The Buddha's Return (2 page)

The encounter took place towards the end of April, in the Jardin du Luxembourg; I was sitting on a bench, reading notes on Karamzin’s travels. He fleetingly glanced at the book and launched into Russian—a very pure and correct Russian that preserved, incidentally, a few archaic turns of phrase: “I should consider it my duty”, “if you would deign to take into account”. Within a very short space of time he had divulged to me a number of details about himself that seemed no less fantastic than did his appearance; among these figured the misty buildings of the Imperial University in St Petersburg, where at one point he had studied, the Faculty of History, and some vague, cagy allusions to vast wealth, which he either had lost, or else was due to receive.

I extracted a ten-franc note and handed it to him. He bowed, maintaining an air of dignity that was perfectly
out of place, and lifted his hat with a sort of undulating gesture, the likes of which I had never before seen. Then he walked off unhurriedly, carefully alternating his feet cased in their torn boots. Even in his back, however, there was none of that timid restraint or physical indignity symptomatic of people of his sort. Slowly he receded farther and farther into the distance; the April sun was already setting, and my imagination, running a few minutes ahead of itself like a bad watch, had already projected along the railings of the Jardin du Luxembourg the twilight that was to come a little later, but was absent at the time. And so this image of a beggar remained fixed in my memory, shrouded in the dusk that was yet to set in; the figure moved off and dissolved amid the milky softness of the outgoing day, and in this state, neurotic and illusory, it prompted several images in my mind. I later recalled that I had seen such light—light in which the last, just-departed ray of sun seems to have left a subtle though unmistakeable trace of its unhurried dissolution in the air—in a number of paintings, in particular one of Correggio’s, although I was unable to remember which.

Yet for me these efforts of memory were transforming imperceptibly into something else, something no less customary, but recently more intense: an endless sequence of haunting visions. I would see a woman in a black dress buttoned up to the neck trudging along a narrow street in a mediaeval town, a thickset man wearing spectacles and
European clothes, lost and unhappy, searching for something he could not find, a tall, elderly man walking down a winding, dusty road, and a woman’s wide, terror-stricken eyes set in a pale face that was somehow very familiar to me. Simultaneously I would experience strange, distressing sensations that mingled with my own feelings on some event or other in my life. And I noticed that some states of mind triggered by very definite factors would persist long after their causes had disappeared, and so I would ask myself what actually came first—the cause or the state of mind; and if the latter, then did it not in certain circumstances predetermine something irrevocable and substantial, something belonging to the material world? Besides, I was faced with yet another persistent question: what was it that connected me to these imaginary people whom I had never wittingly invented and who would appear to me so unexpectedly—like the one who had fallen from the cliff, in whose body I had died not so long ago, like that woman in black, like those others undoubtedly lurking ahead, eagerly waiting to embody me for a few brief, illusory moments. Each of them had been unlike the one that followed, and it was impossible to confuse them with one another. What tied me to them? The laws of heredity, whose lines criss-crossed in such fantastical arabesques all around me, someone’s forgotten memories that were for some unknown reason being dredged up within me, or was it that I was part of some vast human
collective and the impenetrable membrane that separated me from other people and contained my individuality had suddenly lost its impermeability, allowing something foreign to rush in, like waves crashing into the crevice of a cliff ? I was unable to tell anyone about this, knowing that it would be taken for delirium or some peculiar form of madness. But it was neither of these. I was perfectly healthy, every muscle in my body responded with an automatic precision, I found none of my university courses in any way difficult, and my logical and analytical faculties were fine. I had never experienced fainting fits and I knew almost no physical fatigue: I was built, as it were, for the real world. Yet there was another—illusory—world that pursued me everywhere, hounding me. And nearly every day, sometimes in my room, sometimes in the street, in the woods or in the garden, I would cease to exist—I as such-and-such a person, born in such-and-such a place, in such-and-such a year, having completed my secondary education only a few years ago and attending lectures at such-and-such a university—and with peremptory inevitability, someone else would take my place. This metamorphosis would usually be preceded by torturous physical sensations, sometimes taking over the entire surface of my body.

