My Year of Love

by Nizon, Paul.

  I said: what can you be thinking, ma tante, there’s no way I’m going to lose it, I can take care of myself quite well, really, and I thank you very kindly, I appreciate this gift, and believe me, the two of us will both benefit from my having a car. But my aunt just stood there, the envelope in her hand, and then she said: put it in your pocket, my little one, put it in your inside breast pocket, and she unbuttoned my coat and my jacket to see if I had a suitable inside breast pocket. By then I was in a hurry, I put the envelope in my inner breast pocket and, with my aunt’s thoughtful eyes on me, started to button up my jacket and coat. Suddenly she said: no, not like that, someone will take the money from you, I know just how it will happen, either they’ll steal it from you by jostling you in a crowd, pickpockets have a nose for that sort of thing, or they’ll take it away from you when you’re sleeping, no, give it to me, she said. And she herself took my coat and jacket off, went with the jacket into the adjoining room, her bedroom, and as I rather impatiently looked to see what was going on, I saw her fumbling with needle and thread, she was sewing shut the breast pocket that contained the envelope.

  So, my little one, she said, now we have a solution that should work, voilà.

  She was satisfied and smiled her slightly sad, melancholic smile, and I kissed her on the cheeks both in thanks and in farewell, no, she said, I’m going with you to the train station, I won’t be at peace until I have you in the train car and see the train pull out of the station. Let’s go.

  No, my aunt would not have given me the apartment, she would not have approved of the way I’ve taken possession of everything. I see my aunt before my mind’s eye when I find myself fiddling with the locks, and now I also see the short, hunchbacked Fräulein Murz, standing like a skier about to descend a slope, in her coat that reaches down to her feet, I see her shaking the latch, turning away, pretending that she’s leaving, but then unexpectedly turning back to attack the door and the latch yet again.

  NOW I’M AS LIGHT AS A DOVE’S FEATHER, I sometimes said to myself in my boxroom during that initial period in Paris; and as sharp as a stiletto, I added. The lightness came from the fact that I didn’t belong to anyone, I was a nonentity; I could wind up in the gutter, I had no past here, did I have a future? I was simply ready.

  The sharpness was something I hoped to become, I hoped to get it from the city: that it would sharpen me, and sharpen me as it saw fit, just as it liked, whether to live or to die was all the same to me, I wanted it to sharpen me into shape like a pebble. I would put the pebble that I was on my tongue and start to talk. I would speak from a silence light as a stone.

  When I talked to myself that way, and I had in fact become accustomed to talking to myself, which is unavoidable, when you’re really alone; when I talked to myself that way, I seemed to myself like something numb, so probably something hardy, and hopefully real. And it didn’t happen because of self-pity, but on the contrary, out of pride: as if I would soon attain something I had always longed for: to be a feather, the lightest flying object of all, susceptible to the gentlest breath of wind. But the quill, the feather’s quill had to be as sharp as a stiletto.

  I felt the bones in my head, I pinched my arm, I stared across at the old dove man, I squinted at the piece of sky visible from the courtyard, I said to myself, here I am, here is my boxroom, here is my place. Here is where I’ll stay. All that remained of me was myself, whatever that might mean. I was happy, wretchedly happy, so entirely alone in Paris. And I was free. Free, too, to go to such establishments as the one run by Madame Julie, and now I ask myself how I even got such an address. I think I got the address from Brisa, a Brazilian woman I met in a bar a long time ago who remained true to me in her own way.

  Brisa was a call girl forever changing headquarters and bases of operation, and one of her places was Paris. She called me up here one day, calling her customers was, as I later learned, one of her business practices. She had regular customers in different cities and on different continents, and she kept their phone numbers in a tiny address book she always carried with her, and when she arrived in Paris or New York or Zürich or Rio, she called several numbers one after another, I don’t know how she selected them, to announce that she was there and available, should the occasion arise. She didn’t go on the street, or in clubs or bars, at least not to work, she worked on a strictly private and discreet basis, always at her own residence. In Paris, she had a small apartment in the 15th arrondissement, on a street that bore the name of a general, I’ve been in this apartment too, indeed on a day when Brisa wasn’t alone, but in the company of a very dark-skinned, taciturn, even off-putting girlfriend whose name I don’t remember; she seemed to have just arrived on a surprise visit. We had gone out to dinner together and then the three of us went back to Brisa’s apartment. Her apartment was on the seventh floor and consisted of one rather large room with a kitchen, plus a bathtub and a toilet, Brisa had me lie down on the big bed, insisted on taking off my shoes for me, stuffed cushions behind my back, as if I were the beloved, exhausted husband, I lay there and contentedly watched the late show on TV, a large glass of whiskey in my hand, while the two girls whispered next door in the bathroom. Later, I lay on the bed between the two of them, I had stayed mainly from lethargy, from a lethargic need to prolong my contentment. Brisa asked in a whisper if I would like to, which I answered in the affirmative, I would like to, I said, even though I was aware that her very dark-skinned girlfriend was not sleeping, just lying awake, so Brisa ducked under the quilt to judge the size of my erection, the indicator of my readiness, we slipped into each other, and at the same time I could feel this other body on my right, I felt no embarrassment at all, I was as safe and secure as a child in bed with his cousins during the holidays, I was filled with a wonderful feeling of innocence and an effusive love of humanity as the three of us lay there in our different bodies and different skin colors, in this unfamiliar room on the seventh floor of a street that bore the name of a glorious general, it was just as if we were sharing a loaf of bread, as if people thrown together by chance under the canopy of a covered wagon had found a language in which they could communicate, I lay as a guest on another continent, and the sentence was going around in my head WE WERE FLOWING UPSTREAM AND HAD NOTHING TO EAT, I hadn’t read that sentence anywhere, it was there, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked it.

