Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  “You’re not afraid of the sun . . . ,” she had said in her harsh voice and I, childishly vain, chose to imagine that she, speaking in the neutral, almost absent tone of a sibyl, had defined my destiny just as an emissary from the beyond would have done, revealing a pact that allied me to the solar element; but, far from admiring my lack of fear of sunstroke, perhaps she intended to give me, the foreigner, a sensible piece of advice or, she being the shameless one who showed herself in broad daylight, sitting in the middle of the street with her face uncovered, she simply felt it was shameful for someone to whom she attributed a certain rank to display himself, in the eyes of everyone, without any protection against the heavenly body and thus to put himself on the same level as men with the crudest sort of skin? By now I have given up sorting out what exact intention could have been hiding behind Khadidja’s words, and I have also ceased to believe there was any real intention there: no doubt she resorted to an ordinary remark—the first that occurred to her—to show me discreetly (with that professional consciousness that seemed to preserve her from all falsehood) that she was attentive to me. A sort of thorough authenticity which she, the prostitute, had known how to preserve within our relations and which in itself alone would explain why it seemed to me I owed her a kind of fidelity: spending several hours at Saïda when the train that was taking us to Oran stopped there, I went with a comrade to see the whorehouse after stopping in at the Moorish bath; here, there was a girl neither ugly nor pretty but rather fresh and of a touching modesty whom it truly distressed me to turn away because I could see how humiliated she was by it but with whom—all the while heaping her with protestations of affection—I refused to go upstairs, not wanting to play with fire yet again and especially not on my way home, also not wanting another adventure at a brothel to ruin what I had found unique in Khadidja during encounters of which only one, the last, had not been marked by a commercial transaction.

  In a pocket of my tunic or my khaki trousers I carried away, leaving North Africa, the silver cross to which I clung as though to an unexpected sign but which, not conforming to this fashion any more than I had adopted the local baggy trousers, I refrained from pinning on my chest as did so many of my comrades with similar jewels that shopowners had sold them and that they were almost as proud to show off as though our stay in the desert, the fact that it was a long and distant exile compensating for its lack of heroism, had earned each of us the honor of a medal hanging from some ribbon. Why, instead of putting an end to the peregrinations of that Southern Cross by keeping it, as one should in the case of a gift (and even more when a specific sentimental meaning is attached to it) did I feel—when I was back in Paris—that the present that had so delighted me when it came to me from that girl, one evening when she had been touched by some mysterious whim I still wonder about, could have no more honest fate than to pass from my hands, which had received it from those other hands, for once not paid, to those of my wife?

  My mobilization, followed a few days later by my departure for North Africa, had opened in my life a large parenthesis. Being torn from the flow of the life one has created and having one’s persona, as defined by one’s affections, one’s occupations, one’s idiosyncrasies, obliterated—this is what gives the civilian when abruptly transformed into a soldier the illusion of starting from zero again, in a world where, no longer having to hold himself more than half responsible, he feels freed of a part of his ties and, however unsatisfying his new condition may be, suffers less from its weight at the same time that he has available to him, in practical terms, a convenient alibi. The nauseating simplification which in certain cases anonymity and the facile excuse of not having one’s hours free give to the person who, in normal times, doesn’t dare take it upon himself to do what he wants. Having become, upon my conscription, subject to the crude arithmetic which knows no other measure of things but that given by regimental numbers, my life, profoundly divided for the past several months, had recovered a semblance of unity.

