He lapped up Froth on the Daydream, and I have no difficulty at all in picturing Henri le boulevardier waking up in a narrow bed, rubbing his eyes and casting a weary glance out across the galvanised roof where the cooing from the dovecote was enough to wake the dead. He gets up, washes himself in cold water and then sets the table with a Continental breakfast.
The man was truly in his element. He had finally found his way. Here was Paris, waiting for him with its chestnut trees, boulevards, allées, cafés and clubs; its beautiful women, plain women, rich plutocrats and poor clochards, its fumbling bohemians, opportunists and newly launched shooting stars – everything that Bill in the Bear Quartet, Maud and Hemingway had spoken of with such enthusiasm. Henry could swim around like a fish in water; Paris was the place for inquisitive explorers. Henry very quickly became Henri le boulevardier, the man who walked more than two thousand miles in less than a year, who wore out four pairs of shoes, who traipsed up one street and down the next wearing a long white coat – the one he had bought in a second-hand shop in Kensington, London, in 1964 – and his old worn cap, with his pockets full of magazines and tabloids.
He would sit drinking his chicory coffee dissolved in hot milk until late in the morning, gazing out across the galvanised roofs and properly taking in the day before he undertook anything more sensible. He rented a small room on Rue Garreau, in that hodgepodge of buildings between Montmartre Cemetery and Sacré Coeur, not far from Place Clichy, where Henry could dash around for hours pretending to be Henry Miller if he liked. He lacked for nothing. Sometimes he would pick up girls on the street. There were Arabs with peculiar card games, there were people from all parts of the globe who could teach him their tricks and the best gimmicks for staying alive. And he did stay alive.
After breakfast he would shave, and he did so with great care. He studied his face in the mirror above the cracked washbasin, and perhaps he saw that he was getting older. The years can have such a varied effect on different people – some get spare tyres and pot-bellies, others develop big bags under their eyes, wrinkles and nodules, scars or vacant eyes empty of all dreams.
Henry was getting older. Four years in exile had left their mark. His hair was still short, neatly cut and parted. He actually looked like a strong boy who had dug in his heels to resist, who didn’t really want to grow up. His eyes were an ageless blue. Yet he had grown older, in a very particular way. His body had acquired a weight and solidity. He had seen so much, been involved in so much, yet strangely enough he had escaped mostly unscathed, although not always with his honour intact.
At one time or another everyone who has been out in the wide world has to ask himself the question: where am I? You wake up in a strange room somewhere, having stumbled into bed the night before, and for all the world you can’t remember where you are. Town after town and room after room pass through your mind until you finally catch up with your own drowsy and worn-out body in that particular bed. By this time Henry Morgan had slept just about everywhere. In train stations, in Copenhagen, on a farm in Jutland, crashing with chance acquaintances or with friends who suddenly became enemies, in cheap boarding houses in Germany and in whorehouses in Rome. Yet he was seldom plagued by the feeling that he was a step behind, that he had missed the train and watched his own body ride off, with his soul left behind on the platform. He had rarely asked himself the question – where am I? – because he never brooded over that subject. Henry Morgan was a kind of soldier in flight, on excellent terms with his own name and the body that other people – primarily women – admired. Or that some – primarily men – attacked with canes and clenched fists. Now his worn suitcase was standing on the floor in that cheap room on Rue Garreau, covered with labels that shouted: Copenhagen! Esbjerg! Berlin! London! Munich! Rome! Paris! And the list would get even longer. It would have made his grandfather Morgonstjärna, the globetrotter and permanent secretary of the Well- travelled, Well-read and Well-heeled Club, very proud.
