by Nizon, Paul.
I sit down on the bed, couch would be a better word for it, and can’t think of a thing to say. In the stone-gray room I sit across from my silent Mom, take some of the dusty cookies, drink the lukewarm, tasteless, instant Nescafé out of the beautiful old English china cups, black with a gold pattern, and outside there’s this unused patio with no flowers or plants, and beyond the patio a lawn with tall old trees, and above them stretch the struts and arches of the old cast-iron bridge that makes everything so dark and dismal that it’s best to switch a light on. I turn on the radio
Writing practice is what I call this note taking, my daily task, I could also have said: warming up. Warming up, so as not to get rusty, to keep myself going. Or do I do it solely to evade this terrible freedom or emptiness? I’m in Paris, but I’m in this room that’s narrow as a box, and time is passing. I’m waiting. Waiting for something to move. Like the hawk that circles above a gray landscape, and when something moves, it plummets down and tries to grab the moving thing with its talons. It has to happen fast, as fast as I can possibly think, in a nosedive, as it were, or else I wouldn’t start writing at all. I make up my mind to do something and get started at it. I begin the same way an athlete does, he sizes up the course, then summons all his strength so he can jump the hurdles effortlessly and brilliantly. I make up my mind to write about my little nugget of an event or an experience or even something I’ve just imagined and type it up fast. I cast it out, and, sizzling, it solidifies in the matrix of language. I take a look at it. It’s like the New Year’s Eve custom of pouring lead into cold water to tell one’s fortune for the coming year, I pour myself in small depictions into the emptiness of my day, in my boxroom, in this gigantic Paris piled up around me, where “life” is hiding or has lost its way. Like the athlete, I race to the typewriter and fling it out, if possible in a single sentence, no matter what. No matter? No, I do have to be attracted by something. A flash of lightning? At most in the sense of a fish shooting out of the water. That’s beautiful, the jumping of fish, a flash of silver in the air and it’s over again immediately. Or I write about something I’ve picked up on the street, and I think about it at home, about what I’ve picked up, or even just about the jumping of the fish that I thought about during my walk, about this flash of lightning, while I putter around in the apartment, or fiddle with things in the kitchen to put it off, anything rather than beginning, but then I sit down, I throw myself at the typewriter and onto the paper. If I didn’t behave that way, I wouldn’t begin at all.
Fear? Fear, in this boxroom that looks out on the courtyard.
The courtyard. It shows me cracked, dirty white walls, and windows. Down below, separated by iron fences, carefully subdivided sections of the courtyard, cement gardens with plants in pots, rusting bicycles, garbage. Up above, a many-sided cutout of the sky. Across from me: the old dove man.
I hear the hoarse screaming of the baby. And the trilling, rejoicing, chirping of birds in cages. Songbirds. Their singing ranges from a mosquito-like humming through enticing single whistles, then a series of single whistles, to cooing, to fluting, and finally to a very bright tremolo.
And the hoarse screaming of the baby has this desperate straining to it, one senses the effort of will and the helplessness of the tiny red-faced body lying on its back, kicking, it has no other defense than just this straining sound that is finally suffocated in sobs.
And just now the dove man’s nagging caused a big scene again with his missus, escalating until it verged on violence, then she quickly shut the window. He’s the bellyacher, it doesn’t take much to set him off, and he keeps at it until she gets into high gear herself and gives as good as she gets, answering in that Frenchwoman’s voice that you know from chansons, that petticoat voice. He tries to drown her out, but you sense right away that she’ll keep the upper hand.
