Paris Noir Read online

  Adoration

  “I looked out over rue de la Santé—I think I’ve said the main things about it already—and the square courtyard of a little Ursuline convent. At 10 in the morning a window in the building would open and a woman would appear in smiling majesty, and the memory of her majestic smile would accompany me all day through the obedient time at the hospital, for I rediscovered in her slow, secluded life the secret impatience of childhood time, when there is a century from one Christmas to another and two hundred thousand palpitations of the heart between two kisses.

  “‘She’s not smiling, she’s making a face,’ my roommate would say. He was really nasty in his unhappiness, and his company was a nasty face behind my back.

  “I knew that once I fell out of my observatory down there, driven out of the asylum parenthesis, everything would move very quickly between two fatal accidents and from sequels to metastases, from personal bankruptcy to planetary cataclysm, everything would go bust, irremediably, from day to day for centuries and centuries, with no ritual to consecrate the moment or drunkenness ever again to sublimate it, no surprise would shake up the exhaustion of living when the memory and consolation I had found was erased, not near that Ur-suline nun I couldn’t see very well with my own eyes from so far away, my eyes fucked up by the drugs, but I could have walked at least once barefoot into emptiness halfway to the sky to meet her, barefoot, in pajamas, light, on the invisible tightrope of my desire, even after her arms get tired of opening and sorry that my late lamented desire is worn out and dangles down, defeated by medication and other things in my mental constitution, this being noted well before I was freed from the cancer wards.

  “But who was she smiling at twelve months out of twelve all the goddamn day between her four walls and the arcades of her little convent? Was she cloistered there forever? Was she really as I saw her when she stood against the wall in her window frame, Ava Gardner and the Mona Lisa,and if not, then who?

  “‘A slut,’ my roommate would say. ‘She’s doing a mouth striptease with her smile.’

  “It’s true she’d fucking contaminated me with her smile. All I had to do was think of her crowned with light, her breasts raised and her arms open in a sweeping gesture inaugurating the glorious day, and a smile would spread over my beaming face, remaining between my lips like a sigh of the greatest beatitude. The guy who shared my room was a bad-tempered paranoiac with bipolar tendencies; it made him nervous that I never stopped thinking about her, all mischievous and generous, hence the smile. He didn’t like the idea of me smiling behind his back.

  “Not so long ago, when I was nervous too, I felt that time spent doing nothing is blood you’re losing, blood leaving your body. My blood was over there, in the veins of that little nun. Little or big, I don’t know. That’s where life was. Behind the walls. Between four walls and in a bed, in the conversation she has with the world at the intersection of morning and eternity, a certain way of turning the courtyard of a convent on rue de la Santé into the Sahara of Charles de Foucault, and praying there without saying anything and without wasting her time. As for my time, my time for living or not, other people could spend it, think about it, put it to good use. My use of life had been disappointing, especially my own life I mean, I never really managed to live, but if you’ve tried yourself you know it isn’t easy, but I was beginning to hear, in the breathing of the tangible, invisible, and in a word discreet universe—quite unknown, like that Patuyan territory where Lord Jim carved out his fate—something livelier than life, the radar echo of infinitely gentle matter that might welcome me for a while. Things and people we look at stealthily—we steal something from them, as the root word shows, probably a bit of their image, as if we’re surveillance cameras, but why not benevolence cameras? We trust them to lead us, to walk us about, and they embody us, as if that fucking metempsychosis didn’t wait for us to die. We become the dog in the street, the tree waiting for its leaves, the baby bawling in its stroller, and the nun in her room who can’t see you but is probably praying for you, for you to be saved.

  “I saved a greeting for her every morning, she would smile her smile, and it all fused together and remained hanging in the air.

  “The first days at my window it was passionately sexual, I was lying in wait, feverish and predatory, a generous sperm donor, but what with habit and laziness and a whole lenitive chemistry, it turned into something else: murmuring a sweet song, not breaking crackers anymore, taming a titmouse, leaving the night nurses alone, giving a bit of oneself little by little, day after day—I moved all my hope into the nun’s place across the courtyard, making my nest in her flowerpots and my faith in her catechism, whereas my roommate slit his throat in the communal showers.

