by Tony Duvert
On the other hand, I can put up with a lot; if I responded as willingly to the hoaxes of the “fringe” element as they react to the slightest doubt about their perfection, I’d be fighting morning and night. But it almost never comes to that, and it would actually require the pious mugs to dare way beyond the average cheats of their peers.
With time, my indignation dies down. For example, without grimacing, I put up with three guys, aged eighteen to twenty, whom I met here one evening. It was raining and they didn’t know where to sleep, so they spoke to me, and I put them up. Disgusting, hunched-up little Frenchmen mouthing left-wing cliches; they must have had their hair done to look like mops because they couldn’t—for the life of them—find any haloes in the hip boutiques. They talked a lot, and our “discussion” went on until dawn. They made it abundantly clear to me that my beds, shower, short hair, age, income, wine, heaps of food, and street kids meant I wasn’t part of their crew. Then they told about their experiences hanging out as hippies at the homes of some Mediterranean lunatics (because not only do those people, as they called them, suffer from poverty, they also think only about money and—height of insanity—about yours). This mixture of fine sentiments and racist garbage would have been enough for me to kick them out. But how could I blame them? If a man who was eight or ten years older than them made them so hostile, all they deserved was pity for having to rub shoulders with the people around here, who differ widely in ages and are even a little brown. I won’t have the energy to recount the filth I heard. I should, though, given what perfect examples they were of how naturally three and a half ounces of long hair, a virtuously flat wallet, three third-world necklaces and dirty feet allow a rebel to cultivate to the hundredth power those same intellectual and social vices he reproaches his middle-class parents for. But it’s too exhausting.
These pages flatter me the easy way, set me off in a nice clear category. However, the life I lead doesn’t really prevent me from telling myself lies that are as big, or as little, as those who disgust me. It’s that I’m alone, nobody’s watching; and I do have my vices. Devoting myself to them would be too dangerous if I didn’t maintain enough lucidity; the slightest illusion has tiresome consequences, mistakes harm me too quickly and for too long a time. That’s what keeps me from petting my own navel at every chance. So I’d be intransigent despite myself—the same way I’m a writer without choosing to be; I haven’t seen any other viable identity that’s available, any less destructive compromise. This is enough of one.
It’s impossible for me to write without cutting myself off from the outside world for long periods; walks, visits disconcert me for several days, during which my text vacillates, gets repulsive, superficial, unrecognizable. Writing is so unhealthy; playing the crook with words, controlling them the way that’s required is hell when you like to live a little. I don’t want to come to the conclusion that an art form that needs to torture and isolate those who practice it does so because it’s too old, too implacably policed by a narrow network of requirements. Or believe that of an Innnnpnt today’s modest successes are achieved at the expense of more sacrifices and more trauma than required for the masterpieces of the past. But when it comes down to creating a serious work, there’s no other form of art in which the result is constantly so imperfect, so debatable and so often ignored or hated: it’s like draining all your blood from your body in order to dye a worthless rag. Obviously, literature is in a bad way if it survives only in flat parodies pulled together the way you make a phone call, or a few books that half destroy those who create them. In any case, I have this archaic profession, and I like it and don’t want any other.
So the sadness and anguish of these last months couldn’t alone have pushed me into a withdrawal that is as difficult as it now is. I go to sleep at dawn. From a high window comes the delicate light of the sun and the shouts of children passing by. The sky is as pure blue as it is on mountaintops. Some mornings, the cool, fragrant air and transparent shapes, the limitless mildness that welcomes the new day, the laughing, vivid, multicolored music produced by boys everywhere they walk, offer me as much emotion and desire as awakening on an island of dream and coming to life for the first time. But I close the shutters and go to bed.
Well, almost a year has passed since I began this book. During the months when I lived normally, and sometimes happily, I covered whole pages with black and tore up a lot of them. All that withstood were the first sentences that proved I’d begun; I doggedly destroyed the rest. And it is only when my life found itself stripped bare, in suspension, that I was able to hold onto my texts—which such a life would doubtlessly have continued to delete for a long time and chain them to that beginning that nothing followed.
If I want to remember the year I knew Francesco and had other friendly visitors day after day (and tore up so much paper), those months when I was trying not to get Pablos, who was in favor of it, but to be alone with him, I no longer think about the way it ended. Instead I think about those boys as if an accident had suddenly killed them. The idea that, as I write, they’re alive and unchanged and a few minutes away from here doesn’t bother me. Now I have their doubles, and if they reappeared in front of me, I’d no longer confuse the two versions, mine and the other. I wouldn’t even try to establish a connection between the two, which would be a detriment to what I’m writing. I like to evoke autonomous images, brief scenes, sensations, obscenities, words; they come from them, but that isn’t important; I participated in all of it, but it’s as if I’d been an invisible witness. There was cowardice, fear of suffering, in my need to incorporate in real beings these fragments of existence passing through me. It wasn’t me, wasn’t them. These images can hover without ever pertaining to anyone or linking to an outside source, a place in the world that can be named. And it’s only because, in my memory, they’re composed of each other that my narrative lends a name to each group of fragments, the way you assemble three phalanxes in a reliquary, half a jaw, two vertebrae and the splinter of a tibia, which are enough to represent the body of a saint; that’s how I can easily create boys with a smile, a nice set of balls, a sentence hovering in the air, a sunlit morning and three pairs of eyes, without worrying about the living from whom these relics have fallen.
