I close the pen, take the bag and I say Fuck out loud.
Fuck!
His eyes open and he shakes his head, smiling.
Obscene language in a public place, he announces, nothing less. The Super’s coming.
Relaxed now, he circles the room slowly.
I drop the bag on the floor, take out my pen and take another look at the drawing. The ground has to be there to limit the sky. With a few touches I indicate the earth.
When the Super arrives, he stands, arms akimbo, more or less behind me, to announce: You will leave the Gallery under escort. You have insulted one of my men who was doing his job, and you have shouted obscene words in a public institution. You will now walk in front of us to the main exit. I take it you know the way.
They escort me down the steps into the square. There they leave me, and energetically jog up the steps, mission accomplished.
Now many errors consist of this alone, that we do not apply names rightly to things. For when any one says that lines which are drawn from the centre of a circle to the circumference are unequal, he means, at least at the time, something different by circle than mathematicians. Thus when men make mistakes in calculation they have different numbers in their minds than those on the paper. Wherefore if you could see their minds they do not err; they seem to err, however, because we think they have the same numbers in their minds as on the paper. If this were not so we should not believe that they made mistakes any more than I thought a man in error whom I heard the other day shouting that his yard had flown into his neighbour’s chickens, for his mind seemed sufficiently clear to me on the subject.
(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XLVII)
The bicycle I made a drawing of this morning is over sixty years old.
It belongs to Luca, who lives in a suburb to the southeast of Paris. He makes local visits on his bike when the weather is fine and he doesn’t want to take his car out of his garage. The garage is under his home – a ramp leads down to it – and is half the width of the narrow house of which he became the second owner fifty years ago.
On the bike he goes to call on friends or to play petanque and cards or to look down from a bridge at the traffic on the motorway. He is sprightly and has a bushy moustache, the bottom of which is pure white, like his hair. He makes many jokes and their bantering humour is recognisably Italian.
It’s hot, I say to him, I’m going for a swim in the municipal swimming pool, coming? He shakes his head and says: I know! A lot of water in it and very little meat!
When he smiles you mistake the white of the bottom of his moustache for the white of his teeth. He has steady eyes. You can observe him closely observing. His hands are as deft as his eyes are observant. He can fix and repair almost any everyday appliance and he does so for himself, his grown-up children and for any neighbour who has the modesty to ask him.
Each evening he notes in a calendar his brief observations about the day. He started doing this when he retired twenty-five years ago. He notes the weather when it’s exceptional, the date when he plants something in his small back garden, any repairs made, any maintenance task accomplished, the death of an old friend, gossip about neighbours in the street, and, above all, he makes notes about work which he has observed being well or carelessly done on the little houses or along the residential roads he passes by each day. When he considers the work exceptionally well done, he marks it with his initials. For work badly done he reserves a number of violent adjectives. (Carelessness for him is a reminder of the farce that life risks becoming.) Sometimes he notes what he has eaten. Occasionally he sticks in a newspaper cutting, usually a photograph of a faraway place.
During thirty years Luca worked for Air France as a Per-formance Controller of aircraft.
In his garden he grows tomatoes, lettuces, roquette and asters. The name aster, he points out, means ‘star’ in Ancient Greek.
The bicycle was given to him by his mother when he was fifteen years old. Both parents were Italian: father, a tailor, mother, a dressmaker. They came to the same Parisian suburb in the 1920s, after Mussolini’s March on Rome and the Fascist takeover.
During the Second World War and the German occupation of Paris, the father named his dog Hitler. Consequently, when taking it for a walk along the local, crowded shopping street, he would shout: To Heel Hitler! Down Hitler! Do you want a thrashing?
When he first arrived from Italy the father found a shed, mea-suring thirty square metres, near the Croix de Berny. There the whole family lived and worked in their own sweatshop, making women’s dresses to measure for French housewives, whose husbands were among the first French artisans to decide to buy little houses of their own on the outskirts of the city, rather than live in apartments.
After school, from the age of nine, Luca sold evening newspapers outside the nearby metro station. He would get home an hour before bedtime. When he was older he would wander over to the diggings in the marshes, where casual labourers extracted buckets of gypsum which they sold to a nearby plaster factory. These marshes extended then to where his house stands today.
It was wet, badly paid, dirty work, he remembers.
The crystalline structure of the gypsum sometimes set me dreaming of El Dorados – you know calcium sulphate is the same stuff, more or less, as our bones are made of? You didn’t know that! Here, I’ll give you a memento! He goes over to a cabinet of narrow drawers in a corner of his garage, opens one and takes out a small fragment of crystal. Monoclinic prismatic, he says, and hands it to me. May it bring you luck…
When he was thirteen he started helping out as a mechanic’s mate for an Italian who had a garage repair workshop. At that time there were many Italians in the area, employed on construction sites for the extension of Orly Airport. And it was an Italian camarade who, a year or so later, got Luca a trial run, working as a riveter on the assembly line of a small Forman aircraft factory next to Orly. He was taken on. He got his first month’s wages.
