The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  As in a balancing play of opposing forces, these thoughts became more preoccupying as I improved physically, and I eventually said to myself that given my failed gesture—completely absurd, since I was still there, facing the same dilemma, and since all I had done was to display the overwhelming extent of my egocentricity—it would be a nice hell that I was preparing for my wife and for me.

  Forced to censor myself (as happens whenever a total revelation would risk resembling too closely the act of informing against another person), I can give only a general view of the end of this episode, instead of entering into the heart of it, as I would have license to do had I chosen to express myself under the disguise of a novel. Without saying any more about that, I will describe the few other sunny days, as light as a schoolboy’s escapade, that were—in the very height of the summer—the crowning piece of the fireworks display. And I will add (not without regret) that this crowning piece, in accordance with the norm, was at once a high point and a conclusion.

  From Montecatini Terme, where I went to take the cure and where my wife and I had our shared room in the Grand Hôtel e la Pace [Peace] (a luxury Peace less exciting than the one, mir in Russian, pursued at the Vienna Congress of 1952 by the international pilgrims among whom I was included), I wrote—hiding this, more or less—many letters that received tender replies. Then there was the diversion of a brief stay in Florence, where, restored by the cure, I rediscovered the beautiful life of “summer vacation,” which I have always loved but from which my cantankerous humor had closed me off for a long time. Back in Paris, I had to realize that despite a few rough patches, this trip to Italy had represented, for the lover that I believed I was, an easing of the situation at least as much as a privation, so that the imminent return of my friend—an event whose prospect ought to have delighted me—was a thing feared rather than desired by me, since I could measure more coldly than before what a sum of hush-hush mysteries and other unpleasant gymnastics (to say nothing of all the time consumed or frankly squandered) it would cost me to resume our meetings. Thus when my correspondent, noting the change, took it upon herself to break things off at that point, writing that we would have to give up our meetings, I felt less bitterness over this, even, than relief. Whereas the first flame dated from scarcely a few months back, it was in this way, through this epistolary commerce and everything it elicited in the way of written confidences, of avowals glimpsed between the lines and also of misunderstandings, that the end was reached—without a fuss, but never to be resumed—of an intrigue that had so fevered me that it nearly killed me.

  At Montecatini, a small town where there is almost nothing unrelated to the thermal baths, the protocol of the cure had inspired amusement in me much more than boredom. What, elsewhere than in Italy, would have seemed to me a depressing routine became under the Tuscan skies a comical ceremonial to which I submitted, my graduated glass of 250 cubic centimeters in my hand, with the same seriousness as an habitué of the great horseraces, his binoculars hanging from his shoulder, or a subscriber to the old Opéra, his opera hat under his arm. Knowing that Giuseppe Verdi had frequented this spa, I had come to terms with its lack even of picturesqueness well before discovering that one of its main roads is dedicated to the musician, who was also one of the symbols of Italian Independence, and well before having deciphered the plaque that, affixed to the façade of the hotel where Verdi was a guest, points out that it was in the waters of Montecatini that he found “the secret of longevity and youth” not only for himself but for his creative genius. My obligations, which occupied me all morning with sometimes a day of rest, were of two sorts: absorption of the waters coming from different sources (Regina, Tettuccio), whose names, like those of two other sources alien to my regimen (Tamerici, Toretta), charmed me as much as the rigorous meticulousness of the prescriptions, presented for each phase of my three weeks of residence on a chart that indicated in what quantities, in what rhythm, according to which alternation and in which form (cold or warm) I ought to drink these waters; applications of volcanic mud on certain locations on my abdomen and back, marked with a few strokes by the doctor on the doubled figure embellishing another printed sheet (a person entirely naked, without hair and with a smooth skull, his arms slightly away from his body and his palms turned forward, a sort of microcosm-man drawn in two versions, one from the front, the other from the back).

  These applications, in which I was wrapped in a thick corset of warm, sticky earth, could be dispensed only by one establishment: the Terme Leopoldine, a sturdy, undistinguished building of a completely Roman severity, on the pediment of which was engraved the inscription “Aesculapio et Saluti.” But for the other part (the more important) of my treatment, several options were possible. Among the establishments where one consumes the water from various springs, it was the Excelsior that I chose in the very beginning, because it was the closest to my hotel. However, to this fairly discreet building, whose builder had permitted himself only a loggia in the style of Brunelleschi, in the end I preferred the Stabilimento Tettuccio, a grandiose complex with the look of an ancient temple, corrected and augmented by some Victor Emmanuel. Included in the same area as the hall where enormous volumes of water are delivered daily, and of which imposing ranks of sanitary facilities are the necessary counterpart, are counters for tobacco, newspapers and books, a change bureau, a tourist agency (all of these assembled in a sort of waiting room), post, telegraph, and telephones, multiple dependencies such as a bandstand, a café, a dressmaker’s shop, and other stores (including a jewelry business and an art gallery), making this monument, embellished with porticoes, courtyards, and vast gardens, a sort of city whose bronze fountain, from which the water of the Tettuccio spring gushes forth from a jumble of crocodiles and other scaly monsters, is the symbolic heart. More modest in Verdi’s time (as is shown, among other postcards that I acquired that year and during a second stay, by two photographs representing the maestro with his somewhat Garibaldian white beard, his large peasant felt hat, a black or dark suit, leaving the old Tettuccio: in one, he is getting into a horse-drawn carriage whose canopy and canvases for protection against the sun make it strangely resemble a hearse; in the other, on foot and solitary, he sets out, sheltering under a parasol, to cross the square at the far end of which rises the establishment), that pump room, so large and sumptuous that it took me a certain time to discover that such was its intended purpose, reminded me, because of its excess, of the most spacious and profusely decorated stations of the Moscow subway. Once my imagination was set in motion, this superabundant architectural group also seemed to me to evoke what pleasure towns like Herculaneum and Pompeii must have been like before their destruction by the rain of fire and lava.

