Life was rapidly exhausted. Time stagnated, measurable from now on only by the wearing out of heels on the wet asphalt, the succession of sounds, soon learned by heart, that the drafts carried along the corridors of the hotel from dawn till dusk. The window of my room looked out on an apartment block under demolition. A wall covered with wallpaper stood there amid the rubble. Fixed to this colored surface a mirror, without a frame, reflected the delicate and ephemeral depth of the sky. Each morning I wondered whether I was going to see this reflection again when I drew open my curtains. The daily suspense gave a rhythm to the stagnant time, to which I was becoming more and more accustomed. And even the idea that one day I must quit this life, that I must make a break with what little still bound me to those autumn days, to that city, kill myself, perhaps — even such a notion soon became habitual.… And then one morning — when I heard the dry sound of collapsing masonry, and outside the curtains, in the place of the wall, I saw an empty space smoking with dust — the idea seemed to me like a marvelous way of leaving the game.
I remembered it several days later.… I was sitting on a bench in the middle of a boulevard soaked in drizzle. Through the numbness of a fever I felt within myself a kind of silent dialogue between a frightened child and a man: the adult, himself troubled, was trying to reassure the child, speaking in a falsely cheerful tone. The encouraging voice told me that I could get up and return to the café; drink another glass of wine and stay out of the cold for an hour. Or go down into the clammy warmth of the Métro. Or even try to spend another night at the hotel without having anything left to pay with. Or if need be, walk into that pharmacy at the corner of the boulevard and sit down on a leather chair, stay still, say nothing, and when people gather round me, whisper very softly, “Leave me in peace for a moment, in this light and this warmth. I will go soon, I promise you.…”
The keen air above the boulevard condensed and began to fall as a fine, dogged rain. I got up. The reassuring voice had fallen silent. I felt as if my head were wrapped in a cloud of red-hot cotton wool. I dodged a passerby who was walking along holding a little girl by the hand. I was afraid I might alarm the child with my inflamed face, and the cold shivers shaking me.…Wanting to cross the road, I stumbled against the edge of the pavement and waved my arms like a tightrope walker. A car braked and just avoided me. I felt a brief grazing of the door handle against my hand. The driver took the trouble to lower his window and hurl an oath at me. I saw his scowl, but his words reached me with a strange cotton-wool slowness. At the same moment a thought dazzled me with its simplicity: “That’s what I need. That impact, that encounter with metal, but much more violent. An impact that would shatter my head, my throat, my chest. That impact, and then instant, final silence.” Several whistle blasts pierced the fog of the fever that burned my face. Absurdly, I got the idea that a policeman might have set off in pursuit of me. I sped up my pace, floundering on a saturated patch of lawn. I could not breathe. My vision broke up into a multitude of sharp-edged facets. I had an urge to burrow in the ground like an animal.
I was drawn in by a misty void, which opened up into a broad avenue, beyond a wide-open gate. It seemed to be floating between two lines of trees, in the dull air of the twilight. Almost at once the avenue was filled with strident whistle blasts. I turned into a narrower path, skidded on a smooth stone slab, and plunged between strange gray cubes. Finally, without strength, I crouched behind one of them. The whistle blasts rang out for a moment, then fell silent. From a long way off I heard the grating sound of the gate’s metal bars. On the porous wall of the cube I read these words, without immediately grasping the sense of them: Plot held in perpetuity. Number … Year 18 …
Somewhere behind the trees a whistle blast rang out, followed by a conversation. Two men, two keepers, were walking up the avenue.
