North and South, Brussels and Taormina. It was not while listening to the girl who expressed her ardent desire to visit not Sicily, but the particular spot which probably seemed to her to incarnate Sicily, that I effected my conversion, directing toward the bottom of the map those eyes which had until then been drawn toward the top, and adopting as my preferred lands those countries that were warmed tenderly or harshly by the sun. It was two or three years after this conversation, which remained the only chapter (as I have said), that I changed my plans, when for the first time I went to the Côte d’Azur where, at extremely various times and places, I spent so many hours illuminated by Picasso and where I would return fictively to make my confession, to him who had been witness not only to my life as a writer but also to my married life from its beginnings and who, seeing the thing from that angle still, could have criticized twice over my attempt at desertion. Visiting Antibes in 1925 for my summer vacation, I understood à propos of the South of France what I had only heard à propos of Taormina and I discovered, along with our agreement about the beauty of the South, a deeper understanding with the woman who, before we set off, had reported it to me and who up to now has remained my constant tablemate and interlocutrice despite the setbacks that, through my fault, our union may have encountered. Of Taormina I thought I had a distant view when—going to Egypt at the time of the fit of depression of which I have spoken—I sailed past off the coast of Sicily: it seemed to me I could distinguish several white shafts of columns, similar to what I had glimpsed, not from the bridge of a ship, but with my feet firmly planted on a balcony overlooking the boulevard Beaumarchais. At the same time, or almost, I was shown Etna, whose nature as a volcano did not differentiate it from any other mountain. When, shortly after the last war, I found myself in the frightfully touristic place dreamed of in my presence by the nice brown-haired girl, I encountered nothing which could be recognized as that succession of white columns, and I concluded from this that my imagination had been working hard at the moment when I had known that the steamship Lamartine was within sight of Taormina. During the short stay that I made there with my wife, I often went to walk or sit in the remains of the famous theater, but the most interesting image left to me by this period of pleasant idleness was that of another girl with brown hair. In the main street lined with many lace and souvenir shops the saleswomen in which did not hesitate to accost the customers, she stood at all hours of the day on the threshold of her door and smiled at us as soon as we approached, so that I fell into the habit of greeting her with a cordial buon giorno, allowing my gaze to rest on her for an instant as though there were between that stranger and myself a tacit complicity.
A Flemish woman with the pure voice and black eyebrows of Tosca, a brown-haired girl dazzled by what she had heard or read about Taormina, a shopkeeper with dark hair and a welcoming smile—if I have turned my eyes toward these images, too indistinct or too fleetingly imprinted not to be perfectly safe, it is perhaps out of a concern for avoiding the image of the woman so full of life, also raven-haired, who was able, one day, to make me cry when for a long time I had not been able to rediscover that sort of release except figuratively, when I chanced to burst into sobs in one of the increasingly rare dreams I had.
A collapse caused, at the time of our bad quarrel, by words at once harsh and foolish, whose deceptively displayed propriety marked (beyond the actual injury) all the thickness of what separated us, words in the face of which I shamefully measured my weakness, giving in because I could not bury a hope which those words proved, however, that, if fulfilled, would not correspond to my desire. Tears that sprang forth as though from a well which, in the innermost part of me, had reached the level of anguish, tenderness, despair, and irony that consists more or less of what I would like to express but that is also—very probably—unsayable. The sudden afflux of birdsongs when, fine weather having just followed the rain, my eyes were dampening from too much exultation and no longer from sorrow. The chirps that reached my sickroom and, reproducing those that had provided the fanfare for a reconciliation only a few weeks before my gesture of disorderly retreat, also reminded me of the noise that had so intrigued me the first night of my stay in China: notes that I thought at first came from aeolian harps or perhaps (according to some story I no longer remember, real or invented, that I had read) lightweight bamboo pipes the Chinese would attach under the belly or wings of certain birds so that the air would pass through them, notes that in fact were nothing more than the strangely flutelike whistles of locomotives approaching or departing from the Peking station. The great din of winged creatures and insects, the ardor for living and the indomitable melancholy with which the warbling of nature in its abundance seemed charged when, after the Liberation, at the time of the second voyage I made to Africa, I crossed at nightfall, in a Dodge truck, the frontier zone between Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea.
