Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  During the several days that remained before our departure, first for Oran (where I revisited the old Spanish fort from which we could see the roads of Mers el-Kebir sheltering its warships, a place that would, in the not very distant future, become part of history in the space of a single day) and then to Port-Vendres (after embarking on a requisitioned steamboat, two nurses in Red Cross caps posted on either side of the gangway to give each of us as we went by single file two cigarettes and a life belt as viaticum), I was hardly seen in our barracks outside of duty hours, for I had gotten into the regular habit of going off to sleep in the bousbir once I had eaten dinner with the others in the dining room of the dilapidated building with the cracked facade that was the Hôtel du Sahara. At Khadidja’s, it was now as though I were staying with the manager of a boardinghouse, sharing her bed even at hours when her presence there was only virtual; once or twice it happened that I slept alone almost the entire night in that great bed while she poured her bottles of beer for other customers, danced for them (as she did, according to what she alleged when she had to leave me, for a European civil servant who had come with his wife to enjoy himself in this evil place) or quite simply sold herself (as I must conjecture, for she was delicate enough to refrain from uttering the least word that would have clearly indicated to me that I was not the only one with whom she was exercising her principal calling). When I was with her, and generally also with another girl who lived there (who was slighter, plumper, and had a gentler physiognomy, and with whom my friend the Legion corporal, whom I was treating that evening after dinner, once spent the night while I, for my part, was shut up in that bedroom face-to-face with the taller, thinner, fiercer-looking woman next to whom the other appeared to be a humble servant rather than a comrade), I imbibed—without wanting to, but because Khadidja urged me to and I was anxious to seem gracious in entertaining the ladies, to whom the operation was doubly profitable—an excessive number of bottles of her vile beer. Very soon my physical condition began to suffer the effects of this in a tiresome way and there came a night when, my bowels tormented by cramps, I disappeared again and again to go visit the latrines, which I had located in the courtyard; not once did I leave, my stomach ravaged, without Khadidja joining me in that stinking spot—as though to make sure I hadn’t strayed into a rival bed or to put a stop to whatever I might be conniving with the impure spirits that roamed around the rubbish—and saying to me in a suspicious tone: “What are you doing there?” Her comrade no doubt knew she was vindictive, jealous, and in addition determined not to yield an inch of her control, for I recall how firmly—and as though, in caressing her lovely chest, I had committed an impropriety—she repulsed my advances one evening when we were alone together, our friend occupied elsewhere with her sordid duties but surely about to surprise us, since she had the power to make a silver cross and gold rings appear out of nowhere as though by an invisible stroke of the wand.

  Supreme magician as she might seem to me sometimes—or temptress of my middle age or even Lilith, spectral woman born of Adams defilement when God hadn’t yet provided him with a companion—Khadidja, too, felt the effects of our drinking, and I recall that once we went to the latrines to pee together like two kids without any modesty, I standing, she squatting and releasing into the darkness a thick stream of the liquid she had absorbed in considerable quantity as much because she liked it (I think) as for the sake of good business relations. Rather than a perverse pleasure, I believe I found in this total abandonment of the reserve that obtrudes between a man and a woman, however intimate their bond, the contentment of a momentary return to the state of nature and that same feeling of touching the depths that had intoxicated me when I had encountered, in the most secret part of Khadidja, the proof, not so much of our communion, as of the obliteration of the limits of our two bodies under the foam of the most elementary organic fluctuations.

