Compass

by Mathias Enard

  I wonder why I’m thinking about all that now, a hallucinatory trail perhaps, a comet’s tail, a sensual afterglow contaminating the memory of the power of desire, I should accept that the night is dead, get up and go on to something else, correct that paper on Gluck or reread my article on Marouf, the Cairo Cobbler, the opera adapted from Charles Mardrus’s translation of The Thousand and One Nights; I’d like to send it to Sarah, that would be my answer to her opus on the wine of the dead in mysterious Sarawak. I could send her an email, but I know that if I write to her I’ll spend the next few days glued to the computer like an idiot, waiting for her answer. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so bad at the Crime Museum, at least she was there, I’d even have gone to the Funeral Museum or to the Narrenturm to look one more time, in the old Tower of Fools, at horrible genetic anomalies and terrifying pathologies, if she had wanted to go there.

  Not much is missing from that article on Marouf, the Cairo Cobbler, just a touch of je-ne-sais-quoi, aha I could ask Sarah for advice right away, not just send it to her, that would be an entirely intelligent maneuver to make contact with her, instead of confessing to her straight out “I miss you” or subtly reminding her of the naked woman in the Crime Museum (do you remember, dear Sarah, the emotion that gripped me when we contemplated a pornographic image together in a bloody basement?), she too has studied the work of Dr. Mardrus and especially that of his wife Lucie, the first character in her collection of Orientalist women, along with Lou Andreas-Salomé and Jane Dieulafoy. Joseph Charles Mardrus the Caucasian of literature, whose grandfather had fought the Russians in the ranks of the imam Shamyl, there’s a man I’d have liked to meet, Mardrus, in that high-society Paris of the 1890s; he was friends with Mallarmé, then with Apollinaire; as soon as he disembarked from the Messageries Maritimes liner where he officiated as ship’s doctor he became, thanks to his charm and erudition, the heartthrob of the Parisian salons — that’s what I need to write my great work, a few years’ stay in a ship’s cabin, between Marseille and Saigon. Mardrus translated the entirety of The Thousand and One Nights at sea; he grew up in Cairo, studied medicine in Beirut, Arabic was so to speak his native language, that’s the big advantage he has over us Western-born Orientalists, all that time spent learning the language that he saved. The discovery of the Nights in Mardrus’s translation provoked a wave of adaptations, imitations, continuations of the masterpiece, just as Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales, Rückert’s poems, or Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan had done fifty years earlier. This time people thought it was the Orient itself that breathed its force, its eroticism, its exotic power directly into turn-of-the-century art; they loved the sensuality, the violence, the pleasure, the adventures, the monsters and djinns, they copied them, commented on them, multiplied them; they thought they could finally see, without any intermediary, the true face of the eternal and mysterious Orient: but in fact the Orient of Mardrus, still a reflection, another Third-Orient; it’s the Orient, when all is said and done, of Mallarmé and of La Revue blanche, the eroticism of Pierre Louÿs, a representation, an interpretation. As in Joseph Roth’s Tale of the 1002nd Night or Hofmannsthal’s Scheherazade, the motifs in the Nights are used to suggest, to create a tension in a European context; the shah’s desire, in Roth’s novel, to sleep with Countess W. sets off an entirely Viennese intrigue, the way Rimsky-Korsakov’s ballets in Scheherazade or Mata Hari’s dances serve to arouse the Parisian bourgeoisie: in the end, any relationship they had with a so-called real Orient matters little. We ourselves, in the desert, under the Bedouins’ tent, although faced with the most tangible reality of nomad life, were coming up against our own representations, which, by our preconceptions, interfered with the possibility of experiencing this life that was not our own; the poverty of these women and men seemed to us to be full of the poetry of the ancients, their destitution reminded us of that of the hermits and the mystics, their superstitions made us travel through time, the exoticism of their condition prevented us from understanding their vision of existence, just as they saw us — with our bareheaded woman, our SUV, and our rudimentary Arabic — as eccentric idiots, possibly whose money and even car they envied, but certainly not our knowledge or intelligence, not even our technology: the old sheikh had told us that the last Westerners he had welcomed, European without a doubt, had come in a camper van and that the terrible roar of their generator (for the fridge, probably) had kept them from sleeping all night. Only the peddler, I thought while I urinated under Halley’s comet, scrutinizing the darkness to make sure the dog wasn’t about to eat my balls, actually shared the life of this tribe, since he participated in it; eight months a year, he gave up everything to flog his trinkets. We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When Chateaubriand invented travel literature with his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem in 1811, long before Stendhal and his Memoirs of an Egotist, more or less at the same time as the publication of Goethe’s Italian Journey, Chateaubriand was spying for the sake of art; he was certainly no longer the explorer who spied for science or for the army: he spied mainly for literature. Art has its spies, just as history or the natural sciences have theirs. Archaeology is a form of espionage, botany, poetry as well; ethnomusicologists are spies of music. Spies are travelers, travelers are spies. “Don’t trust the stories of travelers,” says Saadi in the The Gulistan. They see nothing. They think they see, but they observe only reflections. We are prisoners of images, of representations, Sarah would say, and only those who, like her or like the peddler, choose to rid themselves of their lives (if such a thing is actually possible) can reach the other. I remember the sound of my urine falling on the stones in the intoxicating silence of the desert; I remember my little thoughts, very futile in light of the infinity of beings; I had no awareness of the ants and spiders I was drowning in the urine. We are condemned, as Montaigne says in his last Essay, to think the way we piss — on the fly, quickly and furtively, like spies. Only love, I thought as I went back to the tent, shivering from cold and desire at the memory of the previous night, opens us up to the other; love as renunciation, as fusion — nothing surprising in these two absolutes, the desert and love, encountering each other to produce one of the most important monuments in universal literature, the madness of Majnun who shouted his passion for Layla to the stones and horned vipers, Layla whom he loved, around the year 750, in a very similar tent. The goatskin wall was closed; the light from the gas lamp filtered through a little door, you had to stoop down to enter. Bilger was half lying on a wool mattress, a glass of cinnamon tea in his hand; Sarah had disappeared. She had been invited to go over to the women’s side, in the tent’s other room, while Bilger and I stayed with the men. They unrolled a bed covered with a quilt that smelled wonderfully of wood-fire and animal. The old man was lying down, the peddler had rolled himself up in a big black cloak, a prophet’s posture. I am in the desert, like Layla’s Qays the Mad, so in love that he gave up his being to live with the gazelles in the midst of the steppe. Me too, they’ve taken Sarah away from me, depriving me of my second night lying against her, chaste night of pure love, and I could have shouted some despairing verses to the moon or the comet, singing of the beauty of my beloved, which social conventions had just torn from my care. I thought of the long flights of Qays Majnun into the desert, to cry his despair onto the traces of Layla’s family’s camp, scratching myself furiously, convinced the wool or cotton of my mattress was overflowing with fleas and other rabid creatures ready to devour my legs.