  The water was handed out in a long gallery, on the left side of the central courtyard. Coiffed with little caps, equipped with aprons and wearing dresses with circles of light blue and white (which made one think of 1900 bathers, even of those in the films of Mack Sennett), a line of young women behind an immense marble counter occupied themselves with serving it. Activating invisible pedals, they caused the water—either warm or cool according to the prescription—to flow from the spring to which they were assigned, and those taking the cure collected it, from the mouths of curved pipes, in their graduated glasses with handles. On the entire length of the wall behind these women extended a series of broad, high panels in ceramic: Childhood (showing a mother with generous curves giving suck surrounded by small children who were pouring water or drinking it, and a few of whom were urinating), Adolescence (with girls and boys carrying pitchers or drinking, and, at the bottom, a group of three or four young discus throwers), Beauty, Fountainhead, Strength, Maturity, Old Age—panels whose common theme was the beneficence of these waters, a true elixir of Youth that imparts vigor and health to anyone willing to drink deep of it. Conceived so that anyone drinking, even the most decrepit, could take comfort in it, this pagan glorification of life extended, in the form of precise allusions to erotic activity, into
the large café room where a crowd of people, once they had consumed their water, came to eat copious breakfasts: innocent Italian landscapes of an archaic sort decorated its walls, but on the ceiling were painted cupids, a few life-sized naked women in poses of courtesans who were restrained by neither modesty nor fear in the divulgation of their attributes, and several love scenes, idylls from Ancient Times or the Renaissance whose female characters appeared to be endowed with a perverse languor à la Sarah Bernhardt. Did these artistic visions simply give the clientele in general an assurance that beauty could be retained or recovered? Or were those of the male fraction who felt they had been dispossessed of the most intimate power of all intimate powers of their flesh supposed to read in these images the announcement of a sort of Risorgimento of which the ithyphallus would be merely the emblem? As far as I myself was concerned, this guarantee of the remission of one of my worst torments was what I wanted to find in this apologia for sensuality.

  Lulled by opera or light music melodies emanating from the bandstand—to the right of the central courtyard, a rotunda with a cupola ornamented on the interior by three compositions no less academic though a touch more modern than those of the café (an outdoor concert, chamber music, a salon recital) alternating with three trompe-l’oeil balconies lined with male and female spectators wearing our fashions or close to it—I remained there long enough to drink my five glasses of water. With the obligatory pauses, this took me almost an hour. Neglecting the book I was carrying with me, War and Peace, valuable at the time of the siesta that followed the manipulations of the Terme Leopoldine but here more cumbersome than anything else, I observed the cosmopolitan crowd of bathers who chatted or listened to the orchestra, sometimes walking about with glass in hand as serious as in the accomplishment of a ritual, sometimes seated on metal chairs with their glasses, full or empty, always within their reach. I played then at imagining I had arrived, after the ineluctable setbacks, in the palace of some Zarastro whose followers, in groups whose comings and goings were regulated by the celestial harmony, would dispute the loftiest problems as they consumed the beverage of immortality.

  This twofold cure—water and mud—that occupied me almost every morning and is the subject of several pages of notes (in the tone of a report rather than a private journal) in my notebook, bound in red boards, from the Hôpital Claude-Bernard; the afternoons and days of full holiday spent in other spots in Tuscany to which friends—Rose and André Masson, who had come purely as tourists—drove us almost daily (André Masson who, in the evening of a life whose beginnings were stormy, has been able to find serenity, I wrote in my notebook shortly after my return to Paris, as though to encourage myself with the precedent offered by the evolution of that great painter); trips up to the old town (for there did in fact exist one, Montecatini Alto, served by a road and by a funicular); our lounging as dilettantes more curious than ironic on the terrace of the cabaret Gambrinus; certain walks in the sensibly laid-out parks or as far as a place pointed out by many road signs and posters, Le Panteraie (a swimming pool–restaurant–dance hall of a false elegance situated on a rather pretty hill planted with pines); the baroque note introduced at the hotel as much by the bons vivants avid to embrace too much, since they wanted both to lose weight and to continue to gorge themselves, as by the appearance, one evening in the dining room, of that statue of the Commandant in bourgeois dress, Giorgio de Chirico (white, as spectral as his pictures, his expression sly, like a small court poisoner of the sixteenth century); the occasional use of a tablet of equanil (knowing, however, that the calm procured by “tranquilizers” is not necessarily preferable to its opposite and that, in any case, one cannot dream of relying one’s entire life on such a recourse); all this—the restoration of a worn-out liver, the muting of shrill nerves, or the simple distractions—helped me to climb back up the slope. Of course, I still could not see a way out of my situation: how to put back together a life not only cut in two concerning my love (the cramped union on one side, vertigo on the other) but subject to yet another sort of division since the very work I am doing here—which was lagging more obviously than ever behind events as they occurred, without my having either the strength or the lucidity needed to tackle right away the most urgent of my current activities—appeared to me a thing frankly anachronistic and, so to speak, foreign? Sad as these considerations were, I nevertheless know that they no longer affected me as much as had, not long ago, reflections of the same order.