  (To say good-bye to her dead body, so youthful despite the disease that had been eating away at her lungs for a long time, my hand placed for a few seconds on the cold forehead of a woman of my period and my region for whom I had felt the deepest friendship, I who—without being a homosexual—regard friendship as a kind of love and am probably—whatever distaste I may have for the sublimity of platonic love—a man more drawn to friendships with women than passion; I discovered later that this final gesture, made to a person who for years had been on such a familiar footing with the angel of death that she seemed to have borrowed from it a little of its marble impenetrability, had actually been the involuntary though tender duplication of an earlier gesture, made at a time when she was still more or less in good health: one evening when a few of us were hanging about in the bars of Montmartre and she had gotten drunk, as often happened when she could no longer sustain the effort she needed to preserve an equilibrium that never held by more than a thread, suspended as she was between ice and fire by her severity and her passion, her distaste and her taste for life, her social messianism and her incapacity to submit to constraint, I had put my hand on her forehead to help her rid herself of her nausea by vomiting, a unique caress that my right palm—pressed down upon by that head which was giving way, as much because of the effect of the alcohol as because of the implacable paradoxes of which she was eternally the victim—has never forgotten. As one can see from certain of the pages she wrote, this friend had chosen to describe herself by the moving name “Laure,” a medieval emerald coupling her somewhat feline incandescence with a vaguely parochial sweetness like a stick of angelica.)

  “Messieurs, et cric! . . . Et crac!” When I have told how touched I was, at night, to hear Khadidja coughing (a crocodile tenderness, mixed, as though to dignify the pleasure, with remorse at having caused her to catch cold by stripping her, more or less, when she was in a sweat, with remorse at being, even despite my paltry attentions, one of the accomplices with whom she was hastening toward her physical ruin), when I have described our last meeting in the sun on a morning that was already almost torrid despite the coolness of the night, the shadow of Khadidja—stretched to the uncertain limit beyond which a shadow is no longer discernable—will bury itself in a recess of my memory without my ever being able, probably, to grasp it again as I am doing now, endeavoring to reconstruct our story.

  The evening before the departure for Oran (the first stage of a journey toward a region where winter had raged while we were settling into the war without foreseeing that it would soon turn to confusion and massacre) I prudently went home with my companions, perhaps because I would not be able to break camp the next day without some preparation impossible to manage in the course of a morning that would necessarily be rushed, perhaps also because I would have committed rather too flagrant a breach of comradeship if I had abandoned the barracks room assigned to us to the extent of not staying there even one more night, perhaps most importantly because I felt it was better not to tempt fate and that another visit to the bousbir would risk adding nothing to an adventure that until then had remained—as though by some remarkable piece of luck—unblemished, nothing except perhaps some affront that might spoil everything. In place of the fully living Khadidja by whose side, had I strongly desired it, none of the specific motives I am alleging (my preparation for departure, my fear of going too far in neglecting my comrades) would have had enough weight to stop me from spending this last night, I preferred, in short, Khadidja the relic, the one whose image—with an overly devout caution—I was trying not to compromise and whose memory I was already cultivating, as though she were dead.

  An episode that I now have great trouble situating on its proper plane—as I skirt two dangers: that of coloring it, romantically, with the flame of a mad love incubated between the sheets of a prostitute and that of, inversely, debasing it to the filthiest level in a frenzy of puritanism—would seem to have been closed once and for all (and through my own efforts) at the hour when the sun rose once again on Béni-Ounif, reanimating for a few more hours the great, but wretched, dusty setting in which the little tow
n kept body and soul together, flanked by its palms and its Arab village. Accepting an offer made with an urbanity always embellished with a thin smile by one of my comrades—a serious, discreet boy with a certain ironic impassivity to whom I had confessed an uneasiness that had been vague up to then but was now intensified by the idea of our imminent return—I had drunk a chemical compound calculated (according to his assurances) to diminish the risk of my organism’s suffering any retribution for a sexual conduct contrary to my circumspect habits. Perhaps my confidence in the power of this product was a shade naive, perhaps it was also enhanced by the joyous atmosphere in which we were packing our bags, chatting and joking all the while; but I was sure that in every respect—most importantly, by nipping in the bud this possibility of putrid consequences—I had put an end to an adventure that thenceforth would appear to me like one of those moving, infinitesimal plant-life discoveries that had so enchanted me when we were obliged to do whatever we could to deny the desolation of our rocky plateau.

  Toward the end of the morning—having been called into town by something connected with my duties or some errand, unless it was that once I had settled all my affairs I wanted to stroll around a little more in those streets where nothing kept me any longer—I was passing near the bousbir. A street urchin hailed me: “Sergeant! Sergeant!” As he explained to me in a rather uncertain French, “Mile Khadidja” had sent him to ask if I was not coming to say good-bye to her. I followed him.