I got up slowly. And through the weariness and the torpor of the start of my illness, I felt a flicker of a smile on my lips; “mockery must enter into the nature of the things of this world. By the same token as the law of gravity.…”
All the gates of the cemetery were now closed. I walked round the family vault behind which I had collapsed. The glass door yielded easily. The interior seemed to me almost spacious. Apart from the dust and a few dead leaves, the paving was clean and dry. My legs would not support me any longer. I sat down, and then stretched out full length. In the darkness my head brushed against a wooden object. I touched it. It was a priedieu. I rested my neck on its faded velvet. Oddly, its surface seemed warm, as if someone had just been kneeling on it.…
For the first two days I left my refuge only to go and look for bread and to wash. I returned at once, stretched out, and sank into a feverish numbness from which I was only roused for a few minutes by the whistle blasts at closing time. The great gate creaked in the fog, the world was reduced to these walls of soft porous stone, which I could touch if I spread out my arms in the form of a cross; to the reflection of the ground glass panes of the door; and to the resonant silence, which I believed I could hear beneath the paving stones, beneath my body.…
I rapidly became confused about the sequence of dates and days. I remember only that one afternoon I finally felt a little better. Walking slowly, screwing up my eyes in the returning sunlight, I was going back … home. Home! Yes, that was my thought: I surprised myself thinking it, and started to laugh, choking in a fit of coughing that made the passersby turn. This family tomb more than a century old, in the least-visited part of the cemetery, where there were no famous tombs to honor — my “home.” With amazement I told myself I had not used the word since my childhood.…
It was during that afternoon, by the light of the autumn sun shining into my vault, that I read the inscriptions on the marble tablets fixed to its walls. It was, in fact, a little chapel belonging to the Belval and Castelot families. And the laconic epitaphs on the tablets retraced their history in outline.
I was still too weak. I read one or two inscriptions and then sat down on the paving stones, breathing as if after a great effort, my head buzzing with giddiness. Born September 27, 1837, at Bordeaux. Died June 4, 1888, in Paris. Perhaps it was the dates that made me giddy. I took note of their time as acutely as if I were hallucinating. Born the 6th March 1849. Recalled to God the 12th December 1901. The intervals between these dates became filled with sounds, with silhouettes, mixing history and literature. There was a flow of images, the vivid and very concrete sharpness of which was almost painful. I thought I could hear the rustling of a lady’s long dress as she stepped into a cab. In this simple action of times past she embodied all those anonymous women who had lived, loved, and suffered; who had seen this sky, breathed this air.… Now I felt physically the cramped stiffness of a dignitary in his black suit: the sun, the great square of a provincial town, the speeches, the brand new republican emblems.… Now the wars, the revolutions, the swarming crowds, the great holidays, all fused for a second into one character, one explosion, one voice, one song, one salvo, one poem, one sensation — and the flow of time resumed its course between the date of birth and the date of death. She was born August 26, 1861, at Biarritz. Deceased February 11, 1922, at Vincennes.
I progressed slowly from one epitaph to the next: Captain of the Empress’s Dragoons. Divisional General. Painter of History, attached to the French armies: Africa, Italy, Syria, Mexico. Intendant General. Section President of the Conseil d’Etat. Woman of letters. Former Public Auditor to the Senate. Lieutenant in the 224th Infantry Regiment. Croix de Guerre with palms. Died for France.… They were the shades of an empire once resplendent at all four corners of the world.… The most recent inscription was also the shortest: Françoise, November 2, 1952–May 10, 1969. Sixteen years old; any other words would have been excessive.
I sat down on the paving stones and closed my eyes. I sensed the vibrant density of all those lives in myself. And without trying to formulate my thoughts, I murmured, “I feel the climate of their days and of their deaths. And the mystery of that birth at Bia
rritz on August 26, 1861. The inconceivable individuality of that birth, precisely at Biarritz, that day, more than a century ago. And I feel the fragility of that face that disappeared on May 10, 1969, I feel it like an emotion that I myself have lived through intensely.… These unknown lives are close to me.”
I left in the middle of the night. The stone wall was not high at that point. But the hem of my coat caught on one of the iron spikes set in the top of the wall. I almost fell head first. In the darkness the blue eye of a street lamp described a question mark. I fell on a thick layer of dead leaves. My descent seemed to take a very long time; I had the impression of landing in an unknown town. Its houses at this night hour resembled the monuments of an abandoned city. Its air smelled of wet forest.
