The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Sad odd-jobs man that he was, after the suave aesthetes, and pathetic counterpart of a form that seems to me to illustrate what is most humanly moving about the art of the theater—an art in which everything receives a response there and then, either ovations or catcalls immediately sanctioning merit or demerit, an art that comes into being through living and active people capable of great moments that will be evoked later as historic dates—my cousin offered me an image of my literary ambitions as unpleasant as though it had been reflected back at me by a distorting mirror (one of those that make people laugh and that in Shanghai I heard referred to, in English, as “ha ha mirrors” by the interpreters who were escorting us, my companions and me, in our visit to the Ta Si Kia or “Great World,” a building with Piranesian stairways and terraces, with attractions on the ground floor and upper stories, each including several theaters in which the most different things were being performed simultaneously). I have never asked to have myself published and have undertaken nothing to win myself a public, but that does not prove that, lacking any vanity, I am indifferent to the effect I may produce: an enthusiast of the theater, I have, like an actor, my role that I want to play, paying particular attention only to playing a role that resembles me and does not oblige me, afterward, to disavow it. Histrion of letters, alternating with a feminine figure who was certainly conventional and not without vulgarity but was at least that of a truly artistic nature, my cousin reminded me, on the one hand, of that thing which a writer ought to avoid like the plague, but which the reading of press clippings and the windfall of a literary prize had perhaps given me a taste for: that excessive flattery for which actors are so avid (which is consistent with their way of acting in direct contact with a crowd confronted in a sort of close combat), that extreme praise which in the theater forms part of the liturgy but that professionals in the other arts cannot drink in without running the risk of losing their way, those who work in the silence of their rooms or studios and for whom the audience—dispersed in time as in space—is, as a rule, simply the person to whom the artist is sending a message from afar, without seeing or hearing him. Linked to me by certain shared episodes of our past, my cousin, on the other hand, took me back to the portion of my childhood which had been ornamented with this woman, so much admired, whose pure and direct singing had obscurely shown me the half-intoxicated, half-desolate tone of the message I would one day believe I was obliged to deliver. But wasn’t the state of physical and mental upheaval in which I found myself favorable to all sorts of regressions, and was it really to that prehistoric phase of my existence, to the exclusion of all other beginnings, that I was inclined to go back when those rumors so strangely located themselves to the right of my bed, the rumors concerning this outrageous fellow, my cousin metamorphosed into an aspiring dramaturge?

  I would like to go to Taormina . . . The speaker is a young girl with dark hair, a little plump but with a lively, delicate face. She is wearing (I think) a black dress and is standing next to me, on the balcony of the old middle-class apartment where we have just had lunch. This is taking place in the early nineteen twenties, and probably in the summer, since, having drunk our coffee, we have moved from the closed space of the dining room or living room to this narrow rectangle almost in the open air, to chat and enjoy the spectacle of the street. Our host is my cousin Loulou, who, for quite a long time now, has ceased to be the bachelor I later so absurdly adopted as the central figure of one of my very recent obsessions as hospital patient. His wife is an excellent person, older, and, especially, much taller and stronger than he, which accentuates that appearance of his that I have always observed in him, as a small young man whose smiling but slightly retiring ways (due in part to the screen of the pince-nez required by his extreme myopia), may be the effect as much of a good education as of a natural shyness. Through ramifications of maternal cousinhoods and marriages which, even at the time, I would not have been able to disentangle, the girl who was expressing to me her desire for Greek ruins and sun belonged—very distantly—to the circle of my relations. When he died, her father had left her, along with her two sisters and her mother, harder pressed, by far, than they had been when he was managing his enamel factory in the Paris region. Was it for this reason (I have since asked myself) that the pair of good souls that my cousin and his companion were had had the idea of this luncheon? Three daughters to marry off is a burden for a widow no longer of an age to “start her life over,” and it was doing her a kindness to arrange, for at least one of the three, a meeting from which might arise a feeling of fondness capable of taking, afterward, a turn toward marriage. I was far from representing a rich match, but they knew me, and they must have, at the very least, thought me a suitable boy. Wouldn’t it have been sensible and friendly to hope for a conjunction between that girl with “artistic” tastes who dreamed of Sicily (a country not so vulgarized at that time) and myself, of whom none of my friends or family was ignorant of the fact that I dreamed about modern art and poetry?

