Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  During this gathering—which, except for the noise, had nothing bacchanalian about it and ended, in fact, without any of my companions choosing to go into a private trance behind closed doors—Khadidja wore in her ears large loops apparently of gold which I had not seen on her in the afternoon and which could just as well have been a gift from a customer coming after our midday siesta as the impatiently awaited fruit of prudent savings, jewelry ordered long ago and delivered between my two visits. She kept these earrings on when we lay down, proud (I think) of the brand-new ornaments that marvelously framed her face incised with tattoos. Too exclusively attached to the purely natural ornaments of which her body boasted, no doubt I would have accorded these only the attention merited by a commonplace refinement of dress—scarcely more striking on her, the vagabond with the beveled face, with the long, bony feet, than on another woman—if blood had not suddenly begun flowing from her right earlobe, abundantly enough to spot the pillow on which her head rested, wholly offered up to my gaze since the body that was crowned by this head when standing on its feet was now lying down quite flat, and I was looking down on it from my own prone position, covering hers without too many gaps or too much inexactitude, just as one geometric figure can be superimposed by another which one wants to demonstrate to be identical and just as my memory, madly, seeks to coincide with the whole of this picture—of which I am the painter but also one of its two models—as though the actor I was could, by doubling himself, become the retrospective witness—or voyeur—of the whole scene.

  (I cant love anyone, so I love myself, I confessed to the girlfriend of a friend of mine one night when I was drunk and she and I were walking up the avenue de l’Opéra together arm in arm; did this statement, more humiliated than cynical—concluding one of those inebriated Dostoevskian confessions that were habitual with me but that I detest today as I detest everything in me that reacts like a sentimental drunk—contain a distant trace of the occultists’ theory about relations between men and women: that because Eve was formed from a rib of Adam’s and is therefore nothing more than man’s very affectivity, his sensibility exteriorized and opposed to him, a man loves himself when loving a woman and returns to his original unity when he thus joins the portion of himself from which he was separated? If I must find in my affirmation anything other than the whimsical notion of a drunken man getting something off his chest, I would be more inclined to believe that just then I was thinking of an image I cherished for a long time, of moral conscience childishly represented as a foreign authority more or less analogous to the sort of guardian angel that keeps watch at night standing at the foot of our bed to observe and judge us in the intimacy of our sleep, in the same way that the conscience keeps watch, motionless, in our head to observe the soul which—like its homonym the little piece of wood in the soundbox of the violin [âme: soundpost, soul]—is also ensconced there as though in the sonorous emptiness of a vast cupola; when you love only yourself, you must at least love yourself enough to have the respect for yourself you would have if you loved someone who should at all costs not see you fail, and in this case the distinct entity which is this angel or this conscience stands facing me like some Dulcinea who causes the lover to tremble at the prospect of losing his prestige. Of old Karamazov’s three sons, it was Alyosha the gentle one, the mystic, to whom I had been compared—in the parlor of a Russian baroness, as he walked about completely naked, on his head an old helmet, crunching an apple—by the youthful companion whose girlfriend I adopted for a confidante one fine evening on the avenue de l’Opéra: We are the brothers Karamazov . . . We are all sensualists ... he declaimed in a barker’s voice, identifying himself with the violent Dimitri and assigning the character of the proud Ivan to the one we admired the most of all of us, whereas in the latter’s studio—in a drunken speech sustained by the leitmotif of I am the strongest swimmer in the world. . .—what he had described for hours on a day of lyrical dishevelment was a voyage that he alone, against everything and everyone, had made across legendary oceans; and as for this pseudo-Alyosha whom a prostitute from Figuig would take to be, possibly, a marabout—which, in her language, probably meant a priest—wasn’t it the case that the interest he showed at this time in gnosticism and also his skull, shaved for the first time at about this period like a polar dome—which, combined with his bearing, always a little stiff, marked him with a strangely monkish appearance—caused him, who behind his armor of untimely frost was more than anything else a spineless fellow and a dreamer, to be dubbed a little later, half seriously, “the Areopagite” by the master of that studio during a walk in the course of which the fanciful companion who had chosen to see me, ridiculously, as a double of the youngest of the three Karamazovs was himself compared to “Lucifer”?)

  Her face a little contracted—whether because she was in pain or because she was frightened by her benign hemorrhage—Khadidja, with a quick gesture, took off the two earrings, one of which was colored the same thick red that I saw trickling down onto the pillowcase; as a wound deep enough to need to be tended, that insignificant injury moved me and what I saw was a tragic princess breathing her last in the wavering light of the flames as I pressed bloody Khadidja against me in the gloaming.

