I knew this meant yes.
At that time telephones were not in such wide use as they are today. You couldn’t reach people directly at their desks, you had to go through the switchboard. I called myself Monsieur Ostinato, an improvised name I borrowed from musical terminology. Who was Monsieur Ostinato? Even after clearing the switchboard you weren’t certain you’d get through to her and you had to tell the inquisitorial voice the purpose of your call. Monsieur Ostinato was a contractor and wanted to give her a private estimate on something. Monsieur Ostinato was only pressed into service once (Marisa thought it was the world’s worst idea, at Aunay’s everyone knew everything, and all it would take was the slightest thing and someone would start asking her husband about the improvements they were having made to their house) but seduced her with his boldness and his wild imagination. Monsieur Ostinato got his rendezvous one April evening at six o’clock in the bar of the Hotel de Dieppe.
She came a quarter of an hour late, a little disappointing in a pale raincoat.
It took me six months to have her. After Ostinato there were other names, other tricks, other lightning rendezvous at the station, at the Bar de la Poste, at the Bar du Palais, at the Dieppe, at the Scotch, the bar in the basement of the Hotel d’Angleterre, she came wearing glasses, she stayed for five minutes with her eyes fixed on the door, she said we can’t see each other anymore, you must forget me, she said in my ear I want you, whenever I think about you I can’t sleep, she just couldn’t do it, she could never do it, there was her son, her husband, her mother, the factory, Rouen, the universe, there was no place to go, there was no time, I was going mad.
One day, I had her. At lunchtime, in a room at the Hotel de la Poste, on the rue Jeanne-d’Arc.
Disturbing life.
There you are, sitting in a good restaurant, you’ve ordered a good wine, you’re trying to hustle a hundred thousand pairs of pajamas, you’re having a pro forma argument but the client isn’t even really using the conditional tense, you can sense it’s gone well, you talk golf or some such bullshit, you laugh with the client till the teeth fall out of your head, which incidentally you’ve always said I was naturally incapable of, you laugh, the buyer leans forward, you clink glasses, you show him your honest face while you calculate your margin, and instead of being no, not happy, heaven forfend, not even satisfied, but just you, pure and simple, you’re fucked, annihilated, you’re shivering in the yawning void that separates you from Marisa, aka Christine Botton, in charge of planning and contract administration at Aunay-Foulquier.
Why didn’t things stay as they were at that point? Two little hours in the rue Jeanne-d’Arc. Two sort-of-mongrel -hours of no particular rapture or even the sweetness of beginnings. But how can we give up our own imaginations, and if we did, where would we be headed? She suited me because she was so out of whack, she said yes, she said no, and yes and no at the same time, she suited me because I didn’t understand her . . . you see, my boy, even today I’m inventing her all over again . . . she suited me because I never wearied of desiring her, because she was an illusion that kept
receding,
and I would rise to that like a fish to the ultimate bait.
One evening, the last (the last evening of a folly that lasted almost three years and incidentally caused me to split up with your mother), I was waiting for her in a room at the Dieppe (waiting would be my definition of it). Botton was at Interstoff, the annual textiles fair in Frankfurt. Her son was supposedly at her sister’s. I waited, swallowing packages of potato crisps I’d stolen from the deserted bar, washed down with tap water (back then there were no minibars and no televisions in the rooms), reread the Paris-Normandy newspaper for the forty-sixth time, paced around like a deranged person banging into the furniture, at two in the morning I called her house. She picked up sounding fast asleep, her voice just killed me. I said, I’m leaving the hotel and I’m coming over. She said, No, no, don’t do that, you know you can’t. I yelled, Here’s what I know, I’ve been waiting for you for four hours in this nightmare of a room. She whispered, My son has a fever, I kept him at home. I knew she was lying, I said, Me too, me too, I’ve got a fever, she laughed and hung up. I called back, I yelled, You’ll never see me again, you’re nothing but a little provincial slut, you’re not even beautiful, you’re NOTHING. I went back to Paris that same night in a state of genuine collapse.
Next morning, I was on my way to the office and this guy on the boulevard des Capucines handed me a tract for Aid to the Sahara or something.
There’s no
greater suffering,
it said on the piece of paper,
than
that of a mother who has to watch helplessly as her child
dies.
I thought, what do you know, asshole, and I crumpled the flyer. Because what was in danger of being extinguished that day wasn’t love or any form of earthly attachment but the very illusion of life. It doesn’t matter, my boy, that this illusion was limited to the corridors at Aunay’s, hotel-room walls, car seats, and the occasional miserable gateway in Rouen, i.e., nothing that could possibly bear a close or a distant resemblance to the ordinary run of life’s illusions. There was never the faintest atmosphere of romance between us, not a single place we visited together, no wood where we walked, not a single landscape, no unfamiliar street, no place in the world we ever took the time to just be. We never did more than pause on thresholds, halt in ephemeral stairwells, and if I had the faintest talent at analyzing things, I’d conclude that with Marisa the illusion of life was all the more violent because it was unadorned by any external element whatever, and never, never confused with happiness.
