And so it was that the postcard exhibiting the handsome Guy in a white shirt, with his strong neck and virile mustache, was admitted into my collection, and occupied a place of honor between the young Bonaparte and Madame Récamier. Sometimes, when I turned the pages, my mother would look over my shoulder, and stop my hand just as it was going to turn the page with Maupassant on it. She would stare at him broodingly, and with a guilty and yet almost frivolous smile. Then she would shake her head and sigh.
“Women adored him,” she would say, and then add, with seeming irrelevance and a hint of regret: “Oh well, perhaps it would be better for us to marry a nice, clean girl from a good family.”
No doubt as a result of gazing too often at the picture of poor Guy, my mother decided that the time had come to issue a solemn warning against the treacherous snares that all too frequently lie in wait for every man of the world. One afternoon, she put me in a cab and dragged me to a most loathsome place called Panopticum, a sort of museum of medical horrors where abominable wax models served the purpose of putting schoolboys on their guard against the consequences of certain forbidden games. I must confess that I was duly impressed. All those collapsed and dissolving noses, slowly vanishing under the merciless attacks of syphilis and leaving nothing but a hole in the face, presented by the authorities for our inspection in a subterranean half-light, made me sick with fear.
For it was always the nose which, for some mysterious and to me incomprehensible reason, was required to pay the price of those fatal pleasures.
The severe warning thus addressed to me in that sinister place had a most salutary effect upon my impressionable nature: all my life I have paid the greatest attention to my nose. I gathered that boxing was a sport which the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Vilna emphatically advised against, and so the ring is one of the few spots into which I have never ventured in my career as a champion of the world. I have always done my best, also, to avoid brawls and fist fights, and can honestly say that, as far as my nose is concerned, the religious authorities have every reason to be pleased with me.
My nose is no longer what it used to be. It had to be Entirely reconstructed in an R.A.F. hospital during the war after a nasty flying accident, but it is still there all the same; it stood by me firmly, and helped me to go on breathing through several French Republics. Even now, as I lie in the afternoon mist between heaven and earth, when my old craving for friendship and companionship once more takes hold of me, and I think of all those who have showed me so much devotion and love—my cat Mortimer, buried in a Chelsea garden; my cats Nicholas, Humphrey, Gaucho; and Gaston, my mongrel dog, all of whom left me long ago—I have only to raise my hand and touch the tip of my nose to feel that I am not entirely alone and that I still have company.
CHAPTER 15
In addition to the edifying reading recommended by my mother, I devoured all the books which came into my hands or, more accurately, on which I managed to lay my hands in the local bookseller’s shop. I carried my booty to my secret treasure island in the barn, and there I would plunge into the fabulous worlds of Walter Scott, Karl May, Mayne Reid and Arsène Lupin. I found the admirable Lupin especially enchanting and did my best to impart to my features the caustic, menacing and superior look with which the artist had endowed the face of the hero on the book’s cover. With that natural gift children have for mimicry, I succeeded only too well, and even today I often recognize in my features a vague resemblance to the cheap drawing which a third-rate illustrator had supplied for the cover of a pulp publication. Walter Scott also gave me great pleasure and I still occasionally fling myself on my bed and set off in imaginary pursuit of some noble ideal, defending poor widows and saving little orphans—the widows are always remarkably beautiful and inclined to show their tender gratitude, after first shutting away the little orphans in the next room.
Another of my favorite books was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I have never tired of reading it, and the thought of that wooden chest filled with doubloons, rubies, emeralds and turquoises—for some reason or other, diamonds have never tempted me—still haunts my dreams. I remain convinced that it truly exists somewhere and that I can find it, if only I try hard enough. I still hope, still wait, I am tortured by the feeling that it is there, and that I need only to break the code to be able to understand the great answer that has been there since the beginning of time but that no human mind or heart has ever been able to decipher. How much disappointment and sadness this tantalizing illusion can encompass only the very old star eaters will fully understand. I have never ceased to believe that a marvelous secret lies in wait somewhere around me and I have always walked this earth with the feeling that I am passing close to a buried treasure. When I wander on the San Francisco heights, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Telegraph Hill, few persons could suspect that the graying gentleman is seeking a hidden sign, an open sesame, that his ironic smile conceals a craving for the master word, that he believes in some fabulous mystery behind the blankness, in a loving smile behind the veil of chaos, in the existence of an answer, a magical formula, a key. My eyes are continually searching heaven and earth; I never stop asking my silent question; I plead, I appeal, I wait. Naturally, I have acquired considerable skill at concealing all this under a courteous and somewhat distant exterior: I have become prudent, I play the grownup, but all the time I am still secretly looking for the golden scarab with a message under his wing, I am waiting for a mysterious beckoning, for a bird to perch upon my shoulder, and, speaking to me in a human voice, to reveal at last the meaning of all this, the why, the how and the what-for.
