“We thought it best to wait for you before we classified them,” he says. “In the meantime we’ve been looking over some odd pages. This bitch threw a beautiful egg into the garbage.”
“It was rotten,” said Babs.
Gregorovius places a visibly trembling hand on one of the folders. It must be very cold outside, a double cognac then. They are warmed by the color of the light, and the green folder, the Club. Oliveira looks at the center of the table, the ash from his cigarette starts to join the ones that fill the ashtray.
(–82)
92
NOW he realized that in his highest moments of desire he had not known how to stick his head into the crest of the wave and pass through the fabulous crash of his blood. Loving La Maga had been a sort of rite from which one no longer expected illumination; words and acts had succeeded one another with an inventive monotony, a dance of tarantulas on a moonlit floor, a viscous and prolonged manipulation of echoes. And all the time he had been waiting for a kind of awakening to come from out of that happy drunkenness, a clearer view of what was around him, whether the colored wallpaper in hotels or the reasons behind any one of his acts, without wanting to understand that by limiting himself to waiting he had abolished all real possibility, as if he had condemned himself in advance to a narrow and trivial present. He had gone from La Maga to Pola in one fell swoop, without offending La Maga or offending himself, without getting annoyed at caressing Pola’s pink ear with La Maga’s arousing name. Failure with Pola was the repetition of innumerable failures, a game that ultimately is lost but was beautiful to play, while with La Maga he had begun to come out resentful, with a taste of tartar and a butt that smelled of dawn in the corner of his mouth. That’s why he took Pola to the same hotel on the Rue Valette, they found the same old woman who greeted them understandingly, what else was there to do in that lousy weather. It still smelled of toilet soap, of soup, but they had cleaned the blue stain on the rug and there was room for new stains.
“Why here?” Pola asked surprised. She looked at the yellow bedspread, the dull and musty room, the pink-spotted lampshade hanging from the ceiling.
“Here or somewhere else …”
“If it’s because of money, all you had to do was say so, love.”
“If it’s a question of revulsion, all we have to do is cut out, sweet.”
“It doesn’t revolt me. It’s ugly, that’s all. Probably …”
She had smiled at him, as if she were trying to understand. Probably … probable … Her hand found Oliveira’s as they both bent over to remove the cover. All that afternoon he had again been present, another time, one of so many times, the ironical witness sorry for his own body, at the surprises, the enchantments, and the deceptions of the ceremony. Habituated without being aware of it to La Maga’s rhythms, suddenly a new ocean, a different set of waves shook him in his reflexes, confronted him, seemed to denounce in a vague way his solitude enmeshed in phantoms. The enchantment and the disenchantment of going from one mouth to another, of searching with his eyes closed for a neck where his hand had chastely slept, and feeling that the curve is different, a thicker base, a tendon that tightens briefly with the effort of getting up to kiss or bite. Every instant of his body was opposite a delightful lack of meeting, having to stretch out a little more, or lower his head to find the mouth that formerly was so close up there, to stroke a thinner hip, incite a reply and not get it, insist, confusedly, until he realized that everything had to be invented all over again, that the code has not been formulated, that the keys and the clues will take shape again, will be different, will respond to other things. Weight, smell, the tone in which she laughed and begged, time and precipitation, nothing coincides even if the same, everything is born again even if immortal, love plays at being invented, it flees from itself to return in its surprising spiral, the breasts tilt a different way, the mouth kisses more deeply or as if from far away, and in one moment where before there had been anger and anguish now there is pure play, an incredible frolic, or vice versa, at the moment when before one fell into dreaming, the babbling of sweet foolish things, now there is a tension, something that cannot be communicated but is present and which demands incorporation, something like an insatiable rage. Only the pleasure in his final wingbeat is the same; before and after, the world has broken into pieces and it will be necessary to rename it, finger by finger, lip by lip, shadow by shadow.
The second time was in Pola’s apartment, on the Rue Dauphine. If a few phrases had succeeded in giving him an idea of what he was going to find, reality was way beyond the imaginable. Everything was in its place and there was a place for everything. The history of contemporary art was modestly inscribed on postcards: a Klee, a Poliakoff, a Picasso (with a certain kindly condescension already), a Manessier, and a Fautrier. Hung artistically with a good sense of distance. A small signoria David did not intrude either. A bottle of pernod and one of cognac. On the bed, a Mexican serape. Pola played the guitar sometimes, the memory of a love of high plateaus. In her flat she looked like Michèle Morgan, but she was resolutely dark. Two bookshelves included Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, well-read and annotated, translations from Dylan Thomas stained with lipstick, copies of Two Cities, Christiane Rochefort, Blondin, Sarraute (uncut), and a few NRF’s. The rest gravitated about the bed, where Pola wept a little while she recalled a girlfriend who had committed suicide (photos, a page torn out of an intimate diary, a pressed flower). It did not seem strange to Oliveira afterwards that Pola had seemed perverse, that she had been the first to open the door to different kinds of love-play, that night found them like two people stretched out on a beach where the sand slowly yields to the algae-laden water. It was the first time that he called her Pola Paris, as a joke, and she liked it and repeated it, and bit him on the lip whispering Pola Paris, as if she had assumed the name and wanted to be worthy of it, pole of Paris, Paris of Pola, the greenish light of a neon sign going on and off against the yellow raffia curtain, Pola Paris, Pola Paris, the naked city with its sex in tune to the palpitation of the curtain. Pola Paris, Pola Paris, every time more his, breasts without surprise, the curve of the stomach traced exactly by his caress, without the slightest fear of reaching the limits before or after, a mouth found now and defined, a smaller and more pointed tongue, less saliva, teeth less sharp, lips which opened so that he could touch her gums, enter and run over every warm ripple where it smelled a little of cognac and tobacco.