Francesco wasn’t really a prostitute. He became attached to his customers and was endlessly saying goodbye to the street. He made fun of himself and said he was the biggest whore in the city, because it wasn’t true. He was very touchy about money; his face became a grimace, it was a horrible embarrassment that made him edgy if he had to ask for something. Homosexuality and poverty were a double misfortune, a double humiliation. He would have been mortified if he knew that the people with whom he hooked up actually considered him a whore. But he was a penniless boy of the streets with a quick mind and fine features who liked men.
That’s why his family welcomed his foreign friends, without being impatient for gifts, despite what I’ve said. Their hold on you only tightened gradually; Francesco let it happen without taking part in it. Besides, in most cases they were only hoping for trinkets. The mom was especially fond of pharmaceuticals; in a wall niche she’d put together a collection for herself—with an emphasis on syrups—forming a disgusting little liqueur cabinet. That’s why, when I arrived, she pretended to cough every once in a while, or to have stomach trouble, or whatever. She performed her little ruse like a child, quickly launching into her act to show that she was sick, rubbing her belly, coming out with sighs and doleful looks, stopping for a moment to see if I was reacting, then quickly starting up again and drowning me in grins as soon as I put on a serious expression and talked about buying some medicine. I’d annoy the pharmacist because I wanted to choose a syrup she didn’t have. She’d forget that she was sick, greedily examine the packaging, exchange some opinions with her daughter and, planted comfortably on her cushions, begin her tasty ritual: open it, a small spoonful, taste it, mmm, mmm, is it OK? Her eyes would stray for a long time as I waited for the result: yes
, it’s good. A little later I’d find the syrup next to the other little bottles that had barely been started. The last time that I got some for her, she was worn out, had trouble walking and shot me an expression that would move mountains. I discovered a new one (it was written on the box): a cherry syrup for bronchitis. It made her much better.
She also had social security and went to the doctor whenever she wanted to. Since her real medical treatment was free, they managed without me—except for one time when she rubbed her belly and moaned louder than usual, and handed me an empty tube of tranquilizers that cost a lot; I bought them without considering that she actually only wanted to save herself a wait at the clinic. Despite all this, her kids could have the flu for three days without her giving them an aspirin. If Francesco told me about it, I took care of it; but deep down I preferred fake medicine. There was nothing immoral about the small pleasures they expected from their hosts; a father comes home to more demands than I endured, and I think the eldest put up with some, which helped me to tolerate his. After all, getting a few treats from a guest who’s richer than you goes without saying. Only the children had nothing to hope for. All acts of kindness that would have favored them over the adults were discouraged. The presents I gave Pablos (clothes, shoes, books, a pen, the movies, sweets) upset priorities, were taken badly, and were considered too expensive or nonessential. Even Francesco, whom such a thing deprived of nothing, was vexed by it. As for Pablos, he’d amiably show his satisfaction to everybody: his brothers—despite the fact that I’d slip them pocket money—would look darts at me and the adults, judging my wealth by what I was wasting on a brat, and they’d step up their requests. Soon I discover a solution: the eldest likes alcohol, so I bring him a bottle whenever I give Pablos something. A tax on the pleasure of giving against the grain. Once the head of the family was appeased, the others kept quiet. The little ones remained glum: I think they took the money back from them, or else the little ones turned it over themselves. Only Pablos’s gifts were irretrievable—and they were very careful to show me that they still existed, hadn’t been sold.
These complications and tributes didn’t embarrass me. In France, when I want to see a child, I’m obliged to go by way of his owners and pay the piper his exorbitant rights: giving it almost every time I stay with them. They know I’m coming for the little one, who’s waiting for me; but they can’t get used to it. To be neglected in favor of a kid makes for an upside-down world. Since I have to play the game to keep from being suspect, the parents take advantage of it, monopolize me, unload their mental garbage cans, secrets and opinions on me, a fetid stream of friendship and problems. I leave so worn out, so nauseous that I don’t start again for ten days. An original method of child protection.
Of course, they love the children; it provides an inexhaustible source of themes for conversation.
“Look at this drawing he made, what do you think it’s saying? Terrible, isn’t it?”
In middle-class families, manners have barely changed since the time when they had bachelors to admire the watercolors of their daughter; today, they invariably show you the little ones’ drawings and psychoanalyze them. They make aghast commentary if the images the brat produced are conformist; his duty is primitive art, not imitating big people. I dodge the requests for Freudian drivel; evolved parents don’t need any help discovering the daddy-mommy syndrome all by themselves and inventing a case history around it. As for the conformist drawings, I say that if a child copies adults it’s because he’d rather be in their situation: pictures by children who are free are quite nice, but the parents don’t do any while they have the right to do everything else. One explains the other.
