When you push one of these doors open and step inside you are in another realm which has little to do with the streets outside, the parked cars or the shopping street.
The air smells slightly of chlorine. Everything is lit from below rather than from above as a consequence of the light reflected off the water of the two pools. The acoustics are distinct: every sound has its slight echo. Everywhere the horizontal, as distinct from the vertical, dominates. Most people are swimming, swimming from one end of the large pool to the other, length after length. Those standing have just taken off their clothes or are getting out of them so there’s little sense of rank or hierarchy. Instead, everywhere, there’s this sense of an odd horizontal equality.
There are many printed notices, all of them employing a distinctive bureaucratic syntax and vocabulary.
The Hairdryer will be shut off 5 minutes before closing-time.
Bathing Caps Obligatory. Council Decree. As from Monday Sept. 12 1980.
Entry through this door forbidden to any person who is not a member of staff.
Thank you.
The voice embodied in such announcements is inseparable from the long political struggle during the Third Republic for the recognition of citizens’ rights and duties. A measured, impersonal committee voice – with somewhere in the distance a child laughing.
Around 1950 Fernand Léger painted a series of canvasses called Plongeurs – Divers in a swimming pool. With their primary colours and their relaxed, simple outlines, these paintings celebrated the dream and the plan of workers enjoying leisure and, because they were workers, transforming leisure into something which had not yet been named.
Today the realisation of this dream is further away than ever. Yet sometimes, whilst putting my clothes in a locker in the men’s changing room and attaching the key to my wrist, and taking the obligatory hot shower before walking through the foot bath, and going to the edge of the large pool and diving in, I remember these paintings.
Most of the swimmers wear, as well as the obligatory bathing caps, dark goggles to protect their eyes from the chlorine. There’s little eye contact between us, and if a swimmer’s foot accidentally touches another swimmer, he or she immediately apologises. The atmosphere is not that of the Côte d’Azur. Here each one privately pursues her or his own target.
I first noticed her because she swam differently. The movements of her arms and legs were curiously slow – like those of a frog – and at the same time her speed was not dramatically reduced. She had a different relationship to the element of water.
The Chinese master Qi Baishe (1863–1957) loved drawing frogs, and he made the tops of their heads very black, as if they were wearing bathing caps. In the Far East the frog is a symbol of freedom.
Her bathing cap was ginger-coloured and she was wearing a costume with a floral pattern, a little like English chintz. She was in her late fifties and I assumed was Vietnamese. Later I discovered my mistake. She is Cambodian.
Every day she swam, length after length, for almost an hour. As I did too. When she decided it was time to climb up one of the corner ladders and leave the pool, a man, who was himself swimming several tracks away, came to help her. He was also Southeast Asian, a little thinner than her, a little shorter, with a face that was more carved than hers; her face was moonlike.
He came up behind her in the water and put his hands under her arse so that she, facing the edge of the pool, sat on them and he bore a little of her weight when they climbed out together.
Once on the solid floor she walked away from the corner of the pool towards the foot bath and the entrance to the women’s changing room, alone and without any discernible limp. Having noticed this ritual a number of times I could see, however, that, when walking, her body was taut, as if stretched on tenterhooks.
The man with the brave, carved face was presumably her husband. I don’t know why I had a slight doubt about this. Was it his deference? Or her aloofness?
When she first came into the pool and wanted to enter the water, he would climb halfway down the ladder and she would sit on one of his shoulders and then he would prudently descend until the water was over his hips and she could launch herself to swim away.
Both of them knew these rituals of immersion and extraction by heart and perhaps both recognised that in the ritual the water played a more important role than either of them. This might explain why they appeared more like fellow-performers than man and wife.
Time went by. The days passed repetitively. Eventually when she and I, swimming our lengths, crossed one another going in opposite directions, for the first time on that day, with only a metre or two between us, we lifted our heads and nodded at one another. And when, about to leave the pool, we crossed for the last time that day, we signalled ‘au revoir’.
How to describe that particular signal? It involves raising the eyebrows, tossing the head as if to throw back the hair and then screwing up the eyes in a smile. Very discreetly. Goggles pushed up onto the bathing cap.
One day whilst I was taking a hot shower after my swim – there are eight showers for men, and to switch one on, there are no taps, you press an old-fashioned button like a doorknob, and the trick is that amongst the eight there’s some variation in the duration of the flow of hot water until the button has to be pressed again, so by now I knew exactly which shower had the hot jet that lasted longest, and, if it was free, I always chose it – one day whilst I was taking a hot shower after my swim the man from Southeast Asia came under the shower next to mine and we shook hands.
Afterwards we exchanged a few words and agreed to meet outside in the little park after we’d dressed. And this is what we did and his wife joined us.
It was then I learnt they were from Cambodia. She is very distantly related to the family of the famous King and then Prince Sihanouk. She had fled to Europe when she was twenty, in the mid-1970s. Prior to that she had studied art in Phnom Penh.