Henry made shaving into a great art, using a cake of soap, a brush and a straight razor, just like a real barber. He had plenty of time to devote to this; he had time to develop every little daily ritual into great artistry. His movements were precise and meticulously planned. Every little gesture meant something, as in Japanese Noh dramas – which are equally incomprehensible to the uninitiated. The movement, the gesture, had become his language. He had learned to describe increasingly subtle things through pure movement; it was his way of expressing himself. A gesture in and of itself can be a form of music; it moves through the air like a wave, like spoken words and tones. He had worked at a billiards hall right near Ponte Umberto in Rome, as well as in countless bars in Munich, and he had acquired a unique control over his hands. He had taught himself to master every tap, bottle, glass, rag and brush – how they felt and where they were to be found – and he could do any sort of hand manoeuvre blindfolded. Anyone who watches a master bartender – and I mean a true master who takes his work seriously – will know what I’m talking about. He can make great art out of even the most insignificant cocktail.
Henry, the Marcel Marceau of booze, was incredibly proud of his dexterity, his ‘supple hands’, which also benefited his piano playing. There was something grand about the whole thing, and it began to seem more and more as if he were taking great pains to acquire a fundamental view of the art of living, a profound everyday ethic. Henry believed wholeheartedly in all these rituals; he put his entire, fiery soul into whatever was commonplace, trivial and banal, trying to turn it into great art. Henry had come to a realisation: his exile was not wasted time. Perhaps he was doing everything simply in order to endure his melancholy. It can be boundlessly dreary to be in exile. Hamlet knew that long ago, as did Odysseus.
________
Those who know how to look out for themselves, as Henry Morgan did, have never needed to starve. A mendacious tongue like his could get him far. He supported himself with odd jobs here and there, in bars and hotels, on the street and in lounges, and now and then he would put his ‘supple hands’ to use – they were quick and could snatch up a valuable or two if the situation presented itself. But they never took advantage of anyone who was poor.
Henri le boulevardier was a bohemian, and there were swarms of bohemians beneath the medieval vault of Bop Sec. That was one of the genuine jazz clubs on the Left Bank, and the owners operated under a very specific objective, to carry on the traditions and to ennoble bop. Dixieland and happy jazz were banned from Bop Sec. That was the place for the more advanced and introspective audiences who wanted to sit and nod their heads behind dark glasses as they smoked cigarettes, sipped at a demi and perhaps, in an abrupt show of ecstasy, snapped their fingers to the beat. Bop Sec was the last outpost of real jazz.
Now and then this insularity might be disrupted by some poet who acted like an alarm-clock and scanned his verses, like a kind of thermometer: communiqués from the revolts in Berkeley, in Berlin, Tokyo, Madrid, Warsaw, Stockholm … The poets liked to end their lyric sermons with slogans from the walls of Paris, such as: ‘Be realists, demand the impossible’ or ‘The dream is reality’ and other phrases. The poets would always leave the stage to standing ovations.
Henry had become friends with the owners – a big fat man and his very thin Algerian wife – and he would sit there night after night, listening. He wanted to show off his talents. At the end of May during that fermenting spring when all of France was paralysed by a general strike and when everyone was waiting for de Gaulle’s departure, Bop Sec was one of the few places that remained untouched. The police were constantly raiding other places, but in some mysterious way the owner of Bop Sec had been given carte blanche and was ignored.
Henry showed off his talents and was invited to sit in with a group during the following month. At that time there were frequent guest performers, and on that particular evening in late May, he sat down on his usual bar stool, ordered a demi, lit a cigarette and listened to a saxophone from the room next to the bar. It sounded strangely f
amiliar.
He took a long drag on his cigarette and listened to that horn. It sounded as if the tenor saxophonist had practised with a pillow in his throat; he had an unusual, explosive force that erupted right down the medulla oblongata, where it became firmly riveted and sat there, vibrating. The drums fell in with the sax, the bass came gliding after and the guitar moved alongside with its terse, staccato accompaniment.
It was the big city, with all its roaring and bellowing, that could be heard between the beats as the drummer literally pounded on the bass drum. It was the big city with its bricks, its dilapidated buildings with some commotion going on at every corner and suicide candidates in every window; it was the hot, trembling, undermined streets with all the dustbins, cigarette butts and lit-up signs, the cars and faces gleaming in the red neon; it was all that wailing in the riffs that piled up on top of each other, getting closer and closer until the rhythm intensified to the unbearable, approaching the pain threshold where everything broke out into the lyric coolness of mercy, which not only asked for beauty but demanded beauty and made the audience tremble like the Shakers, as if confirming that the divine existed right there, at that very moment, fully within reach and yet so elusive and transitory. It demanded the impossible; the dream was reality.
