‘Hi there?’
When I opened the window he told me two girls were looking for me, and he hadn’t liked to let them into the garden. They were waiting in the street, the noses of both of them blue with cold. One was Estelle, the other a slightly younger girl, a lithe brunette. I have forgotten her name, so I shall call her Laure. Laure was standing on the pavement beating her hands together. Estelle, a violet-coloured woollen bonnet pulled over her eyes, asked me if she could finish her cigarette. I made them come into the house; on the threshold Estelle, I think, experienced a sort of tremor. ‘The smell of poverty,’ I said to myself, only to remember that the phrase came straight from one of the conversations that night between Boris and the Guru.
I offered them tea, and I no longer have the least idea what we chatted about: Boris, perhaps, or our various occupations; possibly of Lamont, whom Laure did not know. Laure kept looking at her watch and the toes of her boots. Estelle, after several efforts, asked me what I had in the way of music. Didn’t I have some Sufi stuff? The Guru, I eventually understood, had taken them off to hear the Dervishes of Lower Egypt. Laure gave an audible sniff. Distant cousin of Estelle, she knew neither the Guru nor the young poet—but Estelle, oh yes, she’d always known her. And what was ‘always’ for this pair of geese? There was a moment when, with the two girls standing against the wall and regarding me with curiosity and, I then fancied, some disgust, I felt myself slipping into the pure darkness of Lamont’s cellar. My eyes saw in front of them the fresh faces of the two innocents, and behind them—or so I suppose—the subterraneous regions of Lamont’s house.
That did not last, Laure looked again at her watch and I said that, true enough, it was late.
‘Ah, you’re right.’
Docilely they resumed their coats, their hats, their gloves.
‘And you say,’ babbled Estelle in her high-pitched voice, ‘that Lamont is now living in America?’
The girl I call Laure kept silent.
I escorted them to the Robinson Metro station. In the forecourt Laure gave me her hand, her eyes elsewhere. Estelle moved away, shook her head, then took off her bonnet and turned to me.
‘You know, we’re not going to be able to go back to Paris right away.’
‘Estelle, listen,’ said Laure. ‘It’s idiocy. Don’t you see it’s complete idiocy? We’re off. Drop it.’
Estelle stared at me with eyes that were suddenly tragic. Darkness was coming on. Chattering groups emerged at intervals from the station.
‘We have to return to your house.’
‘You haven’t left anything behind, so far as I know.’
‘Yes we have,’ said Estelle, ‘in a way.’
‘Explain yourself.’
Laure hid her face in her gloved hands.
‘You remember my birthday party?’ said Estelle. ‘You remember the party at my flat? After that party’ (her voice took on a curious hoarseness) ‘someone rifled the bowl I keep my jewellery in. It’s all gone. You . . . you understand? We don’t know each other all that well.’
‘We don’t know each other at all,’ I replied. ‘What do you think? That I’ve laid my hands on your bloody jewels? You’ve come to demand them back from me? You stupid cow! Do you really believe that I’d hand them back politely after having stolen them?’
Lights flickered in the sky from an aeroplane passing above the station.
They returned to my house with downcast eyes, and while Laure and I played cards—we had to pass the time somehow—the shame-faced Estelle ransacked the little house from top to bottom. I saw her even empty the washing machine, which was full of dirty underwear, and open my rubbish bins. There formed in my stomach a fury which made me want to hit this girl, this Estelle, until she bled. The other girl, Laure, would certainly have lent me a hand.
At last I got them out of the door. Once or twice, as I watched them, I had pondered absently on the best way of killing them. I had once, for a moment, seen young Laure pinned to the ground under the skinning knife without my raising a finger. ‘Who will come looking for them at my place? They’ve told no one of their stupid plan.’—‘No’ said the voice of reason; ‘there’s my neighbour’s son, he has seen them,’ and I added the boy to my list of victims.