I began to walk down an empty avenue. All the streets I followed went downhill, as if to keep thrusting me farther toward the heart of this opaque megalopolis. The few cars that passed me looked as if they were fleeing from it at top speed, driving straight ahead. As I walked past him, a tramp stirred in his carapace of cardboard boxes. He put his head out; it was lit by the shop window across the street. He was an African, his eyes heavy with a kind of resigned, calm madness. He spoke. I leaned toward him, but I understood nothing. It was doubtless the language of his country.… The cardboard boxes of his shelter were covered in hieroglyphs.
When I crossed the Seine, the sky began to grow pale. For a while I had been walking with a sleepwalker’s tread. The joyful fever of convalescence had disappeared. I felt as if I were wading through the still-deep shadows of the houses. My giddiness curved the perspectives inward, rolled them around me. The accumulation of apartment blocks along the quays and on the island looked like a gigantic film set in darkness when the arc lights have been switched off. I could no longer remember why I had left the cemetery.
On the wooden footbridge I looked back several times. I thought I could hear the sound of footsteps behind me. Or the throbbing of the blood in my temples. The echo became more resonant in a winding street that drew me along like a toboggan. I made an about-face. I thought I saw the outline of a woman in a long coat slipping under an archway. I remained standing, without strength, leaning against a wall. The world disintegrated, the wall gave way under my palm, the windows trickled down the pale fronts of the houses.…
It was as if by magic that those few words appeared, outlined on a blackened metal plaque. I clung to their message, as a man on the brink of sinking into drunkenness or madness may cling to a maxim that has a banal but flawless logic that saves him from tipping over the edge.… The little plaque was fixed a meter from the ground. I read its inscription three or four times:
FLOOD LEVEL. JANUARY 1910
? It was not a memory, but life itself. I was not reliving; I was living. Sensations that seemed very humble sensations. The warmth of the wooden handrail of a balcony hanging in the air on a summer’s evening. The dry, piquant scents of plants. The distant and melancholy call of a locomotive. The soft rustling of pages on the knees of a woman seated amid flowers. Her gray hair. Her voice … And now the rustling and the voice are mingled with the whispering of the long boughs of willows — I was already living on the bank of that stream, lost in the sun-drenched immensity of the steppe. I saw that woman with gray hair, sunk in a clear reverie, slowly walking in the water and looking so young. And these youthful looks transported me onto the deck of a flatcar hurtling across a plain that sparkled with rain and light. The woman facing me smiled, tossing back the wet locks from her brow. Her eyelashes were iridescent in the rays of the setting sun.…
FLOOD LEVEL . JANUARY 1910. I heard the misty silence, the lapping of the water when a boat passed. A little girl, her forehead pressed against the windowpane, was looking at the pale mirror of a flooded avenue. I lived that silent morning in a great Parisian apartment early in the century so intensely.… And that morning led in sequence to another, with the crunching of gravel in an avenue gilded with autumn foliage. Three women in long black silk dresses, their broad hats trimmed with veils and feathers, were walking away, as if carrying the moment with them, its sunlight and the air of a fleeting era.… Yet another morning: Charlotte (I recognized her now) accompanied by a man in the resonant streets of the Neuilly of her childhood. Charlotte, happy in a slightly confused way, is acting as guide. I felt I could distinguish the clarity of the morning light on each paving stone, see the trembling of each leaf, picture this unknown town in the man’s gaze and the view of the streets, so familiar to Charlotte’s eyes.
What I now understood was that ever since my childhood, Charlotte’s Atlantis had enabled me to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments. Without my knowing it, they had traced the pattern of another life, as it were; invisible, inadmissible, alongside my own. Thus a carpenter who spends his days making chair legs or planing planks does not notice that the lacework of the shavings forms a beautiful ornament on the floor, shining with resin; one day, its clear transparency catches a ray of sunlight breaking through the narrow window piled high with tools, and the next, the blue-tinged reflection of snow.