And yet I cannot pretend that my first contact with magic was very encouraging. I received my initiation behind the woodshed, from the hands of one of the younger boys, nicknamed “Melon” because of the habit he had of observing the world from above a slice of watermelon, so that only his wise and knowing eyes remained visible. His parents kept a fruit and vegetable shop in the building and he almost never emerged from the basement he lived in without a sizable slice of his favorite fruit. He had a way of plunging head first into the succulent flesh which made our mouths water, while his dreamy eyes stared at us above the object of our desires. Melons were common indeed in our part of the world, but every summer there were always a few cases of cholera and typhoid for which they were blamed, and we were strictly forbidden to touch them.
Melon must have been at least two years my junior but I have always been very much influenced by those who are younger than I. Mature men and their advice are entirely wasted upon me. Words of wisdom drop from their lips like dead leaves from a tree, majestic enough perhaps, but from them the sap has vanished. Truth dies young. What old age has “learned” is actually what it has forgotten. The ironic serenity of those who claim to have passed the time of illusions and avoided the pit-falls open to the inexperienced heart always reminds me of the smile of the Cheshire Cat, who has vanished, tail, heart and the rest, and now that ignoble middle age begins to weigh on me and whisper in my ear its tune of wisdom and detachment, I can see the ropes clearly and do not fall for the trick: I know that, in all that truly matters, I have been and shall never be again.
It was little Melon who initiated me into the secrets of magic. I remember my delighted astonishment when he told me that all my wishes would be granted if I knew how to go about it. All I had to do was get hold of a bottle, urinate into it and then fill it, in the following order, with a cat’s whiskers, some rats’ tails, a considerable number of live ants and flies, the ears of a bat and twenty other ingredients all most difficult to come by in commerce, and all of which I have completely forgotten, so that I begin to wonder if I shall ever have my wishes granted. I started an enthusiastic search for the indispensable magic elements. Flies were everywhere and, in our yard, there was never a lack of dead rats and cats. Bats could be found, and urinating into the talisman offered no insurmountable difficulty. But just try and get living ants into a bottle! You can neither catch them nor keep them; they esc
ape as soon as you grab them; when you lift your finger to push one in, two others rush out, and by the time you have persuaded a fourth to enter, all the others are gone, and the whole business has to begin over and over again. A real task for Don Juan in Hell.
A moment came, however, when Melon, sickened by my frantic efforts, and impatient to get his teeth into the cake I was to give him in exchange for his magic formula, finally declared that the talisman was complete and ready to function. The only thing left for me to do was to make a wish. I began to think.
Seated on the ground with the bottle between my legs, I covered my mother with jewels, presented her with yellow Packards driven by liveried chauffeurs; I built her a palace of marble where all the good society of Vilna was summoned to appear on their knees. But something always was lacking. Between these poor crumbs of reality and the extraordinary need which had suddenly come to life in me there was no common measure. Confused and yet piercing, tyrannical and yet impossible to formulate, completely vague and yet totally commanding, a strange craving stirred in me, a longing for something that had no face, no content or shape, no answer. It was the first bite into my soul of that unlimited thirst for total possession and fulfillment which has nurtured mankind’s worst crimes as well as its greatest museums, its most beautiful poetry and its most cruel empires—a longing whose source perhaps lies within our genes like some memory, some microcosmic biological yearning of the ephemeral for the eternal, for that unending immortal flow of time and life from which we become detached when we are born.
It was thus that I made acquaintance with the absolute, and I shall carry its bite within my soul till the end, and shall be haunted by its source as by some infinite and summoning absence.
I was only nine and could scarcely have been expected to guess that I had just felt for the first time the merciless pull upon my heart, soul and mind of what I was to call thirty years later “the roots of heaven” in the novel which bears that title. The absolute had suddenly revealed to me its almost physically felt absence, and already I did not know at which spring to quench my thirst. It was on that day, I think, that I was born as an artist. By that supreme and glorious failure which art is forever condemned to be, man, the eternal self-deceiver, tries to pass off as a satisfactory answer something that has never and can never be more than a tragically and vainly beseeching question.
