by Salim Bachi
Words overheard. Sun. Awesome. Richeliou.
How has this light-filled city, one of the wonders of Europe, where people always used to value the spirit rather than the letter of the law, become so benighted? I asked myself: how was it that, in barely fifty years, the talent that used to spring up from under the trollops’ feet, like weeds between the cracks of the pavement, had disappeared beneath the dog shit? All that remained was the stupidity that Flaubert had feared so much. And it had spread—it attacked the poor, the foreigner with no money to defend himself, and it massacred the Sinbads of the world, with their noses pressed up against the windows of that empty store filled with millions of naked, soulless mannequins operated by an absurd mechanism that allowed them to get up in the morning, drink their coffee while tetchily spouting crap gleaned from the newspaper or television, then leave home to triumph over a bleak day in which the workplace provided an excuse for waging war against their fellow man, particularly if he showed any talent. People respected money, the arrogance that came with money, and the wielders of briefcases who’d been in power for the past two decades. Farewell to the teeming brood, the republican trollops, the glorious artists and the little cafés.
I looked at the young philosopher, I sensed I was her unlucky star, the dark planet interfering with her concentration. She pulled her bags, papers and CD closer.
The tourists unsheath their cameras: unimportant, unsightly contraptions, most of them with defective lenses. They are ready to start their digital shooting. Bang. Bang. Death to the lovely seventeenth-century chapel. Death to the sundial which they don’t like. Death to the students in meaningless images taken by weekend photographers. Death to Doisneau, Man Ray, Evans. Death to the sunless day.
I caught myself hoping that somewhere a little fragment of eternity had slipped into the camera held by one of the crowd. A furtive kiss. A student picking his nose.
I remembered a photo taken in Carthago.
A little girl going to school, carrying a schoolbag bigger than her. She was peacefully making her way to school. Behind her, two soldiers were carrying Kalashnikovs slung across their shoulders. Behind the soldiers, graffiti on the wall: “Vive le FIS”. The photographer had summed up an entire tragic decade. Childhood threatened by hordes of fanatical killers, and soldiers who were just as bad. Carthago had died in those bloody years. Clearly, it would never recover from those terrible massacres; no Sleeper and his dog could change that.
I remembered the little girl’s innocence as she made her way to school, dwarfed by her schoolbag. Could a child save the world? It was a serious question that might amuse fools, but serious none the less, I was certain of it. I couldn’t see any children left on this earth, all I could see were terrible, powerful adults of all ages, a sort of village of the damned. Innocence, if it had ever existed, had died in the space of a quarter of a century, and I, Sinbad, noticed its absence every day when some poor wretch and his family were chased off because their skin wasn’t the right colour, every day when a bomb set fire to a village somewhere in the world because of obscure oil interests, consolidating the position of a puppet potentate in full possession of nothing. I wasn’t so naive as to think we had souls—we, the damned of this earth, the once colonized peoples who had come through every kind of disaster. Even the sons of the Shoah were respectable executioners now; we were decent cannibals who rutted grotesquely then gave birth to hideous offspring.
Watching the tourists put their weapons away, I wondered if the little girl in the photo was still alive. To tell the truth, I didn’t hope for it too strongly. I was afraid of that girl as an adult, afraid that she’d probably been press-ganged into the world I was trying to escape, a perpetual exile, a horrified witness of the air-conditioned nightmare.
If there’s one thing I hope for in this world, it’s that she’s still alive, as intact as a piece of porcelain.
The tourists consult each other noisily about the direction they should take. Those with less of a herd instinct start to head for the exit.
The young student gathers up her things, puts them in her bag, then puts her bag to one side.
I despise her for thinking I might want to steal her bag.