The days of my death throes, whose torments those close to me—and not the zero which I had then become—had suffered. The living dead woman whom I incarnated every night and whose strength was fully equal to that of the man shot during the war with Spain who, during his last vigil in a Barcelona prison, apparently had the courage (but I know none of his compatriots who is surprised at this) to express his ill fortune by singing coplas. The pleasantly wild music, performed by those sparrows who could not reasonably be supposed to inhabit the dismal landscape dominated by the gas company, but who scarcely lost any of their mystery when I was informed of the existence of a courtyard garden onto which faced the other side of the wing where the resuscitations were carried out. The precious technique I had been taught, in the first days of my return to consciousness, to stop my voice from being harsh and staccato: to press with my hand, when I spoke, the dressing that I wore on my throat, which obturated my wound and allowed me to breathe normally.
It was a pretty physical therapist who had shown me this procedure, a rather small girl, brown-haired, plump, and cheerful, a native of Toulouse, the same one who revealed—when I was a little better—the enclosure, Edenic for me, represented by the courtyard garden and pointed out to me, guiding me, the route I should take when I wanted to go there for a walk: a few meters of hallway on the left as I came out of my room, then, on my right, a glass-paned door. Between these two lessons, I gave her some tickets I had received for an evening at the Salle Pleyel, where they were showing Chinese films, and, according to what she told me the next day, I believe she liked the event. “Seeing you, I have recovered my taste for life,” I declared to her once, not out of vain gallantry but because her entire person positively invited me to see the future from a better angle, as though her freshness had a power similar to that of the three young boys put into the service of Zarastro by the librettist of The Magic Flute. It is, however, only in the light of memory that this analogy occurred to me, a very much later counterpart to an impression I received upon emerging from an examination of my wound—not entirely scarred over—in the offices of the ear-nose-and-throat doctors who had operated on me: could I not believe that the suite of underground rooms where they officiated, their foreheads strapped round with fat electric lamps, as though with visors in the form of dogs’ muzzles, had changed them into infernal judges before whom I was appearing, in an Egypt with curiously modernized hypogeums rather than in a hospital?
Knowingly I transformed the physical therapist into a kindly spirit helping me to sail around certain capes of a voyage beyond the grave—that young woman to whom I was indebted for a twofold initiation: breathing better when I spoke, taking the air in the courtyard garden. But it was in perfect innocence that, on one of the very first days, I changed the more robust and more mature nurse who was caring for me into an Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe. That she had twelve children in her charge seemed to me self-evident, and no doubt it was true that, tied to a hospital bed and returned almost to the state of a newborn, since I had to be made to eat and was not allowed to get up by myself, I was inclined to situate her in a context in which chi
ld welfare, relief for orphans, the procreation of twins or of record litters would have been mixed in higglety-pigglety with romantic notions about motherhood in the working classes—this woman who, at that moment, was for me what the wet nurse is for the urchin. “My poor monsieur Leiris! What would I do with twelve children? I have two, and that’s quite enough . . . ,” she said to me, when I thought to express to her my grateful interest by pitying her for the difficulty that such a numerous progeny could not fail to cause her, worn out as she must be already by the obligations of a job that was among the most thankless.