  I could hear Bilger snoring softly; outside a flagpole or a halyard jangled in the breeze, it was like being in a moored sailboat — finally I fell asleep. It was a round moon, at ground level, just before dawn, that woke me, as they were opening the tent onto the gently blue-tinted immensity: the shadow of a woman lifted the section of cloth and the smell of the desert (dry earth, ash, anim
als) whirled around me, in the still-muted cackling of the hens that were pecking at the ground, horrible furtive monsters in the half-light, gathering up the breadcrumbs from our dinner or the nighttime insects our heat had attracted — then the dawn slipped its rosy fingers through the mist, jostling the moon, and everything seemed to come to life at once: the rooster crowed, the old sheikh chased away the overly adventurous chickens with a flip of his blanket, the peddler got up, slipped the cloak he had rolled himself up in at night around his shoulders and went out — only Bilger was still sleeping; I glanced at my watch, it was five a.m. I got up in turn; the women were busy in front of the tent, they motioned me over. The peddler was performing his ablutions sparingly, with a blue plastic pitcher — one of the objects he sold, I imagined. Aside from the slight reddishness in the sky to the east, it was still freezing and very dark out; the dog was still sleeping, curled up against the outer wall. I wondered if I would see Sarah come out too, maybe she was sleeping, like the dog, like Bilger. I stayed there, watching the sky open up, with Félicien David’s oratorio in my head, the first to have rendered the terrifying simplicity of the desert in music.

