The Attraction of Things

by Roger Lewinter

  My father recovered quickly from his fracture — in three weeks the fingers had healed —, but this time the persecution had also appeared, in fits, at Thônex; and, at the end of June, when he had returned home, the energy that the hallucination no longer focused flowing back into his body gave a renewed virulence to a symptom that had remained latent these four years, after it had flared up in the summer of 1978, forcing the hospitalization through which, on August 27, an end was set to my mother’s agony: if the tremor had overcome my father then — around midnight he had fallen, unable to get up, in the bathroom, and it was my mother who, while calling for help, had gotten him up, before alerting me —, ultimately, after my father had taken laxatives compulsively for a week in the feeling, brought on by a bladder obstruction, that he was intolerably constipated, it was diarrhea that defeated him; and this technique of displacement, working in the opposite way as well, had allowed him, as soon as he had been relieved by a catheter, to cease paying any attention to his real infirmity; while the now-resurgent obsession resumed its original line: after a month, on Sunday, August 1, the effect of the laxatives suddenly accumulating, an excremental chaos shattered him into a stuporous state; and at Thônex, to which he had been readmitted, the delirium being immediately cleared, the doctors decided that, since he would no longer be able to remain in an independent living environment, and since it wasn’t possible to hospitalize him this way, at closer and closer intervals, he had to be placed in a retirement home; without wanting to consider that the route chosen four years earlier precluded this recourse, about which, on August 8 — I had come this time on a Sunday and not on Saturday as usual —, when, around two o’clock, in the deserted dining hall, I told him that we need only consider it on a trial basis, my father concluded, “So there’s nothing left for me but suicide.”

  Les Marronniers, a Jewish retirement home located in the neighborhood of Les Délices, no more than ten minutes from the apartment, seemed to be ideally suited: my father, in September, when he had toured it with me — putting on a show of believing that this solution had my approval, he displayed an aggressiveness that, at the time, I didn’t see through —, delighted, had said that he was impatient to move in; and his admission was set for October 4; with the idea, however, of assuming all costs without any subsidy, and wanting to avoid the appearance that the measure was irreversible — which alone would have permitted its success —, I arranged to sublet, beginning in November, his apartment; but on October 4, when I took my father to Les Marronniers, early in the afternoon, from the dread written across his face when he saw the residents flocking to tea, it was obvious that he would never adapt there; and the next day, on his first outing, he fell and cut himself above his right eye; from then on endlessly taking taxis to go to the emergency room, or to come up to my apartment, as soon as he was convinced I didn’t have a secret life that would have prompted me to put him in the home, out of an excessive sensibility; while, dramatically, and even though, despite the vicissitudes, he had remained, immutable, a gentleman of a certain age, making up for twenty years in three weeks, he suddenly became an old man; so much so that, the apartment emptied of all personal effects — my own and my mother’s, because my father’s, I realized then, fit in the suitcase used for his hospitalizations —, those that had accumulated over twenty years, and that I had left, without touching anything there upon the death of my mother, for the sake of a daily routine thus placed under her aegis —, at the very moment I had found a tenant, the step seeming to me intolerable, I suggested to my father, if he thought he had the strength to face the divestment, that he be this tenant; so on October 29 he returned to his apartment, shocked to discover — I had informed him of it, but it hadn’t registered — that the neighbor had disappeared — he had moved out on the day my father entered Les Marronniers —; holding on yet until November 4, his eighty-second birthday, only, the next day, to fall on his right hip and apparently hurt himself, since he couldn’t take a step without giving way and falling again on the same side; nevertheless adamantly refusing a hospitalization that, on Monday, since he could no longer manage to get himself up, the doctor prescribed; but the X-ray didn’t show any injury: the day after his admission to Thônex, he was walking without difficulty, regaining his strength while I organized his ultimate supervision with home health care — this time a nurse would have the keys to the apartment and would come in the morning to help him get up, while I would continue to attend to him as usual, at noon and in the evening —; but on his return home, on December 6, he couldn’t tolerate in real life the intrusion so long hallucinated, and immediately let himself be overwhelmed by his obsession with his bowel movements, the orgasmic character of which finally occurred to me, on Thursday, December 16, when, coming in at seven o’clock in the evening, I found him in my mother’s armchair, his limbs defeated, on his face a relief such that in his exertion it was doubtful whether he had conserved the strength to pull himself back from an absence from which he didn’t emerge, the following day — unsteady all day, that evening he was lying, immobile, on the blue rug in the living room —, until my question, asking whether I should take him to the emergency room, in a matter-of-fact tone then, looking at me: “There isn’t sufficient cause for that.”

