Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  Eliminations now in progress: my love for Verdi’s operas; a little tune to sing (one of the sort that “keeps going through your head”): Un au-delà de l’art, un au-delà de l’ére, un au-delà des lyres, un au-delà des lors . . . [something beyond art, something beyond the times, something beyond poetic talents, something beyond starting then]. But, as the actual consequence of the fact that I have just gone on an extended tour—by that quasi-supernatural means of displacement referred to in the expression “airway”—that took me, this time, after Martinique and Guadeloupe, almost as far as the Iles de la Vierge and then to Marie-Galante, and to the Saintes (visiting them by sailboat), and interrupted my nausea in the purring of these pages, shouldn’t I use the interval thus created to readjust my viewpoint and recognize that—despite certain stray impulses as testified to by this very trip, devoted to studying problems that arise in the French Antilles as in every place where men of different colors live together—I am nowhere near having eliminated everything that assumes the appearance, in my eyes, of the grand aria under the starry vault or the fancy-dress ball in the duke’s palace?

  The period before my departure had, in fact, been punctuated by moving images produced in me by theater performances or manifestations having to do with opera.

  On the stage of our Académie nationale de Musique, a German Salome, her white throat richly timbred and her face tantalizing, rolls over and over almost naked, a melody incarnate making one dream of an art with positive coordinates, such as eroticism can be, and not of a futile magic in which everything operates only symbolically. On this stage, now darkened for the meeting in the cemetery in Un Ballo in maschera—an opera whose plot is moved forward (if one thinks about it) by the coloratura in male dress, a comic-opera page in the role of unwary advisor or overly talkative confidant whom nothing marks, at first sight, as the messenger of death—a pale figure veiled in black hesitates, vacillates, sways to the left, to the right, opposite prompt, prompt side, like a mad butterfly bumping into things; his voice—emerging from the most exquisite milling machines—brushes against us, penetrates us as might an anxious soul forcing entry into our hearts; in the last scene of this opera (as I saw it put on in Paris by the Teatro San Carlo of Naples) masqueraders, hooded cloaks, people in black velvet masks, and plumed savages move about in a splendidly lit place which is not so much a stage as an infernal grotto unconfined by any background since what one sees—in an infinitely receding space—is the very Hearth of Dance, a trap for our gaze, which cannot discern where the fictional architecture takes over from the real architecture and which allows itself to be led, without ever reaching the end of it, through a space that is carved out among the many columns and proves to be, as far as our eyes may see, filled by ever more dancers. At the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, La Dame de Chez Maxims, in which another sabbat—the sabbat of the licentious actress full of sex appeal and spirit—abolishes all distance between the theater and life, as did the singer in the sumptuous costume of a rather vulgar biblical princess; this, in a spectral 1900, with a liturgy of outmoded locutions, bourgeois witticisms and precepts mixed in with guttersnipe quips. In the nave of the smoke-filled Greek temple which is the Eglise de la Madeleine, before the performance of the Requiem dedicated to the memory of Manzoni, the mouth of the soprano—whose breath will uplift us any moment now, like the breath of a majestic angel—purses for a second in a mimed kiss aimed at a lover or husband we divine but can’t separate out from the part of the crowd toward which the movement of her lips is directed, a kiss that is all the sweeter because, thus sent out into the void, it encounters nothing that might stop us from appreciating, if not its taste, at least its intention, and, as the song’s prelude addressed to an invisible listener, can appear, to more than one, to be personally meant for him.