  In Florence, where, freed of the cure, I felt the reins slacken, I profited almost without reservation from the beauties of a town that turned out to be a great city whereas for years I had been loath to stop there, attributing to it merely on the strength of stories and readings all that is irksome implied by the notion of an art town. In better health, I was able to give myself up lightheartedly to the pains and joys of the life of a tourist: work hours involving visits (more or less jostled) to churches, museums, monuments, and other curiosities, reached on foot through streets often narrow and with inadequate sidewalks where, in addition to the menace of the imposing stone structures with their cyclopean look and their fortresslike opacity, there is also the less imaginary danger created by an anarchic traffic of scooters; hours of farniente, sometimes spent on meals in the most Tuscan of the restaurants or on purchases in the elegant boutiques, sometimes at a table in the main café of the place de la République (more welcoming than the superb but too frequented place de la Seigneurie) to listen to the arias that alternated with radio-style songs, looking out of the corner of an eye at the façade of the Savoy Hotel ornamented with falsely ancient statues enclosed in niches illuminated in the evening, sometimes on the balcony of our room—when the sun was setting or when the moon was shining—contemplating the Arno and the whole south bank (where, walking on the wooded hills, one sees sumptuous villas standing cheek by jowl with completely rustic spots rich in vines and haystacks). I, who have always been very bad at orienting myself, became accustomed very quickly to finding my way around in this city, Florence, which must derive from what was the financial power of the Medicis that slight air of a southern London, thanks to which, perhaps, the English there seem so much at home. Had I paradoxically acquired what they call a “sense of direction” at the very moment when, in my private life, I was most disoriented? Or, more simply, was it not sympathy that sharpened my attention and thus made Florence more familiar to me than any other town among those where I made only brief stays?

  In Paris, where I returned before my friend herself was back, the emotional conflict that had so preoccupied me was resolved (as I said) much more simply than I had assumed it would be. Once again I had behaved, throughout this affair, like a cork floating at the whim of the currents: good fortune had come and then had withdrawn without my having made any real decision and, if I differed from the cork, it was only in that it would not have thought of causing itself to drift. Up to now I still have on my neck—as though an animal, all fangs, had attacked it and been encysted there—the scar left by the tracheotomy: a vertical stroke barred by three shorter horizontal strokes today almost invisible (the one on the bottom especially), a pale rather irregular figure that reminds me of those designs so widespread in Africa in the form, notably, of graffiti schematizing various animals themselves emblematic: saurians such as the crocodile, the monitor (often confused with the iguana and commonly called a gueule-tapée [plugged-face]), the lizard, and the salamander; an insect such as the julus (vulgarly known as the centipede). This is another sort of “tree of life,” which I bear imprinted on my skin and which, in the first days, I compared (with the satisfaction of a dandy as much as of an ethnographer) to the scarification marking the face of an initiate. It is the mark of my candidature for the act that, more than any other, by changing death into tragedy, makes of it a conclusion and not merely an end. It is a notch recalling the time spent in a high place of the same sort as the cliff of my dreams and whence, as from a balcony, I had embraced my fate with a single glance. It is a r
ip that closed without having had to be sewn up, but that leaves a signature on my throat through a sort of crude mending, as though the other tear, thus materialized, could not be repaired except imperfectly and by means of an artifice.

  Tranquilizers and later a “de-irritant,” relaxation exercises (inspired by the Asians’ yoga but which, at first, seem so easy-as-pie that one is surprised afterward by the extent of their effects), a farewell to what they had mistakenly called my “intemperate habits,” a zeal brought to the task, despite prudent advice to put it aside, of making up for my slowness in the present book (which, even if it does not exhaust my conflicts with that I with which I have been playing for so long and which is never done being spewed out, will perhaps earn a certificate of “work hero” for the lazybones that I have always felt myself to be), these various medicines—of which the last, however, might have derived from a furious desire for a knife in the wound—worked together effectively. I regained the necessary equilibrium to make me a livable companion, and my life went on as though it had never jumped the rails. However, it appears to me more and more that despite the indisputable happy end that resulted from my own prohibition as well as from the treatment to which I consented, deep inside me something has been destroyed that I cannot hope to see reconstituted: old age, which has always frightened me so, has finally settled in, and the crisis, as quickly quelled as it had roughly seized me, will turn out to have been the rearguard battle or the gallant last stand that I waged against it—every day I am more convinced that this is so.