That tenor saxophonist had listened to Coltrane on a wintry night in front of a woodstove near Odenplan in Stockholm. The audience burst into rapturous applause. Henry had finished smoking his Gitane and was in a cold sweat. He sat there shaking. The dream was reality, life a dream.
‘Are you feeling OK tonight?’ asked the hefty proprietor of the club.
Henry stared at him as he stood there, polishing glasses.
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘No … no …,’ stammered Henry. ‘That’s not it …’
Henry was done in. He had listened to every single note from that saxophone, recognised every trill, every little attack of the terse and so typically spontaneously combustible riffs. It sounded as if the tenor saxophonist were playing for the very last time, as if he had to draw out every little note lengthwise and crosswise until they were about to burst. But it sounded so much better now. Bill had really become a fucking good musician. Bill was starting to sound like the truly great, constantly pursued and sometimes wounded elephants. The ones who danced in Paris.
________
Perhaps the hunted hero now realised that time was catching up with him, that he could no longer flee, because there was nowhere to flee to, that the monogram – and everything it entailed of desire and impotence – engraved on his cigarette case was not his own, and yet it pursued and haunted him like some fateful anagram all over Europe. The initials were etched like a Kilroy into every new central train station. He never dared obliterate them out of a respect for destiny.
It’s possible that both men felt threatened, as if in Maud they had invested a great deal of capital which now, via this encounter with fate, had suddenly become associated with certain incalculable risks. Love and passion can have just as much in common, in terms of risk calculations, as strict economics.
Bill, at any rate, was aggressive, like someone on drugs. Henry felt someone slap him on the back. He calmly stubbed out his Gitane in the ashtray on the bar and turned round to meet Bill’s ravaged, weary visage. Bill was not the same; he had let his hair grow down over his shoulders, his cheeks were hollow and his skin was pale and rather rough-looking. He would never learn to appreciate daylight, and he still wore his dark glasses, even though they were deep underground in the medieval vault.
‘Hey, old pal!’ exclaimed Henry, embracing his friend. ‘I could hear it was you. I couldn’t see you and I didn’t dare look to make sure, but I heard you playing. You’re really great, Bill. You’re fucking great!’
Bill put a damper on his laughter. He was aggressive, but in that cool kind of way. Yet he still couldn’t help laughing, just like a kid who tries to repress his laughter, pretending to be displeased. ‘This is too much!’ said Bill. ‘I recognised you right away. You haven’t changed a fucking bit. How many years has it been?’
‘Almost five,’ said Henry.
‘Five years! This is too much,’ said Bill. ‘I’m really cooking tonight. Everything’s clicking!’
‘You’ve really got damn good. I haven’t heard anything about you in a long time. Maud wrote to me a couple of months ago …’ said Henry.
‘Maud is here, Henry. Maud is here!’
‘At the Sec?’
‘Here in Paris,’ shouted Bill.
‘So are the two of you a couple right now?’ Henry asked.
Bill was high, and to him everything seemed right on that evening at the Bop Sec, but his gestures didn’t seem as expansive as before, when back in Stockholm he had walked around bragging about Paris and the great jazz. Perhaps he’d become chastened and hard by the long path of his career, becoming one with his harsh, ruthless, yet beautiful music. Or maybe he simply felt upset when Henry got a remote expression on his face when he mentioned that Maud was in town. Henry’s eyes looked so sad. Bill talked about everything that had happened to the Bear Quartet, about their gigs in Denmark and Germany, and he talked about all those things a person wants to talk about when he meets an old friend. But he noticed that Henry wasn’t listening, Henry was far away. There was something sombre about his eyes.