He sits across from me. I see into his room on the opposite side of the inner courtyard, and he can see me at my table, in fact, he can see me better, because he lives one floor higher and can look down at me. Since I’ve been coming here, since I’ve been living here, for years, I’ve seen him sitting sideways at the open window, or behind the half-open window, and now and then behind the pulled curtain, an old man with gray, steel-wool hair, in a gray wool shirt, square head, a cigarette between his lips, he sits there and plays his game with the doves. For a long time, I didn’t understand what it was about, this constant strewing of birdfeed, a handful on the window ledge, later he takes it away again and strews it on the adjacent window ledge, and when the doves come, he shoos them away with his hand or a little stick, reaching out from behind the cover of his window, ambushing them. For a long time I couldn’t make any sense of this absurd maneuver between attraction and expulsion. Then I figured it out. He only wants to feed the one dove, his favorite dove; for her, he places the little piles of seeds or crumbs carefully on the window ledge, and also moves them from ledge to ledge, everything is intended for her, he follows her with the food, he watches over it so that she alone gets to enjoy his gifts, while the others, the ones he hits at—they must go.
He sits at his window from early to late, day in, day out, year after year, sometimes he reads, sometimes he has a cap, a beret on his head, I don’t know if he’s an invalid, he can stand up without any trouble. He does his thing with the doves, that’s his only activity, aside from the extremely loud exchanges with his wife; whom I recently saw in her bra, now that it’s really warm, their window is wide open in the afternoons, and that’s when I saw her for the first time far back in the dark recesses of their room. Sometimes she hangs up their laundry diagonally across the room, from the free-standing clothes closet to another piece of furniture out of my line of sight, then their room is full of sopping-wet laundry, and they dine beneath the sky of their room decked out in this manner. Of course he has his television on all day long, maybe that explains the sideways position, his typical way of sitting, he wants to keep both the thieving doves and the television screen in view. We have never yet even nodded at each other, although we sometimes stare into each other’s eyes for minutes at a time. We keep tabs on each other, I’d like to know what he thinks of me.
The beating of the doves’ wings is also part of the stew that brews in this courtyard cauldron. Sometimes it sounds like clapping, while at other times, when they’ve been frightened by something and fly up in a flock, like whirring. Not to forget their cooing. Often a wingbeat sounds like the crack of a whip. Incidentally, in among the common doves, there’s a turtledove that bills and coos every hour of the day, and through the night too.
The windows facing the courtyard show me many of my neighbors, mostly black, young couples, some with many children; the women, and even the tiniest little girls, sport Afro hairstyles, with strands of hair, big and small, twisted into antennae.
The yelling of the dove man, the shrill voice of his missus, their marital duet. Then silence. And the movement of the sunlight across the whitish walls of the inner courtyard, its slight or severe darkening due to clouds I cannot see, and then the sunbeams licking the walls again, a source of happiness.
This waiting, a laying siege to myself. And then I sleep again, in the middle of the day, preferably in the afternoon, and with no bad conscience at all. Sleeping is part of working, I say. Forgetting. Forgetting what’s going on and accumulating up there in my braincase, in my head. Letting it subside. I lie down on the wide bed, eager to dream, while the old dove man pursues his doves or is glued to his television, and while the small child crows, I lie down, a still life of limbs, legs apart, and let the afternoon cover me gently like a soft eiderdown. After that, it takes a little while before I’m fully awake again. First I rinse out my mouth with my favorite mouthwash, “Eau de Botot,” then I rummage around in my correspondence, but preferably in the kitchen, I do housework with ecstatic pedantry, as if I could make up for something with this perfection, could simulate real work. I dawdle until something starts to stir in my mind or my spirit, maybe even starts to
take shape, something that may have been prepared while I slept starts to surface, to form, tips of icebergs jut into my consciousness, I cling to them while I continue rummaging around. I don’t let the tips or angles out of my sight. Waiting
This waiting, for example in the Metro, together with other people who are waiting on the long, narrow, finely wrought bench. Seen from this bench, the subway tunnel seems spacious with a low-vaulted ceiling; and its white, bathroom-like tiles are glistening—an upside-down bathtub. It’s like standing at the shore, then there’s a streaming and thundering as if a torrent has just been let loose, and you sit and watch the train emerge from the black void and arrive and position itself with all its brightly illuminated windows in front of the curved walls with their huge advertisements, it’s like sitting on a beach or a riverbank. When it departs, after a brief stop, and after the beeping that announces the automatic closing of the doors, it is once again the wide, empty hall, the bathtub, and we can look far down onto the riverbed, empty except for the train tracks, a shaft. And waiting again, together with others who are sleeping on the benches, tramps who are sleeping off their intoxication, their time, leisure time that goes on forever.