  On Wednesday, December 22, at the flea market, at Madame Inès’s, I found, for 450 francs, a collection of some twenty 78 albums — two hundred phonograph records, some “advance copies” again, from the years 1932 to 1938 —, instrumental pieces but also vocal: extremely refined in some instances, music, which I had gotten rid of in October, as the apartment was being cleared out, when, though I took the 78s — mostly acoustic recordings, which, because of the constraint of their abbreviation, instead of the music preserving an artist’s project, were ideally vestiges —, I gave up the collection of sixteen hundred LPs, bound up with life such as it had been organized during these twenty years with my parents: primarily an operatic repertory — inaugurated with Mozart, through The Marriage, in 1959; continued with Verdi, and La traviata, in 1961, it had led to Rossini, culminating with Bellini; the last discovery, in the fall of 1977, having been Lucrezia Borgia, by Donizetti, a fading splendor —, from which, among a total of two hundred interpretations, each Sunday in the early afternoon, between tea and coffee, I would choose an opera to be ritually listened to — near the fireplace in the hall, in her armchair, my mother would doze, while, on the couch opposite, I would lie down, curled up, and my father, taking his afternoon nap in the living room, after the broadcast of the trifecta on the transistor, sneaking off for varying amounts of time depending on the returns, would rejoin us at the end of the performance, in line with me then, whereas he had been, on the other axis of the right angle, situated in line with my mother at the beginning of the opera —, which I never again touched after the death of my mother, exploring, in the fervor of Le chercheur, spurred on by the Psalms of David, by Schütz, the last realm that, as it happened, I knew nothing about, the polyphony of the Renaissance, penetrating, in amazement, the sublime: masses and motets — by Dufay, Josquin, Morales, Victoria —, in which the voice, no longer supported by any instrument other than itself, becomes essentially an elaboration of the divine through the being who, articulating the impersonal in the play of numbers, in rapture frees himself; but not managing to carry out the dispossession, one morning in October, in his store, I spoke about it, perplexed, to “J-Sonic,” who, partly at my urging, having in these last years shifted his focus to opera, said he would buy the whole lot for 15,000 francs: the day before closing the deal, however, I debated some more and, because he would break it up, dissuaded him from taking the collection, giving it, with relief, to Anne-Lise, the only one who had been admitted, on a single occasion, to the Sunday concert — it was La sonnambula, interpreted by Callas —; thus repossessed meanwhile of that which I had given up, on December 25 in the presence of my father — having recovered in these few days at Thônex, he had been released, and we had had lunch at Richemond —,
for the first concert that had to be held at my apartment, I played from the collection an aria by Mozart, “Vorrei spiegarvi, oh Dio,” which I knew without having had until then the interpretation by Ria Ginster, whose voice, in its crystalline quality taken to the extreme, embracing in its brilliance a lyric madness, at its highest pitch pierced through the human.

