Surrealist, Lover, Resistant

by Robert Desnos

  The sea-horse to the mermaid

  And let nothing injure them nor separate them

  Let those who would try

  Be confounded if in bad faith

  Rendered impotent if in good faith

  Let nothing in this circle that sets them apart

  Separate the mermaid from the sea-horse

  The sea-horse from the mermaid

  And what does he say:

  Let nothing injure her

  In her beauty in her youth in her health

  In her fortune in her happiness in her life.

  May the drinker, drunk with the song, set off on a two-horned path lined by frightening trees to the sound of the howling roaring sea mounting the most fearsome surge that ever was, not out of its geographical bed, but swiftly flowing out of the overturned bottle while the mermaid, prostrate on the ground near this cataract, considers the star, now black now blue, imagines she recognises it, and does indeed recognise it.

  This happens let’s not forget on a real plain, on a real shore, under a real sky. And it’s a real bottle and a real mermaid, and a real flooding sea that carries off the letter and rises to attack the castle.

  Tumultuous outpouring of the contents of the fathomless bottle. Yet it was an ordinary bottle that shouldn’t have held more than 80 centilitres, and yet, here was the entire Ocean bursting from its neck, to which bits of wax still clung. Roaring of hills and of the castle’s foundations under the waters’ assault, shifting of the star, nothing can distract the mermaid from her reverie in thrall to her own breathing, in the aroma of night violet. Rise, rise, Ocean, roll your waves, reflect and distort the monsters inscribed in the constellations whose joy is to vie with the fearsome creatures of your gulfs and caverns, rise, rise, carry off the shrubs of thyme and sloe, tumble in a heap the cairns and the mounds of clay and loam, overturn the tomb forgotten by an old-time criminal and a lazy gravedigger at a summer day’s dawn

  when life’s diamonds rang out loud in the glasses on the bar and stacked up on maps of unknown islands on the white tablecloth.

  Surge, surge and roll your foam in elegant furs, for the mermaid is plunging, rolling into you and surging with you to the dark portal of the castle, a citadel of shade and phantoms, gaping at the skyline which it engulfs without end.

  And now the mermaid enters the castle and is lost in a long corridor of drapes and spider-webs, at whose far end a knight awaits her, lance and flame and sword in hand.

  Long combat, hand-to-hand, the rattle of armour mingling with the rattle of scales, swords flashing in the gloom, exertions of combatants, sky stars reflected on cuirasses and greaves, Ocean stars on the mermaid’s tail, blood seeping between the flagstones, wind shaking the spider-webs. One of these trembles on the wall and its shadow makes a horribly gigantic creature.

  As the mermaid moves on, the pieces of armour swim pell-mell in blood, on the floor, while in its turn the one now black, now blue, enters the corridor, seizes the knight’s weapon, attacks the mermaid.

  Wonderful swordplay, this spectacle unfolding before my eyes, wonderful swordplay of the star, its branches retracting and extending. Zigomar of the sky, crafty dueller, your last reflection has set off toward planets millions and millions of miles away, and tomorrow, in millions of years’ time, astronomers puzzled not to see your beacon among the astral reefs, will announce a great shipwreck in heavenly space, and say your disappearance must be added to the

  already long list of unexplained phenomena, and I doubt if anyone will say a mermaid struck you in your five-branched heart and snuffed out your gleam of comets’-manes, suns and planets and nebulæ and your sisters the other stars. Among these, you will be missed by your preferred companions, the North star and the South star.

  O mermaid! I shall follow you everywhere. In spite of your crimes, given your legitimate defence, you are seductive to my heart and by your gaze I come through to a universe of sentiment, impervious to life’s mundane preoccupations.

  I shall follow you everywhere. If I lose you, I’ll find you again, be sure of it, and although it takes courage to confront you, I shall confront you, for it’s not a case of wishing for victory or defeat, so splendidly do your weapons flash, and your eyes too, when you fight.

  Go into this deserted castle. Your shadow is certainly a surprise for the staircases. Your forked tail grows much longer on every floor. Just now you were deep, deep underground. Now you are at the top of the keep.

  Suddenly erect, you surge and soar away into the sky. Your shadow, immense at first, quickly shrinks and your tiny silhouette is outlined on the surface of the moon. Mermaid you become flames and you blaze so violently in the night that no light can exist near you in the unknown flower-beds haunted by fireflies.

  Good morning flame.

  She reaches me her long black gloves.

  And it’s day fire dawn and shadows and lightning.

  Good morning flame.

  You don’t burn me.

  You transport me.

  And I’d be nothing but ashes, flame, if you abandoned me.