  Wrapped from head to toe in a vast, immaculate white robe belted at the waist, her forehead crowned with a coil of green muslin, my friend was waiting for me on the doorsill of her workplace like the mistress of some sisterhood adorned for a ceremony and with strict orthodoxy wearing the colors of her patron saint. She was on a chair, surrounded by the madam, standing, and other women. Whether upon leaving the barracks I had already, as I sometimes did, removed my kepi and slipped it between my jacket and my belt, or whether I had taken it off as I stopped in front of this group of women, I was bareheaded and—as usual—displayed a shorn skull. Khadidja in her seat and I standing straight before her looked at each other and it seemed to me I was seeing a completely new person: Khadidja no longer in motion, quick to wiggle her hips, but as fixed as a religious image or a wax museum figure; Khadidja in the grand array of a princess coming to haunt the traveler’s dreams at the hour when vertical rays of sun reach down even to the bottom of the well; Khadidja, perhaps, as she would have been in a world that had not been degraded by whatever had made her an avowed prostitute and me a caricature of a soldier. “You’re not afraid of the sun . . . ,” she observed without moving her torso or her head an inch and as though this sentence had come from very far away, through the medium of her voice, always a little hoarse and too unskilled at handling French sounds for me to be able to tell if the phrase thus articulated was merely a statement or implied a nuance of questioning. Leaning down to put my face on a level with hers, I exchanged with her the simplest of kisses, mouth barely grazing cheek, the sort that might have been given by two people joined by a sentiment in which there wasn’t even a hint of depravity.

  (At a time when the phony war was stored away in an already distant past and France rid of its army of occupation, as I was traveling along a road on the British Gold Coast to visit some gold mines in Konongo, having left the large commercial center of Kumasi that morning, I was to hear, uttered by a woman I did not know, almost the same phrase as the one I had received as an oracle when it came to me from the lips of Khadidja. A great tree had fallen across the road—a frequent occurrence in the damp forest region because the giants of the plant world are more vulnerable than one would think—and obliged us, my companion and me, to stop our van, which was being followed at a short distance by another vehicle; while some manual laborers roused by our black driver were using axes and machetes to cut up the trunk that was obstructing our passage, we struck up a conversation with a very young and very cheery Anglican nun who was riding in the other van in company with a group of African women, all catechumens she was leading in a change of location that had some edifying motive behind it; this gracious person with the transparent complexion of a Palmolive ad rather than a cloistered nun or a Madonna, and dressed all in white and light gray while the other travelers set off their dark skin with the lively colors of printed cotton fabrics from Manchester, wore a cork sun helmet over her head veil; she talked to me about an uncle of hers, an American sculptor who had settled in a spot in the Gâtinais whose name was part of my childhood treasure trove—Bourron, close to mourron [chickweed], which is a kind of honey for little birds—and she asked me to convey a message to that uncle so that he would have the pleasure of receiving news of his niece by someone who had seen her recently; she had to search her mind for a long time to discover what might be the name of the villa where her relative lived, in English “Green Shutters,” a locution for which we could only with great difficulty arrive at the French equivalent: Volets Verts, which we adopted after having rejected Verts Volets, Persiennes Vertes, and also Vertes Persiennes, which we had chosen first. During the course of the conversation, which lasted for about an hour while we stood in the middle of the road and watched the work, as I had descended from my van bareheaded, she politely urged me to put my hat back on, pointing out to me that it was hardly prudent to expose myself like that to the tropical sun for a period of time that had already been too long. “No horseplay,” “Play fair or don’t play at all,” she might have said to me in that model-child tone of voice. Once I was back in Paris, I made sure to convey her news to her uncle, as promised; he responded by expressing his great pleasure at hearing of the good health of this niece he knew only by hearsay—having never had, in fact, the opportunity of meeting her—and invited me to come have lunch at his home if I should ever be passing through Bourron.)