  Ceasing to continue without too many serious deviations along the path laid out for me by my monogamous union, I had learned from experience that it is not arbitrary to speak of a left hand and a right hand, this existence (until then progressing along an axis rarely and only for short lapses deflected, whenever a little too much rectitude passed the point after which there is nothing but boredom) having revealed itself to be no more than a shadow or a half an existence because for me the sun had risen whose sensuous beams, turned on an object which is exempted by such light from intellectual or moral justifications, tend to make everything vanish but that object. Beauty: that which discredits, which deprives the rest (for all women will become ugly because of a single woman who is beautiful). Beauty, always “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” as it is said of the true poet in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Uncertain beauty, of which too often we will be surprised, almost, at having been to such an extent enthusiasts or instruments, discovering that it was a mere straw fire, a bloom of youth that consumed itself without a trace or apparition projected illusorily before us by an arrangement of mirrors. Beauty, nevertheless, with incarnations so numerous that it will not cease to shine here or there, as long as we escape final blinding under the veils of our fatigue, growing every year. A morocco-leather trinket having the very form and the color of love, the soldier’s knife (offered perhaps mistakenly, since it demonstrated how friendships are severed), the specter of the muleta whose corporeal undulation subjugates the bull and that of a high-pitched drumroll summoning to the splendors of a sabbat my accomplice day and night desperately alive have become for me the distant emblems of that incarnation of beauty, an incarnation whose imagined succubus nudity was replaced by a flesh-and-blood nudity because of the upheaval of mobilization, the state of availability which this disruption of acquired habits had created, the species of legitimacy, too, that the gravity of saying good-bye conferred on licentious vaudeville gestures.

  Obedient to the hateful mechanism that often leads one to proceed from one act to the next as though an earlier act over which our good conscience suffers could later be associated with another act in order to change its meaning or make it a fair counterbalance, I had discovered in a new and twofold betrayal—in which Khadidja had been my partner—the means of minimizing the betrayal for which my lifelong companion had a right to refuse to forgive me: it was as though the sudden impulse resulting from my solitude in the Sahara proved that there was also only a sudden impulse involved in the illicit relationship to which I had been so quick to prove unfaithful; to hand over as an acquittal for the first betrayal the jewel I had received was (without any doubt) to acknowledge that over me it had a kind of dominion and over the other betrayal a preeminence of a sort to make me feel, in the end, almost cleared of guilt in the very moment in which I was exhibiting the token of my repeat offense. Beyond any opportunistic cunning, it also seemed to me that by presenting as a gift this jewel that had its own history, I was making a more valid gesture than if I had simply given the traditional gift of a travel souvenir: the object that had come to me without my buying it represented my own property and in some sense a portion of myself which I was giving up; though less attentive than my companions (one of whose main concerns, once the time approached when we would be returning, had been to acquire this sort of souvenir to bring back to their families), didn’t I have an advantage over them since, far from returning home empty-handed, I was bringing back this miniature star, a silver cross enriched by a significance much weightier than that of any other curio I could have procured by normal means?

  (Everything, as it falls, takes with it its little CUM. Of this fake statement by Paracelsus, a vestige from a treatise on falling bodies I had imagined in a dream—or rather dreamed that I was imagining—and that, except for this vestige, disappeared when I woke up, I had been determined, some thirty years ago, when I wanted to make everything fit into the framework of an esoteric doctrine, to establish a mnemonic figuration using a bronze coin, such
as still existed at that time, and the five dice of a game of poker-dice—also called poker-d’as—of which two, joined and forming a horizontal block, had been placed in a carefully perpendicular position on a table or some other piece of furniture with an adequate surface at the top and to the left of the figure, two others, separated, in an oblique position and on a line descending toward the right at a forty-five-degree angle—the second of these dice positioned on the thick penny—and the fifth, also isolated and vertical like the first two, halfway up toward them and the bronze disc, as though halfway up the slope of a line that, also pointing toward the right, would be the ascending response to the other line; the surfaces presented respectively by the five dice of which this figure was composed were a king, an ace, a ten, a nine, and a jack, the last acting as substitute for the joker who is