  So, as when stars fell from the sky on the invisible lake where with delight I immersed myself,

  She put her hands to my neck and, gazing into my eyes with the gaze that my eyes drink down, she said:

  “You are the one I should have loved.”

  Remember those words for the years to come, you who alone can worthily incarnate that incomparable love I bore another who is gone forever,

  And may you never be able to say them again

  In a crossroads of wrinkles, under a sky of wilted days and discontinued yearnings.

  I kiss your hands.

  You are entitled not to love me.

  Deranged is the one who mistakes that.

  I kiss your hands.

  Up, up in the sky go the calm plumes of smoke and the song of a bird so misshapen that the clouds dare not receive it and the sky is brighter and purer when this lonely bird is flying.

  I kiss your hands.

  I kiss your hands before we part for the night,

  when nightmares come, when you sleep and you dream and you think of me and you don’t think of me. I kiss your hands, you are entitled not to love me.

  And you.

  Do you remember that wax mermaid you gave me?

  You already foresaw yourself in her, and in one who is like yourself.

  You don’t die by my love’s transfiguring, but you live by it, it

  perpetuates you.

  For it’s love that prevails, even over you, even over her.

  And you’ll never be truly dead

  Till the day I forget that I loved.

  This mermaid you gave me: she’s the one.

  Do you know what frightening chain of symbols led me from you, once the star, to her, now the mermaid?

  O parallel sisters of sky and Ocean!

  But you.

  I met you the other night,

  A famous night of storm, of tears, of tenderness and of anger.

  Yes, I met you, it was definitely you.

  But when I went to you and called to you and spoke to you,

  Another woman answered me:

  “How do you know my name?”

  Look at your new face, for you’re not dead.

  By the grace of love look at your new face.

  Look, it’s as beautiful as the first one was.

  You’ve hardly changed.

  Your periwinkle eyes, your eyes from now on are quenched, and shine no more in a pained ironical face.

  No, two eyes more gloomy in a face both more stern and more merry.

  Like you, she’s fond of little bistros, zinc counters at dawn in the working-class districts, the gladness of working people when they are glad.

  Do you remember a
night of mystery?

  We’d gone past the Trocadéro and beyond it, on a boulevard where the metro goes overhead, not far from the Vélodrome d’Hiver,

  We drank beer at the “Truckers’ Corner”.

  It was six o’clock in the morning.

  A plumber swapped jokes with us, for quite a while.

  And another time, in that cafe where they serve sweet Belgian beers, do you remember Marie of the Gare de l’Est?

  Once she was loved, rich, beautiful.

  Now she washes in the Wallace fountains.

  But having kept a certain taste for luxury,

  Once a month she has herself deloused in a hospital.

  Sometimes I think it wasn’t with you but with your new body, your new face that I saw all this.

  Look, look at your new face.

  It’s just as beautiful as the first one was.

  Look, look at your new body.

  I remember the meeting of these two faces of my love, my one and only love.

  Perhaps that’s what you died of.

  But you’re alive, both of you,

  Lovers well named, not subjected to my love,

  Faces well named, bodies well named.

  I weep for the memory you lost when you died, but death is all the same to me.

  I do remember.

  I find I resemble you,

  as cruel and as sweet,

  And only allowing me so much

  So as to make me regret more violently the little you refuse me.

  Here we are both old already.

  We’re thirty years older than today,

  we can talk of old times without regret, if not without desire.

  All the same we could have been happy,

  if that were said to be possible

  and if things get sorted out in life.

  But it’s actually misfortune that gives birth to our insatiable, deadly, amazing love.

  And from this love comes the only happiness that two insatiable hearts like ours can know.

  Listen, listen to the great vulgar images rising as we transfigure them.

  Here’s Ocean growling and singing as the sky above writhes and smoothes like your bed.

  Here’s Ocean like our heart.

  Here’s the sky where clouds are shipwrecked in the sad flash of a beacon that the stars parade in turn.

  Here’s the sky like our two hearts.

  Then here are the fields, flowers, steppes, deserts, plains, springs, rivers, chasms, mountains,

  And all of that can be compared to our two hearts.

  But this evening I’ve just one thing to say:

  Two mountains were alike in shape and size

  I’m on one

  You’re on the other.

  Do we recognise each other?

  What signs do we make?

  We should understand and love each other.

  Perhaps you love me?

  I love you already.

  We have these understandings between us. But who will go further?

  You say nothing but you look at me

  And for this look,

  There is no when, no duration.

  My one darling my love.

  I have more to tell you.

