The Attraction of Things

by Roger Lewinter

  At the end of January, when the draft of Le chercheur was advancing rapidly, I went to the Théâtre du Caveau to see Moriaud, with whom I had remained in contact, although the relationship had soured when, after the Musset, Moriaud having asked me what exactly I wanted, disconcerted, I hadn’t known what to answer, while he pressed me to finally choose, whoever it be, a body, at which I expressed my reluctance, claiming, dishonestly, to have already done so besides; and, backstage, after the performance of Point d’eau — in which he played the guru of a group of survivors of some cataclysm —, I was recounting to him my news when Sandra, a Romanian refugee, who had staged the play, her curiosity obviously aroused, invited me to have a drink with the troupe, so as to offer me out of the blue — we hadn’t exchanged three words — the part, in February, in her next production, initially conceived as a montage on the theme of Antigone, of the announcer, then, should the need arise, in the play by Sophocles, which was being staged in May, that of the leader of the chorus.

  At the thought of working again with Moriaud, who was playing Tiresias, but, still more, struck that, when I had known her, eight years earlier, Svetlana, giving up ballet, had rightly tried her hand at theater in a montage of the trilogy by Sophocles in which she played, in addition to the Sphinx and Jocasta, Antigone, I accepted, fascinated by the logic of the proposition: for if I had, initially, given up the theater, it was with the awareness that it would be impossible for me to act without consenting to homosexuality, which would have overwhelmed me, whereas I was aiming for control over it; for which the Fränger had supplied me with a technique whose significance I had long failed to see, similar to the disruption of sleep that, systematically, I had brought on by taking sleeping pills, with an obviousness I didn’t wonder about, as soon as I undertook the Diderot — culminating, when I met Moriaud, in three months of total insomnia, which was losing its agonizing nature only now, with the sudden appearance of the lotus — : the Adamite heresy, as re-created in The Millennial Kingdom, elaborated, in actual practice, tantrically, by the man who, indefinitely postponing his ejaculation in orgasm, with his mind sent it back like a fire into his own body, thus sublimated.

  Starting with three academic conferences on Antigone, which she was responsible for chairing, and the project, soon abandoned, of staging the single play by Sophocles, in the version by André Bonnard; also dangling the prospect of a series of performances at the ancient theater at Delphi in August, after the fifteen performances now set for the Caveau, Sandra had succeeded, for this production, in putting together a professional troupe in which I was the only amateur, moreover the one in charge of the dramaturgy: though every time we had discussed Antigone she would take the words out of my mouth, I didn’t suspect, despite the way she had of leaving her cigarette butts lying around everywhere, that, lacking any substance, she was concerned only with charming whoever was drawn into her obsession with staging one show after another.

  After two weeks of rehearsals, when, the croaks piercing the hoarseness, her voice had become unbearable to me, and although it seemed that, precisely because of the contracts she voluntarily signed, we had to act for the mere beauty of the gesture — which no one, while he was able to withdraw, had apparently noticed —, at the beginning of April, I acknowledged that Sandra was only the opportunity, rare according to Moriaud, for whoever knew how to use it, to be forced, having been driven back onto oneself, to break through one’s own limits; and, as the fraud was on the point of being discovered, my double function making the actors uncertain whether I hadn’t engaged in manipulation by proxy, I had to take on the dramaturgy where the leader of the chorus, the link between the human and the suprahuman, like the third eye opening up to the blind vision of Tiresias, was solely an impassive seat of concentration; adopting, in order to make it perceptible, little by little a bearing taken from yoga: during the performance, which lasted an hour and a half, standing, immobile, on the proscenium, a presence, in the midst of the actors, with a phrasing at first floating but, on the advice of Moriaud, whose attention was focused on me, projected with an increasingly embodied force, to the point where Creon, on the evening of the premiere, and even though, during the rehearsals, he had conspicuously avoided all discussion, before coming onstage being unable to resist any longer, blurted out, “You don’t want to be the Exterminating Angel, either.”