Elevated Metro station. Dupleix. Grey sky. It’s cold and humid as usual in Paris: the prevailing colour is bronze, a bronze, Platonic town, but nothing to do with the age of the same name. This is a prosaic era which regards plastic as a noble material. Some idiots are advocating a return to the soil, the whole shebang, that god-awful glorification of the country yokel which has even the most hard-line Parisian daydreaming about Mother Earth. It’s the hopelessly entrenched side of the only nation in the world so devoted to their mangrove swamps.
Why not simply wait for death, a return to generative sources? When the people of this country return to the earth, become one with it, fertilize it and nourish it with maggots, they prefer to be shut inside boxes that will stand the test of time, or they want to be cremated so they can end up on the mantelpiece. This is the only place on earth where the population’s main concern in the morning, like a constipated man holding out little hope when he tries to have a bowel movement, is gazing at its reflection in the mirror. “Am I fair, O mortals?” asks the old lady in a wig. You can’t open a newspaper, read an article or watch a television programme without people talking, debating and arguing about what France is: France, France, France… ad nauseam… But France means nothing now, that’s why people are trying to find it… it’s an old idea that’s dead and gone, swept under a carpet by a cleaning lady, a Muslim in a burqa, for example, or an African polygamist, a scumbag from the Paris suburbs or a Carthaginian in exile.
France is the early-morning street-sweepers, the men who pick up the shit of the little dogs walked by the old dears, the unseen workers, the Bengali kitchen-hands no one ever notices, who fill the Metro with the fragrance of garlic and spices in the evenings when they are so tired that they fall off their seats; it is the Algerians hated for daring to emerge from colonial darkness, whose children are living remorse for this crime, the Vietnamese and Chinese crammed into the unluckily numbered thirteenth arrondissement, who have become so much part of the scenery that no one notices them any more. This is the fragrant, invisible country, the country that people would rather do without, even at the risk of disappearing, body and soul, and ending up like Switzerland: France’s alternative destiny, a country filled with cuckoo clocks and bankers, an earthly paradise for cows and Nazis.
I’d just missed a train, so I sat down. There are other passengers waiting. No two look alike. The Metro is the only place where you’re sure to see the whole range of humanity. An elderly black man is pacing up and down the station. He’s wearing a threadbare coat and is carefully examining the steel superstructures supporting and elevating the station. The sun detonates against the glass of the windows, slides between the metal girders and bounces off the rails where a boy is trying to perform some acrobatic moves. One of the travellers calls out to him. He climbs back onto the platform, proud of his feat. The elderly black man is still pacing up and down the station, contemplating the marriage of steel and metal, force and permanence. He is enraptured by this masterpiece of ingenuity and engineering.
A man sits down next to me. I have the vague impression that I’ve seen him before. I look a lot like him. He could be my brother. Robinson?
The Book of Stations. The Great Book of Stations. Think about all you can learn from consulting the Metro map.
Who’s speaking?
Me or him?
The solo voice continues in the dazzling light. Every station has its own history, its own spaces. Endless species. You can travel through time, straddle the entire Russian Steppes, plunge deep into equatorial forests, wage battle at Austerlitz, travel from Rome to the Bicêtre hospital in the footsteps of Rainer Maria Rilke. The Metro map would certainly make a remarkable historical treatise.
Robinson continues. That elderly black man is both accountant and surveyor. He is measurin
g the unspecified quantity of sweat, blood and death that has determined the design of the Book of Stations.
“Do you understand?”
“No.”
“And yet it’s very simple. What delights you so much is the result of slavery, of the enslavement of other peoples. Their riches have been transferred and transmuted into steel. They have the most learned alchemists. Now they’re making us foot the bill for having been slaves. That’s why the old man is pacing up and down the platform.”
The next train arrives. It stops. The passengers stream towards the metal doors. Robinson and I get into the same compartment. The train moves off shakily like an old horse.
The slow, certain transformation of landscapes. Blue mingles with grey, the ridges of roofs begin dancing, dancing around the Great Book of Stations.
THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY. People pass through as though they’re in a station, literally. They attach very little importance to what they’re seeing. And what exactly do they see?
