They have, by the way, won over a gang of gentlemen! They make me so afraid that I freeze up with thirty-nine years of non-commerce behind me. There are men and women entering and leaving La Pergola in happy waves, a little like in a Chardin, I feel bad, not from desire for these girls (I’m too thirsty), but because I can’t lie down in the anthill where I was born.

  A big gust of icy wind blows in from la Concorde. I squeeze my bones up against my light overcoat. A group walks by and I speak to a woman. They’re wearing jackets, she’s in a little dress, they laugh discreetly, in accordance with the new, modern customs. They make it through the cold wind, the woman’s skirt barely wrinkles. They descend the stairs to the metro a little crookedly. I stick with them for a few minutes to warm up, near the ticket counter. They even dance around a little while buying their tickets. We’re all fine, but I’m cold, not in the soul but in the body! I hover, then jump over to lean against the polished white and blue wall. People look at me but nobody touches me, they respect my fear. I warm up a little. I worry, is this Savonarola’s Florence? But I don’t want, I really don’t want, I’m afraid of failing at a competitive game. In the old days, I’d often tell a friend, “I play to win,” and I’d beat him at dice, poker, and even bridge (he was an academic player). But which game, I’m telling lies, telling lies, that’s not what this is about, it’s about the fear that I have of my youth. I’m thirty-nine years old, my spiritual children are twenty, I know myself. I’m scared of their power, I’m crazy, sleep!

  Impossible to sleep in the metro without money or a home. I climb back up the stairs, rush into the blizzard, and head back like an envoy to Les Halles by way of Châtelet. 4:40 a.m., I’ll have to freeze until 8:00. I’ve rarely felt so profoundly subhuman. Where’s my group? A little peace in my encephalon, a few flashes of light. Jacqueline appears above me, to my left. This isn’t a cinematic image, but an abstract, hot, and attentive presence. Humanity suddenly returns to me, I control it, watch it, barely smiling. A blast of freezing wind makes me laugh like a sleigh conductor. Jacqueline clearly sends me one of our memories. I smile, this time it’s a trip to Parc de Saint-Cloud where we acted like fiancés in the terrible, troubled joy of the old days.

  I tell her without words that this anxiety is long gone, does she say the same thing at the same time? I doubt it and I’m embarrassed, even though half-sleep could remove any barricades against the disgust that my oppressive situation might give her.

  Stop it, says a brief anguish within us, which comes from a recent relationship with those who seem to protect my equilibrium in the face of psychiatry. And I repeat it dementedly: “Stop it, stop it,” in almost three dimensions, my lips moving, and then, full of perverse and horrific fury, I look for Jacqueline in every direction of my imagination, breaking the dirty mama presence. They won’t kill her.

  Well, here it is, early morning on Easter Sunday. Wind and drizzle. Nothing else happens to me, I feel perfectly awake, but I’m no longer thinking and I’m strangely surprised when I look at public clocks, which throw me into a panic with their unexpected jumps. I am perhaps almost immobile, I must say, I barely made it through Les Halles. I go back down to my periscope and find Ginette and Nève again, then Jacqueline, who seems to be in a bad mood. Ginette displays, I believe, a new feminine quality, something youthful and quick to desire. Nève is not Eve, she doesn’t want to get married, but she is new and white like snow. I don’t dare think what their mortal appearance means for the juggling of time. One is a little girl, one is a grandmother, a masculine voice overwhelms me: “You don’t love souls, Jacques Besse, it’s bodies that you want.” It’s the beautiful voice of a preacher. Maybe it’s “my wife” or a musical collaborator who is teaching me a lesson to take revenge against my old faults as a mentor. I excuse myself without responding to whatever bothered her as an insult, then I gently clear Ginette and Nève out of the left corner of my head like little animals and carefully search for Jacqueline. The motor of a real truck stops me dead in my tracks. I look at the time, it’s 7:30 a.m., I’m in the Réaumur-Sébastopol quartier again. Here Easter blooms in the tenth year. The wind is still cold, and it rains from low and normal clouds, just like in the old days.