  “I would not regret our conversations, not because he called me Monsieur Schmaltz or Sister Smiley, but because I had no idea what he was talking about. One day, before opening his mouth, he wrote out a draft of his declaration:

  Unless seeing what never seen nor possible to know unimaginableto this day of which one would have to in orderto say other words than always the same ones and thustoday senseless and outdated tomorrow by audiovisualwithout a printer, I do not know what to say, Smiley—inFrench in the original.

  “‘No,’ I would say. ‘You don’t always know what to say.’

  “‘You don’t always say what you see either, because what you see is unspeakable, in French in the original, right? Schopenhauer can say that the true existence of man is what takes place inside himself, and that in the same environment each man lives in another world, we’re still in the same room, right? So do me a favor, stop smiling. Or you’re gonna get it from me too.’

  “‘According to Swami Prajnanpad, one must say yes to everything and when we accept something willingly there is no suffering, and fear must be banished from our lives.’

  “‘If I didn’t run a schizophrenic support group in regular life, I wouldn’t feel like I was talking to the wall of an autistic crap-house covered with graffiti smelling sickeningly and sweetly of shit. You put smiles all over this goddamn room, what the hell do you like here?’

  “‘Me.’

  “‘You remind me of that fucking young mother who smothered her baby and threw him into a pond. The same night she was smiling into the TV cameras claiming someone had stolen her kid. Why was she smiling, huh? Why’re you smiling too? Fuck off, get the hell out of here, you asshole. Dickhead. ’”

  Monkeyfish

  “Well, he died, that’s life. So everything would have been okay in the hospital if they’d kept me inside their walls; they’d even confiscated my prick so I couldn’t injure myself, so that my temporary impotence was perfectly interlocked with the votive chastity of my Ursuline across the way. I felt more and more like I was sitting inside myself, like a stone in the sand. There was nothing else I had to do. I was born to be there. I was legitimate, like Verlaine.

  “Then they gave me a Turk for a neighbor. Or maybe a Kurd. He was no poet. I didn’t understand a thing he said, but when he didn’t say anything he looked dead.

  “And when he died he had a smile that looked like me. I wondered why this Turk or Kurd had come to die in the 14th.

  “I told you about the fish with legs who became a monkey and then man, but I didn’t tell you about his dismay when he understood, with his great intelligence, that the dry or promised land was not the center of the world. The center of the world had changed places in the meantime. From then on it was submerged, or Chinese, or somewhere in the suburbs of the world, in the anonymity of forgotten, tiny, unconscious lives, protozoan small fry. So all the monkeyfish could do was go back to the ocean, wherever the currents carried it, but it no longer knew how to swim or breathe in the water. That’s why we can see it on the strand, that strip of wet sand between the beach and the ocean, it talks to seashells and hears Apollinaire’s line: And the single string of the sea trumpets… It paces around without knowing if it’s time to get wet or dry. You really don’t want to keep me here, doct
or, the way you’ve seen me, do you?”

  “I’m a gastroenterologist, not a psychiatrist. I can see you’re a depressive, but you’re not the only one and beds are hard to come by. Your colon looks okay, your stomach has definitively found its spot in the mediastinum, and aside from the problem of anemia, you’re in perfect health. I don’t want to see you here anymore. Next time, go see your primary caregiver. You had an operation ten years ago, that’s old news, and you still keep coming to see us. You live next door? You’re just dropping by like a neighbor? You moved into a boarding house across the street?”

  “Across the street there’s a convent. And your nearest neighbors are jailbirds and insane people. I live further away in a new neighborhood where the lower middle class lives. I feel like I’m my father, but unlike me he didn’t have debts and he paid his rent.”

  “Good. What did your father do?”

  “He biked every morning and evening to the station and back, but I’m walking back.”

