Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  Also situated in a border region was the female figure—not reduced to the proportions of a doll but of natural size—representing Saint-Pierre reborn from its ruins: on the edge between fire and water, between pleasure and pain. A mediocre study from the nude, she had hardly any charm except in her wild expression, the curve of her body, more sensual than sculptural, and the realism of her lines—a true nymph of the volcano, lying all black and naked as though in a sweating-room or a Turkish bath, in a rather secluded corner of this town which remains so sleepy and so provincial, against its background of tropical luxuriance, that it is hard to imagine it was the site of a great disaster. Enveloped by the ash cloud which clothed her, perhaps, in a flame-colored bathing suit, the young girl (if one is to believe the woman to whom I had spoken) had hurled herself, already scorched, into a pool but—less fortunate than the devil who (according to the barker at Luna Park) executed, apparently without any resultant harm to himself, a spectacular leap into his luxurious bathtub—she only encountered, as she became the water sprite of that pool, a second death. After which, more provincial than ever, the town had been rebuilt on the old stones of its enclosure walls, on which are carved here and there, indicating lots, old marks of ownership: the names of great white local families, followed by numbers referring to the land register; and bearing witness to the original catastrophe or to this renewal was the solitary presence of the lava sculpture, in that spot so strangely secluded, to which led the double theater staircase as to a sort of aerial aquarium.

  Following for a moment the path opened to me by a scrap of legend concerning a statue in truth not very defensible despite the quality of savagery and voluptuousness it emitted, I thought of the she-devil, seductive incarnation of the snares laid by desire and of certain of the malign forces that man in the tropics senses oppressing him all day long. But now this same path has just forked, swerved, leading to an image that is more concrete and darker.

  In all climates—warm skies or cold, smiling or gloomy—there exists, in contrast to a greater or smaller number of people whom one can describe as “strong souls” a mass capable, in any waking or sleeping hour, of being assaulted by a fear of ghosts. And in Antillean folklore, this fear takes the form of a belief in zombies, who, whereas they are simple phantoms or other infernal emanations for most of the peasants (and even a number of the townspeople) of Guadeloupe as well as Martinique, become, in Haiti, mechanized dead people or living people who have been deprived by magic of consciousness and will; a sorceror can thus, supposedly, procure cheap labor for himself by employing as slaves either cadavers taken from the cemetery and artificially reanimated or individuals whose personalities have been reduced to nothing by his evil spells. Automatons, in short—those bodily frames without intelligence but capable of moving and, dead or living, being used. Automatons, also, are the madmen, the somnambulists, those who dream out loud—even who merely snore—in sum, all varieties of men reduced to being no more than a carcass dispossessed of the lucid and universal reason without which one ceases to exist except for oneself. It would seem that in these creatures—who have all, in some fashion, come to assume the posture of the aliénés [deranged; lit, alienated]—ravings, mechanical motions, incoherent words, or noisy emissions of breath show that the human being from whom they emanate is a human being radically removed. This is the case for the cadaver, who is also locked away and still inhabited by a special life expressed in a way that is merely more hideous, by the biochemical activity of decomposition. Given this, and without paying more attention to it than some old wives’ tale, how should one regard the Haitian zombie, which can just as well be an incompletely resuscitated dead person as a living person degraded to the rank of a machine?

  No zombie, it should be understood, did I ever see during my visit of barely a month in Haiti. It is true that in a voodoo meeting place in Port-au-Prince’s Saline quarter (a house that one reached by taking a left off the Grande Rue just opposite the Tête boeuf rouge [red bull’s head] which used to be the shop sign of a butcher) I had the opportunity of greeting, with my two little fingers bent and hooking onto two other little fingers similarly bent, and even of kissing on both cheeks, Baron Samedi, one of the principal spirits of death, whose “reposoir” [altar, usu. in procession or for consecrated host in church; lit., resting place] is generally a cross similar to those in cemeteries and who ordinarily presents himself as a man correctly dressed in black and wearing a top hat. When I, in some sense a tourist, was invited by the masters of the house to pay my respects to the god, he had incarnated himself in a fat woman at that moment lying on her back dressed all in white like the chorus of her officiating colleagues, many of whom were vendors in the market during the day and trafficked in fritters, fried fish, or other minor foodstuffs. Soaked in sweat from the agitation of her earlier dances and trances, she was miming, when I greeted and kissed her as I had been bidden to do, the immobility of a cadaver. Had I remained on the island a large enough number of months, would I perhaps have encountered some zombies or individuals reputed to be such? Having visited too briefly, I can speak of them only from what I have read or heard and therefore it would be better if I did not continue. Yet, haven’t I found myself, in other circumstances, in the presence of a type of zombie, having the impression, without analyzing it, of being alone with a dead person who continued to live, whose life was limited, certainly, but nevertheless sufficient to save him from that end of everything which, despite the sort of immortality (very relative anyway) to which I alluded, is incontestably the lot of every cadaver? It was in a dream, already old by now, that I had this experience, which is marked by certain crucial events, the death of my father and, about two years later, a separation that—though not necessary—was admittedly in the natural course of events too, which does not in any way diminish the pain of it.

