A Blaze in a Desert
Page 8
And then he was lucky not to look like a dirty Jew
As for me I felt at a certain point on the back of my neck
A small blue terrifically radiant pain
Comparable I think to the pain felt by people shot so expertly they hardly suffer
But more long-lasting
Because I kept hearing the singer oh life is so beautiful
And the customers the waiters the singer the corpse in the fedora we all got along famously
With the exhausted horsemen of an Apocalypse completely devoid of interest
Who trotted along with their why-not in the dark lowering sky of Boulevard Rochechouart.
March [19]39.
Bérangère
The prisoner was a charming girl
Oh radiant Bérangère
Be glad be glad my lovely child
These keys aren’t heavy tonight
She was but twenty years old
At midnight in her cell
We loved we loved so very much
I wept the morning she died
I was for her she was for me
She loved like nobody else
You know I have a tender heart
And hanging’s an awful shame
The prisoner is in hell tonight
An angel weeps alone
Your flowing tears my lying mouth
And our eternal chains
There’s not a boat that does not sink
Three hundred fathoms deep
The sky above is none too bright
Not even if money don’t stink
Suicide of Dr. C.
Pure northern night on the steppe, pure solitude of northern snow
With my lost manuscripts, with a devastated shade, with our fraternal perils,
My son had just gone to sleep, it was warm in the house of clay and tree trunks built at the very edge of the void, by unknown hands, for us and that unique moment,
You came in, doctor. You came from beyond the comets that rend the skies,
You, whiter than snow under the stars, you, icier than that December night on the Ural plain,
You, more silent than the night, more absolute, more at peace, more nocturnal.
Doctor, don’t say a word, everything has been said, you killed yourself the other night in Paris,
That is much truer than your psychiatric work.
Welcome. You are proof that words are not possible anymore.
It was an amazing Paris night, a night with the universe splendidly whirling about,
You understood everything so well there was really nothing more to understand,
Nothing more to wait for,
You were so alone with that nameless relief that it was like the exaltation of an immense love just like the midnight sun on the ice floes.
You looked at your collections, distractedly, collections, books, what an idea!
Portraits, why portraits when the planet is empty?
You went through the rooms, smoking, calm calm calm
—with a great song in your breast, a song you did not hear, a song of definitive silence,
in the mirrors you saw the necessary visage of your farewell,
Calm calm calm calm farewell
—you cocked the pistol, I can see your last distraught smile, calm calm calm farewell—the pistol,
It was no longer Paris, it was the pole, no, it was no longer this strange universe, admirable and cruel,
But perhaps galaxy M101 in Ursa Major
Or the one in Andromeda?
The axis of the worlds wobbled slightly beneath your footsteps.
There’s no point in living, doctor, no point in living once the miracle is over.
It was no longer worth being the lucid madman who cured other madmen.
Calm calm calm farewell—the pistol.
Orenburg–Ural, 1934.
Marseille
Planet without visas, without money, without compass, great empty sky without comets,
The Son of Man has nowhere left to lay his head,
His head a target for mechanical shooters,
His Remington portable and his last suitcase
Bearing the names of fifteen fallen cities …
Moscou Vienne Berlin
Barcelone, Barcelone!
Paris Parc Montsouris
Orléans, Beaugency, Notre-Dame de Cléry,
Vendôme, Vendôme!
What is to be done if the horizon looks so much like a prison?
All the exiles in the world are at the Greek informer’s café tonight,
Indecisive suicides stroll along the quay, looking at
Chaloupes called Désir, Île de Beauté, Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde,
They’re afraid of roundups as suicides out for a walk never have their papers in order.
They say they should write to the American Committee,
They read the newspapers, they laugh, they smoke, they almost pass for proper living persons,
“We have to laugh, madam, at this mad enterprise, the universal extinction of the Jews,
You won’t get anywhere, there are too many of them, and then the Rich will always save themselves, they will say: ‘We’re Aryans.’
People will believe them because they pay,
And the poor, madam, whether Jews or Aryans, are nothing.”
The Son of Man listens, he drinks a menthe, he remembers he is flat broke,
But he doesn’t give a damn,
the main thing tonight would be to draft the seventh thesis on permanent revolution.
His notepad is full of dazzling ideas ready to explode in flashes,
But they had to be encoded in conventional terms that no one will understand when he is gone
He sets off for the transporter bridge, gazing at the absurdly peaceful sky,
Absurdly, he suddenly feels as peaceful as this sky,
He is glad to be alive thanks to the big seagulls flying over the harbor
And perhaps he would be just as glad to die at this moment
The death of a militant, metallic and violent, almost expected,
But these are things one would rather feign not to know,
Things one half admits to oneself and then only with disapproval.