  Pointless to think about finding money for something to drink and eat on this fine day. Everything’s folded away in families, it’s like walking through a desert. I have to remind myself: I love my friends too much. This warrants a reminder because, my friends, they’re going to celebrate Easter with their families. And Easter is, for me, the day when I won’t find anything to eat or drink. And they know it, and they’ll pay for it with my willpower’s moderation, because I love them and don’t want them to be alone.

  Well, that’s it, at least I think that’s everything. I don’t have any other exact memories of that great Easter Sunday. Honestly, I think I heard church bells, but it’s all a little hazy, maybe it was Saint-Sulpice again. I had to nap on a bench through the profusion of High Masses going around in circles in the sixth arrondissement. I noticed that it was 2:35 on the clock at Gare Montparnasse. I picked up cigarette butts, I at least remember that I went down Rue Mouffetard. I know so little about this day that I won’t even try to make it up, I’ve forgotten everything.

  My memory returns at night, that great Sunday night that was in me for a long time. I was near Gare Montparnasse again, it was ten minutes after midnight on April 20, 1960, and the Easter holiday had officially ended. It was less cold. Crossing the Pont du Châtelet to the south around 2:30 a.m., I stumbled and I was scared, I’m not exaggerating, of falling asleep standing up, or of even falling over the parapet.40 On la Cité, toward the south, I regained a little strength and something totally absurd exploded in me: I realized that I kept speaking of Québo as a socialist because he’d been one of my best friends in high school.

  I walked through la Cité to Place Saint-Michel, basking in a kind of delight that was not of my flesh. Just because he was my friend in high school doesn’t make him a socialist! Have you heard someone speak of the delirium of hunger, or rather, have you read something of this sort, because one rarely associates with the hungry, unless they work for a social service that keeps tabs on them, and heaps the firstborn’s feigned and closed affection upon them. Well, delirium, I just had it. I just believed that being my friend in high school was enough to make him a socialist. And to tell myself that I just believed it is still delirium, the delirium of culpability, I’m so crazy, so ridiculous! Socialist Québo, so, or, oh, the horror, is he only paternalistic toward me? Am I the only child in his universe? And then, if this is the case, it’s me, the starving delirious fool, who isn’t mad at all, but him, the satisfied man, who is completely crazy! But according to whom? Surely not in the eyes of the police or contemporary psychiatrists, but for future readers of little intellectual journals, and so late for everyone that my senile success will be crueler for me than his leaving me for dead!

  And then, as if compensated for my distress, the Good in me warms my soul. And I receive it carefully, because it’s the Goodness of a bushy-haired egoist, a Goodness belonging to the frozen and the starving, a Goodness of the robbed who thinks of nothing else. This Goodness tells me that I was destined for money, but that my friends received it in my name, but are they friends who got rich off me through the oppressive dignity of the father or the mother? And as for those I displease and disappoint, and all those alleged socialists, they watch me flounder in silent pain, just like Émile Zola’s bourgeois gaze upon the most lamentable of the Rougon-Macquart.41 As if their socialism didn’t want this Rougon-Macquart they’ve destroyed, authors of their misery or accomplices of the oppressor, ironic or downright conquered accomplices who’ve been overcome by the sleazy hostility of the good father who beats the unsuspecting child into something that resembles the object of his wishes.

  I follow Boulevard Saint-Michel to l’Observatoire, and nourished, spiritually, I’d say, by this egoistic Goodness, I begin to sing to the roofs without opening my mouth, to sing my songs that free me. This money I’m owed, I’m going to get it: we’ll take it from my what, my parents, those poisonous flowers of my life, my inferiors, my younger siblings, I only think about defeating them, not even of caring for them. But I’m going to get it, all this money, don’t laugh, because I’m a real committed socialist, and it’s like I’m the husband, the great bastard, the future husband who’s just waiting for a little cash to celebrate his wedding.

  My wedding, my wedding! Jacques Besse, I’m shutting up, so much love that it’s suffocating me, Jacques Besse, I’ll keep repeating this name that scandalized me, when you’ve only launched it toward the stars of the New Age for the first time.

  Jacques Besse, I’m finally someone, I let myself cry buckets of tears . . .

  And, with the voice of little girls:

  “Oh . . . Jacques Besse . . .”