  On Tuesday, March 22, 1983, when I went in the early afternoon to Thônex, my father was unconscious: to arrest the bronchopneumonia that, for the past week, had been running him down, they were trying a third antibiotic, as a last resort — on March 16, when I had arrived at his bedside, he had looked at me — “When are we leaving?” —, only to turn away without waiting for an answer; thus making me understand the change that had struck me on Saturday the twelfth, when, in contrast to the improvement of these last times — he had begun to read again, finishing in three days The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth, which I had found for him, for one franc, at Csillagi’s, at the flea market, and, on Monday the seventh, he had come, for my forty-second birthday, to my apartment, finally wearing the moccasins I had bought for him, during the January sales, at Carnaval de Venise — my mother had always wished he would get his clothes there, but he didn’t want to, and it was only during the July sales that he had agreed to buy a summer suit there, gray striped with pale green, which was quite becoming, while in November we had picked out a hat there for his birthday —, which he had refused to begin to wear at Thônex —, I had found him not waiting for me at the entrance, downstairs, but upstairs, wearing yellow moccasins that didn’t belong to him, shaken by a tremor that I tried not to notice, insisting on going to the cafeteria, from which, after a quarter hour — “Let’s go to a different café” —, I led him, his legs giving way, back to the common room; at the time explaining his state to myself as the result of the negative response from Les Tilleuls, which he had learned about the previous day — on December 18, upon his admission, the hospital had agreed to leave him in peace for six weeks, but, punctually on February 2, refusing to keep him indefinitely for observation, they had taken control over the question of his placement, making him visit a facility in Veyrier, disregarding the fact that the proximity of the Jewish cemetery ruled out this choice; while, judging by the reason that the management alleged — he was making too much noise with his cane —, obviously my father — and his impatience, throughout that month, in awaiting the decision retrospectively attested to it —, in not playing by the rules there had staked his all —; because, on the sixteenth, just as it seemed to me, when I saw him, his neck bulging, in his bed, that death had suddenly loomed — in the morning, the social worker had called me: they wanted to admit him to Loëx, the local hospice; I had cut short the discussion, telling them to wait, he was sick —, an impulse of acquiescence came over me; and, without letting himself be dissuaded by the improvements that had been brought about, he was taken there — we had spoken to each other, for the last time, on Friday the eighteenth: seeing me arrive unexpectedly, he had kissed me with a fervor that surprised me and, so that I would be convinced of it, in answer to my asking how he was feeling — he didn’t have a fever —, with his head had indicated “Well”; agreeing that it sufficed for me to come every other day, since from then on we had to be patient; and on Sunday — a septicemia had set in on Saturday, checked by a change of antibiotic — he was sleeping, when I had come, so peacefully that I hadn’t woken him; the fever returning on Monday —; so that now, at two thirty, as I left him, I held his arm tight with my left hand, noticing, when, in the street near my apartment, I ran into the Red Cross nurse who for the past year had cared for those who tried to remain in their homes, that the past tense slipped out as I spoke of him; while that evening, going to bed after the lotus, just before midnight I sank into an unconsciousness from which the telephone pulled me: on Wednesday, March 23, at 1:05, had come death.

  On Saturday, April 23, I went to the flea market, telling myself that what I would find would be my father’s sign, and, as I was arriving in front of the stand of the Ange du Bizarre, to whom, seven years earlier, I had precisely specified the shades of the Kashmir shawl that I would ideally want, Sabine was unfolding on the ground, to lay out her objects on, ragged but shining, the very one, which I bought for 160 francs: an embroidered square from which emerged, fringed in black, commanding the space in its fullness, a Saint Andrew’s cross whose arms projected at their tip a cross extended into domes — white, black, green, and turquoise blue —, gathering, at their junction, around the black heart formed from a square crossed by a diamond, eight concentric swirls, of precious stones and flesh at once: vermilion, yellow, violet; turning crimson to the eye, shot through with fire.

