Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  Not sure what to do, I spent most of the day pretending that nothing had happened—with Claude, I had become accustomed to ailments and crises, or perhaps even anesthetized—but when darkness fell and she still had not returned a sudden flurry of panic drove me out onto the streets. We had recently moved to an apartment on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, and Claude’s aunt, Marguerite Moreno, lived a few doors down. I tried her first. There was nothing she could tell me. Next, I went to Adrienne’s bookshop, but she hadn’t seen Claude for days. Nor had Sylvia. Constant Lounsbery hadn’t seen her either. I telephoned Charles-Henri Barbier, a friend Claude had made not long after leaving the Sorbonne. He offered to help me look for her. I thanked him, but said I would be better on my own. I called on everyone I could think of. Nobody had any idea where she might be. I even knocked on Gertrude Stein’s door, only to be told by her melancholy lover, the one with the drooping eyelids and the weighty metal earrings, that Gertrude was working, and couldn’t be disturbed.

  I wandered the streets without a plan, feeling increasingly desperate. I felt stupid. There was something I wasn’t seeing, something I had failed to imagine. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t think of an explanation that wasn’t catastrophic. Either she was dead or she had left me. I walked into the Cyrano on Place Blanche and took a table by the window. I ordered a pastis. It was ten o’clock by then. Some people I recognized from La Maison des Amis des Livres were sitting by the far wall. Philippe Soupault, with his hat pulled down low over his eyes. Aragon in a black leather coat. Paul Éluard and his Russian wife, Gala. Soupault stopped at my table and spoke to me. He had not forgotten that Claude had turned him down. Maybe, in time, he said, she could be persuaded to reconsider. Maybe, I said. I drank a second pastis, and then a third. The cloudy, milky liquid burned my throat. Soupault passed my table again and asked if I wanted to come to Breton’s apartment. An event was taking place, he said. It was close by. He pointed through the window, across the square.

  “What kind of event?” I asked.

  “Do you know Desnos?”

  I shook my head.

  “He’s a poet. A good friend of Breton’s. He goes into trances and speaks directly from his unconscious. Breton calls it ‘taking subversive action through language.’ ”

  We walked through light rain to rue Fontaine. Breton lived at number 40, above a cabaret called Heaven and Hell. Once inside the building, I followed Soupault up the stairs. My forehead felt warm and clammy. I saw Claude sprawled awkwardly on a pavement, one leg twisted under her. An open window high above, pale curtains drifting…

  As we stood outside Breton’s door, Soupault was looking at me. “Are you nervous?”

  “Perhaps. Just a little.”

  “Don’t be.”

  On the floor, where a doormat would traditionally be found, was a book by Anatole France, an author Breton was known to despise—in his novels, France celebrated the sort of blind, unthinking patriotism that had led to the Great War, and to the futile sacrifice of so many lives, including that of my brother—and Soupault and I both wiped our feet on its already torn and tattered pages before we rang the bell.

  Inside the apartment it was dark, and people stood about in the shadows, talking in hushed voices. The mood was one of expectation, and also of self-importance. André Breton was younger than I imagined he would be, but he had the appearance of great substance and authority. I thought this might have something to do with the size of his head, which was out of proportion to the rest of him and topped with hair that was swept back, almost leonine. I moved into a room that overlooked the street. On boulevard Clichy the nightclub signs flashed on and off, and the room glowed pink, then blue, then pink again. The tribal masks and fetish dolls that hung on the walls jumped out at me. Jumped back. Breton’s new wife, Simone, serene as a high priestess, was serving glasses of mandarin-flavored curaçao.

  “Shall we begin?” Breton said.