Paintings. Paintings. Paintings.
Processions of paintings, processions of people in front of paintings.
The hyperrealists parade past: people harnessed to the same yoke, like oxen.
Don’t hang around, you’ve got to see as much as you can. Then, quick as a flash, upstairs to the Impressionists! An ascent from purgatory to paradise.
Yet more paintings. Van Gogh ripped off his ear, but you’ve got to be quick. No one has seen the darkest, most savage painting: The Potato Eaters. Not enough time.
Further down, few people have seen L’Origine du Monde. The odd visitor has stood in front of it for a minute, chuckling a little, but has then moved off again, double quick.
Si. Two Spanish women. Indeterminate women of indeterminate middle age, midway between two Metro stops. They exclaim touristically. How dreadful!
Women don’t like visualizing their sex organs. They avoid talking about them or looking at them. They aren’t aware of them. But there’s no ignoring them here—they’re right in their face.
I look at the women looking at the picture.
How appalling!
They’re ashamed. They don’t get the chance to see what’s always hidden from them. Few people know how to contemplate the intimate. In fact, nobody can. Our perception of origins is located between the stomach and the heart and fluctuates constantly between the two. It gives me a feeling of deep pleasure, a soothing, sexual pleasure. My eyes drift from the dark line to the rounded stomach. I begin to be stirred by what was so frequently celebrated by Baudelaire, fleeces and furs, tresses and tombs, and I’m enraptured by the crotch of the unknown woman, who is revealing to me what she’s hiding from others—which is no surprise, as they are hurrying by too fast.
It is to the Spanish women’s credit that they stopped to look.
In the end, they chuckle and walk away, not without first calling over the rest of the armada to study the disgraceful painting in close, cackling formation.
You see, I’m much older than I look. I glance at the great master’s studio one last time, remove my hat and head off to take paradise by storm.
Paradise: a place where the inscrutable gods sit in state. Their names are Monet and Manet, and I occasionally get them mixed up. Hardly surprising really, I’m a savage, a man from Barbary, a Carthaginian who sacrifices children to Moloch. I wouldn’t know which of them painted Rouen cathedral at different times of the day and which painted the luncheon on the grass—and I gaze at the beautiful Hélène, naked and shocking, sitting between her fully clothed men.
She seems to have been posed there by the painter without any concern for propriety or form. Is it the form or the impropriety which is shocking, I wonder again. People walk past, blissfully unaware of the lady surrounded by her handsome gentlemen in their fine suits. What is the point of the blind if they don’t sing of the wrath of Achilles or of the man of a thousand turns or of the Sailor of Baghdad. What is the point of the stranger whispering into his mobile. He looks like an angel. Absorption is also a virtue. He is captivated by his call. It links here with there. He is an angel. He is sexless. He doesn’t notice Hélène.
The gods are also called Van Gogh.
All I remembered was the severed ear, even if, in Arles, the light still pours down on the little cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise behind the church, and on the graves of the two brothers, side by side in the light, the rain, the wind blowing over the fields, blowing over the green wheat. Step over the low wall in spring to kiss the lovers united in death, Vincent and Theo under the same magnificent, tormented sky, as poignant as the lovers of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, sweet Héloïse and her Abélard, who was castrated, then became a monk, according to Villon. Yes, that little cemetery and those two graves brought me a boundless joy that reconciled me to death, men and art. Seeing them reunited like this for an eternity of oblivion kept hope alive and made it possible for me to fall asleep in the gold of morning.
Another night stroll, this time with Zoé. We walked along the banks of the Seine towards Notre Dame. We looked at the carvings and were captivated and enchanted by the infernal bestiary. It even made us tremble with desire and we wondered whether the mythical creatures were protecting this holy site or whether, on the contrary, they were about to swoop down on Paris. We shelved the debate to go for an ice cream at Berthillon’s on the Île Saint-Louis.