  April 27 – May 11, 1983

  The Pearl

  ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, at the flea market, at Audéoud’s stand, where I had found, one year earlier, the Kashmir shawl of the Angel, I had noticed, in tatters, another Kashmir shawl, without wanting to look at it; but, two weeks later, since it was still there, coming closer, I discovered that, a square woven in one piece, it was the model for the Kashmir from Marseille that, just before I began Le chercheur, needing to counterpose to the blossoming volutes of the Rose Garden a place of contemplation, I had bought, although I knew that, as a copy, it was but an approximation; without imagining that the original, still in existence, would come along — she wanted thirty francs for it, but suddenly, cutting the price, let me have it for twenty-five francs, next to nothing, not even allowing me not to take it —; so that I hung it in the bedroom in the place that had been reserved for it for more than two years; and the design, freed from the additions that were obscuring it, now emerged — silver, black, and red, mixed with ochre and green, pale and somber, without a trace of turquoise — : at its heart a frame whose compartmentalization identified it as the predella — repeated four times — of a retable, in the black space so threadbare that it was barely discernible floated, beginning and end precisely merging as one, a drop of blood, a pearl, where, from the center, like the circles that on the mirrorlike surface of a lake are left by a stone plunging in, out of the silver unfolded a butterfly, which made me resolve to practice the lotus no longer in the hall beneath the Nepalese tanka but here, my back to the Rose Garden, my profile within sight of the Angel, in front of the rose whose filigree quenched in its blossoming, the dew of the imponderable.

  The Orient of a Pearl

  SINCE, WISHING TO EXPLAIN MYSELF, I cannot explain myself without, bursting in, joy

  L’attrait des choses

  Fragments de vie oblique

  .

  le G. & T. rouge de Saint-Pétersbourg

  15 août – 11 octobre 1980

  le lot d’une vie

  26 – 28 mai 1982

  Duino

  12 juin 1982

  la Argentina

  février 1980 – février 1982

  Alexandre Brongniart

  mai 1982 – avril 1983

  la perle

  27 avril – 11 mai 1983

  l’orient

  15 août – 11 octobre 1980

  le G. & T. rouge de Saint-Pétersbourg

  LE 15 AOÛT 1980, en postant exprès, recommandé, par avion le tome III des Conférences de Groddeck, je souhaitais un signe, pour marquer la fin de ce travail qui avait duré 4 ans : si je trouvais quelque chose de précis, rare, introuvable, Groddeck était satisfait et mon devoir, en tout cas sur ce point, m’était remis; songeant à un G. & T. — premiers disques gramophones, à l’ange graveur sur l’étiquette, rouge ou noire selon le prestige de l’artiste, enregistrés en Europe entre 1902 et 1907, dont il ne subsiste parfois que quelques exemplaires —; un G. & T. rouge de Saint-Pétersbourg en l’occurrence : en 20 ans, je n’en avais jamais trouvé aux Puces; et je pensais aussi à la magie d’appel : il fallait un élan du cœur, pour que cela vînt; sans me rendre compte qu’il y a 2 mois, j’en avais fait l’expérience, à propos de chant : sur la pochette d’un disque
de repiquages de Félia Litvinne — née à Saint-Pétersbourg —, j’avais lu une phrase extraite de ses « Souvenirs » qui, me touchant, m’avait enfin ouvert à sa voix dont, encore débutant aux Puces, j’avais trouvé un enregistrement — mon premier G. & T. rouge, de Paris : la « Prière » de Marguerite, de Faust —, que j’avais pris simplement parce que, par la forme, il sortait de l’ordinaire : un 30 cm gravé sur une largeur de 5 cm; et, voulant à présent lire son livre, de passage à Zurich, j’étais allé chez un libraire spécialisé, mais comme il ignorait jusqu’au nom, je lui marquai sur un billet « Félia Litvinne » : deux semaines plus tard, à Genève, aux Puces, chez Leuba, pour 15 F, en évidence — au point que, n’eût-il pas attiré mon attention, je ne l’aurais pas vu —, il y avait Ma vie et mon art, souvenirs de Félia Litvinne, avec, barrant verticalement la page de garde, à l’encre violette un envoi; de sorte que maintenant, chez « J-Sonic », qui avait depuis peu, sous mon influence en partie, des vieilleries lyriques, j’achetai l’anthologie que Rubini, de Londres, venait de publier des voix de la Russie impériale, à tout hasard m’aiguisant.