There aren’t very many Algerians south of here, even though this district is good for them. I see two passing by in overalls, then another who might be homeless, but there aren’t any real homeless Algerians in Paris, they’re careful. The sidewalk is white, the moon just appeared, all the bistros are closed, and my pockets are empty anyway. Farther north, I dash off toward the Chevaleret station. I’m alone in the street again. Then suddenly, two shadows appear, at least one of which has a home. The Moon is thanked for appearing. A message from distant civilizations: what is she, the Moon, alongside the poor Earth? A neighborhood near Chevaleret or a village out in the Causses, far from metropolitan France. She’s so lonely, far away from her star! I too am so alone, at 12:45 a.m., on this avenue running northeast, even in one of the great cities of the world!

  The Chevalaret station is also lifeless. It’s the desert, the desert rebuilt in the middle of one of the biggest cities on Earth. The silent arches supporting the overhead tracks are like fossils from a vanished civilization. There aren’t even any hotels around here. Wait, I see one, barely lit in blue. I’m suddenly taken by desire, it’s crazy. These desires caused by hunger interrupt my thoughts like blades cutting through straw. Where’s the Moon? Oh, the boulevard isn’t really solid, oh, yes it is, my footsteps build it back up, and I suddenly hear the sound of the soles of my shoes on the asphalt, and the Chevaleret station, and a clean and normal train storms through the nocturnal agora. Two travelers are coming down to lose themselves in this wonderful paradise! A single flat note from a detuned flute comes from the Seine. Quick, return to the Seine and to something that resembles geography.

  At the end of the boulevard, to the north, I come to a bridge crowned by the metro.29 Not a soul. I reach the Seine. The Moon is hiding, a gust of cold wind makes me dream of those who have drowned. Notre Dame barely shows itself to the west, open to all instincts. The night is cold. I put my hands in the pockets of the trench coat that the rich actor gave me.

  The bridge crosses over. It’s windy, a lovely April wind that destroys beggars. The right bank slowly opens and extends to the north. More empty avenues near Bercy-les-vins, then a barricade of destiny that steers my body off course to the west, toward the Bastille, via streets whose names I’ve never known, where conventionally bourgeois buildings stir up my feelings for Gare de Paris-Est, as seen from where I once lived.

  I want to come up with some verses. The first one is inspired by my admiration in the circle. I panic and block my anger. Will I end up going on strike against these women who listen to me and leave me far from my real tools? Is this the same sort of thing that workers in the eighteenth century grumbled about? I stop all lyricism while I can. Dark silence. How much time will I have? The word “posthumous” returns to my lips. I yell it out into space: “posthumous!”

  I don’t know what magical device is providing me a bit of comfort. I’m suddenly as happy as a tourist, with no regard for local sleepers. I continue on to the Bastille. The Place de la Bastille is fabulous, a real cinematic treasure, immense, empty, lunar. The familiar activity of a taxi stand plays out under a huge sky. The Spirit of the Bastille politely yells out his precious funeral service.30 So is she, the Moon, dare we say, “our satellite,” and what laughter, and for whom? I imagine, through what eyes, huge deserts circumscribed by many silent Spirits of the Bastille, arranged in rows. I know these terrors come from love, but this visitor, he’s unbearable! I stop on the sidewalk, hypnotized by the menacing little statue hovering motionlessly thirty meters above the land of humanity.

  Some very high clouds pass by in the light of the satellite to remind us that the Earth ends at an altitude of ten thousand meters, a swarming universe imprisoned in the thin atmosphere like a fruit in its peel.

  Ten years ago these clouds were a meshwork of statues, of beautiful statues made from heavy vapors drawing a smooth, moving Olympus of bodily curves, solid and soft like a feminine arm. But ever since then, they’ve been clouds again, the angel has returned to its ancestral abstraction. Is this a test? Does he think we’re capable of understanding the alphabet of symbols suggested by the forms of these enormous vapors? There is no more folk art, the sky’s become esoteric again, the mystery is renewed, disguised once more in its everydayness, as mournful of life as a mediocre nonfigurative canvas. Again, he’s only a message of human rationality for the rare enlightened ones, the potential future experts, the angel is silent again, to the people as much as to the poet.