  The health of my father, since the previous September, had been deteriorating, the drugs having less and less control over the tremor that was now paralyzing him in spurts, disjointing his day with gaps to which, not wanting to hear of another hospitalization, he reconciled himself, and which I likewise trivialized; while, returning after the three months’ interruption occasioned by Antigone to Le chercheur, I finished the word-for-word translation in June, to find myself confronted with the difficulty unresolved, since I still didn’t know how to convey in French what showed through in the German, in my version rendering, as I was aware, only a state of amazement, not, in its magnetization, the torrent of a life; and, the more I advanced, the more I was losing my way, when, on August 13, I had to have my father admitted, despite his refusal — “because you die there” —, to Thônex so that they could try, by gradually changing his medication, to stabilize his condition; but it was the balance found upon the death of my mother, three years earlier, that was undoubtedly slipping away.

  The following Saturday, at the flea market, at Pauline Cohenoff’s, who had had, almost a year earlier, the red G&T from Saint Petersburg that I had wished for as a reward for finishing the Lectures, amid a collection I found the “Suicidio” from La gioconda, by Ponchielli, and the recitative and air from La vestale, by Spontini, sung by Rosa Ponselle, who, having retired fifty years earlier to her villa Pace in Baltimore, had just died, and whose voice, despite the fact that Neury, my guide in this case, had for years and even quite recently — he had taken part in Antigone as a coach for the chorus — spoken to me about it, eluded me, so I was curious to hear it in particular in the excerpt from La vestale, whose emotion I had glimpsed through Callas; and, as soon as I returned home to my father’s, listening first to the “Suicidio,” I thought Ponselle’s brilliance too intense for the air, the line of which seemed subtle; but, with the first note of Giulia’s recitative, inexhaustible in its splendor singing with the silence, completely freeing itself and articulating itself with unexpected exactitude, her voice attained, overwhelming as it was expressed, found through oblivion in its gift, the absolute.

  Whereas for the past year, I had been searching, without knowing for what, Ponselle broke through to me with the prayer, which from that moment on sustained me; appealing to the tutelary power, to my father as well, to defer death and help me once again, until the end of Le chercheur, which called upon the impulse, in the heart, forced, so as not to be suffocated by it from the moment of its inspiration, to bear witness to the suprahuman overpoweringness, which takes human form in the phrasing, in which the words, through a game of displacement having become fully concrete, create a saturation such that, in its comprehension suddenly reversing itself, it expresses that which transfigures the void.

  In September, my father returned home; nevertheless, everything had become precarious, and, at the beginning of December, when I was two-thirds of the way through Le chercheur, he had to return to Thônex to have his medication adjusted, it being agreed that he would be allowed to return home, if possible, at Christmas; after the holidays, however, in a sudden burst of confidence, he decided to remain at home, even though he was becoming weaker, having picked up from me a cough, which had been plaguing me in fits as I was approaching the completion of Le chercheur but which at his apartment had been silent, although he didn’t worry about it, being impassive — in 1949, in Davos, when they removed three ribs to arrest the tuberculosis that kept him at the sanatorium for a year, he had woken up from the anesthesia in the middle of the operation, which he endured right to the end without blinking an eye —; but, on February 8, when I a
nnounced to him, during the evening meal, the end of Le chercheur, in a flash he had seemed better — “Praise God, I congratulate you” —, so suddenly that at ten o’clock, he called me, in a daze; and, the next morning, since he could hardly stand, I had to take him to the emergency room: he had a double broncho­pneumonia; and the doctor at Thônex, where my father had been readmitted, by the tone of his voice gave me to understand that in his opinion I was reckless, all but responsible for the death of my father, who, however, when I went to see him, didn’t seem upset, saying to the contrary that it was only a chill, from which he had practically recovered when on Wednesday — I had sent out Le chercheur the previous day —, at the flea market, I no longer remember at whose stand, I found two ten-inch Odeon records: four Spanish dances interpreted by La Argentina, which I listened to now, the body that gave her physical form having dematerialized, to dance through a scansion, ultimately purely abstract, where a sharp tap of the castanets sufficed to evoke in its brilliance the entirety of beauty.