It was at several different levels and in the various branches of a hierarchy as nuanced as a celestial hierarchy that these women were situated, all in white from head to foot but of unequal grace, some passing, others entering to tidy the room, to escort doctors at the hour of their visits, if not to occupy themselves directly with me or, even more often, with the poor companion whom one hoped each day to see return to human life and concerning whom, though I certainly joined in that shared hope, I occasionally began thinking that, thus as discreet as it could be, his presence was probably less burdensome than it would become if he rose to the rank of a neighbor with whom I would have to converse. As I learned a little later, those who worked at housekeeping or, like my very good and very expert nanny, formed the lowest class of the medical staff, because they lacked diplomas, were entitled only to those humble pieces of cloth knotted around their heads like the scarves of gypsy women, whereas the much more elaborate headdresses, of different forms and dimensions, that one observed on certain women were the prerogative of the supervisors and nurses with degrees. Standing out against this multitude, in which the angels wore the veil and the archangels the headdress, as though for a folklore demonstration, the physical therapists sported a sort of small skullcap, more or less hemispherical, a raffish mobcap accentuating the corps-de-ballet aspect of their young and nimble team. Despite the cruel questions that I had the leisure to debate and the strain of uneasiness that found its way into my dreams, certainly my forced retirement, by giving me a respite, assumed something of the appearance of a holiday, won with sufficient difficulty, furthermore, so that I could enjoy it without the slightest remorse. Thus was I disposed to observe as a dilettante, with an eye always curious and readily amused, this world in truth more sinister than picturesque, since illness and death were its cornerstones.
One morning, when I knew already that once my wound was closed I would return home, an event occurred more important than it might seem, for the conversation of a few minutes of which it consisted was very helpful to my inner rehabilitation, without which my rescue would have made no sense. I do not know what I was occupied with when one of the doctors who visited me every day entered, dressed in his white shirt. Perhaps I was in the midst of scratching, with the tip of my pointed pen, a few lines in the notebook that I had very soon asked for, among other objects judged to be highly necessary: a thick notebook, brand new, whose cover bore a rather large glued vignette representing, seen from downstream, the middle of the Pont Neuf and the Square du Vert Galant, with, in characters of very large type, the word LUTÈCE, concerning which I do not know, lacking the requisite chronological facts, whether its presence on the front of the notebook (an encounter that strikes me now) could have had something to do with the intervention of my cousin under a name inspired, as I have said, by the noble and ancient pseudonym that his uncle had adopted? Perhaps I was plunged (as much as I was allowed by a faculty of attention that has never been great) in one or the other of the two books that I had had brought to me: the amazing and preposterous notes of Mallarmé relating to his famous “Book,” in the end never written, but which he had made the very goal of his life and which he seems to have conceived as the total work in which the universe is summed up and justified; L’Afrique ambiguë by the ethnologist Georges Balandier, in which one sees tradition and modernity confront each other among the men of the black continent, a work that had come to me as a review copy and was related to the other side of my professional activity, the ethnographic side (that of humanist scholarship and commitment), whereas Mallarmé’s unpublished work—to the reading of which I devoted much more time and passionate application—had to do with the side that was not even literary but strictly poetic? Then again, perhaps I was not engaged in anything definite, thinking about my difficult endeavor to regain my balance in work as well as in life and shifting about in my head the mental signs of a few desires that were always the same and in themselves fairly simple but of which I was powerless to find the means of achieving in practice the synthesis? However it may have been, the doctor crossed the threshold and came to sit down next to my bed.