  On this occasion (if it really was “this occasion,” for I have great difficulty grouping all these occasions according to their exact chronology, tending perhaps to condense, as though to obey the classical rule of unity of time, what in fact was scattered and, for instance, falsely placing Khadidja decked out in her earrings among my comrades who had come in a jovial gang if several days and not several hours separated the bath taken after the siesta from this visit in that case made only when no one could any longer not know that I had established my quarters in a place different from the barracks)—on this occasion, which I would like to situate in a precise way in order to enclose within firm limits the reality that manifested itself here and protect it more effectively from disappearing, it was not a meaningless series of gestures required as much by civility as by lust and leaving the irritating impression that they were nothing more than simulacra, but love—written without a capital letter and denuded of all the flourishes and other refinements beloved of calligraphers—that (seeking nothing except communication with another person in its most literally naked form) I made with Khadidja.

  I was not, as I have said, either in a state or in a mood to accomplish anything analogous to those performances that are featured in the amorous curriculum vitae of certain men and my apparent ardor masked an aptitude in truth so mediocre that long after I was engulfed (suitably stiffened) in the wide open cavern, I had to give up what had finally appeared to me as a dead-end voyage despite the exhilaration I felt at being thus carried along as though on waves and suspended in the imminence, a feeling whose equivalent, almost, I had already felt—on the level of purely metaphysical voluptuousness—one day when I had taken some opium (someone had had me smoke a few pipes): that one is no longer more than a hair away from at last entering into contact with oneself, of contemplating oneself as an object one sees from the outside at the same time as one is interior to it and it is interior to one, to progress constantly in this direction, from landing to landing, but never reach the absolute revelation, to be only at the extreme edge and have in some sense this revelation “on the tip of one’s tongue,” as one says of a thing forgotten which is there, intensely makes its presence felt but nevertheless slips away; a feeling whose fluctuating force is exerted as though in slow motion and which I had recaptured—in a more mechanical form—by abandoning myself to the swaying of a hammock the day after the day on which I had eaten some opium residue: The motion of the hammock imitates the motion of a ship, which imitates the motion of death . . . A chain of successive imitations. To go back to the unique Model. Narcotics such as cocaine and especially heroin procure also a bewildering impression of imminence which I evoke to some degree—though without defining it—if I speak of a sort of abstract tension that feeds on itself independently
of all objects, an extreme tension that still dreams of increasing and is nothing other than this very increase dreaming of reaching its height. But even more than with opium, there is nothing there but solitude, emptiness, complete vertigo and not even that quasi encounter with oneself that can be obtained by the use of the substance extracted from the seeds of the opium poppy or of the residue it leaves in the bowls of pipes after the combustion that generates the smoke. How could I, anyway, compare the assuredly vivid but egoistic and chilly pleasures I sometimes derived from these drugs (in experiments, in truth, so rare and so cautious that it would no doubt be better not to refer to them) to the feverish quest for a delirium with which one cannot be rewarded unless one also rewards the living object from which one derives this delirium? Even if they are equally passionate, these attempts do not have the same end in mind and are subject to a distinction more radical than that which English teachers instruct us to make between to like and to love, the difference being in the present case a real disparity since there is no common measure, even if they must both disappoint us in the end, between a fullness that one only enjoys all alone (or in conjunction with others but without anyone else being the cause of it) and that which one finds in a purely human fusion with another person (who is the means by which I obtain pleasure as in exchange I am the same for her).