  May 1982 – April 1983

  Alexandre Brongniart

  IT WAS A TUESDAY evening, in May 1982, after the end of Le chercheur, when I returned home particularly tense: my father, intruded upon by his neighbor — a young radio engineer, an amateur pop musician, who lived next door at his girlfriend’s, with two hideous dogs and stickers all over the door —, could no longer extricate himself from the neighbor’s presence: at night, when my father had gone to bed and could not, without immense effort, get up again, the neighbor, scoffing at the locks, suddenly having appeared in the apartment, would mock him to the point of sitting down on the edge of his bed; and, during the day, from the other side of the wall, he would harass my father by mimicking his every move; and although for a long time my father had said nothing to me — the first signs had appeared a year and a half earlier, not long after the neighbor had moved in —, making it a point of honor, while imperturbably going about his daily routine, to disregard this intrusion, which for nearly nine months had been, in his opinion, beyond the limits of tolerance, he had on several occasions, first thing in the morning or late in the evening, called the super, who had intervened with conviction, had complained to the police, and, when nothing else worked, had finally gone to see the neighbor, to ask him to dictate his conditions for leaving my father in peace; all of which I had only just learned, when, believing that I was encouraging my father in his ideas, the neighbor and his girlfriend had stopped me in front of the building one evening as I was arriving, no longer allowing me to continue to deliberately ignore — as the only means of curbing it — the hallucination that, now that I was arguing, each day took shape more forcefully.

  I dreaded that my father, in losing his mind, would make it impossible for me to fulfill the vow I had made, while my mother was dying, in September 1978, when the doctors, having discovered that he had prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bone, had announced to me that he didn’t have long to live, and, refusing to accept the diagnosis of this disease that my father was unaware of, I realized that I would have to act likewise, if I wanted to succeed where, it seemed to me, I had failed with my mother; spurred on to it on the day of her interment, October 31, when, upon returning to the apartment, my father, in order to cut off the sobs that were overwhelming me, in recalling the reaction he had had under the same circumstances at seventeen years old, led me to ask him a question about his past, of which I knew only fragments, having never thought — prevented by a gesture of my mother’s, in 1948, upon receiving a letter from Chile, containing some stamps for my collection, and coming from my father’s supposed half brother — to ask: a “natural” child of his parents — when they were married, four years later, they didn’t acknowledge him —, my father had been entrusted to his grandmother in Vienna, learning from her on her deathbed, in 1917, the truth about his origins: in particular that the person whom he believed to be a cousin, in Romania, was his brother, who, when the brother came of age — his parents having in the meantime passed away —, would become the sole heir to a fortune, which my father tried, as a last resort, through a lawsuit, lost in 1927, to claim a part of; and my father showed me the article that he had saved, from a local newspaper, relating this episode, whose revelation now, shocking to me in its scandalousness, made me swear to myself to repair, as far as I could, the injustice by showing my father a love whose frustration formed the basis — as I had already explained to him, before knowing the story in detail — of his persistence in regularly destroying, through gambling, a life circumstance that he obliged my mother to salvage — with the exception of the last time, six years earlier, when, since he was going to be forced into retirement, he had unburdened himself to me about a debt, for which I agreed to accept responsibility with him — through three consecutive wins in the trifecta, in September 1979, he was obligated, down to the last penny, without which he had nothing left, to repay it —, provided that it be kept from my mother, who, without letting on, had nevertheless known about it, giving herself away only in July in a note where, to justify her having set me up as the sole trustee of the 60,000 francs she had just inherited from a brother who had immigrated to Montevideo, whom she had believed to be poor, she had made an allusion to it —; the sharing of this money, which my father did not request, even though it was necessary, without my realizing its significance, sealing, in May 1979, the relationship in which my father, on a sound impulse taking me at my word, devoted himself to me like the master upon whom gratitude confers a liberty that he bestows.