With your brother-in-law Michel I can have conversations about constipation. I mean to say I can have scientific conversations with him. With Arthur, back then, I could also have such conversations, but they were man-to-man, or rather, one damned man to another. With Michel there’s some hope mixed in. I have to say to his credit that the boy does seem to know his digestive tract. For starters, he calls it the “transit,” which is a nice touch. Last Sunday, he switched me from Duphalac to Transipeg, which is supposed to be less bloating. Duphalac worked for me, but made me bloated. He forbids me to use glycerine suppositories. Obviously I’m not going to pay any attention. If I listened to him, I’d use those Eductyl suppositories of his, you shit water every ten minutes four times in a row. Michel never comes to see me without a whole little suitcase of medicines. He knows all my illnesses, he’s interested, and he enjoys fine-tuning my treatments. Your sister, who has developed something of an ecological bent, disapproves, of course. Michel is a good pharmacist, maybe even an excellent pharmacist, and I’d be glad to see him often if our exchanges were confined to the riveting sphere of illnesses and their cures. But how are you supposed to put out the welcome mat for someone who’s just spent the morning jogging from Montfort to Coignières and working his way back by train on the B line with his friends the Jewish Ramblers, without ever mentioning the subject, without asking him for example what secret branch of the tradition produced these lunatics. He takes it badly. A nice boy all the same, happy to help with the weeding, always interested in my health. Threaten his Jewish integrity (his exact words), and within three minutes flat—it never fails—he’ll be invoking genocide as a way of calling me to order. And reminding me that solidarity is not a metaphor. That it’s not necessary to go all the way back to the Garden of Eden to hold out a hand to someone, that if you want to remake the world you have to cut through the everyday games. To remind me that we are still these poor little birds stripped of our feathers, and our urgent task, if we are ever to recover our cohesion and our dignity, is to fly toward one another until we meet, be it in Jerusalem or Coignières, because Michel Cukiermann’s tribe is no longer the People of the Book, but the People of the Shoah. So, because he patiently explained Transipeg to me in all its technical detail, I do not say to him that
my
people, be they the People of the Book, the People of Pride, or the People of Solitude, are bitter and untrained in a different way, that to my knowledge they have never compared themselves to a shivering brood of baby birds, and I do not say that my own suffering is one it is much harder to admit to, namely, that I am forced to confront him in all his pathetic gravity, his righteousness and brotherhood, without
disemboweling
him.
My son, I cannot, absolutely cannot, speak one more word to anyone who lacks the capacity for doubt, who has cocooned himself in everyday simplifications, who sets up against me his own edifying vision of the world. You have certainly avoided such rigidities and you don’t act out such passions, but you have dismissed any form of ambition, opting instead for the complete pointlessness of doing anything. My friend Lionel also represents a vote for humanity as inertia, but you’re not in the same camp. Lionel doesn’t expect anything. Lionel looks at the sheer pointlessness of the day-to-day and he takes evasive action. You, my dear, are still nursing your own little pet project, because what you want is to blossom. Since I’ve been taking a close interest in plants and flowers, this expression has taken on real meaning. You lift your arms in a corolla, you offer your head to the passing breeze, and you beam at anyone who walks by.
Certain pieces in
The Art of the Fugue
have the where-withal to make my soul dance. First Fugue, Counterpoint 1, slow, fast, never wearied of listening to it, stated, restated, never wearying, slow, fast, slow, listening for hours, my boy, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, all of life playing itself out uninterruptedly in one’s ear, never wearying, Counterpoint 10, Counterpoint 12, Counterpoint 13, the thirteenth fugue! danced, sung at the hardest of moments, ineffable dance, ineffable song, bearer of ineffable joy, Counterpoint 14,
unfinished
as per the record sleeve, I liked the word
unfinished,
mi, re’, do, tee, lah, tee, re’—STOP— interruption caused by death, long radical silence, the work isn’t uncompleted, it’s infinite, it’s not incomplete but
unfinished,
arrested, rendered infinite by the grave.
Bach will save me from you all, from your revolting versions of paradise, Bach will save my life.
“My current wife, Nancy,” I say to Genevieve, “is capable of standing motionless—you could time her—in a discount drugstore for an hour at a stretch choosing
loose
face powder (I still don’t know what that is).”
“Doesn’t seem abnormal to me,” says Genevieve.
