Scraps
Page 30
During these past few months, in my daydreams—sinister ones, if I have drunk a little the night before or the night before that, and am not in good condition—I have been chewing over the old theme of suicide like a refrain coming back to me from very far away: the urgent need to have in the house something that ought to help one to live!—certainly not a revolver (because it is too frightening) but the exact dose of sleeping medicine that would allow one gently to do away with oneself some day; the progress in civilization that would be represented by the existence of brothels where one would go to have oneself killed by beautiful, expert, and compassionate women, this progress in addition to the improvement in household arrangements consisting of installing in each apartment a body chute just as there are garbage chutes in quite a few modern buildings (this being the logical way to process the deceased, since we lack the belief that in Egypt justified depositing them in a sarcophagus between two representations, carved or even in relief, of nude female figures: on the verso of the cover, Nut, the celestial goddess, her arms raised and her nocturnal charms floating like a ceiling over the dead person; on the inner surface of the bottom, and with her arms lowered, the infernal goddess Amentit lying beneath the form of the deceased).
To my city dwelling of 53 bis quai des Grands Augustins, where I moved right in the midst of the Occupation, a country house situated in the Etampes region was added about eighteen months ago. A large house with a number of granaries, outhouses or other dependencies, and even a Roman chapel in ruins, this is what I—who used to dream I was some sort of foster brother to the “outlaws”—now co-own, in practical terms. My wife, myself, and the relatives with whom we live spend almost every weekend there. Built on the site of a priory that had its own ossuary (as was discovered during some digging which resulted in the unexpected exhumation of a number of skulls and pieces of skeleton belonging, evidently, to the old nuns) this house has been occupied, since it has belonged to us, by a family from Guadeloupe whose adult members are friends of ours almost as much as they are caretakers; the wife, a mulatto, serves as housekeeper and the husband, a black, takes care of the garden, a little Negress (who is, I think, seventeen) looking after the housework and the cooking. Along with some poultry, a few rabbits, a cat, and two pairs of birds (turtledoves and rock pigeons) there is a bitch who is called Dine, as in the song of the Valois, but was almost named Diane, Didon, or Dina, the initial D being required of us by the custom according to which pedigreed dogs born in the same year are all given names beginning with the same letter.
These people, whom I knew in their own homeland—when I sweated (always too much, in my opinion) under the island sun; this animal who always wants to play or take a walk and gives everyone a lavish welcome; a house nearly a century and a half old; a pretty view, trees, space, a fairly isolated spot: in short, a good many of the things that allow one to be happy. Is it on this estate that I would like to be buried? I had that idea for a short time, but I quickly rejected it, not wanting to play the part of a squire bent on resting in his own lands anymore than I want to be the falsely modest fellow who insists upon the potter’s field—an elegant way of disowning one’s family in the apparendy egalitarian wish to mingle with everyone—and also regarding it as absurd for a non-Christian like me (or even for a Christian) to attach any sort of importance to the fate of his remains. Similarly, I rejected the plan, formed on another day of macabre daydreaming, of having myself buried dressed in the smoking jacket of a slightly too blue tropical fabric that I wore (not without uneasiness, because it was more garish than I had expected) both times I went to Venice for the opera performances which, during the music festival, take place at the Fenice (or, in French, le Phénix) Theater. Worthy of a more serious examination than these egoistic confessions (those of a bachelor having the only say in his final disposal, to the exclusion of a partner who might be justified in considering that she shared the responsibility) is the plan of making the eyeballs of my future corpse available to surgeons for blind people: here, one would be accomplishing something useful and not simply rectifying what was perhaps a failure of taste in assigning a mortuary role to a showy suit of clothes which one hesitated to wear while still alive; to suppress the little chill in the back engendered by the prospect of a posthumous butchery ought not, certainly, to cost me much, for one certainly has no need to be very courageous to display some valor beyond the tomb.