  That evening, having begged my father to put the telephone next to the bed and call me as soon as the neighbor drew his attention — up to now, oddly enough, despite the persecutions he had suffered and even though I was only a short distance away, he had never asked me to intervene —, during the lotus the function of this presence suddenly dawning on me — until now, thinking only to understand rationally, I had avoided wondering about it —, in the shock of its obviousness, convinced that if my father saw its significance, his torment would vanish, I had a surge of hope that he would accede to this knowledge, when the telephone rang: it was my father, who asked me to come; so that, having maintained my concentration, I found myself at his apartment, in front of the bedroom door, which was locked with a key from the inside, knocking impatiently so that he would let me in; and my father, having made sure who it was, quickly got up, half opened the door, and cast an encompassing glance around the hall before turning to me — “He’s not there?” —, thus giving me the signal I was waiting for to go on, incantatorily: that he could understand that he would want this intrusion, since it was protecting him from something else, which he dreaded, and from which his attention, through this persecution, was being diverted . . . “Death. That was foolish. One knows neither the day nor the hour”; hearing which, I was overwhelmed by a burst of emotion in which he let out, “You are saved. Nothing more can happen to you. It is very big of you to have said that. You are saved”; and in the elation of the moment’s shared insight, all distance — where the kiss we exchanged each evening had remained formal — being destroyed, embracing him unrestrainedly at last, we kissed each other.

  In the morning, at the flea market, curious about what I might find to hallmark what had occurred in the night, I went past Lometto’s stand just as Fontanet, going through some porcelain, was unpacking a bust whose luminosity made me stop, so that she laid it in my hands: it was a Sèvres bisque, Alexandre Brongniart, by Houdon, a child’s eyes and smile focused elsewhere, inwardly, which, for one hundred francs, I kept — several people, seeing it, equally dazzled, wanted to buy it —, while considering now two cylindrical cups, early nineteenth century, which made me think of the two Rosenthal cups, all that remained of a service of six, that my father and I used for tea; but, although Fontanet would let me have them for fifteen francs, I couldn’t make up my mind — they were unmatched, and one had a hairline crack —, finally giving them up, with the feeling that I was breaking up the parts of a
collection; and, in fact, my father, who in the morning had greeted me radiant, in the evening was waiting for me with an impatience that at first disconcerted me, maliciously asking me to listen to him before I got angry: after I had left, at two o’clock in the morning, while clearing the low table in the hall, where we drank our tea, he had broken one of the two cups; and, to replace it, he had gone all the way to Girard aux Grottes, more than ten minutes away — for months, he hadn’t ventured more than a hundred yards —, but they had only Langenthal porcelain; so my father had telephoned the Rosenthal Studio, but they had to place a special order, and that took six weeks; so that I decided now whose cup it was that was broken; while, on Thursday evening, when I arrived, he showed me his right hand, which was bruised: in a fall in the apartment, he had just sprained two fingers, the ring finger and the little finger; so that, the nighttime disturbance, from the account he gave me of it the next day, having resumed, I decided that, taking advantage of a check-up, on Monday, at his doctor’s, he would have to ask to be admitted to Thônex: if he would consider this stay as a convalescence at a sanatorium — the persecution, up to now, had seemed tied exclusively to the apartment —, he would be able to salvage the understanding we had glimpsed, which would otherwise be lost; but he wouldn’t hear of it, and I lost my temper; in the evening, however — I had arrived an hour earlier, to apologize and resume calmly —, in the hall, which was crossed by the rays of the setting sun and in which the calm, beneath the profusion of phonograph records scattered everywhere, contrasted with the vehemence within me, my father, in his bottle-green velvet armchair, his face slightly inclined, as usual, onto his right shoulder, as I sat facing him, on an angle, three feet away, on the arm of the silver velvet armchair piled with books and papers, having listened to me with an attention that was sifting from my words something else whose significance I didn’t consider, earnest, said to me softly: “I’ll get to that point, I know, but wait. Why are you so impatient? One can have a relapse in any event”; on Monday, however, since the nighttime episodes hadn’t diminished, I called his doctor so that he would write up an admission slip for Thônex, where an X-ray revealed that my father, in his fall on Thursday, had broken both fingers — it was his first fracture —, thus objectively preventing, because of the cast, which, by immobilizing his arm, forced his hospitalization, any argument.