Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  Here, I no longer have any liking for crystalline, clearly defined lines. (An undated note, extracted from my cards: “My liking for articulate, composed landscapes. Sometime in 1920, in Paramé, my scorn—very much à la Fantasio—for a wild sea that everyone was admiring.”) I no longer like either fire or ice. (But if I examine my past carefully, did I ever really like the two terrible extremes symbolized by those two words?) I now no longer like anything but what is amorphous, soft, lukewarm, damp. The monstrous vegetation of the algae, of hair soaked in sea salt and the salt of sweat. If I make love there is a storm and if there is a storm I make love. (Nine years later, returning from Africa and on vacation with the family at a beach near Perros-Guirec: “Ebb and flow of love: one is thrust back, one is drawn forward, one is drawn forward, one is thrust back; in the end one makes love to stop this rocking which makes one so seasick.”) The very stars have become mouths—only colder than the others—and I would like to devour them.

  The voracious heart.

  No more shadow, no more stratagems of light and crystal. Bodies dense and tightly embraced in their living fullness. To make contact. If I possess one of these bodies, for a time the whole world will belong to me. (As the year came to an end: “Fearful love: to clasp a part of the outside world in order to have the illusion of deflecting its laws. The desire for a shared love: to be the entire universe for a fraction of the universe, so as to be able to believe that your end will be the end of the world. We make love the way certain people say their beads during a storm.”) Delicate meanderings. Eddying of forms. Pressed thighs weave arabesques without pain—just the bitterness of temporary joys—and hands slip from dampness to coolness, from coolness to pungency. The dissolution of bones, gnawed away by the personal life of the sexes that hide like sea monsters spying their prey with a tufted eye: sharp grass, carnivorous flowers. (“Oh whale! Oh siren!” sang the followers of old Maman Lorgina once in honor of the gods of the sea.) Disjunction of limbs and ideas, portraying the last spasm, when our heads will turn over onto the other side of the world.

  With the authority of an island queen (such as exist only in the imagination) requesting the shipwrecked European to rid himself of his possessions, which will become her plunder, my companion had said to me: “Take off your pants!” and—like that shipwrecked fellow or perhaps the centurion suddenly shy in the presence of the patrician woman who notifies him that he should undo his tunic before yielding to her for the sum of a few asses or several sesterces—I had stripped off the military clothing whose banality satisfied my vanity as though the very modesty of the uniform were enough to turn me into the prince or god who, assuming a crude outer appearance, mingles with common mortals. Khadidja having earned her night’s pay and I my rest—I who had momentarily transformed myself (on the same metaphorical level where I clothe myself out of modesty in the goose-pimpled skin of a shipwrecked man or the sweating skin of a centurion) into a sailor who has been swallowed by the waves and who drinks from the belly of a nereid the sap that will assure him some sort of survival—we had slept until dawn in the large iron bed. Then I had left her, in truth without leaving her altogether, going to my barracks to wash, shave, and put in an appearance but in no way like someone who, the line drawn at the bottom of the smutty paragraph he has just written with a girl, and more or less nauseated, goes back to where he lives.

  The society of single men we had formed during our stay in the desert (grouped, for better or for worse, as in any society, according to rank, birthplace, work, all of this overlapping with instinctive attractions or repulsions and the hazards of all sorts that produce cliques) was about to break up. The radiotelegraphists of the Second Etranger were to be the first to leave, returning to Bel-Abbès, and since I had been (I think) the only one of the reservists to associate with them in any consistent way, they amiably suggested that we all have lunch that day—which must have been a Sunday—at the Hôtel du Sahara. Along with their leader, my buddy the corporal, there were two or three Belgians, one of whom, formerly an officer in his national army, had the reputation of being a great drunk whom his passion did not prevent from being always very skillful and scrupulous in his work: a quick and accurate radiographer when he was sober, this calm, taciturn man who rarely showed his face lost nothing of his dexterity (they said) in the most terrible bouts of drunkenness resulting from his solitary drinking sessions, but simply used his left hand at these times instead of his right, which he usually used; he was the oldest member of the little team, whose youngest—also present at lunch—was a boy still barely out of his adolescence, baby faced and smiling, and with an expression at once so naive and so reserved that one wondered by what odd conjunction of circumstances he could have ended up in the Legion, whereas his first occupation (and probably his only one, given his age) had been that of violinist.