  The line of big, light clouds moves to the west, in the direction of Châtelet and la Révolte.31 It’s a line, a blank space in the French night. It forms itself and almost falls into the dictionary. It confuses me: a dragon with feminine eyes, then a compassionate snake. What can I say? The message is still true in the first two hundred meters of Rue Saint-Antoine. Then it suddenly breaks. Now it’s just clouds, a vaulted ceiling that closes in on us the way it knows how.

  It is 1:30 a.m. A man who is alone and totally exposed in his hometown realizes that he will make it to the big day of Christian Passover. He believes that in books they say it is when bread and wine are consumed. Suddenly, crossing Rue Saint-Paul, he screams out in anger, his laughter crashing into the beds of thousands of Parisians who are attentive to their morality. “The reason I’m laughing,” he says, “is because I’m a special vagabond, very special, really, so I’m not afraid of the police, and I don’t submit to the political discipline that’s essential in the world of vagrants. I have the right to tell off all you bastards, hungry fools, guilty suckers . . . Uh . . . uh . . . you rotten poor, as a filmmaker recently said.”32

  He laughs like a madman for three minutes as he makes his way to Châtelet with a heavy step. “It’s me, Jacques Besse.” The laughter in my throat changes into snickering, I bow my orchestra to the ground. “Rotten poor,” the words are nevertheless torn from me by the first nocturnal hours of the Holy Day of Easter of the eleventh year.

  He turns back to the north on Boulevard de Sébastopol. The prostitutes have all gone nighty-night, except for two or three, one of whom looks at him. She looks like Gaby Sylvia. He moves off, calms down, watches a police car that barely slows down as it passes him. The aura of someone going hungry is heavy in the tenth year. He sits down on a bench and tries to remember his family heritage. Dad’s angry, but not at him, Sisi is worried about the Communists in the United States, she takes me for someone else, asks me for news of someone . . . I’ve forgotten . . . someone German. I feel a little melancholy. Cécile Aubry’s entrance makes him burst into laughter! Ah, you, well. He leaves his spot: a bench along Boulevard de Sébastapol. Do we have an egg? Yes, the horse passes by and the dog seems to walk. If this isn’t just hers, it’s from her group, which includes a certain number of French sorcerers like Moroccans. He almost falls asleep, sees the Irish girl who, apparently, used to write verse, then three teachers who are afraid of him, then a functionary from the prefecture who had contributed to his protection under the German occupation. “No, no,” I tell him, “everything’s fine, no offense, but if I get into, say, propositioning minors into debauchery, who would take care of it?” We both laugh for a good minute. He suddenly wakes up, a little cold, and sets off again to Porte Saint-Denis. The weather is mild and pleasant. Everyone’s asleep, big cities grow wise by way of those who have the right to be. He is delighted by the sight of a feathery cloud, he sees it better than when he was over at the Bastille, but he no longer dares say what he gets from it. He passes Strausbourg-Saint-Denis, a gloomy plain at this time of night. We’re warning the planet, Paris, the great Paris, is meditating, even in these areas that offer things to eat and drink all night long. Suddenly, I’m almost “the president,” but I don’t have any money on me and the presence of a uniformed officer at the intersection of two big streets worries me. I go back west, toward the Richelieu-Drouot station from the 1926 metro expansion, my native neighorhood, which sits to the west (and a little to the south) of Porte Saint-Denis. I move back and forth among the eastern portion of these grand boulevards, which have more shops, more piss on the street, and are more open to strange men than the “West End,” which is admired for its girls in little dresses and movie theaters attentive to the splendor that fails them.33 I make it to Richelieu-Drouot. In my dream, a girl holds out her mitt. It’s Solange again, I yell at her: “You’ve eaten but I haven’t, tra-la-la,” because she has money but seems to want to love me in a moral way, with her in her bed and me on the street. I really yelled at Solange, who wouldn’t give me something to eat right away, yet I allow myself, a good man who thinks of himself in good standing, to gently make love to her heading up to la Madeleine. Did Fouquier-Tinville love Polignac like this?34 Or rather, what would Fouquier-Tinville have dreamt about if he were Jacques Besse, starving and obliged to remain in love with girls who are flush with money?