I remember waking up one night and distinctly feeling my long, greasy, rank hair against my face, the slackness of my jowls, and the curiously familiar sensation of
my tongue touching the gaps in my mouth where I was missing teeth. Seconds later, however, the awareness that I was merely a spectator in all this, as well as the heavy odour I had detected from the outset, would vanish. Then slowly, like a man gradually beginning to distinguish objects in the half-light—which, incidentally, was typical at the start of almost all these visions—I would discover this next distressing incarnation, the victim to which I had now fallen. I saw myself as an old woman with a tired, haggard body, deathly pale in colour. Through a small window overlooking a dark, narrow courtyard the oppressive stench of a deprived neighbourhood blew into the room in sultry summer waves; amid the suffocating heat this decrepit body, by whose sides drooped long, fleshy breasts and whose stomach with its roll of fat concealed the origin of two equally chubby legs that ended in black ragged toenails, lay on a grey-and-white bed sheet that was damp with sweat. Sound asleep next to it, head thrown back, mouth agape and white teeth bared, like a dog, was an Arab boy with tight thick curls of black hair, whose back and shoulders were covered in pimples.

The image of this old woman did not, however, occupy my mind for long. She gradually faded into the semi-darkness, and once again I found myself on my narrow bed, in my room with its high window overlooking a quiet street in the Latin Quarter. In the morning, when I awoke and opened my eyes again, I saw—this time entirely as a
spectator to the event—that the Arab boy was gone, and on the bed remained only the corpse of the old woman, the sheets stained with dried blood from a terrible wound at her neck. I never saw her again: she disappeared for ever. But this was undoubtedly the most repulsive sensation I had ever experienced in my life—this body, fat and sagging, in such a cruel state of muscular incapacity.

Since the day that I first met the Russian beggar in the Jardin du Luxembourg, so clearly and indelibly etched in my memory—the black frayed hat, the stubble on his face, the tattered boots and that amazing garment, be it an overcoat or something resembling a jacket—nearly two years had passed. For me these had been long, almost endless years, filled with swarms of silent, delirious visions that blended corridors leading God knows where, narrow chasm-like vertical shafts, exotic trees on the far-distant shores of a southern sea, black rivers that flowed into dreams, and an uninterrupted stream of various people, both men and women, the reason for whose appearance invariably eluded my comprehension, but who were inseparable from my own existence. Nearly every day I would feel this almost abstract psychological weariness, the result of some manifold, unrelenting madness that curiously affected neither my health nor my faculties—nor even did it prevent me from sitting the occasional exam or memorizing a host of university lectures. Sometimes this noiseless torrent would come to a sudden halt without
any forewarning whatsoever; I was drifting through life then without a care in the world, breathing in the damp winter air of the Parisian streets and with carnivorous zeal devouring plates of meat in restaurants, tearing at the succulent morsels with my voracious teeth.

On one such day I was sitting at a table in a large café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. Behind me, an assured male voice, evidently concluding—judging by his final intonation—some period that I hadn’t heard, said:

“And believe me, I have enough experience in life to know.”

I turned around. There was something familiar about his voice. However, the man I saw was completely unknown to me. I quickly looked him over: he was wearing a fitted overcoat, a shirt with a starched collar, a deep-crimson tie, a navy-blue suit and a gold wristwatch. A pair of spectacles rested on his nose, and there was a book lying open in front of him. Next to him sat a blonde woman of around thirty, an artist whom I had met a few times at evenings hosted by some friends; she was puffing away on a cigarette and seemed to be listening to him distractedly. He then closed the book and took off his glasses—he was evidently far-sighted—and that was when I saw his eyes. To my utter disbelief, I recognized the man to whom I had given the ten francs in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I could never have identified him solely on the basis of his
eyes and his voice, though, for the man sitting here in the café seemed to have nothing in common with the beggar who had approached me two years ago, asking for money. Never before had it occurred to me that clothes could so change a man. There was something unnatural and implausible about his metamorphosis. It was as if time had fantastically regressed. Two years ago this man had been a mere shadow; now he had miraculously transformed back into the man he had once been, whose disappearance ought to have been irreversible. I was unable to come to my senses for genuine astonishment.