The presence of my roommate did not even resemble that of a man entombed in a deep sleep, for in his case no sudden awakening was to be feared. Thus my visitor and I talked as though we were alone together. Not troubling himself with useless circumlocutions, this man with a calm face and a very slight smile that was more wise than cheerful, with a gaze neither too detached nor too inquisitive, with an appearance that was perfectly healthy without any unpleasant excess of prosperity, this rather young but somewhat slow and probably not at all chatty man who, having settled next to me as one of my close friends would have done, seemed to me a creature most punctilious in his duties at the same time as most reasonable, broached almost immediately what had, for him, to be the crux of the matter, or, at least, to lead straight to it: someone had spoken to him (and I thought afterward that it was a police report that had informed him) about my “habits of intemperance,” so that he wanted to learn from me exactly what this was all about. I did not absolutely deny anything but, smiling a little, I retorted to him that, if I had happened in fact much too often to drink too much and if that still happened to me sometimes, I had never been a drunk properly speaking and still less an alcoholic; drink was, for me, a means of dealing with the uneasiness of certain circumstances and one which, without my contributing anything, I had frequent occasions, socially, to use; I was quite far from resorting to it as regularly as might have been described. Since he questioned me about my precise occupations, I explained in a few words about my double profession, as writer and ethnographer, and then I confessed more or less everything to him. Very placidly, he then said to me that a man like me should not let himself go as I had. Could I not, with the help of sojourns in the country and sports, lead a more physically active life, which would take care of a lot of things? I rejected such a program, alleging my need to devote my moments of freedom to my literary work, on which I set a very high price; but I answered affirmatively when he asked me whether, among the people I knew, there might not be a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist to whom I could address myself. I acquiesced to the advice he gave me to undergo a treatment of that sort when I left the hospital, and I agreed, as ardently as one can, to a resolution which, one knows, not only represents a last chance, and which elementary good sense therefore commands one to make, but whose significance, insofar as it is the opposite of a lazy solution, since its execution will not be accomplished without effort, is not merely utilitarian. The interview having, with that, reached its logical end, my visitor did not insist, and I, saying goodbye to him, thanked him warmly for having come to talk to me that way, man to man.
Even before my colloquy with one of the heads of that group of men and women whom I saw expending themselves for their patients as though in the front line of a battle, I had said to myself that next to the dubious works of politics, with effects too often the inverse of what one had had in view, there was one thing whose effective value was, by contrast, beyond all argument: the running of an establishment like the one (so well equipped technically and humanly) in which I had regained consciousness. One could not deem it absurd to devote all one’s time to such an enterprise, and the fact that it existed was enough perhaps to rehabilitate life, even in the case where it offered us nothing else defensible.
However convinced I may have been of the beauty of the m
edical profession, there is hardly any need to add that I did not open myself for an instant to an idea that would have been pure chimera, if only because of my age: to devote myself to this relief-worker activity whose validity, at the very least, cannot be contested. But what I retained from the example presented to me—as though to deter me from utopias—by the smooth functioning of a hospital, was that a preference for work well done is a cardinal virtue, and that, without scattering myself as I had formerly in all sorts of stray impulses, I ought above all to resume my real professional task by simply putting into it as much awareness and vision as I could.
Like the “resolutions” that at the time (I believe) of my first communion I inscribed in a notebook reserved for pious uses, literary projects—summarily noted—figure among the rapid and irregular notes composing what was a hold-all rather than the journal of my time of illness. To make a critique of monogamy—this is what would perhaps still have some meaning, and I would employ myself at it in the very next part of this Rules of the Game, so that, without departing from lived experience, the book, by being oriented toward a critique of our customs, would lose the too personal character that it had had at the beginning and that had disgusted me. Obedient to Mallarmé’s lesson, to give myself as my goal the idea of the total book, and to try, with this series of tales and reflections—already a snake biting its own tail, since the search for its own justification was, fundamentally, its main driving force—to achieve a work that would exist as a closed world, complete and incontestable, such could also be my way of escaping from subjectivism, gaining some height, then, instead of choosing a way out that would issue at ground level. To carry out, in all modesty, a piece of work accepted long before but that had not gone beyond the stage of a promise—to write an article on the evolution of Aimé Césaire’s political themes and poetry—was what I was in any case supposed to be putting at the top of my program, as of primary urgency. Almost as cursory as the notes, brief poems were hurled directly or recopied onto certain pages of the “school notebook” that its manufacturers had placed under the patronage of Lutèce. Like those poems of a few lines that from its beginnings marked my unfolding adventure, they derived their flesh and blood from the very thing they brought to life in their turn: that state of passionate tenderness and sadness whose ambiguity, one evening, had been expressed silently and suddenly by my nearly fatal intoxication. It was a sentiment resistant to any illumination through the ordinary paths of discourse, but that each of these lyrical combinations of words caused to shine before me like a crystal thus wrested by main force from my inner darkness.
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 21