  I wake up against a wall near Place d’Italie. The sky hums. But who is Jacques Besse? Is it me? This love I have in my guts, does it really come from my singing about Québo, my friend from times past, who’s very rich and eats fat everyday?

  So, what, Jacques Besse, you can’t hate or love anymore? Does nothing that makes you human remain? Québo, I yield to you, I love with you, but I want to tell you, what you’re doing is criminal.

  He crossed Place d’Italie. It’s cold and lunar. Some blue filaments appear near the small roofs and it’s Québo who points them out to him. He laughs, they laugh together the way the audience laughs along with the artist at the cabaret. He sings out in all three dimensions, like a muezzin:

  “Oh . . . Jacques Besse . . .”

  The air of Paris receives this strange effort at depersonalization with style. The cry echoes across three arrondissements. The reverberation fades into peace. And then Monsieur Jacques Besse goes into a panic. Let’s hope nobody saw me. I’m going mad, howling out my name with the voice of my flesh over the roofs of Paris. Let’s be off, my friends . . . He laughs like a nineteenth-century anarchist and takes the avenue that leads to Austerlitz. No, nobody moved, and neither did any cars, ambulances, or dreadful uncouth madmen listened in on so seriously by the chief of police.

  There, there; Monsieur Jacques Besse is calm. He’s even a little hot, someone . . . an emperor, my dear, and what a . . . Everything’s fine, it’s fine, really. Nevertheless, the blue filaments slowly weave together beneath the tops of the houses. A nocturnal monstrance. A pale, filthy, and puss-filled glare, several square meters in area, has already seized the eighth floor. Empty silence, nothing more than thought fills it, a disturbing toccata of invocations, of calls so foreign to man that they can’t even be described with abstractions. The delicate buildings suffer the angles of their walls, cold and precise coffins carved out of wood, beneath the menacing vision of blue-violet filaments.

  A cry rings out in the distance:

  “Teeeeeee . . .” A bit feminine, wasn’t it? It’s a man, though. He must have a mustache. The silence returns, heavy. An American-style taxi, shivering like a light submarine hearse, passes by. The driver’s eyes are already glazed over. Where’s the twelfth arrondissement? 4:00 a.m., Easter Monday, 1960. The horizon tilts toward Gare d’Austerlitz in a way that no longer divides up from down, the way some master of painted sculpture might superimpose several topographies. Despite the slow blue-violet curves coming from the first filaments, where is the sky above the Seine going? At a height of thirty degrees above the horizontal, through the play of multiple perspectives, a sort of escape route opens, you can’t see it without having doubts about the everyday sense of the vertical, for fear that you might find yourself somewhat removed from your body. My body is still vertical on a horizontal sidewalk, but in front me, two hundred meters away (is it two hundred meters, or thirty-five?), there’s a doorway in the clouds that opens onto incredible skies, planets, and a universe but a kilometer around! The overwhelming terror of a closed infinity and a terribly catastrophic saint!

  So tonight the entire universe is deranged, the entire universe, one of itself, floats above Gare d’Austerlitz like an incredible bubble. The distant stars are silent, the now-visible infinity is no longer anything compared to this hole that an airplane, oh, the horror! could cross in several seconds!

  And yet my body, my very own body, also becomes a hole. I feel my legs going every which way, even though they continue to walk adequately through the three natal dimensions. One of them is a spinning column serving as a static waterspout, swirling around some cloudy ocean beneath the asphalt of Rue Buffon and then of Rue Censier, beginning slowly, a solid crossing other solids, driven along by multiple forces. My other leg is still straight but its foot, in an old black shoe, is already in the inner sphere, barely above the second floor of the houses on Rue Monge a hundred meters away. Then a sad and sadistic little tune rises from the ventricles and auricles of my real heart, on the left side of my real chest, a real song that comes to me across my greasy overcoat as much as it does directly, organically, through the nerves that connect my heart to my brain, since my heart and brain are neighbors in this sort of space.

  This song is a slow waltz:

  You have your death, you have me nude

  Your friend, your friend, he never knew

  The happiness that came to you

  Your heart sings . . .