(–103)
93
BUT love, that word…Horacio the moralist, fearful of passions born without some deep-water reason, disconcerted and surly in the city where love is called by all the names of all the streets, all the buildings, all the flats, all the rooms, all the beds, all the dreams, all the things forgotten or remembered. My love, I do not love you for you or for me or for the two of us together, I do not love you because my blood tells me to love you, I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body, your laugh, there are times when it torments me that you love me (how you like to use the verb to love, with what vulgarity you toss it around among plates and sheets and buses), I’m tormented by your love because I cannot use it as a bridge because a bridge can’t be supported by just one side, Wright or Le Corbusier will never make a bridge that is supported by just one side, and don’t look at me with those bird’s eyes, for you the operation of love is so simple, you’ll be cured before me even if you love me as I do not love you. Of course you’ll be cured, because you’re living in health, after me it’ll be someone else, you can change things the way you do a blouse. So sad to listen to Horacio the cynic who wants a passport-love, a mountain pass-love, a key-love, a revolver-love, a love that will give him the thousand eyes of Argos, ubiquity, the silence out of which music is possible, the root out of which a language can be woven. And it’s foolish be
cause all that is sleeping a little in you, all you would have to do is submerge yourself in a glass of water like a Japanese flower and little by little colored petals would begin to bloom, the bent forms would puff up, beauty would grow. Infinite giver, I do not know how to take, forgive me. You’re offering me an apple and I’ve left my teeth on the night-table. Stop, it’s fine that way. I can also be rude, take note of that. But take good note, because it’s not gratuitous.
Why stop? For fear of starting fabrications, they’re so easy. You get an idea from there, a feeling from the other shelf, you tie them together with the help of words, black bitches, and it turns out that I want you. Partial total: I want you. General total: I love you. That’s the way a lot of my friends live, not to mention an uncle and two cousins convinced of the love-they-feel-for-their-wives. From words to deeds, hey; in general without the verba there isn’t any res. What a lot of people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. You’ll probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert. But I’m alone in my room, I’m falling into tricks of writing, the black bitches get their vengeance any way they can, they’re biting me from underneath the table. Do you say underneath or under? They bite you just the same. Why, why, pourquoi, por qué, warum, perchè this horror of black bitches? Look at them there in that poem by Nashe, transformed into bees. And there in two lines from Octavio Paz, thighs of the sun, corners of summer. But the same body of a woman belongs to Mary and to La Brinvilliers, eyes that cloud up looking at a beautiful sunset are the same optical instrument that gets pleasure from the twisting of a man being hanged. I’m afraid of that pimping, of ink and of voices, a sea of tongues licking the ass of the world. There’s milk and honey underneath your tongue … Yes, but it’s also been said that dead flies make the perfumer’s perfume stink. At war with words, at war, keep everything that might be necessary even though intelligence must be renounced, stick with the simple act of ordering some fried potatoes, and Reuters dispatches, in letters from my noble brother and movie dialogues. Curious, very curious that Puttenham should have had a feeling for words as if they were objects, and even creatures with a life of their own. I too sometimes think that I’m engendering streams of ferocious ants that will devour the world. Oh but that the Roc could breed in silence…Logos, faute éclatante! To conceive a race that could express itself in drawings, the dance, the macramé, or abstract mimicry. Could they avoid connotations, the root of deception? Honneur des hommes, etc. Yes, but an honor that dishonors itself in every phrase, like a brothel of virgins, if such a thing were possible.
