The Buddha's Return (6 page)

“For so long I was deprived,” he began, “of entry to a world that had once been my own… perhaps because I’m no philosopher, and I’m certainly no stoic. I mean to say that for a philosopher, the external conditions of life—remember Aesop’s example—should play no part whatsoever in the development of human thought. I must admit, however, that there are certain materialistic details at whose mercy a man can find himself—insects, filth, cold, foul odours…”

He was sitting in a deep armchair, smoking a cigarette, with a cup of coffee resting in front of him.

“…all this has a most unpleasant effect on a man. Perhaps it’s some law of psychological mimicry gone too far. After all, it’s quite understandable: we often know
which conditions govern the inception of some biological law or other, but we cannot predict when that action will terminate, nor can we be sure that its effects will always be the same. Why is it that
King Lear
and
Don Quixote
should lose all meaning for me simply because I live in inadequately fine surroundings? And yet it is so.”

I was only half listening to him. Before my eyes, doggedly returning to me, was that day in April two years ago when I first set eyes on him, standing there in his ornamental rags, with that dark, unshaven face. Now there were books in heavy leather bindings lined above his head, and the recherché elegance of his speech could in no way seem out of place.

I spent the whole evening with him and left, taking with me the memory of this unlikely metamorphosis, which was utterly baffling and seemed to contradict everything I had until now, consciously or unconsciously, considered plausible. This man had started off in the realm of fantasy and stepped into reality, and for me his existence contained all the luxurious absurdity of a Persian fairy tale, which troubled me.

Some time after this I again—completely by chance—bumped into the residents of Rue Simon le Franc. I ran into one of my former classmates, with whom I had long ago lost touch, but about whom I occasionally read in the newspapers, most often with regard to his latest arrest or conviction. He was an astonishing man, a chronic alcoholic
who had spent his entire life in a drunken haze and had been spared from the grave only by virtue of an uncommonly strong constitution. When he first arrived in France, he worked in a number of factories, although this period did not last for very long: he started seeing some well-to-do girl, taking her to all the cabarets in town; then he caught her cheating on him, shot her new lover, was sent down and on his release began leading the most disparate of lives, one with which it was difficult to draw any comparison. He worked as a gardener in the south of France, journeyed to the Alsace, and had once been spotted in a village in the Pyrenees. For the most part, however, he lived in Paris, in the outlying slums, passing from one shady episode to the next, and, whenever he spoke of it, the narrative would always feature his being released on a lack of evidence and the clarification of some misunderstanding. Then again, it was utterly impossible to keep track of his tale; there was no way to distinguish where the inebriation ended and where the madness began. In any case, there could be no talk of any chronological sequence to what he said.

“You see, just as I get back from Switzerland, she starts telling me how this lady painter from Italy is planning to go off to Sicily, but just then—can you imagine!—a police inspector investigating that Greek journalist barges in, asking me what I was doing in Luxembourg a fortnight ago, while she claims that the doctor who treated the Englishman was the victim of some night-time attack—his
head was smashed in, you see, he was terribly injured, and so he decided to go straight to the lady modeller who lives near the Porte d’Orléans.”

He spoke as though each of his interlocutors was well informed about every individual he mentioned. However, I had never heard of any artists, Greek journalists or doctors, even from him, and I was not altogether sure that they really did exist, such as he described them. Amid the progressive atrophy of his mental faculties, or, rather, amid their incredible confusion, all conception of time vanished; he had no idea in which year we were living, and any semblance of continuity in his own existence appeared miraculously improbable. Thus he wandered about Paris in a drunken madness that had persisted for years, and it was astonishing that he ever found his way home or even recognized anyone. But he had grown much worse in recent years, was taken ill with consumption, and could not go on as he had done. I once met him in the street; he asked me for some money and I gave him what I had, but a few days later I received a note from him, saying that he was bedridden in his hotel room and had nothing to eat. I headed straight there.