  But what’s the use…

  Indifference in you climbs like a devouring rosebush that destroys walls, twists and spreads,

  Befuddles and stifles with its perfume…

  And then does it die?

  A bright melody rings out in the lane washed by morning, night and springtime.

  The geranium at the closed window seems to guess the future.

  That’s the cue for the hero of the drama.

  I only tell you this tale which doesn’t stand up because I daren’t go on as I started.

  Because I have faith in the goodness of words and formulations.

  No game this evening on the white wood table.

  A sky hollow as an empty oyster.

  A flat landscape

  The young lady with no thunderclap: will she appear?

  A fish-heart abandoned on a tiled kitchen floor can take no more tedium

  It swells up

  Near it in the rubbish-bin is the shining backbone.

  Dark corridor, thoroughfare of cats

  A clown’s door opens and shuts on a woman, then a man, then a man, then a woman.

  And the young lady with no thunderclap says that at the hawthorn and sanfoin crossroads she lost a stocking

  That she lost the other under the blasted oak

  And her shirt on the riverbank

  The young lady with no thunderclap is nude quite nude

  She holds a throbbing fish-heart in her hand

  She gazes vaguely in front of her

  She bites her lips enough to draw blood and sometimes stops and croons

  The young lady with no thunderclap is alone quite alone

  The fish-heart throbs in her hand

  Shade falls on her nude body and makes it glitter

  That’s how constellations are born

  That’s how desire is born

  That’s how a sleepwalker comes to himself, stops under the lamp on a street-corner and watches the light redden

  And before going on his way, pictures himself as he was years ago with his bright eyes and bleeding lips

  At the time when the young lady with no thunderclap came to tuck him up tenderly in bed.

  The mermaid meets her double and smiles at her.

  Then she falls asleep, in that adorable sleep, never to awaken.

  She may dream. She does dream. We’re in the morning of a day of gleaming harvests, of earthquakes, of diamond tides, the first

  falling back on your hair and springing from your eyes, the second marking your movement and the third surging to assail your heart.

  It’s five in the morning in the pine-forest where the mermaid’s castle rears up, but the mermaid will not wake again, for she has seen her double, she has seen you. From now on, your empire is immense.

  A wood-cutter comes out of a path. The dew on him trembles and makes starry patterns.

  He fells a tree and up fly a great many dragon-flies.

  They disperse among the twigs. He fells another tree and the first waves break against it. He fells a third tree and you said to me:

  “Sleep in my arms.”

  You said goodbye for me to the little girl at the bridge

  the little girl who sings such pretty songs

  to my lifelong friend I neglected

  to my first mistress

  to those who knew you-know-who

  to my real friends who you’ll easily recognise

  to my glass sword

  to my wax mermaid

  to my monsters to my bed

  as for you the one I love more than anything in the world

  I’m not saying goodbye to you yet

  I’ll see you again

  But I’m afraid of not having much time left to see you.

  Bitter fate, to count the leaf and the white stone

  Malice wandering the first day of May

  Respects from a valiant heart opera hat and white gloves

  Respects I say I tell her and the moon in muslin

  Respects plenty of things

  Respects mainly I tell her

  Respects truly respects

  Respects

  And as I have the honour to tell her

  Niagara Falls might not fit in your glass

  Maybe not Sir maybe

  Maybe and how is Madam maybe

  Maybe Madam is bored

  Maybe Madam has the vapours

  Maybe

&nbs
p; When he put his finger on the tartan rug

  On the Egyptian rug sir oh yes

  We aren’t all like that in the family

  It’s lucky for my father and mother

  Then again the crazier you are…

  Yes it’s lucky

  The more you laugh

  Yes.

  I wrote this song worth plenty of others

  One evening when I was not merry, not sad

  Though as time goes on I understand people better

  Not merry, not sad

  An evening when I hadn’t drunk

  An evening when I hadn’t seen my darling

  I wrote this song worth plenty of others

  To amuse my darling.

  But I know a much lovelier song

  About a dawn in the road or among fields ripe for harvest or on a deserted bed

  When spring came they burnt the last winter logs

  Old sorrows become sweet in the memory

  Younger eyes open on a washed universe.

  I knew this dawn thanks to you.

  But will it ever rise

  On the sorrows you provoke?

  You know what apparition I’m talking about

  What incarnation

  Flow, flow, tears and streams

  And wines in the glasses.

  Those times are gone when we laughed

  when we were drunk.

  She’s a long way up the mermaid among the stars whose sisters were crushed, empresses of not many clouds, queens of one hour of night, evil planets. And look, with one bound, one plunge, the mermaid dives into the sea amid a mass of foam that pales the Milky Way.