by Nizon, Paul.
When I first went to Paris, the train got in at midnight or later, and my aunt met me at Gare de l’Est. We took a taxi to Pigalle and then walked the short distance to her building. I didn’t know what nightlife was, I had never experienced it, now I was overwhelmed, devoured by nightlife. The streets shimmered in the reflections of the most diverse lighting, such as the colored neon signs, the neon lettering and decorative lights of all the bars and night spots, restaurants and shops, the doors of the bars opened and shut like pumps, emitting torrents of music, the boom of loudspeakers, quarrelling, talking, and people. Outside the bars, half-undressed girls, hostesses, prostitutes twitched and turned to the beat of all kinds of music, and walking past all of that were masses of people, lechers, pleasure-seekers; there were hookers and striptease-dancers slipping past who would cross the street quickly or disappear with a guy into the entranceway of a sleazy hotel, and then there were the doormen too. The night had been turned into a sparkling, humming, booming, into a madly warming and exciting nightlife, into a Bengalese Orcus, no expense had been spared, everything could be had here, all kinds of food and drink, flowers and drugs, revolvers, people, it was a night market, a pleasure market, a human market, the craving for pleasure blazed out of every bar door, it twitched in the twitching movements of the prostitutes in the doorways and was disreputably silent in the made-up faces of the whores leaning outside the hotel entranceways, in their inviting expressions and hips, I went along beside my petite aunt through this midnight funfair, in a wave of perfume and joie de vivre, past restaurants, through whose brightly-lit windows one saw the boisterous patrons slurping oysters and devouring sauerkraut, I pushed my way through this surging crowd, the stream of strolling people was so dense that I thought I could walk or push my way through on their heads, I was dazed and ecstatic and at the same time my sexual desire was aroused a thousandfold.
When I strolled along Boulevard de Rochechouart with my aunt in the coming days, I saw night become day and then night again. We sat on the patio of a café as if alongside the stream of life, we sat on the shore, on a shore that stretched for kilometers in fantastic animation, door to door, bar to bar, light to light, and we looked at this incessant human procession that pushed past us, a procession of nighttime strollers greedy for life, greedy for experience, with many tourists among them, all of them had this hungry, enraptured look, they walked as if in a trance, but also like convicts, like people chained together, they were at the mercy of the nightly miracle, the confusing range of special offers, they walked along with the slow, laborious movements of the mystified, they couldn’t stand still at all, they pushed themselves along and were pushed by others, pushed past our glances, flooded by all these stimuli, the stimuli of lights, temptations, the stimuli of women, the temptations to sin, they went past the inexhaustible attractions, they swam, they went under, they flowed past as if underwater. And between them the street vendors, some with carpets over their shoulders, Arabs and Afro-French, others with indecent cards that they showed secretively, touts, pimps, pushers, flower girls, graphic artists who promised to finish a portrait or a silhouette in no time, white-slave traders, everything, and again the procession of these armies of slaves, captives, blinded, hypnotized. And everything dipped in the lights and in the provocative cacophony of the music streaming forth from a thousand doors.
When I took the dog out the next day, I didn’t recognize the streets, they seemed tired to me, like a face without make-up, ravaged, gray, but they soon recovered, and by late morning I found the whores again at their street corners and outside the hotels. If a man passed by, they nodded to him or mimed an invitation some other way, they rang all the changes on “seductive,” on “attractive,” all kinds of women there in the midst of the daily bustle, they drew attention to themselves by standing there, like sentries, even before one had really seen them, I caught my breath whenever I passed close to them. I thought, life here never stops, a mysterious promise seemed to wave at me from all the walls and doorways, the city seemed full to the brim with an inexhaustible supply of temptation, and for me the greatest temptation of all, the most exciting, somehow the most human, the most sensible, were the girls who lined the streets and entranceways day and night, who assumed their posts, these gatekeepers, these women who bring about an armistice through sex, hetaeras, nixies, sirens, it was calming and very pleasant to know that this table would always be set in Paris, so many women ready to receive you, so many gateways into the secret, into adventure, into temptation, no: into life! It was as if one could be continually brought into the world anew by women, or else thrown into the ocean, thrown out. Since I had discovered this promise of the city, I vowed and hoped that I would try all gateways, I would attempt to live forever.
“Many men might have killed themselves because of their desire for women if there weren’t any prostitutes. Whores helped me after my first separation. I loved my wife immeasurably. She was so pretty that I couldn’t sleep peacefully at night when I thought of being without her. The only thing that helped was another woman. You can’t just go out and find a decent woman who will spend the night with you. You find whores, beautiful, wonderfully beautiful young girls. It costs you a few hundred dollars, they stay four or five days and help you get over the sickness. When you have another woman, you realize that you won’t die. Such a whore has an important job. How many men are saved by whores. Whores were sent to Jesus . . .” and so on, said Muhammad Ali alias Cassius Clay in an interview (well, I’m paraphrasing from a translation of an interview that he presumably gave, at some point . . .).