And against the backdrop of the glistening walls, the people on the far shore look exceptionally well dressed, better than I’ve ever seen, and there are many nonwhite people among them, Africans, Asians, Caribbeans, French from the overseas regions; and very old people, who have to live on these implausibly small incomes, and very young people, students, tourists; and one person without shoes, with felt boot-liners on his feet, he keeps running back and forth and then conspicuously inconspicuously going and standing somewhere else, beside the vending machines with gum and nuts, and then again in front of a group of tourists. And all of them share the same fate, together on the shore, the waiting ones in this beautifully illuminated underworld, or on their way together on a little trip to the end of a short night that leads into day again, elsewhere in the city. Then it’s an entering into the day with amazement, with new eyes: coming up onto an avenue, a boulevard teeming with daily life, or else a deserted street, stonily dismissed by its tall buildings. The blind journey, and the sighted surfacing. Sometimes, after arduous hours spent trying to work, when I finally went out and through the turnstile and ran down the stairs that led to my line, I had been so moved down there in the brightly shimmering tunnel, so moved by the sight of the waiting people that the tears came to my eyes, why, why on earth? Because I was among my fellow human beings and noticed that I liked them, all of them without exception? Or simply because there were some people there and I was still there, although I had been away at home in my solitary confinement, now I was there, ready to ride the rails.
I love the Metro. I’m always running away when I walk along the street heading for the next station, and as soon as I begin the descent, when I feel the impact of the warm, musty, stale updraft that assaults me and grabs hold of me, forcing me to brace myself against it and clutch at my fluttering coattails, when I pass the few strangers who are climbing up and into the daylight, strangers I would like to greet and do greet secretly, as soon as I begin the descent I always start to feel fine again, and unburdened.
Down below, I always have this feeling of solidarity, because I’m so busy hurrying along with the other people, walking along with them, that I can completely forget myself, can get completely free of myself. Even more than in the stations, I feel it in the long, reverberating corridors I have to pass through when transferring from one line to another. It’s cool here, just bare walls, and I’m running into these surging crowds, masses, armies, until I see nothing but legs, legs that are crossing my path, pant legs, stockinged legs, and all kinds of shoes, platform shoes, stilettos and espadrilles, sneakers, boots. A forest of legs, scissor legs. And sometimes notes and scraps of melodies wander around in these underground passageways, they come from musicians, there are always musicians down there who have their plate or violin case or some other thing, even just a scrap of paper, lying in front of them to appeal to the charity of the passersby. I know a few of them. There’s an old man barely clinging to life, he’s as inconspicuous as a cipher disintegrating and blotting itself out of its own accord, and since he has no instrument, he plays old records on a gramophone. There are always accordion players there, frequently also young people with sheet music playing Vivaldi or some other old master on their violins or flutes in all seriousness. But most of all, I love the saxophone players who tootle their jazz into their gleaming probosces, it follows me for a long time through the long corridors, notes, scraps of notes, the souls of notes that have gone astray. Sometimes I hear two things at once, the sonorous babbling sound of a wind player and an accordion player working his bellows to squeeze out a musette.