  Near l’Opéra, I go back over the difficult problem with my pre-Marxist conscience. Solange has money and I don’t. All the magical powers pay her the money that she has. Me, I’m underpaid and without magical support. “Oh,” Solange whispers, “you have your fame!” This moves me tremendously, and we make love again as I head to la Madeleine, completely alone in my shoes full of holes. No, nobody is going to make a slave of me, and the love I give is mine and it doesn’t belong to the wealthy, and if the wealthy decided that I were a love generator, they’d be refused, ruined, and harshly abused by a thousand churches, in addition to the fear that they have of the plain and simple truth.

  I dared to speak politically and la Place de la Madeleine makes me laugh nervously. Shit, Jenny, it’s over, soon the power of the rich will be history. Announced to mankind by a sleazy beggar, Massa Jacques Besse, sectarian of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, é di nou, like the planet?35 I alone, Jacques Besse, enjoy the filthy tramps who come to teach me. My body, dreaming around the Élysée Palace, goes down Rue Royale, toward the true work of our precursors. Now I see in her apartment that bitch Jenny, who communes with both heaven and hell, the dirtiest game, as far as I’m concerned, and I record what she says, even though she dictates it naively, and not to her credit: “What if neither hell nor heaven existed on earth, but only brotherhood?” Monsieur Jacques Besse arrives at the Obelisk and is amazed, even posthumously, to see Jenny restrained more brutally than the little rebel Lagaillarde, because he uttered this phrase against order in Jenny’s voice. So it goes when the law is involved.

  I was almost sleeping while walking. I wake up a little embarrassed. What has this hurricane of Biblico-African thought come to do? The Seine grabs onto me, I see the bridge over the water a little unexpectedly, then some violet attic windows with blue light passing through the shutters. The bridge is empty. Poor Jenny, she tries to stir up in me the “roudou roudou” of good little girls, in the style that we call “Melpomene’s.”36 The sorrow I felt won’t save me from her. Bread, bread, bread. The lady had eaten well for her five thousand francs in a neighborhood restaurant, perhaps yelling loudly to the serious waiters that she gave Monsieur Jacques Besse a hand during his lonely night, who would’ve gotten a room and a meal for a quarter of the price of what she licked. Not the sort of love I like. Oh you, give me the power to master this dirty love.

  A few seconds of wakefulness. I appear in the complete emptiness before the Ministry of War. I collapse onto another bench, it must be 2:30 a.m., I’m sad in the old way, but this is the end, maybe I’ll be able to sweep this woman from my memory.

  . . . Three stars, four stars, a starry sky above the street. Wait, what? Who are you, sweet star? Who is this poet who defies forms, who is this egg? The egg sleeps on a bench along boulevard Saint-Germain. It’s almost 3 a.m.

  Two cars: one black, vulgar, bourgeois, and sad; one red with a future girl of mine, but it’s largely under the administrative control of the cops, oh, Moon. She goes: “Ni,” I say: “Na,” she has her car and I don’t, I touch her cunt (but the word doesn’t come from my person), I touch her skirt, and she enjoys loving me as she revs the accelerator under her heel, oh, this skirt! A two-million-franc car to make a skirt-accelerator in a genocidal filth. I tell her this, she anxiously plays with the heel of her shoe, it’s not her heel’s fault that someone bled for her skirt. I pull my now-happier body from hers, oh, this little heel on the accelerator of a car painted red, and for whom? And, really turned on, I cling to the blood of the impoverished Algerians or the destitute beggars of Paris, who are truly worth almost as much to me as this car and this little heel on a mechanism that’s unclear to its owner . . . I . . .

  The owner has driven off in her car to who knows where. The same girl, my girl, sleeps in the southeast, without heels, without stockings, without car. I’ll have a laugh at the car owner’s expense. “I’ll have my way with you and you’ll give your car to her.” “And not just that,” I reply to the greatest number expressed through me by a single comrade, “but she’ll have all the stockings she can imagine right in front of her, for the real gaze of her men, and then, oh then, there won’t be a red car with heels anymore to shatter the heaven of the same little girl en li nou, unless they decide on a red car with heels for Her, that is, for all of them, my true comrades (to whom I never speak), and not for me . . .”37

  I wake up on the bench. I was really dreaming, I actually slept, no cops bothered me. I saw something in my dream: a blonde girl resting her high heel on the accelerator of a red car. And I smiled, let’s hope she pulls through, and the other girl who looks like her on rue Mouffetard, the one without a car, not even a worker but the same being, is she happy, oh, how I love her! . . .