  Several people took their seats at a round table. Those of us who couldn’t find a chair stood behind them, in a circle. A young man with curious, oyster-colored eyes achieved a state of auto-hypnosis that lasted more than an hour. This was Robert Desnos, the poet Soupault had spoken of. I wasn’t sure if the trance was real, and there was a sense in which it didn’t matter; in the context of the evening, authenticity had many forms. Desnos talked fluently, translating the random, disconcerting emanations of his unconscious into lucid images and words. He juxtaposed his dreams and fears with a number of mundane concerns. One moment he was a seer. The next, a fool. Eventually, he became violent, threatening the man sitting next to him, and Breton had to step in and wake him up.

  Later, I found myself standing in front of Desnos. Something of his performance remained—a certain distance, an aura, a kind of afterglow.

  “That was remarkable,” I said.

  His smile was sleepy, dreamy, his heavy eyelids lowering over those extraordinary eyes. “I don’t remember a thing.”

  It was after midnight when I walked back down the stairs. When I said goodbye to Soupault, he asked if I had enjoyed myself. I told him that I had. In truth, I didn’t know what to make of the event. It had somehow managed to be at once compelling and ridiculous. I shook my head. Claude, though…Where could she be? The alcohol was wearing off, and I felt blurred and numb, but also frantic. If I pictured the inside of my head, I saw forked lightning flickering at the base of a huge black sky.

  I hurried back to rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. The apartment was dark and silent. I stood at the window, looking out. A tree shook in the wind.

  When I woke the next morning, Claude still had not come home. I did the things I always did—I bought bread, made coffee, swept and mopped the floors—but I moved in a kind of stupor. I was desolate. From now on, I would live alone. It was the first day of a new gray life.

  Charles-Henri Barbier appeared at the door.

  “Any sign of her?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  Still only twenty-one, Charles-Henri had a strong nose, like a warrior, and eyes that always looked concerned. He had studied at the Sorbonne, as Claude had, and belonged to a group of young intellectuals who produced Philosophies, a magazine to which Claude had contributed. That morning, he talked about Claude’s spontaneity. It was an attribute he approved of, he said, one he wished he had himself. He was still with me when a key turned in the lock and Claude walked in with two sunflowers wrapped in brown paper and a bag of avocados. She was wearing a pale-blue cotton shirt and a pair of baggy trousers that were spattered with mud. There were traces of gold paint in her eyebrows and inside her ears.

  Charles-Henri greeted her, telling her we had been worried about her, then tactfully withdrew. When the door had closed behind him, Claude put her arms around me.

  “Poor Marcel. I wasn’t thinking.” She started, as if she had discovered a truth. “But that’s how we should live, isn’t it—instinctively, and without restraints.”

  “There’s no such thing as should,” I muttered.

  She stroked my hair. “You’re right.”

  “Where were you?”

  The previous morning she had woken at five, she told me, a kind of shiver at the edges of her field of vision. She was seeing in too much detail—the jeweled bubbles in a glass of water on the bedside table, the shadow between each page of a closed book. I was fast asleep, and she envied me that sleep, so untroubled and oblivious. She decided to go out. The click of the front door closing was neat as a full stop—but an end is also a beginning. She walked east, towards Île Saint-Louis.

  Half an hour later, she was descending a flight of steps that led down to the river when a voice called out.

  “Garçon?”

  The word was unexpected, and yet completely in tune with her shifting, fluid sense of herself. It was almost as if her thoughts had become audible. Looking round, she saw an African woman seated on a bench. The woman wo
re a faded coffee-colored dress, dusty black ankle boots, and a pair of sunglasses with oval lenses.

  “Can you help me?” She spoke French with a heavy, sugary accent.

  Claude walked over. This was hardly the first time she had been mistaken for a young man or a boy, but she felt a thrill nonetheless.

  “My eyes are not so good,” the woman said.

  She explained that she had wandered far from her people, and that she needed some assistance in finding her way back. She spoke with a grandness that implied the journey would be long and dramatic, and Claude pictured wooden market stalls on cracked red earth and distant, wind-carved dunes that rose and fell like waves.

  “I’d be happy to guide you,” she said. “But where are they, your people?”

  “The Zone.”