From love to philology, you’re brilliant, Horacio. It’s Morelli’s fault, he’s like an obsession with you, his crazy experiment makes you catch a glimpse of the lost paradise, poor pre-Adamite, in a cellophane-wrapped golden age. This is the age of plastics, man, the age of plastics. Forget about the bitches. Beat it, the pack of you, we have to think, what’s called thinking, that is to say, feeling, locating yourself, and confronting yourself before you let pass the minutest main or subordinate clause. Paris is a center, you understand, a mandala through which one must pass without dialectics, a labyrinth where pragmatic formulas are of no use except to get lost in. Then a cogito which may be a kind of breathing Paris in, getting into it by letting it get in you, pneuma and not logos. Argentine big buddy, disembarking with the sufficiency of a three-by-five culture, wise in everything, up to date in everything, with acceptable good taste, good knowledge of the history of the human race, the periods of art, the Romanesque and the Gothic, philosophical currents, political tensions, Shell Mex, action and reflection, compromise and liberty, Piero della Francesca and Anton Webern, well-catalogued technology, Lettera 22, Fiat 1600, John XXIII. Wonderful, wonderful. It was a little bookstore on the Rue du Cherche-Midi, it was a soft sense of spinning slowly, it was the afternoon and the hour, it was the flowering season of the year, it was the Verbum (in the beginning), it was a man who thought he was a man. What an infinite piece of stupidity, my God. And she came out of the bookstore (I just now realize that it was like a metaphor, her coming out of a bookstore, no less) and we exchanged a couple of words and we went to have a glass of pelure d’oignon at a café in Sèvres-Babylone (speaking of metaphors, I a delicate piece of porcelain just arrived, HANDLE WITH CARE, and she Babylonia, root of time, something previous, primeval being, terror and delight of beginnings, the romanticism of Atala but with a real tiger waiting behind the tree). And so Sèvres went with Babylonia to have a glass of pelure d’oignon, we looked at each other and I think we began to desire each other (but that was later on, on the Rue Réamur) and a memorable dialogue resulted, clothed from head to toe in misunderstandings, maladjustments that dissolved into vague moments of silence, until our hands began to chat, it was sweet stroking hands while we looked at each other and smiled, we lit Gauloises, each in the other’s mouth, we rubbed each other with our eyes, we were so much in agreement on everything that it was shameful, Paris was dancing there outside waiting for us, we’d barely disembarked, we were barely alive, everything was there without a name and without a history (especially Babylonia, and poor Sèvres made an enormous effort, fascinated by that Babylonia way of looking at the Gothic without putting labels on it, of walking along the banks of the river without seeing the Norman ducks take flight). When we said goodbye we were like two children who have suddenly become friends at a birthday party and keep looking at one another while their parents take them by the hand and lead them off, and it’s a sweet pain and a hope, and you know the name of one is Tony and the other one Lulu, and that’s all that’s needed for the heart to become a little piece of fruit, and…
Horacio, Horacio.
Merde, alors. Why not? I’m talking about then, about Sèvres-Babylone, not about these elegiac scorecards where we know that the game has been played already.
(–68)
94
MORELLIANA
A piece of prose can turn rotten like a side of beef. For some years now I have been witness to the signs of rot in my writing. Just like me, it has its angina, its jaundice, its appendicitis, but it is ahead of me on its way to final dissolution. After all, rotting means the end of the impurities in the component parts and the return of rights to chemically pure sodium, magnesium, carbon. My prose is rotting syntactically and is heading—with so much work—towards simplicity. I think that is why I no longer know how to write “coherent”; the bucking of a verbal bronco leaves me on foot after a few steps. Fixer les vertiges, how good. But I get the feeling that I should establish elements. Poems are waiting for that, and certain kinds of novel or short story or theater. The rest is the job of stuffing and it does not work out well for me.
“Yes, but elements, are they the essential thing? Establishing carbon is not worth as much as establishing the Guermantes family.”
“I think in a vague sort of way that the elements I am aiming for are a result of composition. The Schoolbook chemistry point of view has been turned inside out. When composition has reached its extreme limit, the territory of the elemental opens up. Establish them and if it is possible, be them.”
(–91)
95
IN some note or other, Morelli had shown himself to be curiously explicit about his intentions. Giving evidence of a strange anachronism, he became interested in studies or nonstudies such as Zen Buddhism, which in those years was the rash of the beat generation. The anachronism did not lie in that, but in the fact that Morelli seemed much more radical and younger in his spiritual exigencies than those California youngsters getting drunk on Sanskrit words and canned beer. One of the notes referred Suzukianly to language as a kind of exclamation or shout that ris
es directly out of an inner experience. There followed several examples of dialogues between teachers and pupils, completely unintelligible for a rational ear and for all dualistic and binary logic, just like the answers that teachers give their pupils, consisting in the main of whacking them over the head with a pointer, throwing a pitcher of water in their faces, throwing them out of the room or, in the best cases, throwing the question back at them. Morelli seemed to move about at will in that apparently demented universe, and took it for granted that this pedagogical behavior constituted the real lesson, the only manner in which one could open the pupil’s spiritual eye and reveal the truth to him. This violent unnaturalness seemed natural to him, in the sense that it abolished the structures which made up the specialty of the Western world, the axes on which man’s historical understanding rotated and which in discursive thought (including aesthetic and even poetic feeling) find their instrument of choice.
The tone of the notes (jottings with a view to mnemotechny or an end not too well explained) seemed to indicate that Morelli had gone off into an adventure analogous to the work that he had been painfully writing and publishing over the years. For some of his readers (and for himself) it was laughable to try to write the kind of novel that would do away with the logical articulations of discourse. One ended up by divining a kind of transaction, a proceeding (even though the absurdity of choosing a narration for ends that did not seem to be narrative might remain standing).*