  For me, Brisa wasn’t a mistress, more like a friend, and one day she started going on about how we should live together. At first I took this suggestion as a mischievous joke, but with time I saw that she meant it seriously, if in a complicated sort of way. I said: how do you picture that working, and why me of all people? I’m anything but solvent, I’m more of a ne’er-do-well, I guess, Brisa, there’s no room for two under my roof. I countered with this and similar answers, but Brisa said I had misunderstood her proposal, she would by no means be a burden to me, she would continue working as she had until now, and in Rio she owned a small house, and besides, she wouldn’t require me to be faithful, on the contrary, she would introduce me to her girlfriends.

  But how do you picture that working? I asked, what would I do in Rio and in your house, which I’m sure is certainly beautiful, would I perhaps sit at the cash register?

  You’re disgusting, she said. You’re pretending to be stupid. Don’t pretend to be stupider than you are. But why me of all people? I asked. Why the hell have you got your eye on me?

  You, she said, are intelligent and nice, and I can laugh with you. And you’ll also be able to do the other thing until you drop dead. So why not you?

  Brisa came back to the topic again and again, when she visited me, or when she phoned, and sometimes she phoned in the middle of the night from somewhere very far away, once from America, and the first thing she asked me was always if I was still alone, that is, if I was living without a girlfriend or a wife. And when I answered in the affirmative, I’m alone, she said I would have to move to Rio to live with her, she would lend me the money for the trip. It was from
Brisa that I got the addresses of the maisons de rendez-vous, through Brisa that I found my way to Madame Julie. Once, when she had unexpectedly turned up again, but just for a very short time, she said, meu amor, she said, I don’t like the thought of you sleeping around with any old cow, women are bad, be careful, they’ll either fleece you or they’ll throw themselves at you. She took out her tiny address book and wrote down one or two addresses from it. There, she said, you have addresses that you won’t regret. Say that I sent you, they’re admittedly a little more expensive than usual, but you’ll be in good hands this way and out of every kind of danger.

  Going to a Room; I’ve often been in such rooms, after I’ve been there I no longer know how I got there, don’t know where the room is located in the building or what street it’s on, it remains a room on an unfamiliar continent, but I remember the bed, perhaps the little basin, the scrap of a curtain that billowed in the wind, I remember the sound that I heard at the very moment I entered the room, I’m just passing through, renting the room for an hour, and the sound might have been a child’s laugh or a chirp, yes, once it was a chirp, I remember, and for some reason it made me hesitate, a chirp at this hour? I thought, not possible—and went to the window, there, far below on the deserted street, I saw an old woman with a handcart, it was the ungreased, squeaking wheels that made this chirping sound and had made me think for a moment that I heard birds chirping, it was a room to which chirping wheels belonged, and the wheels belonged to a handcart that just happened to be pulled across the godforsaken street at that hour by an old woman. A room, and I’m in this room, as is the woman I’ve brought here, who is perhaps just then stroking her hair out of her face or tossing it back over her shoulder, so that it looks like a wave of hair, or I think: Hair like a wave, wave of hair; or she says, come and sit down, sit next to me, she says and gestures toward the bed, gestures at the place beside her on the bed, and I’m standing in this room that is small, actually much too small for two people who don’t know each other, I light a cigarette, or I take my coat off, and maybe I do sit down on this bed that gives a little beneath me, I feel the hardness or the softness of the mattress as I let myself down on it.