  Whether we were invited solely for the joy of bringing us together or for a little more than that, the fact is that there was no sequel to this lunch. Even though I was sensitive to her attractions, I did not try to see the girl I had been talking to again, and there was no way I could know, afterward, whether our several hours of concord signified that a deeper fellow feeling was possible between us. Our hosts, in truth, were familiar with my life only in its most external features, and their calculations—if they really had made any—rested on a poor foundation: from an outing during which the two of us leaned tenderly against the railing of one of the sightseeing boats that went up and down the Seine at that time, like omnibuses ricocheting from one landing stage to the next, was born, without there being any need of the Sicilian sky, an idyll that hardly led us beyond the limits where a passionate friendship stops, but took hold of me body and soul at the moment when her admission concerning Taormina might have incited me to attempt to see that the woman who was formulating it actually went there with me. What was in her body and soul? I would certainly be flattering myself as to my own powers to think that that conversation, if it hadn’t been for the other bond that inhibited me, might have resulted in a reciprocal commitment! At a distance of forty years, or almost, and when I could be the father of the woman I am talking about, it is easy for me to say: “It was entirely up to me . . .” Everything levels out, at such a great distance, and that encounter appears, in memory, like one of those happy dreams in which love forms of its own accord and without the slightest obstacle, while the promise it held out remains unaltered, since one never went so far as to try one’s chances.

  As I see her again, now, the girl with whom I had felt in such immediate sympathy (justified neither by the vague family connection of which I have spoken nor by the fact, uncertain anyway, that I had seen her with her sisters once or twice when we were very small), this girl who had charmed me by the very thing that I lacked, the great ardor for living which was perceptible through her gestures and her words, she is severely dressed in black, on that balcony overhanging, in the Bastille neighborhood, the tranquil boulevard which the name of the dramaturge Beaumarchais designates without qualifying, as is the case for most of the names attributed to the streets of Paris. Did a recent bereavement oblige her to wear that gloomy color or is it I, recalling her as a half orphan, who have clothed her after the fact in the proper dress for the part? Even though I know from experience what mutations the stuff of memories, rarely indifferent, may undergo, I do not think my memory is at fault here, for I’m sure that in my state of mind at the time, this girl would have seemed less fetching to me without that contrast between the relish she obviously had for life and the mourning that seemed indicated by the severity of her attire. But I’m sure, also, that it was not the loss of her father that caused her thus to be dressed in mourning, and that she owed to a more recent misfortune the gloomy envelope in which (I now believe) she appeared somewhat of the same substance as those girls or women of certain po
or villages in Mediterranean countries, so often consigned to black because of accumulated deaths, and whose sunny skin surprises us, who are accustomed to associate mourning with pallor. Rather than turning toward the manufacturer, whose manner at once crude and formal I vaguely recollect, it is in the direction of his widow—more gracious—that I should look in order to find the probable addressee of the piece of darkness in which, that day, their daughter was wrapped: the shade honored by this garment had to be, in fact, that of one of her maternal grandparents, both of whom were people of the theater who had won renown in the comic opera and of whom, at the time of our meeting, the survivor had just (I believe) disappeared in his turn into an inferno in no way Offenbachian.