  Throughout the meal, my hosts were anxious to show that, mercenaries though they were, and consigned more or less to the category of outcasts, they were not hardened, crude soldiers. Since I, for my part, wanted to demonstrate that I didn’t attribute to them the customs of the Swiss Guard or the Iroquois Indians, our exchanges were marked by a reserve greater than the conversations that took place every day among chemists when, at the table, we listened to our star performers compete at tall tales or irreverent descriptions worthy of a satirical weekly, then, drawn in by one of them, would sing together L’Artilleur de Metz or some other popular song appreciated by the soldiery. At dessert, one of my hosts simply intoned, in a very dignified and serious way, Bel-Abbès, berceau de la Légion, a romantic, sentimental song in which the greatness and the service of the Legionnaire are celebrated in elegiac terms. Treated this way, I was as gratified in my snobbery as though I had been admitted into the most exclusive sort of club or some distant initiatic brotherhood.

  After coffee and a chaser, we were free until evening, so we had to do something and the bousbir was obviously the most likely place where we would be welcome. I was the one, I think, who suggested going there: I had to return my companions’ courtesy in one way or another, and to pay a visit there would, more importantly, give me an occasion to see Khadidja again without seeming—in my own eyes as well as in hers—too clearly to want to be with her again when scarcely half a day had passed since we had separated. Even if they had wanted to, I’m sure my companions would have refrained from taking such an initiative, desirous as they were to make a good impression on someone they considered not just any NCO, of whom they had seen so many, but an intellectual, even a scholar; and it was (paradoxically) because of the occupation of professional soldier to which their setbacks had reduced them and the fact that they were seeking, if not to make one forget it, at least to give it the most correct appearance possible, and because of my own quality as a person who had done his studies like a good bourgeois and was anxious to avoid any appearance of superiority or pedantry, that if one of us behaved like a hardened, crude soldier that afternoon, it was not any of that group, specialists in one of the numerous lines of work that come together to create modern-style massacre, but, in the end, the educated man.

  Of course I went straight to the place where I had the most chance of meeting Khadidja: the room where, served by her, I had drunk beer the evening before, in a single-story house that did not open onto the street but stood at the back of a courtyard bordered by other small rooms where other people—apparently all soldiers—also came to drink slender bottles of beer before putting themselves in the hands of some unfortunate woman to relieve their boredom or rid themselves of the completely carnal obsession that was torturing them. Khadidja was there, unoccupied, and it was in her company—to which, perhaps, was intermittently added that of one or two other girls—that we ingested the beer I was so determined to offer them. The great burst of tenderness (the desire to fuss over her, envelope her, protect her) which, the night before, had uplifted me so when I was preparing to go to sleep with her, indifferent to the fact that her graces could be bought and sold, now turned into
a need to play the part of the generous fellow, who not only spares no expense and therefore gains in popularity, but, in the cordiality that induces him to give excessively, throws all sense of jealous appropriation to the winds and goes to the extreme of buying for others the pleasures that can be dispensed by his woman (whom, in doing this, he in truth claims as his possession since he thus poses as the master, the only one entitled to bestow her). “You’ll have to excuse me, Sergeant! I get an erection on the thirty-sixth of every month,” the senior member of the Legionnaires confided to me, declining the offer I had made him, the oldest, the placid ascetic whose drinking binges were legendary, of a turn with Khadidja. This offer met with the same lack of success, in the end—even though the new beneficiary would have consented, without having to be entreated too much, to shut himself up in a nearby room with the immodest Berber (whose possible poisons, I was forgetting, I myself had been afraid of)—when I again tried to make a display of altruism by addressing myself, this time, to the youngest, the violinist, whom his comrades teased amiably about a virginity which hadn’t been breached by his life as a professional in remote garrisons.

  My guests went off rather early, not having the same reasons I did for lingering and being, in addition, summoned back to the barracks for those various trifling occupations that fill a soldier’s Sunday: mending jobs, a letter to write, a card game, even simply a pipe to smoke or a bottle of red wine to drink while listening to time pass as the old one did, the one who, from the beginning of this life, seemed to aspire to nothing more than a sort of nirvana, the methodical and patient practice of drinking taking the place of wisdom.