  “Don’t get caught in the demo with your dickhead and your wobbly legs. It’s the firemen against the CRS riot police; things are going to heat up. And call me this evening for the results of the biopsy.”

  Farewell

  I went back up to see my room. It had no smell anymore. The moron who’d slit his throat ten years back was there, he’d come back again, all sewed up, in bed, in bad shape. He didn’t want my compassion, and he didn’t even recognize me. I went up to the window to take a look at the convent. Veiled Ursulines were walking around the courtyard, I didn’t know which one was mine. They never went outside, or very rarely. A little like me. We were not fated to meet. On the other side over the rooftops you could see the Eiffel Tower as if it were brand new.

  Genocide

  Once I was outside I backed up. I crossed the boulevard and I went and sat down in a garden of the Observatory. From there I could see Sacré-Coeur, but between the big hill of Montmartre and that part of Montparnasse, there sits all of Paris: In the mist, it wasn’t much. And to think I’d wanted to stick something up the ass of this fucking city. Walls, houses, and behind the walls of the houses, heads, and in each head other walls, dollhouses, makeup, and monkey-dreams—that’s all there was.

  I was mad at myself for not being in good shape. I’d been afraid of a relapse and my body had become an irresponsible mechanism.

  I say eternal words to myself with no substance, fine day, bare sky, the blue transparent skin of emptiness, the trembling of the air, the border of absence, rue de la Santé, Health Street, the health of the street. So everything is in everything else? But I am in nothing. Isolating, escaping, thinking against the grain, alone, thinking Tao, sparrow and Tao, not acting, no longer moving, until the reality test.

  That’s when that first corpse came into the picture. I heard myself saying: He’s dead, that’s life. There was no border between him and me. I had already thought all that about someone I loved, or maybe not, or else someone with wings, or crawling, or an inanimate object. A household robot? No doubt FN, French Norms, I have always been faithful to French Norms, even to my smallest whim.

  I am a man of quality,I said aloud, French quality, a creation of national craftsmanship. Not a top-of-the-line product, but not supermarket junk. I am a “cultural exception” in the French sense, except for the fact that there’s nothing exceptional about me. Perfectly average. It seems to me the corpse is sitting on the bench and I’m sitting on my ass. I have no other spiritual base but my own bottom, bottomless anyway, ever since I got sick, but that’s the base I’m talking from, right? To the walls, to the dead.

  I stir thoughts with the pins and needles in my legs. Maybe they’re the pins that stir my thoughts. They think in German, like strategists, they hold me very straight in my boots, like Bismarck. But I’m going to take French leave, like the Invisible Man. I may think like a strategist but I still act like a wanderer. I wander standing still. I have this corpse on my hands, it’s hard to get away from it. He’s a young man and I find him touching. What should I do? Administer first aid? Aid yourself first. Wait for help, some clarification, after which I could kiss this episode goodbye and enjoy the benefits of resilience? This city is dead and inhabited by corpses. Even the leaves of the chestnut trees are dead. The wind growls at the big trees and the rain’s teeth are chattering on the surface of the Fontaine des Quatre-Mondes. A leaf falls on my nose, soft and wet, dead. An actual slug coming out of my nose. I’m more or less in the same state of dismayed stupor as the day I was excluded from the Great Competition of Floral Poetry because I shat in my pants before the official jury.

  At present, through a shining rain, I am distressed to see a young man next to me on the bench all slumped down with his shoulders hacked to pieces by a machete, and just five minutes ago he was telling me with a smile and flawless teeth about his reasoned ambition to live here in France, the land of welcome—a young, practically French-speaking friendly Rwandan who lived, from what I could glean from his damned gobbledygook, in the dorms of the Cité Universitaire and wanted to give up his studies in Paris. He had met a girl he liked, someone of the same culture and status, and his temporary job as an interpreter for tourists on the Bateaux-Mouches was enough for him to begin integrating into society, while he waited. Waited for what? I said to him. Waited to get old? He had Camus’s The Strangerin his pocket, that asshole. It’s funny. When you read The Stranger, you always think you’re Meursault, the one who kills, the one who thinks, and never the Arab who dies like an asshole. If I were the general-in-chief of smalltown France I wouldn’t have been very proud of myself. A guy asks someone for a cigarette, the other guy’s a nonsmoker, so the first guy persists, walks away and comes back with a machete, and hacks the guy to pieces. No comprendo. I hadn’t seen the danger coming, I didn’t sense that the enemy offensive was coming around the Maginot Line either. But after all, we don’t have eyes on our backs. On our backs we have wings, right?