  No doubt I have spoken, reclothing in my own way some romantic commonplaces, of my predilection for the countries of the North: the dignity of the cold, the places and the people of too harsh a grain for the postcard effect, a city like Liverpool attractive to the extent that its name puts winter [l’hiver] in our bones, the adventure that smoulders deep inside little bars with softened lights in ports fragrant with tar. With my forbidding skies I was far away, certainly, from her azure, but we shared the same desire to travel. What figure could I have cut in her eyes? I don’t know. As for me, I attributed to her all the more piquancy because she was the granddaughter of a comic-opera star whose charm and talent I had heard praised many times. The niece also (through her mother) of a well-known actor, she was without a doubt a child brought up on the boards . . . Wasn’t there a little coquetry mingled with her quick-witted ways, as though, quite simply, she had decided to play in daily life a role in keeping with the most attractive of what was offered by the branches of her genealogy? This sort of choice, however, can hardly be absolutely premeditated, and I have, after all, no reason to suspect this girl of artificiality considering that her so very pleasantly spontaneous manner had permitted this dialogue in which, when one person said “south,” the other, without becoming aloof, could answer “north.”

  I have known for a little while now that that amiable grandmother (to whom, I would like to think, the mourning of my table companion was dedicated) had created, among other light works, Les Cloches de Corneville, an operetta which I cannot think of without mixing in, with the memory of its music, more than three-quarters extinguished, a confused noise of an alarm, having learned at the time of my first stay in Martinique that at the moment of the disastrous eruption of Mount Peleus it was being performed at the theater of Saint-Pierre, a town that in the blink of an eye was to be changed by the catastrophe into a heap of ashes. Even before knowing that (her connection with those Cloches [bells] that, one evening, would awaken tragic echoes), I projected onto the figure of the comic-opera star—a figure completely imagined, since all I knew of her were a few poor photographs—a rather boisterous light, which came straight from a lavish production in which she was also the first to perform: Les Quatre Cents Coups du Diable, put on at the Châtelet several years before the other war and the text of which I read, when I was very young, in an illustrated periodical that must have been called Mon Beau Livre.

  I recall it very clearly, the play included a first scene or prologue situated—as the text indicated—“on the banks of the Styx.” A rather small reproduction showed, in the center of a rocky setting, the famous comic-opera star dressed up as Satan: in clinging tights, a mephistophelian headdress, and a large coat which, hanging down from her two outstretched arms, gave her something like two vast wings. Next, the devil abandoning its infernal attributes, the star appeared as a man, dressed notably in an elegant modern suit in order to sing (perhaps among the winter residents and the gamblers of Monte Carlo) couplets that I have entirely forgotten, except that the booklet specified that they were sung to the tune of Big Brass Band, which—I now assume—must have been a cakewalk or ragtime. There was, close to the beginning, a tableau called “Les Valentins et Valentines,” a pretext for a balletic interlude; then another entitled “Alcofribas’s laboratory,” in which, by means of mechanical contrivances or pure theater, one witnessed various wonders; finally, shortly before the finale, a military scene with fusillade and explosion that took place in “the fortress of the Carpathians.” Is it true? Is it false? According to the illustrations and the text itself, I remember soldiers bundled up in large dark greatcoats (and these were, perhaps, children in disguise), a magician in an ample robe and great white beard, young men offering girls Valentine’s Day bouquets, a grotto indicated only by the simulacra of rough surfaces that framed the stage, a wild lair in which the spectator was supposed to find himself (like its diabolical inhabitants) and whose entrance gaped on the open air evoked by the backdrop.

  However confused my memory of this fairy play may prove to be, in the end—a play that I no doubt read many times but scarcely a few scenes of which had been shown me by the detour of photography—still, it made a strong enough impression on me so that certain details (accurate or distorted) are more vivid in me than some realities that I could describe with less of a margin of approximation. It goes without saying that I was thinking of other things beside reconstructing all this, while, on my cousin’s balcony, I chatted with the granddaughter of the deceased actress whom, in small format and without color or depth, I had seen playing the part of Satan. But, almost certainly, I was unconsciously adding, to the granddaughter’s natural vivacity, a speck of devilishness taken from the grandmother and that the phrase “banks of the Styx” hovered as a sort of distant resonance deep within my ear when she said “Taormina.” Was it the sparkle that enlivened her features as she spoke of that place? The texture of a name that seemed to have been made, like the names “Oloossone” and “Camyre,” for a play in Alexandrine verses celebrating the ancient fasti? The blossoming—as I listened to it—of a mirage of a happy place in contrast to the harsh tenor of my own nordic mirage? There is no need (it may appear) to seek elsewhere for the reason why, of all our remarks, the one that suddenly unfurled the whiteness of Taormina is the only one that I have retained. Biased as I was against the Mediterranean with its too facile enchantments, it nevertheless seems to me that whether indifferent or disgusted rather than attracted, I would have—on this point also—been inclined to forget, if everything about this pleasant girl had not given added color to her remark, in which whimsically tinted magic-lantern glimmers interfered with the pure classical light in which the Sicilian village is bathed.