He lived on the outskirts of the city, not far from the abattoirs. Nowhere had I seen more abject poverty. Below, a man with tattoos and the currish face of a criminal told me as he idly rinsed out cloudy glasses behind the bar that Michel lived at No. 34. Up and down the steep, narrow
stairwell passed some rather suspect-looking people, and each floor bore the peculiar trace of some foul stench that seemed to permeate the entire building. Mishka was lying on the bed, unshaven, haggard and emaciated. By the head of the bed sat a woman of around sixty, clumsily trowelled in make-up and wearing a black dress and slippers. When I came in Mishka said to her in Russian:

“You may go now.”

She stood up and, with hardly any expression in her voice, said, “Goodbye,” her mouth agape, revealing a number of missing teeth, and left. I silently watched her go. Mishka asked:

“Don’t you recognize her?”

“No.”

“It’s Zina.”

“Which Zina?”

“You know, the famous one.”

I had never heard of any famous Zina.

“What is she famous for?”

“An artist’s sitter, a beauty. She was the lover of all the great artists. She was my lover, too, but now, you understand, all that’s a thing of the past. Women no longer exist for me; I’d be too out of breath. It was just before I was in Versailles that I had some business with this Albanian architect who had an imbroglio with my little Swiss—”

“Wait, wait,” I said. “Tell me a bit more about Zina.”

“She’s living with a marksman these days,” said Mishka. He was entirely sober—probably for the first time in a long while. “The little swine, we had a run-in around five years ago; he almost stole the money I’d just received from this English girl, she’d just got married and—”

“Did he steal it or not?”

“Steal it he did, but he gave it back. I twisted his arm. Such a mousey little swine, you know. Well, of course she gave him syphilis. From what I gather he’s always been a marksman, goes about telling some story involving a motorcycle, something about being arrested in Lyons. I say to him, ‘What good is Lyons when I remember you in the prison at Versailles?’ And prisons don’t come any worse, upon my word of honour, the Santé’s a thousand times better. God forbid you ever end up at Versailles, take this as a piece of friendly advice. It was Alexei Alexeyevich Chernov who wrote this chap’s entire life story for him—that, my friend, is talent. I even have something of his, typed out.”

And indeed he extracted from the shelf a dirty-grey notebook with very dog-eared corners and handed it to me. It was Chernov’s novel
Before the Storm.
I read the opening lines:

“A winter dusk was falling over Petersburg, majestic as always. Pyotr Ivanovich Belokonnikov, a wealthy man of forty, belonging both by birth and by the education he received in the Page Corps to the high society of the
Palmyra of the North, was walking along the pavement, his fur coat undone. He had just taken leave of Betty, his mistress, and could not stop thinking about the marble white of her bosom and the burning caress of her sumptuous body.”

I questioned Mishka about these people whom he knew so well. Despite the disjointedness of the narrative, I nevertheless managed to ascertain that Alexei Alexeyevich Chernov was that ill-looking, shabbily dressed old man whom I had seen many times and who would ask me for alms at the entrance to the Russian church. I also learnt that Zina had a daughter, Lida, who was around twenty-six years old and had at one time been married to some Frenchman; he had died suddenly, poisoning was suspected, and Lida encountered some unpleasantness. I had already had occasion to note that in Mishka’s language the word “unpleasantness” more often than not denoted “prison”. These days she sold flowers in the streets somewhere.