  It was at about five in the morning—and as though emerging from an intoxication in which visions and somnolence had alternated until the moment of plunging into the shadows—that I resumed, in order to see it all the way through, at last, what I had abandoned late in the night when, to my great detriment, there had been a relaxation of the physical and strictly localized tension that until then had unfailingly expressed the exaltation of my whole being straining toward the moment (too often one-sided) when the erotic climax takes place, the entire body overflowing and being reabsorbed in one decisive fulguration. A short time before the moment when I had realized that there was no use persisting and that I was even losing the means to do so—a renunciation soon transformed into total abdication since yet again I slipped off to sleep—I had, however, discovered that my obstinacy was not pointless, for, secretly, Khadidja revealed to me that she was moved by it: something like the pulsations or slight contractions one could perceive deep in the gallery of a mine if the earth were alive and if the men who work it, lost in its folds, received a response emanating from the most distant part of that great sentient animal; something comparable for me—since I have been interested in books about alchemy for a long time and passionately fond, as an amateur, of old theories about the nature of fire as well as modern hypotheses about the structure of matter—to the proof (administered ad hominem) of the real, rather than mythological, existence of a sexuality hidden within metals, and also to the illusion I had that with my own eyes I had seen the ultimate foundation of the world when (during a visit to the Ecole de Physique et Chimie I had made at the urging of one of the teachers at that institution) I observed the standard experiment designed to show “Brownian motion”: the examination of a sol through an ultramicroscope, revealing the disorderly motion of corpuscles less than four microns in diameter suspended in liquid and inducing me—who was amazed by the spectacle of points illuminated by the oblique light that changed them into stars moving about against the dark background—to imagine that I was penetrating the arcanae of molecular life; also something that recalled to me, well after the ephemeral conjunction of my fate with Khadidjas, that ultimate reality which it seemed to me I touched miraculously in a dream or nocturnal revery almost thirty years ago now: having spent the day in the studio of that friend for whom the word eternal had such a special force and having seen drawings of his showing nudes in architectural forms, these sketches came into my mind again while I slept and seemed to me, not so much drawings, as prophetic graphics, diagrams, or, even better, designs for the truth; through these designs I saw my life (whose larger lines coincided with them) and behind my life a thing, indescribable in form and substance, that I called “resistance.” It was almost this heart of the earth, mineral soul, innermost being of fate and of things that I had thought I was touching when I perceived the tangible signs of Khadidja s joy.

  “Titus reginam Berenicen cui etiam nuptias pollicitus ferebatur statim ab urbe dimisit invitus invitam; Titus, who, it was believed, had even promised Queen Berenice he would marry her, sent her away from Rome, despite himself and despite her, in the first days of his rule.” It is in these few lines that Racine, quoting Suetonius, presents the argument of Bérénice and I still recall, when I was in the eleventh or twelfth grade, one of our professors inviting us—with a greedy air, behind his glasses and his flamboyant beard—to appreciate the beauty of the Latin phrase, whose last two words sum up the whole drama: invitus invitam, “against his wishes, against her wishes,” the only fragment that has stayed with me from that phrase, along with the verb dimisit, which for a long time my memory erroneously placed at the very end of the passage from Suetonius and transformed into dimissit, as though the barbarism that consisted in doubling the sibilant consonant had, by introducing a hesitation or a suspense, accentuated the signification of indefinitely prolonged farewells that this verb lent to the story of the Roman lover and his Jewish beloved. Invitus invitam dimissit: murmured to oneself during some soliloquy, this group of words—of which the second, coming before the long rustling sigh, is only the almost unchanged echo of the first—loses all translatable meaning and becomes (well beyond the man who sends her off as much against his own will as against hers, even beyond the desolation of two separated lovers) an adage expressing an irreducible impossibility as is insinuated by the first two words with their symmetrical barriers, the whole (suitably churned and stewed) finally resolving into one of those all-purpose formulas which impart to many folklorical songs a burden of melancholy having nothing to do with the song’s content and age: invitus invitam, “our good fortune, hey nonny-nonny-no, our good fortu-u-ne.”

  It was perhaps from Iphigenia, “the pure blood of the god who throws thunderbolts” and the central figure in the tragedy that moved me the most when I was studying the classics, that Khadidja derived that bloody signature that one of her earlobes had left on the pillowcase, elevating to the rank of an innocent already touched by the knife of the sacrificer a woman who, ripened by the African sun, had arisen at a bend in my road like a sidewalk Venus revealed by the bewildering arabesques of her behavior and her long goatish legs (for lack of some infernal mark such as a forked hoof) as a spectral Empusa or a temptress of my middle age. Clearly she never had the elegiac tenderness of Berenice and, in any case, to soften her to the point of tears would have required someone other than I, who seemed to her (I would like to think) a good and not overly tiresome customer but was obviously not the ruffian capable of metamorphosing her into a docile lover. If it hadn’t been for her long white robe and her head turbaned in green the morning the two of us played the great farewell scene, it would only be out of a ludicrous desire to poeticize that I would refer to Titus and Berenice in speaking of an adventure none of whose strictly verifiable episodes exceeded what was in principle a love affair between an NCO and a soldiers’ whore.