‘So are the two of you a couple right now?’ Henry repeated. ‘You and Maud …’
‘Sigh!’ said Bill. ‘Well, we have been, off and on.’
‘What do you mean by off and on?’ repeated Henry.
‘Until today, for instance.’
‘Did you have a fight?’
‘You know how it is when you’ve got a gig,’ said Bill. ‘You get a little touchy … She was going out to a dinner tonight, with some fucking ambassador. She always has to put in an appearance wherever something is happening. If Paris is burning, she has to see the fire; that’s how it is with that woman. She’s thirty now, by the way.’
‘Time flies,’ said Henry.
‘But she’s probably back at the hotel by now,’ said Bill. ‘The Hotel Ivry, on Rue de Richelieu. Go over and see her, Henry. You have to go.’
Henry still had a totally vacant look in his eyes, and he took a big gulp of beer. ‘Why should I?’ he said.
‘Because she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, and you know it.’
‘Whatever happened to Eva?’
‘Married with children, hitched to a tie-wearing devil like yourself.’
‘Get down off your high horse,’ said Henry morosely. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Shit,’ said Bill. ‘I’m no fucking martyr … Have you got a smoke?’
Henry handed over his cigarette case, on which the initials W.S. were engraved in script. Bill read the monogram and laughed.
‘Have you met him?’ asked Henry.
‘Sterner is a real gangster,’ said Bill. ‘He’s one of the world’s best mafiosi. Maud is his chick. I’m his pimp.’ Bill gave a loud, shrill laugh. His teeth were brown and presumably hollow, just like the rest of him. ‘But she’s the world’s best whore, and you know that. It’s only popes and real bums that are any good. Popes like Sterner and bums like us.’ Bill laughed again, that shrill, hollow laugh, and Henry felt as if he was going to pass out. The dream was reality, and reality was a nightmare.
‘You have to go there, Henry,’ said Bill. ‘The Hotel Ivry, on Rue de Richelieu. It’s fate. You were bound to come back some time; it just happened to be tonight. There’s nothing stopping you.’
Henry practically passed out, and he muttered something about phoning. ‘I should … I should ring first,’ he said.
Bill looked like a perverse film director. ‘What do you mean “ring”?’ he said.
‘I should ring first,’ said Henry.
‘Then go ahead!’
‘I’m asking you,’ said Henry. ‘Ring and make sure.’
Bill blew smoke up towards the ceiling, took a c
ouple of swallows of beer from the glass that the corpulent owner had placed in front of him and gave Henry a slap on the back. ‘OK, buddy. I’ll ring her.’
Still weak in the knees, dazed and aching all over, Henry ordered another beer. The idea that Maud was sitting all alone in a hotel room on Rue de Richelieu and waiting for him was almost a horrible thought; it was too upsetting to be appealing. All of Paris, all of France as a nation was on its way to being overthrown, revolutionised by the striking masses of workers and students who at any moment might seize power and force de Gaulle out. All this ferment was making Paris tremble like a jittery teletype machine, and there sat Henry Morgan in the middle of the whole mess, Henri le boulevardier, in a medieval cellar with a vaulted ceiling, and he too was shaking, but for strictly personal reasons. The world in which the big elephants danced no longer had anything to do with him.
Bill came back from the phone booth, smiling, calm and collected. ‘It’s a go, buddy,’ he said, hanging over Henry’s shoulder. ‘All she could say was “yes, yes, YES”. It’s all OK. You’ve got the night to yourselves.’
‘So are you just going to hang there on the cross all night long?’
‘That’s none of your business,’ said Bill.
‘If that’s the way you want it …’ said Henry. He stuck out his hand and Bill slapped it with the palm of his hand, the way some blacks greet each other. He was having a fucking great evening at the Bop Sec. And if you were having a fucking great evening at the Bop Sec, then a thirty-year-old hot number from Stockholm didn’t mean a thing. Henry Morgan, on the other hand, was not having a particularly good evening at the Bop Sec.
Gentlemen (Klas Ostergren) (FO8) Page 31