  In a bedroom in the real world, late one afternoon, I looked on—at the same time as all of that—while a girl I did not love and who did not love me pinned her black hair up on top of her head with a quick and precise gesture, facing the mirror, in a style I had never seen on her before and which, crowning her delicate mulatto profile with an oblong mass, gave her the satisfaction (reprehensible, because she was denying herself) of resembling an Egyptian. And a short time before—rather distressed, because I felt I was caught in the trap of an amorphous adventure into which, without circumlocution, I had been invited by this same person and found myself in the situation of a gambler who knows that the dice are loaded but also knows that he will not be able to stop himself from playing—seated on the edge of a bed in another hotel room, I was leafing through a child’s book, an illustrated spelling book, along with its owner, a simple, honest Haitian boy I had gotten to know during my first trip to the Antilles and who, having become a voodoo priest after having been the leader of a choir in a voodoo center in one of the poorest neighborhoods of his capital city, was now touring Europe with a company of dancers and was counting on earning enough from this engagement to open his own hounfor once he was back in Haiti; in the childish manner he owed in part to his flirtatiousness as a scarcely disguised homosexual, in part, also, no doubt, to his nature as one inspired by the gods, my companion—playing the good little boy—was eager to show me that he was profiting from his trip to learn to read, and that he was doing this from the spelling book he had been given by a “gentleman” who had also given him a large map of Paris published in the form of a page that unfolded; I didn’t know whether this erstwhile ragged sprite had invited me to accompany him to his room and then to sit next to him out of simple friendliness, to make me welcome in his lodgings and have me admire the progress he had made since joining the music-hall troupe, or whether the ulterior motive of a seduction that could result in a calculable profit was one of the reasons for this invitation; distressed as I was, I was more moved than I should have been by the two of us reading this picture book, on each page of which—or nearly—appeared animals such as one so often sees in children’s books; it wouldn’t have taken much to let myself be carried away, like a cork, on the current of an adventure that would certainly have been a great cause of confusion for the mediocre libertine that I am but would, perhaps, have deflected me from a more banal intrigue about which, without knowing that it would induce me, for a rather long time, to see myself, where my emotions were concerned, as a boxer broken in two by a low blow or a bull nailed alive by a bad thrust, I nevertheless had a presentiment that, starting up from just about nothing and not promising much, it would hurt me all the more because it contained nothing of the sort of illusion contained in that friendly reading of the spelling book; this was only a vague thought that disturbed me for a few minutes without crossing over the boundaries of the possibility that was being contemplated, and very recently, with frank pleasure, I saw once again my companion from that other late afternoon: passing through Paris, from which he was preparing, when his tour continued, to leave for the South of France, he came for a family dinner at my home and told me about the amazing circumstances surrounding his birth, describing to me how he came into the world “feet first” (here the narrator, throwing his chest back, extends his two arms straight in front of him to show the position of his legs), his mother—who died before she could raise him—having given birth suddenly on the steps of the “cathedral” of a town in the north of Haiti and a storm (which the narrator at first describes as a “cyclone”) having broken at that very moment as though to proclaim that the son of the poor Negro was truly one predestined.

  A girl who wanted to be an amber-skinned Thais instead of a dark-skinned Aïda and whose physical attractions I can now admire quite coolly, feeling as I look at her a sweetness unmixed with any friendship; a hirsute and sophisticated boy I find touching in the devotion he shows to his brand-new wardrobe and his schoolboy’s spelling book as well as to his gods imported from Guinea. These two figures, who continue to move me when I remember the scenes that centered on them, come back to me illuminated by the same stage lights as their contemporaries, who appeared before
my eyes as I, the spectator, sat there tranquilly, the first group more serious, the others lighter, as though, by summoning me to respond, they wished to notify me of something essential to my life: that Salome, so well formed to give the expression “vision of art” a meaning of the same order as, but more weighty than, the meaning in the advertisements of the smutty newspapers and who calls upon me, without subterfuge, to question, again, my entire conception of beauty; that page, death’s emissary, expressing himself in frivolous terms, who may be sphinx, siren, harpy, or any other creature whose ambiguity goes beyond the imprecision of the sex and is a sign that he belongs to the intermediary world populated by angels, demons, and other messengers from heaven and hell; that maddened creature wanting and not wanting, making its pendulous way again and again, between the struts of the night, from one term to the other of love’s alternative; that masked crowd filling a theater platform which has deepened to become a universe into which, every frontier having been abolished between what is real and what is fiction, one’s gaze plunges vertiginously; that same Last Judgment crowd when, seeing the drama crystallize in the steel of a dagger, it unmasks itself with a single gesture. In her unenigmatic way, the little woman of Chez Maxim’s also has a lesson for me, for she teaches me with a simple twirl of her tucked-up skirt that in art as in literature, nothing is worth anything unless it comes across, leaps the footlights, and strikes one in the middle of one’s chest, the way a prostitute’s solicitations awaken a sudden desire. As for the kiss sent out silently by the soprano in the Requiem as she stood in a very historical evening gown in the church choir, is there any need to comment on that to explain what it was saying?