reminiscent of the Mountebank of the tarots and whom I, stammering metaphysician, saw as, relatively, the demon without which there would be nothingness, so that the figure could be read by anyone who shared my views as a thorough hermeticist: king, every; ace of hearts, the thing as pulp or heart of the world; slanting ten, as it falls, this number appearing to me through my uncertain knowledge of arithmosophy as that of Man and consequently of the Fall; ten-centime piece, takes with it, its form being that of a wheel; slanting nine—positioned perpendicular to the ten to express the meaningful rise of hope—its little, because the nine is the weakest value in the game of poker-dice; jack—in other words assistant, necessary crutch—CUM, that entity about which I write in a gloss contemporary with the figure: “The CUM—Latin for ‘with’—is the adjuvant, the cluster of relations, that is, of accidents, that a body drags with it when it moves from its place. It is also a fraction of the substance of neighboring bodies, every relationship between two bodies being necessarily a physical thing, partaking of the substance of both bodies at once. A body is therefore at once itself and all other bodies since one can connect it to all of them and conceive of them all as existing only in relation to it. Thus, the visual universe is identified with myself, since I have knowledge of it only through my perspective, which I displace along with myself. In the same way, as men fall into death, they take with them a baggage of perceptible links, filaments of fleshly survival they have obtained from the world during their passage there.” Once back from these utopias, I still continued to assign a symbolic value to my five dice—concretions of fate that one holds in one’s hand, not on the level of a sacristy or fortune-teller’s parlor redolent of incense paper, but on that of a low-life bar in which passe anglaise and other illegal games are played—and it was, probably, as one does with a talisman or a viaticum that I deposited them, when she was dead, in the coffin of that friend whom I had helped to vomit one evening of heavy drinking in Montmartre and who, as she was dying, had caused me to feel, beyond all pity and all sorrow, the true holy terror: a great cold that ran up my spine and that the close companion of the dying woman, as he assured me shortly afterward, had observed in the form of a bluish fulguration emanating from my head, when we saw the woman who seemed to exist no longer except at a fabulous distance attempt a half sign of the cross, backwards—the gesture of touching herself on one shoulder, then the other, and that was all—with an expression of intense joy and irony, like a little girl who wanted to play a naughty joke on us; to attempt but not to achieve it, as though she had wanted to go to the very edge, in order to scare us by raising before us, her friends and atheists like her, the specter of a possible conversion, though clearly a heterodox one. Did I hope that, placed in the safest hands, the cross that Khadidja had given me would one day be deposited in a similar way in a corner of my coffin impervious to any hope of survival several seconds or minutes before the cover was closed?)

  The object that, for Khadidja, perhaps represented the price of the obscenities she had performed, either while taking her own pleasure in them or with the same cynical indifference as that other girl from the bousbir who, for the sum of forty sous, publicly put a bottle of beer in her vagina (a spectacle at which I refrained from being present, despite being invited, and which Khadidja also, along with most of her companions, seemed to view as an extreme of which they would leave the monopoly to their colleague, the most inexorably ugly and withered of them all); the object that had passed from those impure hands, then from mine, which were hardly more worthy, into others absolutely faithful and clean did not stay very long in the possession of the woman who, in full knowledge and in full rectitude of heart, had accepted it as deposit. In that Limousin countryside where my wife’s brother-in-law had settled at the time of the 1940 exodus—forced like so many others to seek shelter from the Hitlerites’ outburst of racism—we were looted by Gestapo cops one night in 1943: a sham search motivated by a hunt for a supposed arms depot; in fact, a burglary, one man with a machine gun posted in the garden and all of us who happened to be in the house kept under watch while awaiting, the cops said, the arrival of the car that would take us to Limoges for the interrogation (especially worrying for the one among us who was not “Aryan” and whom in one way or another the occupying force would certainly arrange to hold there, whence an inexpressible anguish that oddly enough had its ebbs and flows, without any direct connection with the course of our thoughts and like a physical nausea subject to its own rhythm so that it sometimes attained its height at the moment when one was formulating to oneself some reassuring thought); then, the cops having slipped away under the pretext of going to see if the tardy vehicle had not broken down or stopped for some reason in the vicinity of the house, our cautious exit from the living room in which we had been confined under the threat of revolvers and, very quickly, the discovery of