It was she who talked and I who asked the questions. Again I had the impression that his role was that of a bodyguard or assistant. We were standing near the birch trees beside their parked two-seater Citroën C15 with a seatless space behind. A vehicle much the worse for wear. Do you still paint? I asked. She lifted her left hand into the air making a gesture of releasing a bird, and nodded. Often she’s in pain, he said. I read a lot too, she added, in Khmer and in Chinese. Then he indicated it was perhaps time for them to climb into their C15. I noticed, hanging from the rearview mirror above the windscreen, a tiny Buddhist Dharma wheel, like a ship’s helm in miniature.
After they had driven off I lay on the grass – it was the month of May – beneath the weeping willows and found myself thinking about pain. She’d left Cambodia – still then Kampuchea – in the year when Sihanouk had been ousted with the probable help of the CIA, and when the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot had taken over the capital and were beginning the enforced deportation of its 2 million inhabitants to the countryside, where living in communities with no individual property, they had to learn to become New Khmers! A million of them didn’t survive. In the preceding years Phnom Penh and its surrounding villages had been systematically bombarded by USA B-52 bombers. At least a hundred thousand people died.
The Kampuchean people, with their mighty past of Angkhor Wat and its massive, painless stone statues, which later were cracked open and marauded by something which has come to look today like suffering, the Kampuchean people were, at the moment she left her country, surrounded by enemies – Vietnamese, Laotians, Thais – and were on the point of being tyrannised and massacred by their own political visionaries, who transformed themselves into fanatics so that they could inflict vengeance on reality itself, so they could reduce reality to a single dimension. Such reduction brings with it as many pains as there are cells in a heart.
Gazing at the willows, I watched their leaves trailing in the wind. Each leaf a small brushstroke. I found it impossible to separate the pain to which her body was apparently heir from the pain of her country
’s history during the last half century.
Today Cambodia is the poorest country in Southeast Asia and 90 per cent of its exports are manufactured in sweatshops producing pieces of garments for the brand-name rag-trade multinationals of the West.
A group of four-year-old kids ran past me up the steps and through the glass doors – going to their swimming lessons.
The next time I saw her and her husband in the pool I approached her when she had finished one of her lengths, and asked if she could tell me what it was that caused her pain. She answered immediately as if naming a place: Polyarthritis. It came when I was young, when I knew I had to leave. It’s kind of you to ask.
The left half of her forehead is a little discoloured, browner than the rest, as if the leaf of a frond, once placed on her skin there, had slightly stained it. When her head is thrown back floating on the water and her face looks moonlike, you could compare this little discolouring with one of the ‘seas’ on the surface of the moon.
We both trod water and she smiled. When I’m in water, she said, I weigh less and after a little while my joints stop hurting.
I nodded. And then we went on swimming. Swimming on her front, as I have said, she moved her legs and arms as slowly as a frog sometimes does. On her back she swam like an otter.
Cambodia is a land with an unique, osmotic relationship with fresh water. The Khmer word for homeland is Teuk-Dey, which means Water-Land. Framed by mountains, Cambodia’s flat, horizontal, alluvial plain – about a fifth of the size of France – is crossed by six rivers, including the vast Mekong. During and after the summer monsoon rains, the flow of this river multiplies by fifty! And in Phnom Penh, at the head of its delta, the river’s level rises systematically by eight metres. At the same time, to the north, the lake of Tonlé Sap overflows each summer to four times its ‘normal’ winter size to become an immense reservoir, and the river of Tonlé Sap turns round to run in the opposite direction, its downstream becoming upstream.
Small wonder then that this plain offered the most varied and abundant freshwater fishing in the world, and that for centuries its peasants lived off rice and the fish of these waters.
It was on that day whilst swimming during the lunch hour at the municipal swimming pool, after she had said the word Polyarthritis, pronouncing it as if it were a place, that I thought of giving her my Sho brush.
The same evening I put it into a box and wrapped it. And each time I went to the pool I took it with me until they turned up again. Then I placed the little box on one of the benches behind the diving boards and told her husband so he could pick it up when they left. I left before they did.
Months passed without my seeing them because I was elsewhere. When I returned to the pool I looked for them and could not see them. I adjusted my goggles and dived in. Several kids were jumping in feet first, holding their noses. Others on the edge were adjusting flippers to their feet. It was noisier and more animated than usual because by now it was the month of July; school was over, and the kids whose families couldn’t afford to leave Paris were coming to play for hours in the water. The special entrance fee for them was minimal, and the lifesaving swimming instructors maintained an easy-going discipline. A few regulars, with their strict routines and personal targets, were still there.
I had done about twenty lengths and was about to start another when – to my astonishment – I felt a hand firmly placed from behind on my right shoulder. I turned my head and saw the stained moon-face of the one-time art student from Phnom Penh. She was wearing the same ginger-coloured bathing cap and she was smiling, a wide smile.