The female artist got up to leave, waving to me both hello and goodbye simultaneously as she made her exit. Then I went up to the gentleman’s table and said:

“Forgive me, but I believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting you somewhere before.”

“Please, do sit down,” he replied with quiet courtesy. “It’s a credit to your memory. You’re the first of those who knew me in the old days to have recognized me. You say we’ve met? You’re quite correct. It was back when I was living in a slum, in Rue Simon le Franc.”

He made a vague hand gesture.

“I presume you would like to know what happened to me? Well then, let us begin with the fact that miracles simply do not happen.”

“Until a few moments ago I’d have agreed with you, but now I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Oh, you’d be wrong to doubt it,” he said. “There’s nothing more deceptive than appearances. One can make assertions on the basis of these only if one acknowledges their total arbitrariness beforehand. In five minutes’ time the causes of my metamorphosis will seem entirely natural to you.”

He leant his elbows on the table.

“I don’t recall whether I told you back then…”

And so he told me exactly what had happened to him, and truly there was nothing miraculous about it. In one of the Baltic states—he neglected to mention which—lived his elder brother, who, in the wake of the Revolution, had managed to retain a sizeable fortune. According to my acquaintance, he was a cruel and miserly man, who hated everyone who had, or might have had, cause to ask him for money. He never married and he had no heirs. Some time ago he had drowned while bathing in the sea, and so the inheritance passed on to his brother, whom a solicitor tracked down in Paris, living in Rue Simon le Franc. Once the formalities had been concluded, he came into possession of a fortune valued at many hundreds of thousands of francs. Then he took an apartment on Rue Molitor, living alone and passing the time, as he put it, between reading and pleasant idleness. He invited me to drop by one day between appointed hours; there was no need to call in advance. Thereupon we parted. I stayed on in the café, and again, just as I had done two years ago,
I watched him leave. It was April, but the day was cold by comparison with the previous year. He walked along the wide passage between the little café tables and slowly vanished into the soft electric light in his new fitted overcoat and new hat; now the assuredness of his gait could seem in no way out of place to anyone, even to me, who had been so struck by it at our first meeting.

Alone, I lapsed into thought—contemplative at first and without aim; then, among the formless motion of images, features gradually drew into focus and I began to recall the events that had taken place two years ago. Now it was cold, but then it had been warm, and I had remained sitting on that bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I did now in the café, following the man’s departure. Back then, of course, I had been reading Karamzin: immediately forgetting the words on the page, my thoughts kept returning to the nineteenth century and its sharp disparity with the twentieth. I even pondered the differences in political regimes—thoughts that, generally speaking, very seldom captivated my attention—and it seemed to me that the nineteenth century had known none of the barbaric and violent forms of government that characterized the history of certain nations in the twentieth century. I recalled Durkheim’s theory of “social constraint”,
contrainte sociale,
and, deviating once again from the university’s course material, I proceeded to considerations of a more general and more contentious order. I mused on the idiocy of
state-led violence and how it ought to have been much more apparent to contemporaries than to so-called “future historians”, who would fail to grasp the personal tragedy of this oppression, along with its palpable absurdity. I also thought how state ethics, taken to their logical paroxysm—as the culmination of some collective delirium—would inevitably lead to an almost criminal notion of authority, and that, in such periods of history, power truly belongs to ignorant crooks and fanatics, tyrants and madmen: sometimes they end their life on the gallows or at the guillotine, sometimes they die of natural causes, their coffin accompanied on its journey by the unspoken damnation of those whose misfortune and disgrace it was to be their subjects. I also thought of the Grand Inquisitor and the tragic fate of his author, and how personal, even illusory freedom can essentially prove to have a negative value, with a meaning and significance that frequently eludes us because it contains, in an extremely unstable equilibrium, the roots of opposition.