return in three weeks, when she would have moved in and begun rehearsals for Oedipus Now, a montage of the trilogy by Sophocles in which she played the Sphinx, Jocasta, Antigone; so that I returned to London for a week three times; because the fourth time, when I returned there from Paris, only to set off again the next day, on December 12, 1972, she had resolved to break up — by telephone, she had informed me of it, on a Sunday afternoon in November in Geneva, while I was listening to The Marriage —; in this way, too, ended the Diderot, which, in 1967, at a word tossed out — “There is no edition of the Complete Works of Diderot, someone should do one” — “So do it” —, I had taken on, and which, after three years of constraint — every two months I had to turn in a volume of a thousand pages, there were fifteen of them, and for every delay of more than fifteen days I would have to pay in financial compensation a sum I didn’t have —, was an extreme that, precluding any laxity, had led to the end; and I had ended it exactly as Duclos had predicted to me when, drawn by the very outrageousness of the request, she had in her turn undertaken it, carrying me then, a gestating burden, itself gestating the suprahuman, in which, through a fascination from which I drew my own strength, I experienced what, by the destruction of limits, human, unheeded, within the impossible permits fulfillment and is imparted by passion, which is insensible, in its essence, to all objects, to all subjects, done away with for something inconceivable, its aim being divestment: announcing to me, “I know, when the Diderot is finished, you will leave,” to which I had said nothing, knowing that it was true, even if I knew neither why nor how; but in October 1969, when the first volume, then coming out, was temporally sealing our commitment to this shared madness, agreeing to translate The Hands of the Living God, I was invited to London by Masud, who was a prince and the editor of the book, thus meeting Svetlana — on Sunday, November 27, in exchange for a crystal pen and a miniature silver mirror, which I had found, in the morning, in the snow, at the Portobello flea market, parting gifts, I received, in the evening, a pale green prince’s caftan; and, Masud having donned a white caftan, Svetlana a red caftan, when, for the photo to be taken by Sussu, the Spanish servant, we were all three seated on the big sofa in the living room, I in the middle, my right arm resting on the back, an impulse passing through me, I lightly pressed the shoulder of Svetlana, whose unearthly cry in the middle of the night struck me through with terror; leaving on Monday, shivering with fever upon my arrival in Paris, without having again seen Svetlana —, who eluded me until, when my share of the work on the Diderot was coming to an end, on June 16, 1972, now separated from Masud, she reappeared in Geneva, explaining to me their breakup, which restored to each the space of his essential passion.
On a Wednesday in October, at the flea market, Paulette Cohenoff — who for three weeks had had a collection in which I had found all sorts of records —, noticing me, from a distance asked me whether I knew of it and, taking a record from the front seat of her van, held it out to me: a red G&T from Saint Petersburg; and she set it on the battery-powered record player that sat on a chair next to her stand so that I might hear it; letting me have it for thirty-five francs: the “Habanera” from Carmen by the leading lady of the Théâtre Marie, Medea Mei-Figner; with a sudden inflection, grace.
May 26–28, 1982
The Find of a Life
ON MAY 26, 1982, around nine o’clock in the evening, Jean-François, whom I hadn’t seen again since he had returned, about ten years earlier, from Beijing, telephoned me to invite me to dinner: there would be, besides his wife, only a colleague and his girlfriend, Michèle, who I supposed were about to get married, if it hadn’t already happened, now that she had finished the book on Groddeck that I had proposed she write, following a meeting that had been determined by Groddeck, seven years earlier, as, in Paris for a few days in May, I was leaving Gallimard one morning, still holding the door, when someone whom I didn’t immediately recognize — in 1969, when I was ending my second stay at the Swiss House, he was beginning his —, seeing me from the street, exclaimed, “My goodness, that’s lucky, you’re just the person I was looking for”; because he had come, unsuccessfully, to ask for my address — he had to write, they would forward the letter — for his sister, by his side, who, from Geneva but in Paris for a few days, a doctor specializing in psychiatry, having read my study Groddeck et le Royaume millénaire de Jérôme Bosch, wanted to meet me; shocked that in Geneva, a few steps from the home of my parents, where I would go every day to work, she lived in the building on the corner of their street; going afterward to the place I had been assigned, when, embarking on the Lectures by way of the Musset, it dawned on me that I had to find the apartment that, until then, I hadn’t had the conviction to look for: as it happened, her neighbor, whom I had known by sight for a long time, intrigued by her face — for whom Michèle had found the apartment on her landing, on the fifth floor —, had committed suicide in May by throwing herself out a fifth-floor window, elsewhere in the city; so Michèle spoke to her landlord, whose ear she had, and, in July, when the seals affixed to the door had been removed, I visited the apartment, which I began leasing on September 15 — even though I didn’t move in until after its renovation, in January 1977 —, using it for the first time, both hands frozen, for the rehearsals of the Musset.