You’re here!
She nods and whilst we are treading water she comes close and kisses me twice on both cheeks.
Then she asks: Bird or flower?
Bird!
Thereupon she lays her head back on the water and laughs. I wish I could let you hear her laugh. Compared to the splashing and cries of the kids around us, it is low-keyed, slow and persistent. Her face is more moonlike than ever, moonlike and timeless. The laugh of this woman, who will soon be sixty, continues. It is unaccountably the laugh of a child – that same child whom I imagined laughing somewhere behind the committee voices.
A few days later her husband swims towards me, asks after my health, and whispers: On the bench by the diving boards. Then they leave the pool. He comes up behind her, puts his hands under her arse, and she, facing the edge of the pool, sits on them whilst he bears a little of her weight and they climb up and out together.
Neither of them wave back to me as they have on other occasions. A question of modesty. Gestural modesty. No gift can be accompanied by a claim.
On the bench is a large envelope which I take. Inside is a painting on rice paper. The painting of the bird I chose when she asked me what I wanted. The painting shows a bamboo and perched on one of its stems a blue tit. The bamboo is drawn according to all the rules of the art. A single brushstroke beginning at the top of the stalk, stopping at each section, descending and becoming slightly wider. The branches, narrow as matches, drawn with the tip of the brush. The dark leaves rendered in single strokes like darting fish. And lastly the horizontal nodes, brushed from left to right, between each section of the hollow stalk.
The bird with its blue cap, its yellow breast, its greyish tail and its claws like the letter W, from which it can hang upside down when necessary, is depicted differently. Whereas the bamboo is liquid, the bird looks embroidered, its colours applied with a brush as pointed as a needle.
Together, on the surface of the rice paper, bamboo and bird have the elegance of a single image, with the discreet stencil of the artist’s name stamped below and to the left of the bird. Her name is L—.
When you enter the drawing, however, and let its air touch the back of your head, you sense how this bird is homeless. Inexplicably homeless.
I framed the drawing like a scroll, without a mount, and with great pleasure chose a place to hang it. Then one day, many months later, I needed to look up something in one of the Larousse illustrated encyclopaedias. And turning the pages I happened to fall upon the little illustration it contained of a mésange bleue (blue tit). I was puzzled. It looked oddly familiar. Then I realised that, in this standard encyclopaedia I was looking at the model – the two W’s of the blue tit’s claws were, for instance, at precisely the same angle, as were also the head and beak – the exact model which L— had taken for the bird perched on the bamboo.
And again I understood a little more about homelessness.
But it is appropriate here to note that we can only distinctly imagine distance of time, like that of space, up to a certain limit, that is, just as those things which are beyond two hundred feet from us, or, whose distance from the place where we are exceeds that which we can distinctly imagine, we are wont to imagine equally distant from us and if they were in the same plane, so also those objects whose time of existing we imagine to be distant from the present by a longer interval than that which we are accustomed to imagine, we imagine all to be equally distant from the present, and refer them all as it were to one moment of time.
(Ethics, Part IV, Definitions VI)
All things depend on the power of God. That things should be different from what they are must involve a change in the will of God, but the will of God cannot change (as we have most clearly shown from the perfection of God): therefore things could not be otherwise than as they are. I confess that the theory which subjects all things to the will of an indifferent God and makes them dependent on his pleasure is far nearer the truth than that which states that God acts in all things for the furthering of good.
(Ethics, Part I, Proposition XXXIII, Note II)
Existence appertains to the nature of substance.
A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.
(Ethics, Part I, Proposition VII, Proof)
I live in a state
of habitual confusion. By confronting the confusion I sometimes achieve a certain lucidity. You showed us how to do this.
But human power is considerably limited and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes, and therefore we do not have an absolute power of adapting things which are outside us for our use. But we shall bear with equanimity those things which happen to us contrary to that which a regard for our advantage postulates, if we are conscious that we have done that which we ought, and that we could not have extended the power we have to such an extent as to avoid those things, and moreover, that we are part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow. If we understand this clearly and distinctly, that part of us which is defined by our understanding, that is, the best part of us, will be wholly contented, and will endeavour to persist in that contentment. For in so far as we understand, we can desire nothing save that which is necessary, nor can we absolutely be contented with anything save what is true: and therefore in so far as we understand this rightly, the endeavour of the best part of us agrees with the order of the whole of nature.
(Ethics, Part IV, Appendix, Paragraph 32)
The human body (corpus humanum) is composed of many individuals (of different nature), each one of which is highly composite.
The individuals of which the human body is composed are some fluid, some soft and some hard.
The individuals composing the human body, and consequently the human body itself is affected in many ways by external bodies.
The human body needs for its preservation many other bodies from which it is, so to speak, continually regenerated.
When a fluid part of the human body is so determined by an external body that it impinges frequently on another part which is soft, it changes its surface and as it were imprints on it the traces of the external impelling body.