  The water maid with large metal ankle supports who, her pitcher of water on her head, came to me from Pakistan by airmail; a female colossus, the Demeter of Cherchel seen in Algeria at the Galland Park museum which is also populated by nereids and by Europa lolling over the bull’s spine as though among cushions on a couch; at the aquarium of Castiglione, where there are also morays, the figureheads and the forward part of the lampare on either side of which is sculpted a mermaid blowing into a trumpet, her tail split into two long scaly branches, tightly braided serpents; the great Italian angel encountered at every step in the twilight of Tuscan cathedrals or the harsh glare of exhibition rooms; white against the azure sky, the tall headless female one sees—close to a broken phallus—on the island of Delos, an immense space choked with broken marble, encircled by an intensely blue sea with its fat billows of foam, where there is a “dragon’s den” open, perhaps, to a few creatures akin to those dryads among whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau dreamed of finding his love; the London thyiad, the Lady of the Lions, whom—quite illogically—I hoped to find again, like a phoenix, one beautiful Venice evening at the Fenice.

  In a meadow very reminiscent of old France, white turkeys, peacock, pale barefoot shepherdess sitting sewing or knitting on a rock, we landed late one afternoon, Guadeloupe scarcely more than an hour away and thrust back into the far distance by this brief flight that had carried us, the pilot and me, from Pointe-à-Pitre to the island of Saint Barthélemy, a tropical Elsinore with its nordic, sometimes princely looking peasants, its cows, its palm trees, its two-sided roofs painted oxblood red, its deeply indented coastline, its schooners at anchor in the port of Gustavia. Having up to then traveled only on airliners, I was discovering the great joy of arriving in a marvelous country after a landing made in uncomfortable conditions that allowed one to imagine what a “heavier than air” flight must have been like at the time of the pioneers.

  The machine that transported me had belonged (as I was informed by the professional who now used it to convey passengers like me) to the famous shoe manufacturer Bata. During our flight, as my companion was naming for me the islands we could see—Antigüe, Montserrat, Redonde, Nevis (which the Spanish called Nieves, meaning “snows”) and then Saint Christophe and Saint Eustache—I was as attentive to the various maneuvers as I would have been during a flying lesson and amused myself by reading on the control panel a sheet of paper on which—filling in here and there the blanks deliberately left in the printed text—were typed particulars indicating the plane’s characteristics. Without understanding much about it, I took some pleasure in reading this and as I did so I was no doubt rediscovering, several dozen years later, the pleasure I used to take—when I was collecting postcards of airplanes, filing them in a thick album—in initiating myself, as I supposed, into the mysteries of aviation, still quite new then, by means of the brief explanatory lines placed at the bottom of certain of these cards published a little later than the others, and about which I particularly appreciated their air of being documents for specialists, an air they owed to these notes, which were in truth quite vague but constituted enough of a guarantee to eliminate the idea of any fraud similar to that which I had observed in the case of other specimens from my collection, created by presenting a very small number of images under many different titles, the caption differing from one card to another only in the pilot’s name and, sometimes, the photograph being reproduced in reverse, so that “Védrines in full flight” became, for example, “Garros ...” even though the same monoplane, which was flying toward the left edge of the postcard when it was piloted by Védrines, now flew toward the right edge.