  On the boulevard Beaumarchais, at the time of this luncheon, I did not foresee that one day—upon my return from a voyage that, almost without moving from home, I made “to the banks of the Styx”—a curious substitute for my cousin would come daily to visit me. At the time, this series of visits seemed to me an absurd fantasy connected to my deficient state, nothing more (apart from the repetition) than those dreams brought on by fever whose extreme oddness distinguishes them from most other dreams, as though the oneiric world itself were deformed in them as much as the real world is in an ordinary dream. I very soon recognized that this invention had as its basis a myth of the theater, as old as all the distance that separates me from my childhood. But I discovered its true root only after examining all that, in my cousin as he is defined by our places on the family chessboard and the few vivid details offered me by the history of our relations, could predestine him personally to the mandate in the name of which he had intervened with so much insistence.

  It was a truly strange excursion that I had imagined, when I thought that after my nocturnal jump to Cannes I had found myself in a Brussels hospital, as though the devil of the Monacan tableau of Les Quatre Cents Coups had put into the same bag the shores of the Riviera of which the song speaks and the banks of the Senne mocked by Baudelaire. Such was the disorder that reigned in me as to the cardinal points and as to my own cartography that one may say I had, literally, lost my compass [French idiom meaning “gone mad”]: in place of the South of France, which appeared as the goal of a sort of pilgrimage or pardon, was substituted the North, and the town
in which lives the artist whom I have admired above all others since I became an adult mutated into the one inhabited by the great artiste of my childhood. After the sort of mortal negation to which my troubles had driven me—an act of which I could only be ashamed in the presence of the indefectible pioneer known as Picasso—a recoil occurred and caused me to retreat into the naïve period in which neither love nor art posed any serious problem for me since the first, at that time, was hardly more than a pretty word and the second, still quite exterior, like a chandelier or mantelpiece ornament, was embodied in a moving and beautiful person whose kindness tempered her too great majesty. A return to my origins, soon to be recaptured in the form of my cousin, whose own duty would be to bring me back—by ways equally indirect—to two distinct levels of time and not to my childhood alone.

  Through my mother, through my Aunt Claire, and, more subtly, through the comic-opera star whose shadow floats over that girl to whom I suspect him and his wife of having thought of marrying me, my cousin touched a world that fascinated me, and he had full plenary right of entree into the half-sleep of my hospital night since (symbolically) they are intertwined, the theater and he, in shining thin cords which, above and beyond old age and disenchantment, attach me to two crucial phases of my life: the childish period of the first great admirations; the moment when, the die not yet cast, the beginner seeks his way at the same time as, privately, he prepares to bet on one of the four queens. Could I confess to myself that those innocent preambles to what, afterward, would become so terribly muddled on the level of art as on that of love had become for me a twofold object of nostalgia? If I secretly aspired to draw close to it, I had within my reach an ideal intermediary in the person of my cousin, disguised as much as was required by the clandestine nature of his mission, but clothed in pieces of tawdry finery that revealed the nature of that mission at the same time as they concealed it. Promoted to a helot drunk on dramaturgy—as though at the moment when art offered me a last hope, I had had, in order to set off again on another foot, to heap with scorn the artist that for so long I had dreamed of being—my cousin showed me plainly what I should never cease to guard myself against, and, in sibylline language, which vicinities harbored the cool springs in which I wanted to bathe myself again.