Some idle prostitutes behind the windows of a sleazy little bar
Say: He must be a Russian or a Jew or some Spanish anarchist,
Sure are a lot of these foreigners on their uppers these days, I can’t wait till they pack them off to Africa!
Under a dark halo, some misshapen bargemen play with limp cards,
Trumps, I pass, clubs,
Big Jules is explaining the clever vermicelli racket,
Jupiter and Saturn shine high in the sky.
Marseille, 1941.
The rats are leaving …
The rats are leaving the sinking freighter because rats are little gray gnawing rodents,
Rats fear the sea and death, rats care only about themselves,
The rats will drown all the same, but the plague they carry will live on
In other rats, fat gray rats, rich treacherous rats that think they’re great conquerors.
Neither purifying storms nor salutary torpedoes nor scientific disinfections can do a thing about it.
See, even the plague can’t drive us to despair.
We must not leave this great liner that is going to founder, we must stay on board
For the last handshake and the last swig of wine
Among emigrants with tenacious hearts gone forever to other continents.
We are neither the first nor the last, we simply form a human chain
From one misfortune to the next effort and from one shipwreck to the next dawn.
We must not leave the great defeated worlds, we must hold on to them with a bitter grip
As one clings to floating hulks.
And so may singing hulks carry us off with the bracing memory of the drowned,
May they lull our thirst slak
ed by salt water through demented nights,
Those among us who hold on, the toughest, guided by the North Star and the Southern Cross,
Will drink one day from gently delirious waters.
And we will arrive, my steadfast traveling companions!
On a morning of amber, crystal, and snow, in a torrid calm,
We will have unforgiving faces, hands turned absolutely inexorable,
Such a fearsome knowledge of justice,
We will feel welling up in our breasts a joy so ravaged by silence and suffering
That we will start life anew with strictly necessary massacres.
Martinique, [19]41.
Out at Sea
For L.
The Cuban artist with the handsome Negroid profile struck in China,
across the ages,
Is drawing metallic saw-toothed monsters:
He knows we’re all lost if we don’t smash the teeth of the machines.
In the brisk air of departure I am waiting for Marseille, that court of miracles of defeated revolutions, to vanish below the horizon,
Its Old Port decked out in destitution, its cafés, its crowds,
Its godless basilica erected on the golden rock.
I am thinking of you. You’re passing by the Brûleur de Loups, you’re alone, you bear our solemn love,
It is a burning, it is a wound, it is flowing water, it is our thirst-quenching spring in the desert,
You are sure, you are pure, you are my thirst-quenching spring out at sea.
You are walking down Rue Pavillon with a determined step signaling ardor, anxiety, timidity, pride,
You are pretty, you know it, you are devoted, you do not know what you are, in a little while you will doubt yourself and the world
In the panic of twilight, heartbreak, forsakenness,
You will step down from the tram at the Parette stop and tears will fill your eyes when you recognize our constellations, but is that possible, is that possible?
A devastated, boundless joy will calm you. Sleep now.
I am waiting to see shining in the sky, in your footprints, the daylight stars,
Will they be black, will they be the pupils of your eyes, will they be pure fire,
We will know tomorrow,
I await them in your stead, I am sure they will appear, if we had no confirmed miracles
We would have no recourse but to blow up the last ships or hang ourselves down in the hold.
I love you so simply that it’s like this sea,
Obvious and radiant.
Here are the distant snows of the Pyrenees, the plain of Figueres,
Peaceful yet gorged with the dead who are our brothers. I give you this sea, this snow, this verdant plain,
Having only my eyes to see for yours.
Before the vast landscape of Castelldefels I think of you
As a comrade points out the fortifications on the Catalan earth in the distance,
This was a torture site for the International Brigades, he says,
We pass by without shame or remorse. Hail, innocent earth!
Let our innocent hands, which will be strong hands, salute you.
I was thanking you for living in these times and retempering my strength with your strength
Like that of gently powerful plants.
Night was falling over the heights along the Ebro where a vast fire reddened the peaks.
The sierra was bleeding fire, close to you I felt like the twenty-year-old fighter I once was.
Can it be that I am already fifty—with this all-consuming black gold in my veins, this gold for you, this gold for life?
My past lives, torn to shreds, snap behind me in the trade winds
Like tattered flags.
It’s the boat that’s in motion, but it’s the stars that pitch across the sky,
I was truly expecting to experience their prodigious rocking,
I surrender to it as if to the depths of your eyes.
We are crossing the tropic in the total calm of accomplishment.
Perfect night. You are as real as this night. Six thousand meters of ocean carry us through the absolute.
Bottomless calm, nameless pride, humility. I love you.