  This was a derelict space on the outskirts of the city, the dwelling place of gypsies, ragpickers, and other dubious itinerants. Not another country, then, but still a good few miles away.

  She asked the woman’s name.

  “I’m Soulef. And you?”

  “Claude.”

  How could she explain the feeling of exhilaration as Soulef took her arm and they began to walk? Was it the sense of purpose that only a coincidence can offer?

  They crossed the river by way of the Pont Neuf and moved north, towards Porte Saint-Denis. Soulef murmured to herself constantly. Her mysterious, explosive exclamations—Mais oui! or Voilà!—didn’t appear to be prompted by anything that happened on the street but rather by events or revelations that were taking place inside her head. She smelled marvelously of rose petals and molasses. A little pale blue stole into the sky, but the air was still cool. It seemed unlikely it would rain.

  After perhaps an hour Soulef came to a halt. They stood at the junction of rue d’Hauteville and rue de Paradis, the streets high and narrow, almost gorgelike, with shops and bars occupying the ground floors of many of the buildings.

  She lifted her head. “We should have a drink—something to fortify ourselves.”

  “I don’t usually drink,” Claude said. “Not in the morning, anyhow.”

  “Usually is not a word that applies today,” Soulef said.

  They entered a bar on the corner, and a young woman put two glasses of calvados in front of them. Like Soulef, the young woman looked African, though her skin was darker. Swallowing the drink in a single gulp, Soulef banged the glass down on the counter, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and turned away. The young woman watched her go, her face undisturbed, like a pond that absorbs a thrown pebble without producing any ripples. When Claude asked to pay, the young woman shook her head and made a quick, sharp sound against the roof of her mouth with her tongue.

  Out on the pavement, Soulef reached for Claude’s arm and they set off once more.

  “That young woman in the bar,” Claude said. “She didn’t want any money.”

  “She’s my daughter,” Soulef said.

  Claude glanced over her shoulder. Though she was shocked—puzzled too—she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  As they journeyed north, they drew comments from several people on the street. One man with a ladder balanced on his shoulder stood in front of them and pointed to the east. That way for Salpêtrière, he said. Salpêtrière, as Claude was well aware, was the city’s most notorious asylum.

  Soulef adjusted her dark glasses. “The third rung from the top is rather weak,” she said. “Beware of accidents.”

  The man gaped at her as she moved on.

  When Claude asked how she knew about the ladder, she dismissed the question with a wave of the hand. “The ladder has no relevance.”

  A few minutes later, she said, “You can always make things happen if you articulate with sufficient confidence and power.”

  By the time they arrived at Porte de Clignancourt it was nearly dark. They pushed through the flea market and on into the Zone, an area of wasteland between a railway line and a canal. A derelict factory stood on the mud, its doors hanging off their hinges, most of its windows broken.

  A fire burned near the entrance, old chairs and carriage wheels sticking up out of the flames. A few people huddled in a small group, talking and smoking. One of them was bald, and had a drum strapped to his chest. On seeing Soulef, there was a flash of gold and a watery hiss as a tattooed woman brought two cymbals together.

  “My people,” Soulef said.

  That evening, a banquet was held on the top floor of the building. There were rabbits roasted on skewers, tomatoes salvaged from the gutters in the market, and clay jugs of rough red wine. Afterwards, when the table was a mess of spillages and bones, Claude asked Soulef about her family.

  “I found them, just as I found you.” She gave Claude a strange, fierce smile, her mouth shiny with meat juices. “If you wish, you could be one of us. You’d be most welcome.”

  Claude couldn’t think how to answer.

  “Though I suspect,” Soulef added, “that you have another path.”

  Towards midnight, a man played the accordion, and a young couple danced. Drizzle fell from a gritty, granite sky. Later, a woman painted Claude’s face gold, like a Buddha. Later still, Claude stripped off her clothes and swam in the cold canal. As she dried herself next to the fire, a man walked towards her on his hands, his legs bent at the knee, the heels of his boots dangling just above his forehead.