  What’s your name, I might say, and tell her my name, and she might say, you’re not from here or are you passing through, she says something like that and I listen to the sound of her voice, I listen to whether her voice says something or betrays something or communicates something to me, I tune in to my inner self, I listen to the timbre of her voice, which arouses something in me, something I enjoy, a memory, an idea. And later, when Ada takes off her clothes, when we take off our clothes, take off these disguises and cast them aside, I drink in the sight of her thighs, her thighs curving out of her buttocks seem colossal to me, even in such a young person, I adore this sight, it can take my breath away, I don’t know why, and her breasts—but that’s going much too fast, I can’t reconcile the now-distant sight of this beautifully dressed stranger, this stranger who was made up, made to billow out, was girdled in, wearing a skirt and high heels, with the image of this naked woman, that’s going too fast, already the distant sight is lost, forgotten, already we’re standing flat on our bare feet in this room, where we go to the little basin to wash ourselves, and the way hair falls over the naked back or over the round shoulders of a naked woman looks entirely different from the way hair nestles over a coat or a fur collar, now we are naked, we sit down, lie down on this bed in the room, we touch each other, now I know her voice, know this hint of huskiness or the rolling throatiness that belongs to this voice, and her thighs grow colossal under my groping fingers, it’s like your tongue when you have a fever, it’s a swelling up that becomes overpowering, the room and my ability to take it in are much too limited for the swelling of her limbs, her thighs, her buttocks, and when I penetrate into these thighs, when I burrow my way in and am inside and move in this interior that is now only tangibly warm and moist, and while doing so I follow her curves with my hands, and perhaps just now catch one more, last impression of her lips, these lips that are curved this way or that, before her mouth is sealed by mine and only our tongues are still there, and everything engulfs me, engulfs us in this feeling, this feeling of pleasure that increases till we go wild, the two naked people, held in an embrace, struggle as one, their bodies intertwined, and small sighs of desire, gasps of breath come from this stranger’s throat, and I break out in a sweat that mixes with the sweat of this Ada in our excitement, and all that takes place in this room, and now our senses vanish, and with the vanishing of our senses the last fragments of foreignness float away in a single sound from the throat, or a scream, there’s long since been no place anymore for shame or restraint on our part, we don’t know one another but are now more ardently alloyed than anyone, because what is exchanged here, what is created in this moment?

  And later, with or without cigarettes between their fingers, she can stroke the hair from his forehead, he can stroke the hair from her forehead, with the tenderness of people who have been close friends since the beginning of time. The room remains a room rented by the hour, with this or that bed or basin and scrap of curtain, but now there’s a breath or a note, a tint in it, something like a reflection of them that accompanies them in thought as a sort of mood when she, dressed again, her make-up applied again, is all done up and the two of them, no longer standing flat on the floor in their naked feet, but rather in shoes, leave the room and go down the stairs and separate on the street. Ada, ciao Ada, I say, or he says, but that didn’t happen in Paris, that was somewhere else or everywhere, I’m starting to talk about the feeling of reserve between people and about this precipitous removal of that reserve, of that plunge into this other thing. In my memory, in my thoughts, the room is pink or pinkish-red, and I think it was in Rome and some time ago.

  I no longer know when it began, this absolute craving, this running after women, this obsession, and sometimes I was so obsessed that it seemed to me as if I were intimately acquainted with every individual body part of every woman. And I’m running around with people who are entirely naked, I’m carried along with crowds of people as I drift through the long corridors of the Metro, through the streets, and I can hardly keep myself under control, it’s a feeling of happiness, of profound understanding. I can hardly keep myself under control, I say, yes, can hardly keep myself from grabbing at passersby, from reaching out and touching all the rear ends that are waving at me, winking at me though the folds of their jeans, why on earth do we have these preambles, these proprieties, these formalities, come, let’s lie down together, I think, or, anyway, the thought crosses my mind as I walk along. And in social settings, when I’m in this state of mind, I would like to say, instead of “pleased to meet you, my name is so and so, I’m this and that, it’s a pleasure, nice evening, isn’t it,” I would like to say “come, let’s take our clothes off, come now, no names.” This conversation with our hands on the other person’s body, this and the other afterward, this plunge head over heels from being reserved into being intertwined, as if this were the only possible way of making oneself understood, the only language on earth, as simple as breaking bread. A feeling of physical understanding, a feeling of happiness, as if I had the magic wand and I feel this swelling and through the swelling this lust for living, this lust to make everything come alive, as if I could awaken everything to life, it’s a feeling I also get when I’m writing, when I finally reach the point where I’m not writing, where it’s writing itself, an exuberance.

  I don’t know when that began, don’t know if it had something to do with my mother or with my father, but it definitely did have something to do with the fact that they were unapproachable, I felt excluded, solitary, obstinate and lonely, afraid of dying, of death.