He had told them nothing about the new job at home. He handed the money over to his mother. She said: How did you get so much? Have you told your father? You stole it! Luca shook his head. His mother nodded. He hadn’t told his father out of a kind of filial respect for the father’s pride. The father now had another dog. Both Hitlers were dead. This one he called Money. In the sweatshop after supper the father would hold up a piece of panettone before the dog and say: Sit up and beg, Money! That’s it! Into your basket, Money!
The following week, without a word to anyone, his mother went and bought him a bicycle. The one I drew this morning.
On his new bike Luca would cycle around the perimeter of the airport, which was then the largest in France. He often stopped, chatted, asked questions.
When Air France was created, he applied for work as an apprentice mechanic and, given his experience at the Forman factory, was accepted. He attended Air France’s own Technical School which was on the airport. He was methodical and gifted. And he graduated from the School as a Grade 1 Control Mechanic.
Older men enjoyed working with him, for he was quick, jokey and at the same time calm. Precision was for him a source of pleasure, not a constriction. They gave him the nickname of Rabbit – which meant in their vocabulary an object revealed by radar.
He met a Parisian woman named Odille. He called her My Rosalie. She liked to read, particularly long novels. And this was fortunate, for his work often took him away from Paris for days on end, when he was sent with other meccanos to work on a plane that had for some reason been grounded at a foreign airport and needed revision. She had hair that fell over her face like sunlight, he says when showing me one of their old wedding photos. Their first son was born in ’59. Their second eight years later.
In the early ’70s Luca was promoted to rank of Engineer Controller. Controllers worked in teams of five. Air France, with one hundred jet aircraft, including Caravelles, Boeing 747s, Airbuses, Concordes, had become the largest passenger airline in the world, and the second largest freight
airline.
Their job was to calibrate and check the controls of an aircraft after it had been delivered, repaired, modified, overhauled or renovated. They tested and tuned every circuit: reactors, generator, cooling system, ailerons, flaps, rudder, fuselage, oxygen, pressurisation, radar, radio. They did this when the plane was on the ground, and then, with the cooperation of the flying crew, when it was airborne. Each controller had his own sector, although in principle the five were interchangeable. Luca’s was the cockpit instrument panel: altimetre, wind-gauge, turn and bank indicator, variometre, gyrocompass, VSI, pilot head, etc., etc.
The work was demanding and meticulous. On occasions it involved travelling to airports on the other side of the world. Working hours were irregular. No error would be forgotten. Yet it was well paid and relatively uncompetitive – controllers, flying crew, chief engineers became used to meeting up again and again, collaborating and depending upon one another – like musicians performing at the same gig, each time playing something new.
The Rabbit was proud of his skills. They were minute, within a hair’s breadth, and they were far-reaching. When a control was finished, each of the team of five initialled a CDN (Certificate of Air Worthiness). After which it was assumed that the aircraft in question could be counted on for 2,500 more flying hours before its next overhaul.
The Rabbit’s initials were like this:
He bought the house he now lives in. He helped out his parents. He paid regularly into his savings account. And when he saw retirement approaching at the age of sixty he felt rewarded.
Rosalie and he would travel to some of the cities he had discovered when on mission. He’d spend time with his grandchildren. He’d see old comrades. And he’d make prototypes for one or two inventions he had in his head.
A few years after he retired, Rosalie began to go out of her mind. She would leave the house, follow some story she was inventing and then be unable to find her way home. Eventually she was diagnosed as suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Luca took her in charge and looked after her, but Rosalie continued to lose her faculties one by one, and finally had to be hospitalised. Luca visited her each day and fed her, with a spoon, her evening meal. Often she failed to recognise him. Time went on, and apparently she never recognised him. But if I didn’t go, he reasoned, perhaps she would recognise my absence!
After a few months the hospital announced it could no longer keep her and that Luca must find a private nursing home. He began searching. He wanted her to have a room of her own, and for it to be not too far from the Croix de Berny. There was only one such residence. It had twenty beds, and with food and nursing facilities cost 3,500 euros a month.
He drove Rosalie there and she smiled, so he took the room she smiled in.
The same night he carefully consulted his bank statement and opened his calendar.
She will be fine there, he wrote, for three years, which is to say 1,095 days. After that, we’ll have nothing left. Then he added his initials:
How can destinies be named? They often have the regularity of geometric figures, but there are no nouns for them. Can a drawing replace a noun? I thought so this morning. Now I’m not so sure. I gave Luca the drawing, and the next day he framed it.
The more an image is joined with many other things, the more often it flourishes.
The more an image is joined with many other things, the more causes there are by which it can be excited.
(Ethics, Part V, Proposition XIII, Proof)
I see the face of Anton Chekhov. ‘The role of the writer’, he said, ‘is to describe a situation so truthfully … that the reader can no longer evade it.’
How to apply this advice today?
I have no answer, only a hunch which stutters like any story before it’s told.
I want to compare two experiences of being with a lot of people dancing. Both events took place a week ago in an alpine valley, within a few kilometres of each other.