It was this life that now revealed itself to be essential. Somehow, I did not yet know how, I must let it unfold within me. Through the silent work of memory I must learn the notation of these moments. Learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, amid the numbness of banal words. Live, conscious of this timelessness …
I returned to the cemetery just before the gate closed. The evening was clear. I sat down on the threshold and began writing in my address book, long since useless:
My situation beyond the grave is ideal, not only for discovering this essential life but also for recreating it, by recording it in a style that has yet to be invented. Or rather, this style will hence-forth be my way of life. I will have no other life than these moments reborn on a page.…
For want of paper my manifesto was soon going to peter out. Writing was a very important action for my project. In this high-sounding credo, I declared that only works created on the brink of the grave or indeed beyond the grave would withstand the test of time. I cited the epilepsy of some; asthma and the cork-lined room for others; exile, deeper than any tomb, for yet others.… The pompous tone of this profession of faith was soon to disappear. It would be replaced by the pad of rough paper that I purchased the next day with the last of my money, and on whose first page I would write very simply:
Charlotte Lemonnier: Biographical Notes.
Indeed that very morning I left the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots forever.… I had woken up in the middle of the night. An impossible, crazy thought had just crossed my mind, like a tracer bullet. I had to utter it aloud to gauge its extraordinary reality: “What if Charlotte were still alive?”
Stunned, I pictured her coming out onto her little flower-covered balcony, bent over a book. For many years I had received no news from Saranza. So Charlotte could still be living much as before, as she had during my childhood. She would be over eighty now, but in my memory this age did not touch her. For me she always remained the same.
Then the dream flashed into my mind. It was probably its aura that had just woken me. To find Charlotte again, to bring her to France …
The unrealistic nature of this project, formulated by a vagrant stretched out on the stone slabs of a family tomb, was so evident that I made no effort to spell it out to myself. For the moment, I decided not to think about the details, to live, and to keep this unreasonable hope at the heart of each day. To live off this hope.
I was unable to get to sleep again that night. Wrapping myself in my coat, I went out. The warmth of the late autumn had given way to a north wind. I remained standing, watching the low clouds, which were gradually becoming infused with a gray pallor. I remembered that one day, in an unsmiling jest, Charlotte had said to me that, after all her journeys across the vastness of Russia, for her to come to France on foot would have had nothing impossible about it.…
To begin with, durin
g my long months of poverty and wanderings, my crazy dream was to seem very similar to her sad bravado. I would picture a woman dressed in black entering a little frontier town in the very early hours of a dark winter morning. The hem of her coat would be caked with mud, her big shawl drenched with the cold mist. She would push open the door of a café at the corner of a small sleeping square, would sit down near the window, beside a radiator. The patronne would bring her a cup of tea. And looking through the window at the quiet fronts of the half-timbered houses, the woman would murmur softly, “It’s France.… I have returned to France. After … after a whole lifetime.”
15
WHEN I LEFT THE BOOKSHOP I walked through the town and began to cross the bridge poised above the sunlit expanse of the Garonne. I recalled that old films had a time-honored trick for skip-ping over several years in the lives of their heroes in a few seconds. The action would be interrupted, and this legend would appear on a black background with an unashamed frankness that had always appealed to me: “Two years later,” or “three years went by.” But who would use this outmoded device nowadays?
And yet on entering that empty bookshop in the middle of a heat-stunned provincial town, and on finding my latest book on the shelf, I had just that impression. “Three years went by.” The cemetery, the family vault of the Belvals and the Castelots. And now this book in the colorful mosaic of jackets under the sign “New French Novels” …
Toward evening I reached the forest of the Landes. I wanted to walk, for two days or perhaps more, sensing that beyond this rolling country covered in pine trees the ocean lay perpetually in wait. Two days, two nights … Thanks to the Notes, time had acquired an extra-ordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte’s past, it seemed to me that I had never experienced the present so intensely! Those landscapes of days gone by threw into a singular relief this patch of sky between the clusters of pine needles; this glade lit by the setting sun like a river of amber… .
Dreams of My Russian Summers Page 22