  In the municipal museum of a foreign town I am visiting briefly, I discover a room in which many human bodies are sitting, their backs against the wall. Some sudden rupture of their organisms has no doubt immobilized these bodies here, stuck to the floor by a sort of glue emanating from their flesh and preserved intact by a natural mummification. Having reached a small chamber situated under the eaves, I see a woman, probably a widow, with an air of poverty about her, who has taken refuge here with her little boy. Bread crumbs are scattered about on the floor. She is heating her coffee not far from a cadaver in a blue smock spotted with plaster, most likely an old peasant who has died next to his treasure. I go down into the garden adjoining the museum and here I find other cadavers sitting in tall chairs; nurses are helping them drink and eat, slipping stone basins under them to collect their excrements. A break, and it is night, in the same garden, now lit by Chinese lanterns, which give it the look of an outdoor cafe with arbors where idlers come to kill time or as members of a pleasure party. Here I encounter several of my friends, with veins that appear phosphorescent, visible through their clothes, then the woman from whom I had parted and from whom—when I had this dream—I was definitively separated after having been tied to her in the way you often are to the person who has first revealed to you the sort of love that burns your flesh. With a gesture of her hand, she showed me her heart, bared as though in an anatomy plate.

  The worm-eaten and probably creaking floor, the glue that had flowed from the bodies (like a kind of Seccotine, in hard protuberances from the rolled and fissured pale blue tube), the garret or attic with its probable dust and its cobwebs, the smock of coarse faded linen, all powdery, the crumbs, no doubt stale, the widows black dress, the coffee being made in a wretched manner, and, mingling with these accessories, the naturally mummified people, and then the miser, the mother, and her little boy, characters all human to the same degree, whether dead or alive.

  Long ago, I was shown, in the display case of the old Musée Guimet—the only thing I have retained from that visit, made perhaps on a Thursday (a day better loved than Sunday, when you are a schoolchild, because it is your own)—a mummy called “mom
ie de Thais” [mummy of Thaïs]; I looked for a long time at the little that remained of the repentant courtesan behind her thin wall of glass, but she was so dead, so dried up, that I had no more fear of her than of a yellowed branch of boxwood. On another afternoon, I was taken to a small theater, the Trianon-Lyrique, which has since disappeared, to see a performance of Les Cloches de Corneville and of this show I have preserved two memories: the charming peasant girl Serpolette pinching her petticoat with her fingertips and boldly lifting her hem to reveal her calves while singing: “Voyez par-ci, voyez par-là . . . ” [look over here, look over there] ; old Gaspard locked up alone in a hall where suits of armor stand, terrified when he sees them move, not knowing that hidden inside are practical jokers who are trying to get him to cough up what he has; perhaps also—a third fragment from that matinée operetta—the tenor’s song: “J’ai fait trois fois le tour du monde ... ” [I have been thrice around the world]. At the peasant in his blue smock, frightened by pseudoghosts within the simulated walls of a castle, I laughed, like all the other spectators.

  It is often by quite indirect routes that the fear of death creeps up on us: the rasping of an insect heard in the night, the clacking of hooves on the surface of the street when one is in bed, the creaking of furniture (manifesting a life foreign to us), the click announcing the start of a mechanism or—like a death rattle—the snore of a sleeper, to mention only noises. Unlike the creaking of one’s bones (undeniable proof that one is rusting), they contain nothing that is of a nature to worry us especially: a stammer emanating from an indeterminate spot, or a clue to a life separate from ours—only upon reflection might we detect anything that could turn either one or the other of these traits into signs reminiscent of death.

  As for the dream I described, it is completely silent. From beginning to end, I am only someone strolling through and no one talks to me, neither those friends who are in the garden nor even that woman, who expresses herself only through a gesture. It is also in silence that care and attention are bestowed on the cadavers. The muffled bedrooms, perhaps, of the dying? People stopped talking—or only whispered—when my father was dying from the aftereffects of an operation on his prostate that hardly did anything but add more pain to the pain he was already suffering, when he could no longer urinate except through a tube (which, if I proceeded to a rational exegesis of the dream, would perhaps explain the needs that continued to torment the dead people and required the use of basins, of stone and not of enameled metal, as though to emphasize their importance and give them more solemnity). But, really, I think that if my dream was soundless—a series of tableaux not animated by any dialogue and in which I was not involved until the final gesture showing me that heart, hardly more dismaying than the piece of meat decorated with lace paper you see from the street in the chiaroscuro of a butcher shop—it is because, from the outset, it was a dream about death.