It seems to me that I am still sitting there in my short pants among the nettles with a magic bottle in my hands. I made the most desperate efforts of imagination, for already, like all artists, I had the feeling that the time at my disposal was strictly limited. But I could find nothing satisfying enough to answer my mysterious, confused and already tyrannical longing, nothing that was worthy of my mother, of my love, of all those masterpieces of accomplishment that I wished to give her. The craving for perfection had just visited me, never again to leave. Gradually, my lips began to tremble, my face assumed an expression of vexation and anger, and I started to howl in fear, astonishment and rage.
Since then, I have grown used to the idea and, instead of howling, I write books.
I buried my talisman deep in the woodshed. I prudently put the top hat on the spot, so as to be able to find it again, but somehow a sort of disenchantment had taken hold on me and I never looked for it again.
CHAPTER 16
Yet circumstances saw to it that, very soon, my mother and I found ourselves in need of all the magic we could find.
I fell very ill. Hardly had scarlet fever left me when an acute inflammation of the kidneys set in and the distinguished doctors who had hastened to my bedside pronounced me lost. I have been pronounced lost several times in my life; on one such interesting occasion, extreme unction had been administered to me, and an R.A.F. guard of honor, complete with white gloves and dirks, was mounted around my body, while the Senegalese soldiers were busy with the coffin in the corridor.
During my rare moments of consciousness, I felt very pre-occupied. I had an acute sense of my responsibilities, and the idea of leaving my mother in the world with no one to support her was intolerable to me. I was also painfully aware of everything she expected of me, and as I lay there, vomiting black blood, the idea of letting her down caused me more torment than my infected kidneys. I had been a failure. I had become neither Jascha Heifetz nor a French Ambassador, I had neither ear nor voice and, to make matters worse, I was now destined to die like a fool without having had so much as one single success with women and without even becoming a Frenchman! I still shudder at the idea that I might have died then, without having won the ping-pong championship of Nice in 1932.
I imagine that my refusal to evade my responsibilities toward my mother played a major part in my struggle to remain alive. Each time I saw her grief-stricken face leaning over me, I tried to smile and to utter a few coherent words, just to show that I was putting up a good fight, as she had always thought I would, and that things were not as bad as all that.
I did my best. I summoned to my aid d’Artagnan and Arsène Lupin; I spoke French to the doctor and muttered aloud fables of La Fontaine; with an imaginary sword in my hand, I performed prodigies of cut and thrust, flying after the enemy, just as Lieutenant Sverdlovski had taught me. The lieutenant came in person to see me and stayed for a long time by my side, holding my hand in his great paw and violently agitating his mustache; and I felt mightily encouraged by this martial presence. I tried to raise my arm and to score a bull’s eye with my pistol; I hummed the “Marseillaise” and gave accurately the birth date of the Roi Soleil; I was winning prizes at the horse show and even had the effrontery to imagine myself standing on the stage, in my black velvet suit, playing the violin before an entranced audience while my mother, in her box, received tributes of flowers. With a monocle in my eye and a top hat on my head—helped, I must admit, by Rouletabille 1—I was saving France from the diabolical schemes of the Kaiser, then rushing to London to recover the Queen’s diamonds,2 and returning just in time to sing Boris Godunov at the Vilna Opera.
Everybody knows the story of the willing chameleon. He was put upon a green cloth and obligingly turned green; he was put upon a red cloth and obligingly turned red. Upon a white cloth he turned white, and on a yellow one, yellow. But when they put him upon a Scottish plaid, the little fellow burst.
I did not burst, but I was very ill indeed. However, I put up a good fight, as befits a Frenchman, and I won the battle.
All of us can win many battles in our lives but it takes a lot of courage to get used to the idea that we may be constantly winning battles without ever winning the war. The war goes on and on and we die with our hands full of victories. But I believe, and shall always believe, that one day mankind will win the great war it has been waging since the beginning of time, and that one day human hands will succeed where I have failed and tear down the mask of darkness and chaos and absurdity, and look at the face of truth radiant with meaning, justice and love.
As far as my personal battle was concerned, I can only say that I fought in accordance with the best traditions of my country, with the sole purpose of saving the widow and the orphan. I very nearly died all the same, leaving to others the task of representing France abroad.
At one moment, under the eyes and on the advice of three doctors, I was wrapped in a sheet full of ice, a treatment to which I was to be subjected once again in Damascus, in 1941, after a particularly virulent attack of typhoid with intestinal hemorrhages, when the doctors decided they might just as well give me one more delightful experience.
After that, it was unanimously agreed to “decapsulate” my right kidney—whatever that may mean. But at that point my mother reacted in a grand manner worthy of her. She forbade the operation. She forbade it flatly and almost furiously, in spite of the insistence of the great German kidney specialist who had been summoned at enormous expense from Berlin.