Zoé was about twenty. I’d met her standing in front of L’Origine du Monde: we made fun of the uptight Spanish women and the stuck-up passers-by who barely glanced at the bush of the headless woman. Zoé couldn’t believe that my name was Sinbad and that I had no connection with the famous hero of the same name from Galland’s tales. I kept quiet about my secret kinship, my birth across the sea like that of the man from Baghdad. I didn’t want to scare her off.
Her eyes beneath her glasses were blue and she had delicate features and full lips. She took great care when expressing herself, as if her thoughts had to take shape first before they were captured by language. I liked that about her: the slightly mannered way she had of speaking, and her Provençal accent, which was as mild and soft as a Roman spring.
We often met in a hotel room on Rue de l’Estrapade, behind the Pantheon. She had the soft skin of a child and barely developed breasts. Her nipples grew larger beneath my tongue and turned purplish when she was fully aroused. I caressed her stomach and kissed it, then buried my face between her thighs, where I lingered, intoxicated by the softness of her vulva and the faint scent emanating from it. I could have lost myself between her legs for hours, but Zoé pulled away and took my cock in her mouth, melting it like an aniseed-flavoured lollipop.
One day, she stole what little money I had and disappeared, leaving me alone in that seedy hotel room. I was intending to leave her, so she went off with my wallet as a form of revenge. But do you take everything an artist, sailor or orphan possesses? Did she really need the paltry sum I owned?
I left the hotel in the early hours of the morning. She hadn’t paid the bill and I had no wish to end up at the police station. That was the way Héloïse and Abélard had parted. The latter was the son of a Breton noble, who’d given up his rights of primogeniture to teach philosophy. As the Notre Dame cloister was dwindling, Abélard broke with his masters and founded a school on Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. His students followed him. He was young, handsome and unusually eloquent. In the evenings, he’d hurry down the mountain to the Seine and return to the house of Canon Fulbert, where he was lodging. The Canon had a very beautiful niece, Héloïse. She became Abélard’s diligent student. Naturally, she fell pregnant between one theology lesson and the next. Abélard married her, but the Canon felt that he had been deceived. He hired some ruffians who entered Abélard’s room one night and castrated him.
So I went on my way, without Héloïse, still intact. I came down the mountain along Rue Saint-Jacques, walked behind the Sorbonne, then went up Rue Dante, and then Rue du Fouarre: Straw Street. Strange, isn’t it, how the streets of Paris always have
a hidden meaning, a history. This street used to be covered with straw so that the medieval escoliers had somewhere dry to sit when listening to lectures. The street would be packed with students. If a carter took it into his head to drive through during the lectures given by the monks, he would be given a thrashing by the students, who then tipped his load into the road. The city authorities closed off the road with chains to avoid brawls. Classes began in the morning, after mass. Since, during the night, tramps would come and sleep on the straw, they had to be beaten awake before the fouarre could be changed for the medieval students.
“How do you know all that?” asked Robinson, my dear, nocturnal companion.
Yes, Robinson had suddenly appeared at the street corner, just like that, just like an apparition. He’d given me some money after I’d told him all about my romantic troubles with the despicable Zoé.
“What about Rue Dante? Why is it called that?” asked tall Robinson, whom I hadn’t seen for ages and whom I’d missed.
“They say that Dante Alighieri lived here after his flight from Florence.”
“Poor Dante, but Paris wasn’t the same city back then. People still lived here then, I think.”
“In 1309, Dante left Italy. He came here to hear the lessons of Sigier de Brabant. Sitting on the straw in the Rue du Fouarre, he soaked up ‘syllogized invidious truths’.”
Robinson had hunger pangs; the delicious, heady aroma of kebabs was titillating his nostrils, and that was the only truth he was managing to syllogize.
“I’m starving.”
“You should aim for an empty stomach and a light mind. Is there any news of Carlo Moro?”