  Alone with Khadidja, I returned to the room where I had left her only a few hours before and which was no more than the dwelling place for a large bed with uncertain springs. Until fairly late in the afternoon we took a siesta there and Khadidja did nothing to change our repose into a bacchanalian romp that would certainly have resulted in a substantial profit for her business. With great courtesy—as one goes to some trouble for a guest without there being anything servile about it—she asked me, when our siesta was finished, if I would like to take a bath, and when I said I would, brought a zinc tub of the most classical style, filled it with warm water, and then, when I had gotten into it, so blissful that I felt no shame at letting myself be handled this way, like a baby, soaped me from head to toe with great care, energy, but also sweetness. Always, after that—in Béni-Ounif, as well as in Saïda when the train taking us to Oran stopped there for a few hours—it was a pleasure for me to go wash myself in the Moorish baths: a contentment that certainly had something to do with satisfying a desire for comfort as well as for hygiene (to rid oneself of that almost moral filth that coats the soldier’s skin even when he is not in a warm country and which, it would seem, only an indefinitely prolonged immersion can cleanse) but also with the idea of recapturing, in the warmth of those vast halls as peaceful and pleasingly ornamented as a mosque, a drop of the well-being of body and heart that had been bestowed on me the day I had simply rested in Khadidja’s room like a traveler stopping over at a caravansary. Rebecca, the young girl with the pitcher (and perhaps large earrings?), Eliezer, the camel drover. Nineveh, a terraced city, in the thick plumes of smoke exhaled by incense burners like locomotive smokestacks. On the poster one used to see so often on the walls of train and metro stations, the elephant carrying (with his trunk?) a banner on which one read the slogan: “I only smoke Niles.” The flight into Egypt, the night spent in the open air, with no other sleeping alcove than the belly of the ass. The elephant Saïd, who lived, I think, at the Jardin des Plantes. Lacking any of the sumptuousness of an oasis despite its name, the café Au Palmier de Lorette, in the quarter known as Bréda when it was mostly populated by women of loose morals [femmes galantes], who are to the ladies’ men [hommes galants] what the courtisan [courtisane] is to the courtier [courtisan], more or less, and where there now stands a residential hotel I know of that goes by the curious name of Modial Hôtel, as though at the time it was baptized with a view to public appeal there was some hesitation between the drawing power of frivolous fashion [mode] and that of a global [mondial] sort of effulgence.

  When, as a schoolboy, I made my way as best I could through Latin texts and, except on rare occasions, derived from the study of these word puzzles no literary joy, I liked Ovid better than anyone else, and especially “The Golden Age,” which opens the Metamorphoses. “Aurea prima sata est aetas ...”, “. . . stillabant ilice mella”: shallow contours of a poem explicated in class, probably learned by heart, in any case read and reread savoring the long succession of syllables as a dilettante would have, but of which I no longer have in my head more than this almost nonexistent residue, in other words (when I think about it) not much less than the dust, almost impossible to gather up, into which the golden days I am relating here—a historian masking his ignorance with digressions rather than rhapsody—have resolved themselves with the passing of time.

  As though one of the trees in Land-without-Evil or Cockaigne of which Ovid speaks had sprung up invisibly within my reach to feed me with its honey (instead of rising only today, and as a pure allegory, on the dung heap with which my brain has fattened itself from one reading to the next since my earliest school days), what was installed in me that afternoon, which ended on a note so different from the spirit of the braggart, the guy in the know, in which I had begun it, was a philter imbued with a succulence and a beneficent power different from the beer with which Khadidja—female Ganymede in Egyptian dancing-woman’s pants—had slaked our thirst. I now felt for this swarthy sommelier an affectionate gratitude for the way she had treated me, she who, without ever forgetting her twofold profession as prostitute and hostess, at least knew that mercenary love also involved its own protocol, that hospitality had its rituals and it was precisely to the extent that a whore proved scrupulous in the performance of such rituals that she preserved her dignity. For this body, to which my own had been closely joined during one whole night though without there being a total pairing between it and me, I began to feel the simplest, most positive desire: the desire a normal man normally has for any woman whose physical appearance attracts him. It seemed to me imbecilic to have thus made love, to all intents and purposes, without making love, inhuman to have used this girl with a discrimination that had led me to travel with her only part of the way along a road whose pratfalls I was afraid of, scandalous to have shown such reticence toward someone who had just demonstrated to me that there still existed in our day—at least in certain regions—something analogous to what sacred prostitution must have been in the ancient world. The devil take my greedy caution, incompatible (it was flagrantly obvious) with the handsome impulse of generous cordiality that had moved me a short time before! Whatever was going to happen would happen: I could not leave things where they were with this creature whom I hadn’t regarded even for a second as an object, the way, ordinarily, because of the very fact that they are offered or offer themselves, one is led despite oneself to regard prostitutes or those nocturnal strollers whom I much later heard described by the melodramatic term “women of midnight” by a woman from Guadeloupe who was visiting Paris for the first time.