The first was at the wedding party of an Algerian bride and a Moroccan bridegroom. We, friends of the bride’s mother and in-vited by her, were the only Europeans present. There were 150 guests. All of them, and spectacularly for the women, dressed up for the occasion, since a marriage permits – or demands – extravagance.
Traditionally on their wedding day, the couple, however modest, sits on shining thrones. In the ritual of such weddings women dominate. Women of all ages from young teenagers to grandmothers.
Put it another way, it is at weddings that these Maghrebian women are encouraged to extend their domain and demonstrate their power, whereas normally any show or any practice of authority in a public situation is a male prerogative.
At weddings the queens (who are menial workers in the French economy) take over the palace.
The dinner – without alcohol – is copious and continuous. All the chairs at the tables have been covered by white drapes with flounces so that they look like bridesmaids. The bride and bridegroom sit on their thrones on a podium. (During the evening the bride will change dresses four times.) There’s music. Sometimes loud, stopping conversations, sometimes soft and enticing. Dance music. Mostly raqs baladi.
There were continually dancers on the floor. The women danced with men but more often alone. When the bride and bridegroom stepped off the podium to dance, the number of dancers increased so that the moment might be more widely shared. Teenagers, mothers, grandmothers, whose clothes and get-up had so little in common, all danced in the same manner. Shimmying.
The other event was in the playground of a closed-down village school and the occasion was the fiftieth birthday party of the man who is now living there. He’s a local Lycée teacher and he has a Moto Guzzi California 3 bike (1,000cc). A long summer evening. Trestle tables loaded with dishes brought by guests. Beer. Wine. A Pissaladiere, made by the teacher himself, with anchovies and sweet onions and black olives, round as a full moon, cut with a bread knife. He learnt the recipe as a kid from his mother in Marseilles. She’s here too tonight in the playground. Later a paella, which the teacher’s son ordered from a Spanish friend, is brought in. Most of the guests are in their thirties, some are ex-pupils from the schools the teacher has taught in.
The music is from the ’80s. The Blues Brothers. U2. Les Rita Mitsouko.
The mood of the guests is friendly, uncompetitive and undisappointed, because they have no illusions about who for the moment is ruling the world, yet the world is large.
As soon as the music is plugged in and the loudspeaker adjusted, a few start dancing – mostly not in couples. ‘Look at a mirror/in my tea/watching it in my cup/change a little my make-up/in my tea …’
Others watch or go on talking. There are about thirty of us in the asphalt playground – the same as the number of kids the village school was designed for, when it was built in the 1920s.
The dancing is happy, repetitive, easy-going, energetic, hallucinated. I could apply exactly the same adjectives to the dancing at the wedding, yet the two manners of dancing are deeply different. What is this difference?
I might say: one is introverted, the other extroverted. Not psychologically but corporally, in terms of focus and attention.
For the women at the wedding, dance offered the chance of drawing attention to what they were carrying hidden within themselves, and the men danced in face of, and around, that which was hidden. Intro = inwards, vertere = to turn.
For the guests at the birthday party the beat and surge of the music encouraged them to disclose, and expose, their own vitalities to the company. Had one of them been dancing alone, the disclosure would have been to the playground or to the night. They were each of them adventuring out and signalling, along the way, their approach. Extro = outwards, vertere = to turn.
The difference between the two ways of dancing becomes clearer if we simplify them to a ritualistic form. The ‘introverted’ dance would become the raqs sharqi (the belly dance). The ‘extro-verted’ dance would become the striptease.
Both ar
e sexy and enticing, but their strategies and ontology are opposed. It’s the difference between hiding and displaying. Which, in this case, has nothing to do with modesty or brazenness. Both are immodest. It’s a question of the priority given to the hidden or the displayed, to the invisible or the visible, to the contained or the free.
For the raqs sharqi the invisible is, by its nature, hidden, because it is something that exists inside the body. Dancers say the best condition for dancing the raqs sharqi is when the dancer has recently learnt that she is pregnant. The hidden enfolds the mysterious, which is the future and which represents continuity.
The striptease, by contrast, celebrates the revealed. For sure, it titillates. It plays with feints. It uses suspense. It can be used as a commercial or pathetic manipulative device. But finally it offers, for a moment, the undisguised. It offers an individual naked truth.
Compared to traditional ballroom dancing, which is orchestrated and directed by strict conventions, both these ways of dancing are means of self-expression, allowing for innovation and collaboration. In this sense they are both informal.
Now for the question: can these two manners of dancing help us to distinguish more clearly between two different ways of telling stories, two different procedures of narration?
A story’s outcome. My hunch is that this could be a useful term for facing the challenge Anton Chekhov left us. Outcome: like coming out of a house or residence, coming out into the street.
Traditionally the term refers to how a story ends, to what finally happens to the protagonists. A tragic, happy or transcendental ending.
Yet it can also refer to how the listener or reader or spectator leaves the story to continue their ongoing lives. Where does the story deposit those who have followed it, and in what frame of mind are they?