  “You know, of course,” he said, looking sideways and upwards at her, “that Soulef is a fortune-teller of great repute.”

  “I had no idea,” Claude said. “She didn’t mention it.”

  “That’s because she’s modest.”

  “You think she would tell my fortune?”

  “How would I know?” he said. “I’m not the one who can see into the future.” Still on his hands, he walked away.

  Claude broke off and looked at me. “You know something, Suzanne? If I went back to the Zone, I don’t think there would be any trace of their presence.”

  “You’re sure they were really there?”

  Claude shrugged. “Even if I imagined the whole thing, it would be no less valid.”

  “And that woman,” I said. “Did she tell your fortune, in the end?”

  Claude looked at me, her expression delicate, but fully inhabited, complete, like a glass of water filled right to the brim. “Yes.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘You’ve found your soul’s companion. The other you.’ ”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “I smiled and said, ‘I know.’ ”

  André Breton, Robert Desnos, Philippe Soupault…It was only later that I understood the significance of what I had witnessed that night—not the birth of Surrealism, perhaps, but a glimpse of the movement in its infancy. Back then, in the days before the first manifesto, the emphasis was on words rather than images. Inspired by Freud, the Surrealists used automatic writing and trancelike states to unearth the truths hidden in language and in themselves. They were trying to capture the actual functioning of thought. They wanted to replicate the kind of instinctive, irrational awareness that was found in dreams, and could also be induced by games and activities, most famously, déambulation, as Breton called it later, a random drifting or wandering through the city that left the walker open to chance encounters and discoveries. We didn’t realize it at the time, but in her spontaneous meeting with Soulef, and her apparent willingness to go wherever Soulef went, Claude had acted just like the Surrealists. In fact, her behavior had preceded theirs. But we made no attempt to join them. While we shared many of their sympathies and their objectives—the rejection of traditional structures like religion and the family, the opening of a dialogue between reality and dream, the determination to re-enchant a disenchanted world—and while we subscribed to a romantic version of Marxism, as Breton did, we saw the movement as one that was dominated by men who
seemed unwilling or unable to take women seriously, and who regarded homosexuality with wariness, if not disgust. Also, we had no real interest in affiliation. We were too private. Too particular.

  As for my visit to rue Fontaine, I didn’t mention it to Claude. I’m not sure why. It might have been because I didn’t want to appear to be competing with her. She thought she was the one who had had an adventure. It didn’t occur to her that I might have had one too. Or perhaps my attending that event in Breton’s apartment seemed at odds with the impression I had given—namely that, in her absence, I had been consumed with anxiety and fear. As the weeks went by, it became more and more difficult to bring the subject up—there was never a right moment—and in the end, almost by default, it turned into a secret.

  St. Brelade’s Bay, sometime in the early twenties. The kind of afternoon that doesn’t feel hot until the wind drops. By now, Helen Colley and her son Bob were running the hotel, and since they thought of us as regulars—we had holidayed in Jersey every summer for the past few years—they had given us a room with a south-facing terrace and a panoramic view of the beach. Claude was sitting by the French window, her legs in the sun, the rest of her body in the shade. She was reading an issue of Inversions, an underground homosexual magazine to which she had contributed, and which, some months later, would be seized by the police and banned. From outside came the muted cries of gulls and children.

  That morning I had traveled into St. Helier to collect several rolls of film from Sennett & Spears, the local developers, and I had spread some of the photographs out on the bed.

  “Damn,” I said.

  I was looking at an image of Claude in her bathing suit, an attempt to replicate a picture I had taken a few years before. Perched on the rocks and sitting sideways-on to the camera, she had drawn her knees up to her chest. Her hands were looped around her ankles. At first glance, she looked like a child, but the expression on her face was self-possessed and challenging, almost fierce. It would have been a good picture had there not been a shadow in the bottom right-hand corner.