  Although I received my true baptism by air during the “phony war” (when I was a serviceman in the area of the Sahara and one of my barracks companions was a sergeant aviator who took me up, one Sunday after lunch, in the biplane with which he taxied for our commander) and although I have since then traveled quite often by plane or hydroplane (even flying, when I made my first trip to the Antilles, in the all-too-famous Latécoère, which disappeared in the Atlantic on its return trip) I had, in order to understand what was exciting about mastering such a means of locomotion, to go from Guadeloupe to Saint Barthélemy entrusting myself—for lack of any regular connection between those two islands—to a pilot regarded as no less skillful than he was adventurous and whose resemblance to the companion of King Artus was perhaps to be explained as much by this sky rider’s rebellious streak where our social norms are concerned as by his Breton origins.

  The opposite of the “great jockey,” whom my brother and I prized not only for his equestrian abilities but also for his wisdom and almost ascetic seriousness, the aviator is a daredevil, a rowdy, and it was probably during the 1914-18 war that he showed himself in all his brilliance as hothead, given the examples of men such as Navarre, Nungesser, and other military celebrities whom high-school boys like me were thrilled to see in great places like Maxim’s in the rue Royale or Harry’s in the rue Daunou (at that time called the “New York Bar”) or else in Gerny’s in the rue de Port-Mahon or in a microscopic bistro like Kannett’s in the rue d’Antin which numbered among its female clientele a woman named Jiji, sister (according to her) of the illustrious Védrines, and where I was delighted, one day, to hear the ace of aces, Navarre in flesh and blood, chatting with the woman who owned the place while I myself sat at the bar. For the sports star adopted as a model of a species of saintliness—a conception still belonging to childhood and smacking of its catechism—a very different sort of character was consequently substituted at the time of the First World War, and not only because it was now the lofty feats of the champions of combat aviation and their frequent harebrained or desperado exploits that were featured in the newspapers but because, as I grew older, I was attracted to a different type of hero: the more I aspired to emancipate myself, and the more specific my sexual ambitions became (the image of a fraternal woman—so to speak—with whom one is on an equal footing, gaining more substance now than that of the maternal or purely ideal woman adolescents dream of), the more I detached myself from the figure of the sportsman who has complete command of himself and turned my gaze toward the figure—much less conformist—of the free spirit who laughs at all the rules and, physically, shrinks from nothing.

  Just like those adventurers of the Far West shown in certain
illustrated stories in the children’s magazines—such as, perhaps, Le Jeudi de la Jeunesse— ordering, in a pine-board saloon which they had just entered with their pistols at their hips, a cocktail (at that time I pronounced it “coquetaille” and thought it was, not a mixture of variable components, but a particular spirit) or sometimes a whiskey or what must be a most refined beverage—if indeed it exists outside the imagination of a writer for children—“strawberry champagne” (as light and fresh as the design featuring an enormous rose that embellished the back of the black satin blouse worn by Buffalo Bill, the horseman with the vast felt hat and the musketeer’s thin goatee, when I saw him at the Champ de Mars caracoling with his rifle in hand, star and impresario of a troupe that included cowboys who were carbine rifle marksmen and horse trainers, Cossacks who sometimes flipped over along the flanks of their mounts and galloped with their heads almost touching the ground, a group of whirling dervishes, gymnasts performing the exercise called the “human pyramid,” and lastly some Redskins, whom one saw attacking a stagecoach and whom, at the end of the show, I so greatly wanted to view close up that I got lost in the crowd and was found—it appears—at the edge of their camp, not overly dismayed at having remained separated all this time from my parents), the aviator of the years 1914-18—at least the sort that my schoolfellows and I dreamed about—was at once the knight-errant, the outlaw, and the man whose only form of relaxation was the sort of excess symbolized by a bout of heavy drinking.