I set aside this newspaper clipping once upon a time, and now I’ve come across it in my boxroom. When you have another woman, you realize that you won’t die, says Ali, and I think the same way he does—to die, wither, pass away, take your own life, those are my words, it’s exactly the same way for me, especially since I’ve been so godforsaken and alone here in Paris.
By the way, my dear friend Beat, on one of his recent visits, expressed the opinion that I needed to look for or take or get myself a girlfriend. As if one could just go out and do that. He said: you need a girlfriend, my dear fellow, you’re in need of constant female companionship, of someone who waits for you, someone with whom you can share your feelings, your expectations for a pleasant evening, and with whom you can satisfy your desire to be a stallion; you need more than the occasional visit to these maisons de rendez-vous, you need a relationship.
But I can’t even begin to think of that, let alone wish for it, there’s simply no available space in me, the space in question is already taken, doubly taken. Really, Beat, I say, you ought to know that. You must know how much damage ending a marriage can cause. And that’s why I’ve come here, because my marriage broke up. Of course, there was this apartment of my aunt’s, this means of escape, but it’s a bachelor pad, a place of refuge, a little place where I can lick my wounds, and I still feel really wounded, as you know, I say to Beat.
Now you’re exaggerating, he says, you’re the one who destroyed your marriage, which everyone considered an enviable, indeed warm and successful marriage, you’re the one who wanted to get out of it. You fell head over heels in love with this other girl who made you crazy, but didn’t accept you, if I understand correctly, says Beat, are you actually a masochist by profession? You can forget the girl, if she doesn’t come here of her own accord, and soon, just forget her, he says, and forget your marriage too, forget them both. Find yourself a girlfriend, she can be a barmaid or, even better, a cashier in a department store, go into the department stores and keep a lookout for a pretty cashier, for one who doesn’t want to get married right away, for a “sensuous” one who’d like to get some experience first before she starts thinking of having children, a pretty, cheeky cashier, one who’s bored at the checkout and in her dreary attic room and with the few egoistic guys she’s met until now, who all go to the same sort of bars and have the same sort of buddies, a girl you can spoil a little and train to spoil you, that sort
of girl, says Beat.
Now I think disasters. Here in my boxroom, I think of the many disasters, I think of my wife’s face petrified with pain, it suddenly changed into this cold, arrogant mask with a pointed chin, yes, her beloved face solidified into this mask after I had spoken with her about that other amorous encounter, and in that split second it must have become clear to her that everything that had joined us together and sustained us for so long had been destroyed forever. Now she has this arrogant face that also seems somehow simpleminded, a face has to look simpleminded to show contempt, the face of a Foolish Virgin, I thought, after the long silence that followed my confession, so that I thought I could hear all the sounds of the water and heating pipes, and neither one of us moved in that pipe-silence. After that, we let ourselves be washed away by our tears. No, I don’t like to think of the ensuing arguments, the nightly discussions, in which each of us was the other’s orderly and good Samaritan, plying ourselves with alcohol. We were swimming in alcohol, we kept reaching for the bottles of wine, we went out to buy more at all hours of the day and night, we always sat together at this negotiation table, faced with our broken marriage, emptying the bottles and filling the ashtrays.
But the worst disasters are of another kind. They’re turns of speech that suddenly besiege me, phrases from our private language, the argot that developed between us after all that time, and when I think them or whisper them here, it sounds like blasphemy. Those phrases are the most painful memories, and I’m waiting for them to be extinguished from my mind. What should I do now with this language for two that has become superfluous, that now falls into a void? The orphaned words, the outcast, betrayed language that used to mean home, where should I send it?
You’ll forget it, says Beat, after all, you can’t have everything, he says. I know he’s just saying that to have something to say and to move the conversation along, at least away from this sore point.
Disasters, I think. Disasters—an old word, a beautiful word. But disasters also come from others, I’m caught between two fires, Beat, between the devil and the deep blue sea, I add—I picked up that turn of phrase recently in a bar, of course in French. Entre deux feux is what I heard there, people were talking about a love affair, a love triangle.
I can’t forget the Other Woman, I say to Beat. I’d like to, but I can’t. It’s as if I’m in a waiting room here, I can’t believe that something that was so intense that it cost me my marriage was merely a product of my imagination. I’ve been poisoned by this other love, I say, I’m suffering from love poisoning, Beat, I’m waiting.
There are evenings I spend rearranging the apartment, taking care of correspondence, washing the dishes, just to keep myself away from the telephone. I want to prevent myself from dialing that transatlantic number whose ringing or beeping would bring her, that is, this other voice onto the line, and with her voice would come her face, the other face that’s poisoned me, but I don’t do it, I wrestle with myself not to do it, and why? Because I’m afraid. This voice would then come to me through the telephone line across the great ocean and would be here with me in my boxroom, would be alive here and would be a mouth, a face, and I’m afraid a word or even just an intonation, a timbre in this voice, could injure me, worse: disown me. And leave me without hope here in this waiting room. Women, my God, women—! says Beat. You’re having a midlife crisis, throw yourself into your writing. How should I write in my current state of mind, I say to Beat. I’m being scorched by these two damned fires, I’m not free, I’m blinded. If only I had my ticket, my incentive, my marching orders.