I’m sitting here in my boxroom in Paris, “like in the city of Paris,” people used to say at our place in Bern when I was small, which means, they said, “one after the other, like in the city of Paris,” and of course I said it too, without knowing what it meant, but somebody explained to me later, that the expression refers to the order of the courses of a meal, first the hors d’oeuvres, then the main course, then salad, then cheese, fruit, perhaps something sweet, then coffee, one after the other, like in the city of Paris, I’m in Paris but I’m in this boxroom that looks out on the courtyard and the dove man. Sometimes I hate him, so he must remind me of myself, how else could my hatred be explained? My friend Lemm, he’s a physician, also somewhat of a psychotherapist, and for me he’s a sort of guru, in any case my friend Lemm once said to me, if you get that worked up about someone else for no apparent reason, when there’s been no cause for conflict, but you’re constantly thinking about him, concerning yourself with him seemingly needlessly, compulsively, without being able to drop the subject, so that he dominates your thoughts and your conversations with yourself, although you see no real reason for it, if you swear at him, curse him, said Lemm, that means that you’re worked up about one of your own weaknesses, a weakness you don’t want to admit, that you want to hide from yourself; the other person simply made your own weakness visible to you, like holding up a placard, a roaming self-reproach. Back then, it was Florian B. who irritated me. He lived in the same building. So it’s possible that my hatred for the dove man, who sits at the window all day and does nothing, is self-hatred? I see this guy ad nauseum, I see the courtyard, and then I see this or that when I go out, go out on little errands, just this morning I made a quick trip down to Rue Rodier to buy a new typewriter ribbon and have a few pages photocopied at Madame Tribolet’s, I took the bus, not the Metro, I set little goals for myself to get some exercise, just as one has to exercise a horse, or a car, the latter on account of the battery, and I set little goals for myself in exactly the same way, otherwise I wouldn’t get out at all, and in doing so I see the streets, different views of the city, stretches of the sky, I experience it as I have before, and I could write about it, but where should I begin? Write about life. Then, after that, I was at the seamstress’s, another such pretext, I took her my old jacket that’s already covered with leather patches hiding the worn-through parts, I’d like to keep the jacket, we’ve been together for such a long time, but the seamstress, an Arab with bleached hair, told me the latest abrasions or worn-through parts would have to be repaired by invisible mending, if at all, but that costs a fortune, so she suggested that she turn the jacket for me, the jacket is blue outside and plaid inside, the inside is still in good condition. I could write about that too. Is that life? So where the hell is life? As I’m thinking about that, it occurs to me that I’ve been intending for a long time to write about Wertmüller in Zürich, to date, I’ve bought four typewriters from him, beautiful old machines, prewar models, but of a quality, that is, precision, that can’t be matched by even the most modern machines, he says. When he talks about one of them, he contends that it deserves to be called the Rolls Royce of typewriters, so I definitely will have to write about Wertmüller someday. “Wertmüller, Office Machi
nes, I’m not in the store right now,” is what his answering machine says, he’s never in the store, he’s in a bar, but he’s the last competent typewriter mechanic, I fear, an artist in his trade, I note that I’m always expecting him to die and fear the impending loss.
I’m sitting in my boxroom, and when I sit this way for a long time and stare at the dove man, that obnoxious person, in fact when I stare into the courtyard at all I get scared. Because after all, there’s a huge city piled up around me, a city full of life, and time is passing. And I’m sitting at my table like the old dove man at his window, and life is running through me too, in the form of thoughts, feelings, fears, tiny rays of hope, feelings of sadness, running, it’s running down. So I seat myself at the typewriter and get down to work on something from my own gray, lukewarm timestream, something that I put aside for myself during the day, stuck into my vest pocket, as it were, then I warm up for it as I would for a long jump, or better: hurdles, I concentrate on the starting line and fling myself at the typewriter, blindly, in one leap, one sentence, and my only thought is that I have to land on my feet. If I succeed, then I’m not just seeing the fish now like a flash of silver, but am pulling it to shore. Pulling it to shore? Am I the fish? Have I pulled a piece of MYSELF to shore? or some bit, a small piece of life? Something solid, a finished product, almost a day’s work already—whereas in the case of the old dove man, if he should ask himself what he’s accomplished in a day, it would be at most feeding his dove.