“No, not at all abnormal, on the contrary I was expressing regret.”
“She doesn’t do it anymore?”
“These days Nancy, although she’s beautiful to me, spends her money on rejuvenating creams and potions, but, how can I put it, her bent is now scientific. No more of that charming tendency to err toward the magical. Sooner or later women abandon futility.”
“That’s what you think. No more than two weeks ago—and Samuel, I’m no longer in the bloom of youth—I threw a tantrum because I couldn’t get my usual lipstick. I said Arancil is no longer making Bamboo? I said, they’ve
discontinued
Bamboo?! I’m talking too loud, aren’t I? Samuel, I’m pissed, you’ve got me completely drunk, my friend, you know I basically don’t drink. Our friend the false Hauvette is leaving. He’s not so terrible. The real Hauvette is probably not that well preserved. He may even be dead. At our age, there’s a good chance we’re dead, no? It’s our only rendezvous these days. Which is why I’m capable of going all the way across Paris for a lipstick or a lightning facefirming gel, the hell with the gravity of our final moments, I want pure fantasy, because waiting at the end of the road, my dear, what’s waiting is Bagneux where I’ll be stuck with Abramowitz and his parents, who were already dead as doornails while they were alive, when I would have been so happy to be in Montparnasse in the Jewish part of the cemetery next to Leopold, finally sleeping next to him, even as dust, even in oblivion, even as nothing. Finally no more having to get up and pretend to take everything so lightly, no more standing forever on the threshold of my own life, a little mocking, a little unreliable, a little treacherous, no more wasting my physical strength and my time fighting against the love I felt for him, you’re pouring me another glass, you must take total responsibility for the state I’m in, Montparnasse is still part of the city, you go walking there without thinking twice, you take the children and hunt for entertaining figures among the dead, Leo would have hated being at Bagneux, last time I laid a pebble on his grave, almost a year ago, it was already dark, and I forbid you to laugh, we talked to each other: where were you all our lives? I murmured, when my life intersected with yours, where were you, now I’m too old to attract you, love passes me by and doesn’t even see me. —This is what I wanted, Genevieve. —What did you want? —That your face would be soft. That time would have left its marks, that I can stroke it the way you stroke a dog. —Why? He doesn’t answer. I ask why, but he doesn’t answer. There’s nothing more than the brown gravestone and the pebble in one corner, just as I too, during his life, stayed in a corner, and, absurdly, I tell them all the things I would never ever have said out loud while he was alive, I tell the marble and the incised letters things I left unsaid while my life and his intersected, and that will still remain unsaid tonight, even though I’m lightheaded, because I will never worry again about upsetting him or contradicting him or losing him, death has given him to me. Help, Samuel, right away, we have to get some fresh air.”
Stand up, Genevieve, I said, in the living room in rue Ampère, where we found ourselves after walking the whole length of the Park Monceau and sitting for quite some while in the rotunda. Stand up, Genevieve, I commanded after we’d shared a third of a surviving bottle of vodka. Stand up, come on, we’ll move the armchairs, let’s push back the chairs and the table, I’ll close the curtains, Genevieve, and make rue Ampère and Paris and time all disappear, give me your hand and we’ll dance,
Jewish Songs for Cello and Piano,
present from my son-in-law Michel, never listened to them before, it’s just like opening a bottle of some ancient nectar with you but I think we’ve drunk enough, let’s dance instead, this evening we’ll dance to
Uncertainty
and the
Kaddish
and the
Kol Nidre,
I was born somewhere between Samara and Kazan on the Volga, somewhere between deserted roads and deserted villages, I’m going to die in the bed in that bedroom next door, a good bed to croak in, as I said to Nancy the other day, she was lying on the daybed for once in her life as was I, I said it’s perfect for keeping watch over someone who’s dying, you smile, Nancy, but that’s where you’ll be, in the armchair, I mean, my love, I’ll be in the bed. Frankly I don’t know which is the better spot. Let’s dance, Genevieve, the steppes are blanketed in white, there are no walls and no doors, the road we’re traveling doesn’t matter anymore. The little pre-Columbian goat has lost a leg, Rosa Dacimiento threw it out, a little leg made of clay, what does she think she’s doing? In the great tradition of Audoulia, I run the cloth over the bookcase slowly to begin with, then speed up as I get closer to the clay statue, laugh, Genevieve, laugh, I do so love your laugh, I’ll do the impossible, go anywhere, if it’ll make you laugh. Audoulia was our pre-Dacimiento, Spanish, my boy as a mere child made model fighter planes, and she broke them all dusting, she didn’t dust, she dueled with fighter squadrons, I miss her today, just as I miss everything to do with times past, whether it’s Audoulia, a leather bag, or the smell of fresh-sawn lumber, I’m immensely nostalgic, Genevieve, incurably nostalgic, it’s something