I returned to Mishka’s hotel a few days later, but he was no longer there and no one could tell me what had happened to him. Only much later did I learn that he had died of consumption around a month after I last met him, in one of the sanatoriums just outside Paris. It was around the same time, while walking down Boulevard Garibaldi, that I once spotted a group of people coming towards me on the pavement. It was Zina and the mousey marksman,
the one I had seen at Pavel Alexandrovich’s on the day I paid him a visit, with a young woman, very shabbily dressed, with unkempt fair hair—Lida, just as Mishka had described her to me. They were all walking almost abreast of one another. Lida was lagging just a little behind. I could see a discarded cigarette lying in the middle of the pavement in front of them. As they approached it, the mousey man was clearly about to bend down, but at that moment, with a peculiar rhythmical precision and speed, Zina pushed his shoulder so hard that he very nearly fell over. Then, in one casual, precise movement, she picked up the cigarette end and in the same step continued onward. I was put in mind of the
dzhigits
who, while sliding down from their saddles, are able to pick up a kerchief lying on the ground as their horse races on at full gallop. I saw Lida smile, and could not help noticing that in her drawn, sickly face, despite its youthfulness, there was a definite, if somewhat alarming, attractiveness.

That evening when I ran into these people, with recent events still fresh in my memory—the visit to Shcherbakov, the conversation with Mishka, my impressions of the mousey marksman, Zina and her daughter—that evening a great distance had separated me from them, and all this ceased to occupy my mind. During the day I had felt strangely exhausted; I had come home and slept for three whole hours. Then I got up, washed and went out to dine at a restaurant, but from the restaurant I went straight
home again. It was around nine o’clock in the evening. I stood for a long time by the window, looking down onto the narrow street. Everything was as it always was: the stained glass of the brothel opposite my apartment was lit up and above it one could easily read the sign “
Au panier fleuri”
;
‡
the concierges sat on their stools, in front of their doors, and amid the evening silence I could hear their voices conversing about the weather and the high cost of living; at the corner, where the street met the boulevard, Mado’s silhouette kept appearing and disappearing by the windows of a bookshop as she went about her work, back and forth along that same stretch—thirty paces there, thirty paces back; somewhere nearby a pianola was playing. I knew everyone on this street, just as I knew every odour, the look of every building, the glass of every window pane, and that lamentable imitation of life, intrinsic to each of its inhabitants, which never revealed its greatest secret: what inspired these people in the lives they led? What were their hopes, their desires, their aspirations, and to what end did each of them obediently, patiently repeat the same thing day after day? What could there be in all this—apart from some biological law that they obeyed unknowingly and unthinkingly? What had summoned them to life out of apocalyptic nothingness? The accidental and perhaps momentary union of two human bodies one evening or late one night a few dozen years ago? And so I recalled
what Paul, a short, stout forty-year-old man in a cap, who worked as a lorry driver and lived two floors below me, had said over a glass of red wine:

“J’ai pas connu mes parents, c’est à s’demander s’ils ont jamais existé. Tel, que vous m’voyez, j’ai été trouvé dans une poubelle, au 24 de la rue Caulaincourt. Je suis un vrai parisien, moi.”
§

And when I once asked Mado what she planned to do in the future and how she expected her life to turn out, she looked at me with heavily pencilled empty eyes and, shrugging her shoulders, replied that she never wasted any time thinking about such things. Then she paused for a second and said that she would work until the day she died—“
jusqu’au jour où je vais crever, parce que je suis poitrinaire.”
¶