  Of going numb, I was afraid of that all too often when I was first here in Paris, then I had no desire at all to leave the apartment. I didn’t want to go out because I expected myself to work, but the concept of work became increasingly empty, until at last ju
st the word sufficed to set off a panic attack. Work would have meant writing, but what should I write in my boxroom, in this state of emergency. I was cut off from everything, and when I had taken myself out for my morning walk and was back again, staring at the old dove man, I found that I was motionless, buried alive, stiff as a corpse. I had become a boarder, my boarding house was this huge city that no longer enticed or inspired me as it had before, it seemed to me like one of those magnificent, exotic, carnivorous plants that are so fascinating in their fully unfolded splendor, but if you touch them, they roll themselves up and contract to a tiny, unspectacular lump—that’s exactly how the city withdrew from me into something untouchable. Since I was starting to lose the habit of daily work, and no longer participated in the working life of the many countless people around me, I had lost all interest in roaming around, I sat in the trap of my boxroom and started listening to my own panic. For a long time, I didn’t ask myself if I was unhappy, I just noticed that something wasn’t right. I caught myself avoiding my desk, pretending to tidy up the apartment, and spending inordinate lengths of time in the kitchen. Or I went out after all, hurriedly, somewhere, I quickly had to set myself a goal, unless I already had a pretext, such as when I had promised a painter I would have a look at his exhibition, and in order to do so I had to locate Rue de Lille, which branches off Rue des Saint-Pères near the Seine. Afterward, I took the bus to Gare de L’Est and then carried on home on the Metro, but I didn’t have anything to eat at home, so I decided to go to the Greek restaurant behind my building on Rue Marcadet. I was the only patron when I arrived, the only person in this charmingly arranged empty room that looked downright inviting with its neatly-set tables and the many individually burning candles on the red tablecloths, the candles were set in bottles that had cataracts of wax around their necks, I had with me a philosopher’s manuscript that the painter had given me, it was a nit-picking analysis of his work, about the seeing or imagining of his kaleidoscopic paintings that evoked something like a science-fiction version of paradise, and the philosopher had come to the conclusion that one saw nothing, that is, objectively and with certainty one couldn’t recognize anything definite at all in these pictures, the pictures were cleverly devised traps, mousetraps for the imagination, basically just hollow spaces, or something to that effect. I had neither exactly understood his conclusion, nor did I want to, after what the painter had told me about him, I could imagine this thinker quite well, he would have depressed me, not inspired me. A confirmed bachelor between sixty and seventy, an emigrant from Prague, allegedly a blood relation of Kafka’s, he had lived in South America for a long time and was now in Southern France as a person without a home or a nationality, eking out an existence rather than living life to the full, he had no feeling at all for art, but was full of theories, said the artist, not without envy, in my mind’s eye I saw the gentleman as a sort of nuisance down there in Provence and in the Provençal artists’ circles, an argumentative gentleman, heaven knows, I said under my breath. I had just this one manuscript with me, nothing else to read while I waited for my meal in the candlelight that illuminated the many waiting tables, causing them to shimmer. The philosopher lived in a rented apartment in a tiny Provençal nest, he was contemplating writing all sorts of books; and so I had another go at the nit-picking manuscript, and there was Greek folk music playing, a zither recording, the theme from Zorba perhaps, it’s played in all Greek restaurants, and the rather chubby owner with his hissing, lisping French busied himself at the bar, another customer was sitting there now, chatting with the owner’s wife, a corpulent younger woman with glasses, a hard worker who could, when necessary, be surprisingly friendly, a French woman, and there was yet another customer who kept talking on the phone at the end of the counter near the exit, and I drank the retsina and ate the excellent dishes that the owner served up with visible pride, which is why he didn’t allow himself to appear amiable, and in between I leafed through the indigestible philosophizing by the Provençal from Prague, then a large group of pretty girls came in with their friends, boyfriends, companions, the restaurant owner led them to a long table and seated them there; I found one of them extraordinarily appealing, she looked me boldly in the eye, once when they were coming in and again when she went past me on her way to the toilet, now I felt even more morose, I asked myself what the owner must be thinking of me. I went out stiffly, I’m moving now in a stiff and contorted manner, I thought, and I trudged back along deserted Rue Marcadet with its partially torn-up sidewalk, in this condition it seemed to be in even worse disrepair than before. I took care to get past Said’s unseen, and at home I lay on the sofa because a late movie was about to begin, good timing, I thought, but then it turned out to be Pasolini’s Teorema, which I’d already seen and didn’t want to see again, not now, so I turned off the television and tried to read myself to sleep.