The health of my mother, ever since she had come back from vacation, in August of that year, had been deteriorating: she had had, exactly twenty years earlier, while we were living in Vienna, a tumor in her tongue, on which they had operated, just in time, by embedding in her tongue two seeds of radium, which had burned the tumor out; and even if she hadn’t had a relapse, she had retained a torment that, suddenly, grew: as if, she would say, Bad Gastein — where I had persuaded her to go because, ten years earlier, we had spent a vacation there that I had memories of —, because of its radioactive spring, had been the drop that caused the vase to overflow; while for me, it was as if the torrent of the Musset — in the course of which the antagonism that was straining relations between us had, at the wave
of a magic wand, evaporated, freeing in its purity the intelligence that united us — had through fascination infected her; the specialist, however, whom she had agreed to consult, first in November, then in March, when the pains, rather than diminishing, were cyclically increasing, had, despite the case history, detected nothing; although she continued to lose weight — particularly since, at the end of May, the loss, long dreaded, of her job —; but it was as if the doctors, whom she was now consulting, were constrained by a resolve that, in September, on her return from a holiday in Tessin, when, as I waited for her on the platform at the station, from the door of the train, with bulging eyes, she called out to me, obviously seemed to me irrevocable, contrary to what had happened twenty years earlier, when my father, by suddenly disappearing for two months — before the discovery of a gambling debt that he had incurred at the casino —, summoning up her strength for life, had led her to take control over the management of our lives in order to get us established, just as during the war, as survivors, in Geneva, where for a few years she alone had provided for our support; thus consenting to the role that had apparently devolved on Michèle: on December 8, in the early afternoon, from a pay phone on the Champs-Élysées — my mother had at last agreed to submit to some new tests, at the hospital this time, and, marking the end of the week, I had gone to record a broadcast on La traviata —, calling Michèle, she had confirmed it: “It’s cancer of the tongue, inoperable, as if it had been left to grow for nine months; there’s nothing more for it but palliative care. Your mother, according to the doctors, has six weeks to live.”
On December 11, at ten thirty in the morning, when I arrived at the Café Méditerranée, opposite the station, for our Sunday morning tête-à-tête, which my mother had kept up — the evening before, on my return from Paris, she had already been asleep, and I had suggested to my father, if she wished, the usual rendezvous —, sitting near the door, in the black astrakhan coat that she had bought from a Vietnamese woman three months earlier, she was waiting for me, trying to drink a glass of tea, saying simply, “This is not going well,” repeating, since I didn’t let it drop, “This is not going well”; but when, stopping on the way back, I showed her the flesh-colored rose that, during my absence, had opened out in the cold as no rose at my apartment had ever bloomed, she turned and looked at me, a smile illuminating her: “It’s a good omen”; and, in the afternoon, telling me about her fear of having lost the signet ring with the little diamond that I had given her some years ago, for Mother’s Day, which for the past two or three months she hadn’t been wearing, she pulled it from her bag and put it on the little finger of her left hand, and never again took it off; while Wednesday at the hospital, when Michèle went to visit her in the evening, my mother confided to her in one breath the story of her life; the first chemotherapy treatment — the doctors had decided on a series of six — on Monday putting a sudden stop, lastingly, to the pains; so that, returning home on December 23, my mother, freed from the weight of her body, opened herself up to the lightness that, until then, she had denied herself; and, to everyone’s disbelief, in the course of the treatment, in my company, since she now rationally needed to be accompanied — in the morning at the café after a checkup at the hospital, in the afternoon out walking before the nurse’s visit —, she abandoned herself to the idyll; the doctors, faced with this unexpected remission, then proposing radiation therapy, which she had always refused, believing it to be the source of her illness, and which suddenly she accepted, setting the treatment date herself for March 3, two days after her seventieth birthday — these last years, several times, during our Sunday morning tête-à-têtes, she had blurted out to me that she would not become old, she knew it, seventy years was enough for her — : that day the pains returning, never to cease, in an agony to which, on August 27 — the tremor that for five years he had not wanted anyone to stabilize suddenly overcoming him —, my father, breaking the structure of our life as three, set an end, leaving me, for as long as necessary, alone with my mother, who, when I returned from Thônex, where I had hospitalized my father, in the afternoon took things in hand: “I’ve been thinking,” she wrote to me on the pad that she had been using since her tongue had been irradiated, “you ought to give the ring to Michèle” — a ring with six small diamond brilliants that my father and I had given her, for a birthday, a dozen years earlier: an engagement ring —; but I refused to do it; so that the next day, Michèle, who was visiting my mother while I took advantage of the opportunity to go home and work, called me on her return home: “I’m letting you know that we’re engaged; your mother gave me the ring; but in fact I don’t really know whom I’m engaged to, if not, rather, to your mother”; two weeks after the death of my mother — on October 27 in Thônex, where, at the beginning of the month, I had taken Michèle to see my father —, as if she were rediscovering her freedom of movement, taking an apartment at the other end of the city, into which she moved beginning January 1, 1979, the picture that now came together excluding him: my father, each time she would call to ask after him, would observe, “It’s strange, I never recognize her voice”; and so it was logical that in turn, at the end of November 1979, when, thrown into a panic by a streaming nosebleed and not wanting to disturb me, he called her, she didn’t answer; in the evening, as I was relating the incident to her, confirming: “Yes, I was sure it was him, this morning at six o’clock; that’s why I didn’t pick up”; thus putting me in a mood to break things off.