  He gets up and is crushed by shame in front of the courthouse that appears. Was it really me who dreamed of giving a red luxury car to a comrade? It’s as idiotic to admit it as it is to deny it. Even speaking of it is to sink deeper into insanity. I remain silent to escape the delirium, directing my dreadfully sleepy eyes toward Boulevard Saint-Germain. What’s this story about a red car? I don’t understand any of it.

  He returns almost physically to the comfort of the traditional bourgeoisie. But, they ask: “Freedom, what’s freedom? You have red convertibles to consume, what are you going to do about it?” Then the Chairman intervenes: “Luxury-girl convertibles to distribute? . . . it might as well be you, boss, you’re in charge!” I break out laughing: “Well, I’m going to give them to my girlfriends!” There are some who admit to it. I crash. Everything happens as if I were crying up through my digestive tract. We have the tears that we can.

  So Blum, Québo, and Maria must get drunk the night before Easter! A technician told me so, it seems that in traditional black magic, doing something wicked to someone is enough to possess their body as well as their soul . . . They really did me wrong, they took dinner money from me and put me at definite odds with my future wife. Now they have my body, at the very least, I feel as drunk as them on a spiritual whisky that doesn’t make one happy. But I’ll be worshiped by them, even posthumously, but not me, because the entire social order is always the accomplice of this sort of magical act.

  I hear “Québo” carve into my being.

  So he has my soul too, and is bewitched by my virtue. He’s very rich in earthly goods. I begin to feel the word “adultery.” Québo is an adult and I’m a child, how do they say that in Spanish? Even if he dictates these phrases to me himself, how will he wash away this awful sin?

  I said sin, I feel my feet (I haven’t changed my socks in a week and I cling to bourgeois sensibilities), we’re always ridiculed somewhere, I know this, and Québo, or Maria in his bed, they might be amused. If they get sad, it’s even worse, they also have enough to buy themselves some virtue. I make a wish upon them and sit down on another bench. Is Québo going to feel real virtue and call the cops in despair over its cause? He had to do that in his distant province, where he’s undoubtedly a leftist and where the cops obey him. It’s very cold but I surrender. I think they’re fucking right now, climaxing.

  I start laughing silently near Boulevard Raspail, but it’s as tragic as the counterpart.38 Even though I’m starving, I had to act elite to select my women, all leading eugenics, such a virtuous sieve through which all the seeds pass straight to Québo and even cause Blum to refuse me a hundred francs. More privileged women, and I say love is as rotten as an engineer who opts for capitalism.

  She’s here, three five nine, it’s Montluçon, Rodez, Marseille, Paris in whichever corner, they’re anonymous, and it’s so strong, anonymity, that I let them laugh at me, then they come while jerking off my astral body and disgracefully neglect to bring me any grub. But I’m lying to myself, lying to them, we can’t do anything without love, money isn’t her. It’s my classmate, Lulu Doumer, who has to do it or otherwise smash her own face, all this to let me love these multiple liars who live in the corners (Oh . . . Jacques Besse . . .), as for the mothers, I cover my eyes.

  Saint-Germain-des-Prés again. It’s 4:10 a.m. There’s an upstairs café on the corner, where one can eat for anywhere from eighty to four thousand francs, it’s the macrocosm. I approach it, I hear some music around the calm and alert young people. There’s no longer a dull moment (I pass by like Clémenceau, I’m mad, mad, I seduce . . . I’m wrong, I seduce someone who loves Québo, control . . .).

  I remind the reader that I have no money on me and I’m looking at La Pergola’s facade with them.39 I suddenly remember that it’s 4:15 a.m. on the Holy Day of Easter. I’m cold, I love and I hate, I do everything, I’m afraid of sin, I want (I prefer to want vice), I want my body and speak the body that I have, and you know . . . I’ll go into La Pergola and eat steaks and fish in béarnaise sauce, but how? I pass by, keeping my distance, and brace myself; it’s not me, there are well-behaved customers . . . what? Well-behaved people who are eating exactly what I want for myself . . .

  Do you like to eat? Will I have red salmon roe, green vegetables, almost pure alcohol, jams, those rich jams that Eros craved? Human culture makes a thousand types of ordinary bread. I’m standing up, no horizontal benches. I collapse like a monk, groups of young people begin to hum, they’re kind of small, I think, judging by the poor condition of their clothes, that they’re workers who are out in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the night before Easter.

 

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