If it appears untenable to express on our own account—as though preparing an entrance to a masked ball for the absent one which we will be—any sort of desire having to do with our own funeral arrangements, is it similarly senseless to wish that our life, instead of stopping short like a serial story that has been suddenly interrupted, should be extended, even if only a little, in what a few other people might derive from it? After my separation from Khadidja, followed by an enormous jostle of events, had caused her to become, for me, almost the equivalent of a dead woman (whom I would have liked to see reappear in a pool of shadow or light when, in Algiers, I visited the Casbah), that jewel which disappeared in the end played—without the faraway woman knowing anything about it—the role of another of her incarnations, whose story was linked as a new phase to the brief episode of our encounter. Is it stupid of me to wish that once I am dead, a legacy concerning my inward parts (my two eyes if I make up my mind to it and, in any case, a written work resembling me, though the usefulness of that particular legacy may be terribly debatable) may allow me, as was the case with the cross given by Khadidja, to open the chapter—whose unfolding, to my very great annoyance, is unforeseeable—in which my story will come to an end?
But, in recounting the blackest thoughts one by one like this, as though I enjoyed improvising a depressing recitative on some out-of-tune instrument, I am probably just as ridiculous as those comrades of mine in the army who could see nothing else in the spot to which we had been led by a dead-end road but a backwater where they would perish of immobility and desolation.
Rebecca, the servant Agar, Naomi, Rachel (who also appears in the card game, along with Judith, Pallas Athena, and the unknown Argina, whom one never worried about): beauties with insidious names which, in Hebrew legend, confront a comic Potiphar and—like the young girl as thin as “the E string of a mandolin”—correspond to a moving capacity for invention, whose sparkling productions are also signs of gratitude. Khadidja the promiscuous, crowned with a piece of green muslin like a sharif’s turban to speak to me about the sun and more naked perhaps than in our past embraces when my mouth rested against her cheek for a good-bye kiss simply exchanged from one person to another; that friend, on whose pale forehead my hand pressed twice and who died so radiant after a sign almost as confusing as the sight of a watch suddenly beginning to move backwards, denying the order of things as well as the passage of time: truthful images which, I will dare to say, are for me, even though imbued with melancholy, rather comforting, their magic causing me to forget, in the case of the first, the pitiful life led by the woman herself and, in the case of the second, the fact that it is nothing more than the trace left at the bottom of several memories by a person as unshakable in her demand for high ideals, as those close to her knew, as she was violent in her rebellion against the norms to which most people subscribed. However demoralizing our condition may be and however frankly detestable our institutions make it for a great number—which increases my discomfort at adding to it a bad conscience—can I despair completely and give up trying to discover a program other than an abandonment to the undulation of personal desires and repulsions or a morose utilitarianism, as long as this world appears to me as the place where a quantity, even if infinitesimal, of acts and words came into being in which a human accord was formulated in a pure state, so to speak, and which (even if only in the lightning flash of a fortunate throw of the dice) organized themselves into crystals of a design so perfect they made me cry out in admiration?
Vedi? ... di morte l’angelo
Radiante a noi si appressa . . .
sweetly sing Radamès and Aïda, almost happy, though half dead of asphyxiation in their funeral cave; as though, within the darkness in which they are illuminated by love, these two lovers—of a kind, however, never thus far encountered outside novels and operas—imagined in the dazzling guise of a single archangel the burn that Aida was, at least, for Radamès and Radamès for Aida.
1948-1955
MICHEL LEIRIS (1901-1990), born in Paris, was an early Surrealist, an ethnographer, and a prominent and influential writer of poetry, essays, a novel, and, most importantly, the 4-volume, 35-year project of autobiographical and linguistic self-reflection, The Rules of the Game, of which Scraps is the second volume to appear in English.
LYDIA DAVIS, recipient of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, is the author of, most recently, Cant and Won’t (2014) and The Collected Stories (2009). She has translated many works from the French and other languages, including Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010).