I withdrew from the window. The pianola mercilessly went on playing one aria after the next. I felt as if I were venturing deeper and deeper into some vague mental fog. I tried to envisage everything my mind could envelop in the most comprehensive terms possible—the world as it was right now: the dark sky above Paris, its enormous expanse, thousands upon thousands of kilometres of ocean, the dawn over Melbourne, late evening in Moscow, the rushing of sea foam along the shores of Greece, the midday heat in the Bay of Bengal, the diaphanous movement of air across the earth, and time’s unstoppable
march into the past. How many people had died while I had been standing there by the window, how many were now in their last agony as I had this very thought, how many bodies were writhing about in the throes of death—those for whom the inexorable final day of their lives had already dawned? I closed my eyes and before me appeared Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement,
and for whatever reason I immediately recalled his final epistle, in which he stated that he could write no more. As I remembered these lines I felt a chill run down my spine: this hand that was now incapable of writing had carved
David
and
Moses
from marble—and yet his genius was dissolving into that very same nothingness from which it had come; each of his works was an apparent victory over death and time. So that these concepts—time and death—appeared to me in all their finality, I had to tread the long path of gradual immersion, and conquer the aural inadequacy of this series of letters, “t”, “m”, “d”, “h”, and only then did the infinite perspective of my own journey towards death come into view. Those lines in Michelangelo’s letter rang in my ears, and I saw the printed page plainly before my eyes: the date, “Rome, 28 December 1563”, and the address, “Lionardo di Buonarroto Simoni, Florence”. “I have received many letters from thee of late to which I have not replied because my hand no longer submits to my will.” Two months later, in February 1564, he died. Did he still recall the tragic grandeur of that swell of muscles
and bodies that his relentless inspiration had so imperiously cast down into hell—with the countless, unerring movements of that truly unique hand, the very one that would later refuse to serve him—in the days when the illusion of his superhuman might and the earthly vanity of his singular genius became so apparent? I sat in my armchair and with cold rage pondered the fundamental bankruptcy of everything, in particular any abstract morality and even the unattainable spiritual loftiness of Christianity—because of the limitations imposed on us by time, and because of the existence of death. Of course, none of these thoughts were revelatory; I had known them my whole life, just as millions of others had known them before me, but only rarely did they cross from a theoretical understanding into something tangible, and whenever they made this transition I experienced a peculiar and incomparable terror. My entire world and everything that surrounded me would lose all meaning and sense of reality. Later I developed a strange and abiding desire—to vanish into thin air, like a phantom in a dream, like a patch of morning mist, like someone’s distant memory. I wanted to forget everything, everything that constituted me, beyond which it seemed impossible to imagine my own existence, this aggregate of absurd, random conventions—as though I desired to prove to myself that I had not one life, but many, and consequently that the conditions in which I found myself in no way limited my options. I observed,
from a theoretical and conceptual standpoint, the whole sequence of my gradual metamorphoses, and among the multitude of images to appear before me was the hope of some illusory immortality. I saw myself as a composer, a miner, an officer, a labourer, a diplomat, a tramp: there was something convincing about each transformation, and so I began to believe that I really had no idea who I might be the very next day or what distance would separate me from this night after the darkness had passed. Where would I be and what awaited me? I had lived what seemed like so many different lives, so often had I shuddered as I experienced the suffering of another, so often had I acutely felt what affected other people, often the dead or those far away from me, that I had long lost all concept of my own profiles. So on that evening, as happened whenever I was left alone for a lengthy period of time, I found myself surrounded by this sensual ocean of innumerable memories, thoughts, experiences and hopes, which were both preceded and succeeded by a vague and overwhelming sense of expectation. Ultimately I would be so wearied by this state of being that everything would begin to get mixed up in my imagination, and then I would either go out to a café or else try to concentrate on a single, specific idea or series of ideas, or perhaps I might try to rack my memory for some salutary melody that I would force myself to follow through to its end. As I lay in my bed in a state of total debility, I suddenly recalled
the Unfinished Symphony; it resonated in the evening silence of my room, and after several minutes I began to feel as if I were once again in a concert hall: the black tail-coat of the conductor, the intricate floating dance of his baton, whose movements amid the vanquished silence led the music—strings, bows, piano keys—the immediate and essentially miraculous return of distant inspiration, halted many years ago by that blind and merciless law, the same law that stayed Michelangelo’s hand. Night was setting in and there were already stars in the sky, downstairs the concierges were asleep, the sign “
Au panier fleuri
” was shining brightly, and at the corner, like a pendulum, Mado was pacing back and forth—and all this filtered through the Unfinished Symphony, without darkening it or disturbing it, gradually blurring and disappearing in this whirl of sound, in this illusory victory of memory and imagination over reality and perception.