  Whereas because of a zealous attachment to the memory that would remain to me of a brief idyll I had, of my own accord, reduced it by one night—interrupting (in my eternal incapacity to break the circle of myself) a succession of events of which I wanted, instead of recklessly hurling myself into it, to preserve intact the sort of perfection I attributed to it in my greedy jubilation—Khadidja had conducted herself as though she were intending to show me that I was strongly mistaken in believing her capable of degrading what I was hoping to protect. Not only, during this last meeting, had she done nothing that might lead me to feel that her behavior was inopportune or frankly annoying, but she had been the one to set down, like an expert artist, the decisive mark that would cause the whole of the picture, now lit by the most tender sort of light, to assume at last its true form. Chance, too, intervened in what was happening to me that day and when, several minutes before departure time, near the train that was waiting in the station, I noticed the tank truck which during our stay at Base 2 had daily brought to our station, served only by a “dead-end road,” the ration of liquid that it was my role to divide up among laboratory, kitchens, and washrooms, it seemed to me that even the things—and not only people—with which I had been involved in this intractable country were coming to me to say good-bye, in keeping with one of the simplest and most cordial of all protocols. Was it to the truck that brought the water, to the person driving it, or to the last ambassador of all those people and those things that I said my good-bye when, wishing him good luck, I tightly clasped the hand of the driver, a large fellow from Martigues, dark skinned and jovial, who generally made his delivery assisted by a man from Oran with a flat, olive-colored face, large dark eyes, and the monkeylike bearing of a picador’s boy, with whom we would go and drink an anisette once our distribution was finished, which sometimes meant three anisettes because of the ritual of buying rounds?

  (Formalism, in accordance with which I would like to see things order themselves as in a ceremonial, and formulation, which I impose on what passes into me so that it will cease to be alien. Except for an occasional sudden plunge into the rejection of all forms—a plunge that is, anyway, immediat
ely taken up and treated as though it were necessary to grasp the form of that plunge that negated all forms—it is only when things or my thoughts submit to a certain arrangement in which logic plays no part that I feel myself carried beyond my singularity, in communion with the outside and very close to a state that one could call total. By chance, it can happen that a thing reveals its formula of its own accord right away, so that one has only to secure it: in the countryside in Limousin where I went immediately after my demobilization, later returning many times to visit those of my close relatives whom the anti-Semitic furor had forced to take refuge there, I happened to observe, in the course of a number of walks, the humble bird of the poultry yard which is the turkey, actually one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever had the opportunity to see; the motion of the turkey when, the wheel of his tail completely tightened, he pivots lightly on his feet, touching the ground with the tips of his lowered wings and emitting a soft breathing sound, all the while strutting about; it reminds one of certain movements made by the matador when the bull won’t charge and the man, in order to provoke him, stamps lightly and shakes his muleta a little.)

  This public farewell which Khadidja seemed to have been expecting even before she sent the boy to me—for, had she been less certain I would come, would she have dressed that way and then installed herself before her door and among her companions at the risk of the offense that would have been represented by the futile deployment of such a production?—did she value it because of an affinity real enough for her to refuse to let me go without taking leave of her? Concerned about her duties toward a faithful customer and wanting everything to be correct to the very end, did she, rather, see this farewell as a formal obligation which neither she nor I had the right to shirk? Or, confident of her power, did she take pride in showing her comrades that an NCO would go to some trouble for her or that the least sign from her was enough to take him out of his way? Greedier and less coquettish, did she think that coming to say good-bye to her I would feel obliged to give her a present? I’m inclined to think there was a little of all this in the motive for her conduct and that by going to her without realizing that she might assume I would have something more substantial to give her than my emotional kiss, I sinned at once against the code of proper behavior and against friendship. Nevertheless, if she was vexed, she had enough manners not to let me suspect it, or—who knows? (and in this case my failure of generosity would show a certain tact)—the very absence of a gift might have been quite in line with what she wanted since it enabled her to feel proud that she was being treated like a lady.