  The ebb and flow: one opens up and then closes again, by turns. That evening, when I returned to the bousbir, it was high tide for me. Not that I was in a physiological state different from the sluggishness in which so many enlisted men in the phony war found themselves mired, to their surprise, a sluggishness they felt was humiliating to their vanity as men and chose to ascribe to the deliberate addition of some chemical ingredient to the table wine. I was, quite simply, charmed by Khadidja and wanted to experience with her, unrestrictedly, whatever could be experienced. For years I had been mulling over a remark made to me long ago, You don’t dare go all the way with your desires, by a man with whom I had a passionate friendship (the same one who said he prefered the substantive God to any other word in the language, whereas a painter to whom we listened somewh
at as though he were an oracle claimed as his key word the adjective eternal and I the verb transmute); for years, too, I had been brooding about the condemnation hidden behind this other remark, and you don’t yet know the woman whom you will pillage and plunder, concluding a letter I dreamed was sent to me by the wife of a poet I see only at long intervals but who is one of those older than I whom I have always loved and admired the most.

  For some time already, a number of my comrades the chemists had also wished to make an excursion to the bousbir, quite without any intention of taking up with any of the girls there (for this, they were too delicate!) but in the same spirit that they would have toured Bagdad-by-night if they had happened to be in Iraq or the-heart-of-Isfahan if fate had led them a little farther East. Because they knew I had often gone into these neighborhoods, where only a few of us had been up to now, I could not decently refuse to go there with my less initiated comrades and the know-it-alls who had appointed themselves their guides, for they would have attributed this unexpected abstention to some sort of desire to cold-shoulder them by keeping to myself; besides, it was an excellent excuse to return to Khadidja again as though by a happy chance. I must say, however, that I wasn’t really pleased to be going in a group, like this, to a place where I wanted only to display a certain deferential civility toward those who lived there, even if in my eyes it was the most dismal of whorehouses. As I had to, unless I was to disobey the laws of comradeship, I put the best face on things: as irritated as I might be by what was intolerable, in itself, about such a visit in a corporate body, I settled with my entire escort of rather tipsy reservists in that room whose orientalism seemed copied (but in a manner even more provincial) from that of the Place Clichy and which replaced the room that in France is called a salon in similar establishments. As they drank their beer—that real horse-urine that was served up in the guise of mead by my Valkyrie, without helmet other than her black hair—my companions, sitting in a circle, sang in chorus many barracks-room obscenities, I remaining silent as I listened to them with Khadidja at my side, as though we were the host and hostess by a tacit agreement among all of us, without there having been anything expressly premeditated about it. My group, in the end, displayed more tact that I had expected, offering up its crudenesses in the manner, not of boorish louts who think the coarsest kind of talk is the proper thing with girls but of boys accustomed to enlivening social groups and thinking it absurd to wait to be asked to perform their usual numbers; I think I can add that they also sang—quite inspired, and to the delight of Khadidja as well as that of her companions—the North African song that was one of our favorite pieces and that dates from the other war: Ai! Ai! qu’il est joli mon p’tit paillasson de nuit [oh, my pretty little tart]. It was that evening (I think) that Khadidja, after going away for a moment, suddenly put into my right hand—murmuring to me that she had just found it—a silver pendant of a pattern standard in North Africa: the famous “Southern Cross” sold, in different sizes and forms, everywhere to visiting Europeans and especially soldiers who, quite often, wear it on their chest as they would a badge. With the discretion almost of a player at hunt-the-slipper or of a child passing a stolen sweet to another child, Khadidja presented me with this jewel, a sort of diamond shape whose four sides fell inward—curving in toward the center of the figure—and whose lateral points, like those on the bottom, ended in bulbous swellings while the top one was crowned by an open circle allowing it to be hooked up or suspended. My first thought was that this object had been, not really stolen, but surreptitiously picked up after being lost by one of my companions; yet, once I had made inquiries the following day, I knew that this quite large and delicately worked cross did not belong to any of them and that I could therefore keep it without troubling myself further, having no idea how it came to be in Khadidja s hands after having left those—more industrious—of the artisan who had fashioned it.