  There’s a little snicker in me. My heart sings, there, it’s written, all’s well. And I’m scared of dying, but like an animal this time. The auricles increase my pulse to the rhythm of the slow waltz, and within my chest, it feels like my heart has movements that go beyond standard physiology. A deep baritone voice crosses this viscera, a symbol of my life, and then becomes bagpipes:

  Never fear the unknown

  You who can die beautiful

  You know not the salvation

  Of which your heart sings . . .

  I shiver in fear. It’s as funereal as Sibelius, but this time it’s lived.42 I remember that I didn’t go to war. A ventricle is going to blow on a high F and we’ll see Monsieur Jacques Besse collapse, flooded within, an internal hemorrhage, it’ll all end right there, oh Daniele!

  Monsieur Jacques Besse, he doesn’t reveal anything, he’s very apathetic, he walks like everyone else, a little bent over, he’s on Boulevard de l’Hôpital, near what? La Closerie des Lilas. I’ll never speak of this, evviva la muerte,43 and quietly, I don’t have feet anymore and I’m walking, my heart has changed its ways:

  You’ve your death

  You’ve your death

  You’ve your death and you’ve me nude

  Your friend, he never knew

  The heart that sings . . .

  The ventricles and auricles grow accustomed to the bagpiper. Suddenly, I have hope. I won’t die here! Here’s Boulevard Saint-Michel. The universe-bubble is now two: the one on the right is at around forty-five degrees, the other is at fifteen or twenty, swallowing the bourgeois buildings up to the sixth floor.

  My chest expands. My regularized heartbeat better withstands the surreal bagpiper’s effort. The two universe-bubbles send the dirge back to him. I feel laughter warming me up again, laughter with the scent of the underworld, soft and uneven.

  A gray, indistinct man attaches a crank to the Gibert bookstore’s awning. Approaching him, I’m afraid that he’ll hear my heart singing and go into a panic, communicating me his fear, or jump on top of me to hit me, like strangers and even friends have done several times in similar circumstances for no apparent reason. But no, he isn’t troubled at all, as my heart continues along peacefully with its slow waltz:

  You’ve your death and you’ve me nude

  It is happy, what has ensued

  Which has known, with days accrued

  The heart that sings . . .

  The terrible squealing of the awnings continues as I pass under them. Their prophecy drowns out the song of my ventricles:

  Erinyes, Erinyes of Eleusis,

  Jakbes has you, Jakbes had you . . .

  Be aware of 7 o’clock in the morning . . .

  Gélin!44

  The awning is unfolded. The message has ended. The bland man disconnects his crank. Nothing surprises me anymore. Is something unusual going to happen this morning? Something even more unusual? And I only laugh recounting it, as I totally lost any sense of humor that morning.

  A sort of silence follows all of this. My heart has stopped singing. I feel it with my hand: it beats normally, a little anxiously, and responds with a “rawr,” like a kitten.

  It’s after 6:30 in the morning. I take Rue de l’École-de-Médecine. Oddly enough, I feel very close to where I am, I’m dreaming less, I’m closer to mankind on the surface of the Earth than I am to the sea creatures at great depths. I’m alive like the joy of a resurrection. I must admit that nature plays its part. The most beautiful creations of painters and filmmakers hardly diminish the pleasure I take from this fact. In the light, rustling silence of early morning, the layers of sky are slowly released into airy circles. Houses bearing the weight of their gray ridges hover smoothly above a blue-green vault. The cold light enjoys the sudden warm weather. The slabs of sidewalk that curve slightly toward the center of the street straighten up as I pass by, but I don’t even feel the slightest describable movement. What is positivity? We are without tools, without compasses, without levels, their inventors hide or are hidden, so am I, maybe the surveying lenses and the electronic noses are rotting away in dusty corners, like me in the streets.

  “Erinyes, Erinyes of Eleusis . . .” I still hear the squealing song of the rusty awning at Gibert. I think it’s the boy in the shop window whose singing it in tritone again. Where am I going at 7:00 a.m.? “Rue Monsieur-le-Prince,” the We replies. Good. Now I’ll know what whoever signed off with “Gélin” meant.45

 

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