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You’re still acting in shitty films?”

  “I write books,” she said. “I’m the new Virginia Woolf.”

  I shouldn’t have been there in the Closerie des Lilas, a stone’s throw from Cochin and the Observatory. Famous writers had come to this brasserie, then their ghosts, finally plaques on the tables in memoriam and finally fat men smoking cigars and skeleton women coughing away.

  The last time I saw the woman facing me was twenty years ago and the shitty film was a time in my life, not a masterpiece they show in the cinematheque. I should go back home along rue de la Santé with my eyes closed and lock myself up at my place. Last time, I’d managed to make her laugh with Parisian gossip, that red-haired slut in leopard tights. Maybe I had intrigued her, maybe not. I gave her a hard-on, what else can I say. I had a furious beast between my legs, a famished tiger. She looked like an elegant scarecrow at the time and now like an epileptic mummy. She was always smoking little foul-smelling cigars and she used to laugh loudly but without gaiety or any reason to laugh, aside from me. She drank large quantities of beer. Ten or twenty years ago—the last time—she was already a former dancer, or a former model, and a former American too. She already had an impressive length of service in a whole bunch of fields. She didn’t speak French very well and wasn’t listening to what I was saying. She didn’t want to listen to just anything. She was in a rush to live and now in even more of a rush, in a state of emergency really, except with me. It was as if for ten or twenty years she’d been recharging her battery and I’d emptied mine. I had absolutely no desire to be sitting across the table from her. If I could have chosen a female companion I would rather have chosen a dead woman, or one with Alzheimer’s, a mischievous little madwoman, inoffensive, hesitant, stammering, out of it, with gestures and signs of affection from another era. I was not unhappy to have left my cock in the cloakroom. I had nothing under the table that could have given me a hard time; under the table there were only cigarette butts that nobody would have thought of lighting.


  I had set foot in a place I shouldn’t have, onto the other side of the boulevard. In the space of a hundred yards I’d gone through the 5th and 6th arrondissements, whereas that night I had dreamed that I belonged to the middle middle class, you know, the one people say is neither more nor less. So in that dream I was walking my dog, a ghost dog, without hurrying, and the dog starts pulling on his leash, he crosses through Sainte-Anne from rue d’Alésia to the elevated subway, then he scratches at the little metal door of the prison and he goes sniffing out sickness in the crowded ER of Cochin, as if he’s looking for something or someone. Not at all. He’s just trying to get rid of me among the crazies, the jailbirds, and the dying. He makes me go through the revolving door of the Closerie des Lilas, pulls me up to a lady with bright red hair and leopard tights, then leaves through the same revolving door and makes me wander out onto rue Campagne-Première, a street Godard used in Breathless. He bites the ass of the stone lion on Place Denfert, plunges into the catacombs, and to finish things off, to finish meoff, he raises his leg on me. I wake up all pissy, sticky, sweaty, in a lukewarm smell that makes your stomach heave and breaks your heart, and makes you cry pissy, sticky floods of tears, it’s the smell of chemotherapy embalming you and profaning you while you’re still alive, I’m stretched out on a bed in a white room and the dog’s not there anymore, he must be sniffing around the Montparnasse cemetery behind the high gray walls, looking for a concession. That’s the kind of polytraumatising dream I came in for. But the worst is still to come: A doctor throws me out of the room saying I’m a simulator. Go figure Parisian life!