the truth, when we had visible confirmation of what—without at first daring to believe we would be let off so cheaply—we had for a certain time reckoned, namely that the operation had no other end but to steal all there was in the way of jewels and other easily transportable valuables. For my part, I left in the hands of the looters the pen that I had already used to write a good part of Biffures, the only fountain pen that has been really satisfactory (a Parker replaced today, though it is nowhere near its equivalent, by a 51 model with hooded nib); in addition, I was robbed of all my cigarettes, a rare commodity whose theft I resented as a gratuitous piece of malice, our police certainly numbering among the last to be anxious about procuring tobacco for themselves. As for my wife, she lost, along with her rings and various jewels she prized highly because they had belonged to her family, that silver cross, which she had become accustomed to wearing on her wrist attached to a bracelet hung with many other trinkets. Thus, in accordance (one might have believed) with a scenario for a charade illustrating the proverb Easy come easy go, the object brought back from the brothel vanished almost directly to the Gestapo as though prostitution and police maintained an obligatory collusion in the as yet undestroyed world of which they are cornerstones. When, long after the Liberation, I learned from the newspapers (where I recognized him from the mention of his name and reference to his past as chemist employed in the perfume industry) that one of my messmates in the Hôtel du Sahara had, during the Occupation, joined the SPAC, or Anticommunist Police Service, and was now being hunted down as a member of a team of torturers, it was with a mixture of repugnance and shame that I thought of this boy. In truth, I had never had much liking for him—because of his overly self-satisfied air, his ambitions as a rowdy, and the dullness of mind evident in his approval of the most vulgar slogans of the day—but I put it down to his credit that he happened to be, militarily, one of the few in our group to have taken the bull by the horns by applying for assignment to a fighting unit (one of the few and not the only one, since a similar request had been formulated by the manager of our mess at Base 2, a viscous character whose lack of bone structure disgusted almost all of us and whom, playing rather histrionically the braggadocio, I had been one of the very first to bully, going so far, one evening of drinking, as to slap him in public because he had once said, with the little laugh of a salacio
us sacristan, that he liked to get whores to “tell him their life stories,” without blushing at taking pleasure in extracting confessions that were sometimes accompanied by tears from these women who were of course prepared to do a great deal—theatrical or real—to satisfy the knowing or innocent cruelty of such a large part of their clientele). After everything had been called into question again by the war, that hour of truth, I could not forget that, either out of nonchalance or motivated by a conceited desire for popularity among those whose behavior seemed to prove that they “had what it took,” I had treated a potential persecutor as an individual with whom, without losing prestige, one could maintain an excellent friendship. In the light of such a revelation about the ignominious bent that could be followed by someone with whom I had consented to be on familiar terms without entertaining the least illusion about his mediocrity, which was at once too complacent and too anxious to impress not to be alarming, it appeared to me that during my period in the Sahara I had, all in all, seriously degraded myself and that in believing I was disengaging myself from a certain bourgeois conformity I had fallen into something even worse. Would that corporal of the Legion who had one day spoken to me—without being more precise—about the time when he was “in politics” and of the exaltation he felt then speaking at public meetings, have limited himself to this vague allusion if he had been anything else but a paid agitator, working for some mafia or other? Wasn’t Khadidja, though I am tempted to hail her as my tutelary angel or demon, in some sense the equivalent (since being compliant toward a master was part of her profession) of those atrocious whores who, between one torture session and the next, caroused with the members of the Gestapo or the militiamen? As for me, who, after our banquet, had offered her to my companions the mercenaries (for fear, perhaps, that she would do this herself), hadn’t I, by treating her like a prize that one passes from one soldier to the next, embraced a good deal of the degradation that she shared with all those, men or women, who in some way or other use themselves for commercial transactions? But if I justly accused myself of having often been—however scornful toward certain people—too indulgent in my choice of male companions, wasn’t it because of an old Manicheism originating in my childhood (when everything, despite the compromise of Purgatory, was either theological virtue or capital sin, treasure of the good or arsenal of the wicked) that after having endowed this girl with an almost sidereal brilliance I was prepared to suspect her of having harbored in her flesh the most abject potentialities?