  Automatons and robots. The fake humanity in shop windows, some imitative, others purely allusive or produced in fragments (such as a bust with an alluring décolleté, a leg or a hand). Museum mannequins, sometimes alone, sometimes in couples or gathered in groups, to show the martial gear of the Gaul with his long mustaches and his breeches, the feathered headdress and the skin coat of an old Indian sachem, the male and female costumes of the Basque country toward the middle of the last century or perhaps a certain scene from the daily life of the primitive peoples of Africa or Oceania. If a cadaver—and especially that of someone we know—arouses such anguished questions, isn’t it because, in addition to the rigidity, there is this very same silence, and because, without any apparent great change, it finds itself, even while in its own way continuing to exist, in a state from which it can no longer answer us? And if, sometimes, an almost equal disturbance is caused in us by a noise that for us becomes a voice from beyond the grave, isn’t it because what lies concealed behind it is also silence, a silence from which it seems to have returned like a survivor from the abyss, when it comes to tap at the door of our ear and ask us its question?

  Ou-vrez-moi

  cet-te-porte

  où-je-frappe

  en-pleu-rant

  La-vie

  est-va-ri-able

  aus-si-bien

  que-l’Eu-ripe . . .

  [Op-en-this

  door-to-me

  Weep-ing

  I-knock

  Life

  is-change-able

  as-the-Strait

  of-Ev-ri-pos . . . ]

  Thus spoke, some twenty years after it was made at the Archives de la Parole, a recording of the late Guillaume Apollinaire, restoring a voice that is already gloomy (because of the very tone of the recitation) but also deadened by the poor quality of the impression and as though streaked with rain like a very old film. The idea of this deeply sad, dead man whose soliloquy comes from so far away and is uttered in such a tired voice, as though by someone who is being pestered when he should be allowed to rest. Cervantes’s tragedy about the capture of Numantia by Scipio Aemilianus (in other words, the Scipio of Songe . . . [Dream . . . ]) has a cadaver speaking too, a cadaver questioned by a necromancer: the dead man, first objurgated verbally, then whipped as hard as possible, is forced to leave his tomb and tell what will become of the town beset by Romans. And when I was studying chemistry a very long time ago, didn’t I learn that one can cook bones (of animal origin, of course, but why not human? It would work just as well) in a pressure cooker in order to extract gelatin from them? Similarly, toward the end of the war before the last one, the rumor went around France that the Germans were processing the cadavers of the soldiers who had been killed in order to extract fat from them—which (in 1938, when the threat of a worldwide catastrophe became clear) provided me with the subject of a dream: a sort of premortuary medical review or lottery required of those who, like me, were eligible for mobilization, the point of the procedure being to discriminate, among the future dead, between those who would be left in peace and those who would be chemically salvaged for the needs of the war.

  As though, therefore, certain dead people will not be at rest even in eternity—and could this even, perhaps, be the fate of all dead people? But the little we know conspires to assure us that the dead person, once dead, is quite dead and that, therefore, only a childish apprehension can cause us to fear posthumous adventures which, in truth, involve only the body. However free we may be of all superstition, our imaginations will nevertheless always work to fill in a certain gap: the hiatus that makes us pass irremediably from the presence of a being to that of a figure occupying a determined portion of space but from whom consciousness is forever absent; the lack of common measure, despite the formal identity, between the person whose life has stopped and the remains that survive. This, consequently, might be the opening into which pious illusions and spectral effluvia might take the opportunity of insinuating themselves.

  A curtain that can be lowered or a hanging that can be drawn. Eyelids that with a single gesture of the hand one can slip down over the eyeballs, as though to put the eyes in harmony with the muteness of the mouth. Even before a dead person is buried, don’t we have to cut off all communication between ourselves and that terrible world where he is but about which—even as his wide-open eyes reveal to us all its horror—he can’t speak to us; cut short also the thing that is his scandal, the wordless discourse carried on by not only his glassy eye but also (if it weren’t for the chin bandage) his dropping jaw and (supposing one should delay too long in stealing him away) the metaphors difficult to accept that are being worked by the liquefaction of his features? It is easy for a taciturn person to seem profound, and in the same way, the silence of a cadaver leads one to believe that he has much to tell; as with regard to the taciturn person, our attitude toward him is marked by ambiguity: that he says nothing gives rise to uneasiness, but we are also afraid that, if his tongue loosens, it will only be for the most incongruous of revelations; better, then, that he persist in saying nothing and that, without danger of be
ing disappointed, we remain free to reckon what sublimities hide behind this profound mask. What is important to safeguard, when all is said and done, is the imposing muteness of the cadaver, because it would be too crushing to discover through his drooling-idiot grimaces that if he says nothing, the reason for this is simply that he has nothing to say to us.