There’s your material: Between the devil and the deep blue sea. Write yourself free, he says.
Even better, call it My Year of Love. But I can’t see my way through. After all, I’m just the innkeeper of my life, and what does an innkeeper know about what goes on in his inn? What I mean by marching orders, by incentive, is that I haven’t yet reached the state in which I’ll have had enough of it. If only I were at the point where I could move the carriage of my typewriter and take it for walks and send everything away in columns and caravans of words! But in order to do so, I need my ticket. I’m in this waiting room, I’m waiting.
If Beat knew how long it takes before the things kept in the hump of my traveling camel have been sufficiently shaken and fermented, that is, well enough digested so that finally, years later, surfacing as vivid subject matter, as a contemplation—or memory?—and can be put into images or coughed up . . . If you knew, I say to Beat. I’m still just the innkeeper, do you understand? I can’t see my way through, I’m blind, I can’t tap beer anywhere. I have to wait.
That’s all Greek to me. You’re a philanderer. Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s grab a bite to eat, says Beat.
Just now the old dove man has started making a fuss again. Without his old wife he’d have nothing to make a fuss about: that’s one of those love-hate relationships, says Beat. They never go out of business.
What grounds do I have to be so opposed to the dove man, what can I have against him, I wonder, after all, over time he’s become a real point of reference. We’ve never yet actually approached each other, never yet had verbal contact, although he’s recently started yelling to one of the other tenants who lives on the floor above me, they converse from window to window. The whole thing started with my fellow tenant, a tiny old man who nevertheless seems quite tenacious, a new renter, I meet him in the stairwell, where the tenants generally neither greet nor speak to each other, they go silently past each other, that is, they pause on the wider landings and wait to let whoever is climbing or descending the stairs go past them, as if to avoid a collision, as if there were too little room on the stairs for two people to get past each other, but it’s not that, it’s a sort of fear of contact, the desire to keep one’s distance, it’s mistrust. Well, the new man, a short fellow who seems sinewy and tough, who rather resembles the bicycle dealer on our street, recently let me go past him with the following observation: just run on up, I get out of breath climbing the stairs, one just isn’t the same person one used to be, and other such sayings, but then, when I was already several steps above him, I heard the remark: it’s just not easy to find one’s way when one’s lost one’s mother. I thought I hadn’t heard him correctly, because the new tenant must have been long since past retirement age, but the concierge, that woman who, when she isn’t drunk, is always grumpy, always smoking, this rather curt, unfeeling person, said to me en passant with a hint of sympathy, first the new tenant lost his wife, then he moved in with his mother, who was as old as the hills—back to his mother’s breast when he was already a pensioner!—and when she died shortly afterward he took an apartment here. Sometimes I see him looking out his kitchen window onto the front courtyard with a face that clearly shows he’s been crying, he cries, the old man, he cries because he’s so lonely.
But now he’s hit it off with the old dove man, and in the afternoons I see and hear the two of them talking with each other, it’s mainly boasting bellowed from window to window, but since then I also know why my old dove man does nothing but sit around, he seems to be really sick, he has leg problems, even if he can still stand up and go out now and then, he must experience, is experiencing a lot of pain nonetheless. As far as their illnesses and afflictions are concerned, they’ve shouted everything to each other in minute detail, including the remedies they take for them, then they’ve gone on to talk about everything else under the sun, I still have to verify some of it. It’s strange to see how my old dove man behaves when he’s sitting sideways like that at his wide-open window, conferring with his new chum and simultaneously watching the one dove that’s always eating to make sure she has nothing against this change in their routine. Sometimes he looks at the bird with an almost adoring grimace, then again with a conspiratorial grin, usually though with a pure exvoto face, while the other man is shouting across at him; perhaps he regrets the fact that his dove life, his exclusive focus on that life-form, has now been devalued by this d
aily talk.
I think: other people have a dog or a cat or a canary, he has this favorite dove that he spoils and would like to protect from the other greedy doves, that’s his right, he’s a pensioner and already over seventy, as I now know, so why do I take such exception to him? In any case, the dove man has seemed much more human to me of late, which certainly has something to do with his conversations with the new tenant. They started off with their afflictions, then went on to compare their present state with the way they used to be, when they were still young men, back then they often stayed up all night, just wasting time, of course they worked hard too, and were certainly different from these wimps today, these eunuchs, but so what, they say, it’s all the same to them now, soon they’ll croak, they’re already sick.
I get the impression that the dove man’s wife doesn’t like to see their developing friendship. Several times now she’s cut short one of these afternoon conversations from window to window across the courtyard by picking a fight with her husband, going so far as to shut the window.
They’re held together by hatred, said Beat. Maybe he just said it without thinking very much about it, but I think this apparent hatred, this nagging, could on the contrary be a rather shameful expression of love, in fact I often think, once I’ve formed an impression, especially about relationships, that the opposite of whatever conclusion I’ve come to could just as well be true. I don’t know where it comes from, I’m almost pathologically cautious about judgments that have become so-called certainties, not only is something in me constantly weighing in on the opposite side of whatever I’ve assumed, but also I’m always prepared to discover the most terrible things imaginable, the most terrible revelations.