Atlantic, April [19]41.
Caribbean Sea
Off these hot islands, these forgotten islands, caravels one day emerged from the sea,
The night stars were spearheads, balmy winds were blowing from the gates of hell,
To this forgotten world, the ships brought the Cross, they brought faith,
They brought strange, savage illnesses,
They brought men of savage energy,
Ruthless men from Europe and from Asia.
On this earth they knew only crucifixion,
They looked only for gold, oh Lord! to make into machines when they were all dead.
They were white men like centaurs, they were black men conquered by centaurs.
And so strong was their hope they brought mastiffs to hunt down hopeless men in the bush.
The Caribs had only a little mild poison on their arrowheads,
A little venomous cunning in their keen eyes.
Their women learned to love according to European rites,
The Caribs died as the forest dies when the land breakers arrive.
Mar del Caribe, voracious sea, dangerous sea, you still sing your menacing song for all those dead men,
You are no different with these infant lands, with today’s little flags,
The surge of your low waves toward these lush lands is like a surge of hatred,
The palm trees that contemplate you without seeing you are shredded by it.
You are the burning, you are the storm, you are the endless calm violence, you are the power, you are—
But what has been slain?
Races, bodies, sweat, blood were mixed together
In muggy, fermented jungles,
With a torrid determination,
And the bellies, bellies, bellies gave birth to people of every human color
For every suffering, however inhuman,
For every imaginable travail,
For every imaginable murder—but that is no longer important,
Because all these faces from Eurasia, Eurafrica, Euramerica, and Polynesia,
Those from unknown lands, those with the most naked expectations,
Fine white faces, golden faces, black or copper faces, faces of unexpected hues
Are present today, with the hundred thousand smiles of young girls in pink on a night full of annoying radio music.
Danger, danger in the air we breathe, you are not the worst,
Nor is being this graying man, alone before this strange sea,
Who suddenly looks for the Eiffel Tower in the unfurled clouds,
Or the faded onion domes, strewn with faint stars, of a little old Russian church surrounded by birch trees …
The worst has neither name nor number nor face.
To exist without you, is that even possible?
Sharks roam this mineral sea, it seems they are always hungry.
Ciudad Trujillo,
Dominican Republic, June [19]41.
Our Children
I see, closing my eyes, I see
Stars as big as terrestrial moons
Hanging above the rafts carrying our children.
The sea, bitter darkness, pitches iridescent with infant light,
It is glacial, it is vertical, it is shifting,
Perhaps it is hopeless.
Above the rafts, spindrift unfurls strange flags that wind, night, and stars rip apart with a quiet sovereign fury,
And our children are calm, armed with ignorance, armed with wisdom.
They see in the palms of their hands warm crystals sprung from the deep,
They hold in their hands the miracle of seeds.
A great school of patient sharks follows the rafts,
The watery eyes of sharks contemplate o
ur children.
Mex[ico City], Sept[ember] [19]43.
Death of Jacques Mesnil
Jacques Mesnil has finished his long, long life
Under his old capes and his corduroy suit
He died on the roads during the fall of France, in a convent, I don’t know where.
His emaciated face bore the marks of a great, dogged courage,
His thin chest like that of an old saint wasted by mundane torments
Retained the still-warm ashes of the most exalted earthly blazes.
When I met him as he descended with his sprightly step on his way down
Toward the Pré-Saint-Gervais,
I would see his failing tenacious passion for living out in front, courageously,
Like a figurehead, pathetic and
Abandoned.
No more spindrift to cleave, no more dawns to surprise, no more future to seize on distant shores!
He also resembled those El Greco figures who suddenly look at you with intolerably serious eyes.
Jacques, was it you, really you, the barely aging man I met in Moscow,
The man who held Clara by the hand, Clara like a figure out of Botticelli but living, loving, thinking?
Is it really you, Jacques, who so loved age-old Florence?
—who plumbed the soul of revolutions, who heard Trotsky in the year nineteen twenty, during the terror,
who scrupulously strove to distinguish, amid the blood we were shedding, rectitude from error?
I know how lucid and firm you are, and your almost secret greatness.
I see you descending alone in a convulsive solitude.
No one can join you there anymore.
You are listening to the distant chords of great, perhaps eternal symphonies diminishing inside you
—no one will ever again listen to them with you—
And soon you won’t hear them anymore. Doesn’t this thought bring some relief?
So it was that Beethoven gone deaf heard the terrifying music of the spheres
And a joy greater than the darkness burst forth inside him.
I can’t speak to you anymore for I see you’re too close to the inconceivable frontier
Where words have no more meaning, where every reality is flickering and fading out
Like the constellations in the pale light of dawn.