that can wreck your reputation in a minute these days, if you’re nostalgic you’re one of our world’s bastards, I hate our world. Nancy is in Brest, at her parents’. My wife Nancy, Genevieve, is forging right ahead, and since she’s been forging right ahead she’s no longer pretending to jump out of the window, she no longer rolls around on the ground, she beats me periodically and that makes me feel a rediscovered tenderness for her because this madness makes me remember her old fragility, I used to love Nancy, I loved her fits, I loved her laugh, she had the laugh I love, your laugh, and Lionel’s. Arthur’s before he became the universal man. She called me at the office to say I’m off to kill myself, do you realize this is the last time you’ll hear me on the phone, I said but where are you, she started to cry, I’m stuck in traffic on the avenue de la Grande Armée, even when I need to kill myself I can’t get out of Paris. That was the Nancy I loved. I went to get her, I took her shopping, she spent a century choosing a face powder or a pair of shoes, she gave it the same sincerity, the same seriousness she had brought an hour before to the idea of killing herself, I waited for her in overheated rooms, sitting on makeshift stools, we came out clutching parcels, she hung on my neck and kissed me, half-laughing, half-crying, and I ended up crying with her and we both cried over how hard life is and the price of shoes, why our paths are diverging like this, why she’s become this socially engaged person, driven from dawn to dusk by the world as adventure, once she didn’t give a shit, now that she’s in love with illegal aliens from Mali she’s no longer in love with me, since she’s come down on the side of generosity, she’s out to kill me. Let’s dance. What we’re listening to is a
Prayer.
Let’s dance, Genevieve, before us there was nobody and after us there will be nobody. The world goes on, but for nothing. Let’s dance. I was born in a country that existed in a different time, on white plains, I am incurably nostalgic for empty villages, empty roads, empty sounds, how am I supposed to follow my wife in all her humanistic bustle? I’m happy to go back into winter where I came from. Maybe that’s the distant place that gave me my taste for gray light and it’s from that distant place that the sounds of strings echo in my ears, continually, like a ghostly relic. Let’s do a spin. I admire how light you are on your feet. Lionel, who watches the world from his window, loves the gray of the sky as much as I do, at least he’s sure, he says, that the weather isn’t pleasing anyone at all, and with a little luck, he says, melancholy will manage to overtake an idiot or two and you’ll feel a little less alone, a tiny little bit less alone, he says, than on those National Cultural Heritage days when you see clusters of happy people going past in shorts like fat bunches of grapes, shorts should be banned in towns, he says, even in small towns, shorts should be permitted in open country and only in open country, and then only in autumn colors, towns should have a ban on shorts and happy people, he says in conclusion. Every day, Genevieve, we talk on the phone. Every morning we call each other, we almost don’t speak to each other anymore except on the phone, we’re that close. We no longer need a face to talk to. Tomorrow morning I’ll tell Lionel that Arthur has bought himself an apartment in Jerusalem. Maybe he knows and he’s had the tact, knowing how coolly I would view it, to keep quiet. I would like to know what Lionel thinks on this matter. And Arthur too, I miss. I miss him. Not just at checkers, where despite the fact that his game had really gone down, he was the only possible partner. Despite the fact that his game had gone down alarmingly, which he did out of friendship, another discipline. I miss him because I laughed with him too. There was a time when Arthur and I could laugh about the general failure of life. Arthur, I don’t know if you know, almost separated from Vera because of a dream. He woke up one morning and said to Vera, “You’re horrible. You’re a horrible woman.” Vera, in his dream, was taking him to lunch. Contrary to their usual habits, Vera is driving the BMW. It’s supposed to be midday, but they’re driving in twilight down the sandy bed of a dried-up river, sort of like the Garonne at the end of its course. They’re driving, alone, in some sort of estuary lined with truck stops, they meet the occasional construction vehicle, pass a gravel pit that’s operating at full capacity. There are boats pulled up in pools of water against the banks, you can tell that there’s free passage only once a day, you can tell the tide’s going to come in, suddenly Arthur tries to grab the wheel and yells, Quicksand—the BMW’s going to sink! Vera replies, All you think about is your damn car, you’re such a gutless wonder, I’m never going to take you anywhere again. When he wakes up, Arthur analyzes the dream, he goes back to the sand, the mud, the rising tide, the gravel, the truck stops pretending to be port taverns, the smell of fish, he thinks about the twilight, he thinks about the horrible reaction when he tried to save the BMW, which is to say their return, which is to say the two of them, and he says to himself, aha, that’s where she was taking me to lunch. She was actually taking me to death.