One or two weeks passed before I was able to tell Lamont about the two silly girls. I wrote two or three letters a week to her, but I did not post them all. Lamont was lazier. She sent postcards: sea lions from the Seattle aquarium, avalanche lilies, bears standing on their hind legs, holding fish in their jaws, large red and black totem poles belonging to Indians on the Pacific coast, cherry blossom festivals. Her messages had a lapidary quality. She worked for three months in Portland, then found a job and a flat-share in Tacoma. I moved into my grandfather’s place. My mother and her husband had bought out the other heirs, and leased it to me for six hundred francs a month. In this flat I set myself almost every night to dream with greater or less vividness of Lamont. They were often amorous dreams, with Lamont making me absurd propositions. She was naked, sitting in the grass, the blades of which marked her buttocks and her knees; she was outstretched in mud, in water, her face just emerging from its smooth surface; she was smiling, putting her tongue out at me, raising her knees. I was going to join her. The dreams probably made me stray from the life I should have been leading. My days and my companions seemed equally misty. At this period I was working in a shop selling scientific books on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and under my negligent direction it was dying of inanition. The owner, a victim of early dementia, used to come every evening, when I first worked for him, and disarrange the books; next morning it was my task to reorder them. In the end he threw himself under a Metro train. I found work a couple of stops further, in a shop that sold works in foreign languages. We often went to lunch at La Grisette, the shop girls and I—they were two girls, one undulating, the other short and chubby. I never spoke to them of Lamont.
III
The dreams in which Lamont appeared to me were not all erotic. Some nights she—or the inexact likeness which my dreaming brain substituted for her—received me in her home, in a middle class flat. Her husband would greet me coldly, and a child, sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy, would grasp me by the leg. Or we would go to a concert together, and lose sight of each other during the interval. I was never happier than during this period in my life, which is the reason it never occurred to me to join Lamont in America. Did Lamont on her side dream of me with the same assiduity? I never asked her. I sometimes had the foolish feeling, however, that we were making some of our dreams together. There was really a moment in the night, wasn’t there, that we shared? Then Lamont, as once in Paris, would sit close to me and draw from my head memories that were not mine. It would have been ideal, of course, to go to sleep at the same times as she, so that she would have the opportunity to dig down to the bottom of my mind.
It was the poet aged fifteen (or sixteen or seventeen, for all I know) who dragged me against my will out of this amorous dizziness. One day towards the end of August I saw him enter the shop on the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, and I recognised him as he consulted a French-Portuguese dictionary and furtively noted on a scrap of paper the word he was looking for. I coughed. He raised his eyes, blushed, and came over to me with outstretched hand. ‘How are you? Do you work here? Ah, it’s so quiet.’ He had improved in looks, and was carrying by a shoulder strap a bag full of books. So what was he looking for? ‘Oh, just a word. You know. . . .’ The sales girls were out, one at a rendezvous, the other on holiday, and he established himself tranquilly on my side of the till.
‘You’ve seen any more of those people? Boris de ——, the professor?’
I shook my head. Hector deposited his bag under the counter, and I gave him a cup of coffee.
‘I have some little cakes I’ve just bought. Would you like a little cake?
We shared the packet.
‘It’s odd,’ said Hector. ‘I haven’t seen them since that evening of disgusting
drunkenness—on the part of Boris’s sister. Funny girl, don’t you think? In point of fact I have seen Boris, but only in the distance, you know, and I ran across his sister, when was it, a month ago, yes, in July; and she told me he’d just gone off to America, to Seattle, to see that girl again. You know who I mean? What was she called?’
‘Lamont,’ I said, feeling the hand of death.
‘And then his sister told me he was no longer with Estelle, and besides Estelle had completely vanished from circulation.’
‘Estelle?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how is it that you came to know these people?’
‘My sister went out with Boris, a long time ago. It didn’t last. Between you and me, he’s a real shit. But last year I wasn’t on bad terms with him, I admit. A mistake of youth.’
‘And Professor Machin?’
‘Oh, him? He’s Boris’s spiritual guide, you might say. Actually he’s no more a professor than you or me. He’s in Israel at the moment, I think refuelling himself in a kibbutz.’
I steered the poet gently out of the door after we had eaten the cakes and drunk the coffee. I had the heart-rending conviction that the boy’s indiscretion was going to drive Lamont from my dreams, never to return. Already I found myself unable to recreate her in my mind, to make her live in the tinsel theatre of waking imagination. And as I feared, she disappeared from that day forward. My dreams were always quite varied, always distributed quite unpredictably in my nights, but other girls than she played in the little charades of my unconscious. The poet, blundering fool, had plucked the flower of my dreams.