“But why are you getting hostile?” they answer. My blunders accumulate; what a lousy teacher I’d be. In my country, I’m not a good conversationalist, especially with intellectual conversations or the ones pretending to be (because that’s also something that creates a facsimile of itself: the frog that comes on like a toad, the pest that becomes the pox). Everything I say in front of somebody immediately launches into orbit around his navel-gazing, and his answer will be a reaction to that kind of gravitation. He doesn’t see what I name, be it a poor smoked herring: he contemplates only the landscape of himself complemented by the new moon that I’ve launched. And depending on the light it affords his navel-gazing, he approves, critiques, touches up or, most often, eliminates: the moon sets. His navel is sad, and I don’t know how to have a dialogue.
I’ve never seen an adult who finds me with a child (I’m talking about the ones who don’t know about or disapprove of my ways) hesitate to bother or interrupt us, not pull me over, or kick the kid out for a walk without asking anyone—something he’d never dare do if the other person were my age. Their disdain for children makes them view my interest in them as trivial, my connection with them as insignificant, the conversation that they’re interrupting as derisory. What they’d see instead is an obsession or exaggeration, a pose, and they’d try to fix it in me, bring me over to the correct side among people of the same stock—meaning, adults. They can’t conceive of the fact that between two humans I’d choose the one that seems to them the lesser, when in reality he’s the only one I’d choose.
I liked to be with Pablos to make up for the intermittent and crippled nature of my relations with other children: I sampled the bodies of one, the company of the other. Two forbidden things, and it’s almost impossible for them to exist together, because not the same kind of child permits each. On some days, when Pablos was brought over, I’d had sex the night before with one kid or another of the same age and, occasionally, better looking, but whom I wouldn’t be able to see again and whom I knew nothing about: we had too much to hide, it was left there. Pablos brought the half that was missing; by looking at him I’d evoke the other.
Likewise, in Pablos’ family, they figured he and those like him were too skinny to interest me. Popular custom dictated that brats were to be revered, petted, spoiled, favored; but only until the age when they could outrun their mother. From then on it’s all over in a poor family. They’re the last, the last in line. The eldest, who’s singled out from the others, escapes part of that. At home, the boys help with the housework (as adults they won’t lift a finger); outside, if they don’t stay in school, they’re rented out to anyone at all, and they’ll be under the thumb of any boss who denounces them to their parents for laziness or supposed thefts so he can cut back on their salary. They say they’re sorry, slap him around, take next to no money, and the kid only obeys more. That’s how the children become the standard workforce for all the cottage industries, tiny penitentiaries where a lot of families get rid of excess baggage. The countless workshops and stall of the city, tailors or carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, painters, grocers and every trade, blacksmiths, garage and bicycle mechanics, locksmiths, greasy spoon owners, and a thousand other petty professions—there are almost as many of them as there are human objects or actions—present an invariable spectacle: kids at work, some of them teenagers, an idle adult who gives the orders. The workdays are very long but relaxed; few places give Sunday off. Apparently, in this place, half the inhabitants are younger than twenty; and since it’s to the advantage of the small-time bosses to exploit the population of underclass children, you end up working more often before you’re an adult than after.
Francesco’s family, which isn’t as poor under the eldest’s rule as it was under the father’s, was lenient enough with the later children, who were well treated and well fed, quiet schoolboys raised with lower-middle-class virtues, in contrast to the childhood of the older ones. Looking at Pablos’s fine notebooks and his chaste belly, I thought how Francesco, at the same age, in between school and work with the bosses, would take off in a thousand different directions for a dose of male sex organs. He says that he’d squeeze them between his thighs and wouldn’t agree to any more; I believe him, more or less. He didn’t feel good about his former exploits, and to his other friends he preferred
telling stories about farfetched challenges when—returning from jaunts—he came close to bringing home treasures and crowns. He finds a lot of wallets. The photos of him as a child show a sad, hard, hopeless face.
Now his little brothers couldn’t go thirty feet from the house without being thrashed. The eldest performed the beatings. He was doing a bad job with that brood inflicted on him by his father’s death; he terrorized his younger brothers and wouldn’t put up with anything from them. However, he looked down on them too much to harass them; he liked wine, whores, stayed home as little as possible. But his mother, as fond of drama as she was of potions, insisted he torture. She ordained punishments while whining that her sons didn’t respect her, then begged for it to stop while whining that she’d never asked for anything like that, although the consequence of her denouncing was always the same. Good at his role, the eldest kept smacking right to the end; his own violence excited him, and although the thrashings were rare, they were dreadful. That’s how he took on all the hate, and the old lady shrewdly maintained her maternal power and the love they bore for her. To me, that way of taking charge seems common among mothers; their double game is in proportion to their calling for being loved.