I went on writing to Lamont, but I never had the courage to ask her if what the poet had said was true. And I received two cards in reply, one showing the beach at La Push, the other Douglas firs on Mount Olympus. Had she visited those mountains in company with Boris? Jealousy devoured me, slowly eating away the whole interior of my body. I used to go to the bookshop as an empty shell, and gave myself up, when the others had their backs turned, to sterile rage. The sales girls found me changed and tried to cheer me up; they often invited me to dinner at La Grisette. I remember one evening when, after one of these therapeutic dinners, I went back to my place on foot. It was an astonishingly cold night. I lived on the slopes, near the Jourdain Metro station. I saw the moon, evilly bloated, detach itself from the roofs and float slowly up in a slightly misty sky. Why love Lamont only from afar? And being unable to remember accurately either her features or those of Boris, I could picture to myself on the slopes of Mount Olympus nothing but the grotesque couplings of monsters without heads.
I wanted to see once again the house at Arcueil. It was probably later in the year, a Sunday morning. I went back by the route I had followed with Lamont, through the campus of the Cité Universitaire, and past the front of the Portuguese church, the angels of which were perhaps reformed demons, fired in bronze and then rapidly hauled up, by way of punishment, above the Boulevard Péripherique; nothing escaped their malign gaze. The one that looked towards the south saw me at its feet take the Rue Malon and follow the track of the RER. But at the entry of the Passage Boutet the angel’s eye transfixed the back of my neck. Grief nailed me to the wall. With an irresistible iron blade it calmly opened up my back, rolled back the skin and the covering of muscles, and in despite of me, fabricated a pair of wings for my shoulders. ‘You understand, my friend? You are one of us.’ Before me I saw appear Boris’s sister, whose name I had forgotten. ‘I show you the spectacle of your nothingness, and my rage before your nothingness.’ She approached, arms extended, sex exposed. I went on my way; I had recovered my strength.
Lamont sent me from Boise in Idaho a card showing peaks one above another. She had found a winter season job in a mountain hotel, ‘perfectly modern’ she wrote. I should have liked to explain to her the company in which I found myself, but it was impossible. The angel of the South tore the pen from my hands. What haunted me above all was Boris, subtle beast; Boris in a mountain hotel with long corridors hung with bull’s blood paper, a potted plant or a spittoon every two yards—Boris opening the thousand doors of the hotel upon the sleeping Lamont. I arranged another meeting with the young poet. He was my path to the sister, and the sister to Boris, even if this familial logic seemed to me increasingly tortuous. It was not hard to make the young poet talk, on his guard as he was. I invited him to come after opening hours to a bar on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, and I made him drink first wine and then whisky. ‘I find extraordinarily trite the idea of a poet who drinks,’ he said, ‘the idea in general that one can find inspiration only in sorrow and absence. I wish to write of joy.’
That was now, he confided to me with shining eyes, his ‘new project’. Armed with his accursed passion for the positive, he kept beating for a good hour around the bush—in which the former love of Boris for Estelle had been conceived. Or of Estelle for Boris.
‘For the last time, Hector. You’ve told me either too much or too little.’
The little wretch gave an embarrassed laugh.
‘I’ve thought about it. It’s better, as you say, to speak out, to probe the abscess. Boris from the first day took a total dislike to you. Is that what you felt? Yes, you could call it a morbid hatred. He was furious that Estelle had asked you to her birthday. He went so far as to wonder if you and Estelle were not sleeping together. He pocketed Estelle’s jewellery, and made her believe that you were responsible.’
‘What a slimy creep,’ I said. And the poet, soon to be an adult, ordered a second whisky and drank it neat at one gulp.
‘And you, Hector, what did you think? That I was sleeping with Estelle? That I was too seedy for her? That I had stolen her filthy jewels to pay myself back for the evening?’
‘I don’t know anything,’ said the cautious booby. ‘I’m no judge of people.’
‘And Lamont, poet? Where does she come from?’
Lamont, thought the poet, his tongue running on faster than ever, was a friend of Boris. ‘You didn’t know? You fancied her, all the same?’
Excess of alcohol made him explicit. There came to me, while he shut his eyes and massaged his chin, a luminous idea, a deliverance. Boris had not gone to America to join Lamont. But from here in Paris, and to humiliate me—the reason for this persecution I still couldn’t grasp—he was sending his tormentors. The poet drank a third whisky which I was so kind as to offer him.
‘And you say that Estelle has left France too?’
‘She isn’t anywhere any more,’ the poet replied with a look of vague unease.
IV
I dreamt again of Lamont, now that I had driven her seducer from my mind. My time without her had been almost three months. Lamont came back the second or third day after I had hocused the young poet. In the dream that restored her an old gipsy had me visit her garden, in which were playing some deformed children. That was caused, she said, by the high tension wires. Lamont was waiting for me, sitting on the verge; from here she could see both the old woman’s garden and the lake in which other children were paddling among weed. There was no effusion of joy in the dream, at least my dreaming self had no consciousness of it. But I woke in the night for no apparent cause and knew that I had again found her whom I loved. I saw myself drifting down in the darkness, a pale raft, with Lamont lying stretched out on top of me, and trailing her hand through the water, her strange smile on her lips.
Lamont, oh bliss, was no longer confined to dream; after that night she came to me also at certain moments in the day, and soon in order to see her or feel her near me I had no need even to be alone or sleepy. She often came when I was working in the bookshop, and, invisible as she was, entwined herself with me and looked out at the customers or my too curious colleagues through my eyes; and when I shut them, something I never did without careful precautions, I was alone with her, alone with Lamont, and could hear her moving about within my body. Occasionally, and this could happen at any hour of the day or night, whether or not I was alone, she would grasp ho
ld of my buttocks, and I would see on the plump swelling of her lower lip her two small canines. If by good fortune I was alone at these moments I withdrew into myself, I found my Lamont, I let my joy in her wash over me. This so to speak luminous and shining body of Lamont I now carried through the streets with a renewed pride, and I think I pitied those who could not see me. It seemed to me I could have made these insensates feel my happiness with their fingers. Sometimes shadows would issue from my sleeves, and I would make them enact scenes of my life with and without Lamont: that was when I was alone with her, and it would make us writhe in laughter. But why not speak of it to everyone, beginning with those around me? ‘No,’ I said to Lamont, ‘if they do not see this brilliance, what can we do?’ And she, delectable cannibal, nibbled the lining of my stomach while I continued to tell lies to the unbelievers, and fell asleep with her head in my burning entrails.
Thereafter I no longer saw the world except through a two-way grill which allowed particles of light to escape—but not enough to make those who still lived around me scatter, transformed by fear. No, there was no fear, and I went forward masked. People came to me, even, and asked me what news I had of the poet and other persons. The poet walked a path I did not know. But I was unwilling to say I had sent him away, and that on this road that had neither beginning nor end there also wandered other souls. Neither beginning nor end nor the faintest light, whereas I could produce it through every pore in my glorified body.
Setting out from the town early and while it was still dark, I have walked without meeting anyone; the magnificent fire beneath my skin is extinguished at sunrise, and this has caused me not distress but lightness of heart. ‘Have I still bones? Have I still a skin?’ ‘Obviously, idiot, since you are walking.’ My skin—and this makes me laugh, and spread out my arms—my skin actually separates two worlds; I am the living frontier. ‘Come on, come on,’ I should like to say to those who pass me in the morning; but not one of them thinks of treading on me, digging into my skin, and passing with amazement to the other side where nevertheless, I could assure them, all is light. I brush against them, laughing, drunkenly or soberly depending on who is looking at me. For old women I have a drunken eye, for the strong a beatific smile and extended hand. I pass beneath the four angels. Eight hands, eight rough feet of bronze, push me towards the house in the Passage Boutet; I am miniscule between their colossal legs. Boris is sitting at the kitchen table, and the golden yellow paint of the walls gives the skin of his face the shine of baked bread. He rises when I enter, he carries his hands to his mouth. I sign to him to be silent. He recoils anxiously, knocking over the chair. I shake my head and hold out my hand to him. He raises his eyes to the ceiling. Perhaps he thinks we are not alone. He comes forward, he comes towards me, and I withdraw, bowing, laughing up my sleeve. Boris’s hands take me by the waist. A step towards the door to the basement. Boris draws me towards him; I laugh soundlessly, pretending to resist him.
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