  If it was five o’clock already I could get up now, exhausted as I am every morning, vanquished by the night; impossible to escape these memories of Sarah, I wonder if it’s better to chase them away or abandon myself completely to desire and reminiscence. I am paralyzed, sitting up in bed, how long have I been staring at the bookshelves, motionless, my head elsewhere, my hand still clinging to the switch, a kid clutching his rattle? What time is it? Waking up is the crutch of the insomniac, I should buy myself a mosque-alarm clock like Bilger in Damascus, the mosque of Medina or Jerusalem, in gilded plastic, with a little compass built in to indicate the direction of prayer — that’s the superiority of the Muslim over the Christian: in Germany they impose the Scriptures on you in the back of the bedside table drawer, in Muslim hotels they stick a little compass for you into the wood of the bed, or they draw a wind rose marking the direction of Mecca on the desk, compass and wind rose that can indeed serve to locate the Arabic peninsula, but also, if you’re so inclined, Rome, Vienna, or Moscow: you’re never lost in these lands. I even saw some prayer rugs with a little compass woven into them, carpets you immediately wanted to set flying, since they were so prepared for aerial navigation: a garden in the clouds with, like Solomon’s carpet in Jewish legend, a canopy of doves to protect you from the sun — there would be a lot to write about flying carpets, about those fine illustrations, so propitious to daydreaming, of princes and princesses sitting cross-legged, in sumptuous outfits, right in the middle of a mythical sky, reddening to the west, carpets that owe no doubt more to the tales of Wilhelm Hauff than to the Thousand and One Nights themselves, more to the customs and sets of the Scheherazade of Russian ballets than to the texts of Arabic or Persian authors — once again, a linked construction, a complex work of time where imagination is superimposed atop imagination, creation over creation, between Europe and Dar el-Islam. The Turks and Persians are familiar with the translated versions of the Nights by Antoine Galland and Richard Burton, and only rarely bother to translate them from the Arabic; they imagine, in turn, what others before them have translated: the Scheherazade who finds Iran in the twentieth century has traveled far, she has weighed herself down with the France of Louis XIV, Victorian England, Tsarist Russia; her very face stems from a mingling of Safavid miniatures, Paul Poiret’s costumes, Georges Lepape’s fashionable women, and the Iranian women of today. “On the Cosmopolitan Fate of Magical Objects,” there’s a title for Sarah: it would include a discussion of genie lamps, flying carpets, and fabulous slippers; she could show how these objects are the result of successive shared efforts, and how what we regard as purely “Oriental” is in fact, very often, the repetition of a “Western” element that itself modifies another previous “Oriental” element, and so on; she could conclude that Orient and Occident never appear separately, that they are always intermingled, present in each other, and that these words — Orient, Occident — have no more heuristic value than the unreachable directions they designate. I imagine she’d finish it all up with a political projection on cosmopolitanism as the only point of view possible on the question. Me too, if I were more — more what? More brilliant, healthier, more decisive, I could develop this laughable article on Marouf, the Cairo Cobbler, Henri Rabaud and Charles Mardrus, and construct a real synthesis of that famous Third-Orient in French music, around the students of Massenet maybe, Rabaud himself, but also Florent Schmitt, Reynaldo Hahn, Ernest Chausson, and especially Georges Enesco, there’s an interesting case, an “Oriental” who returns to the “Orient” after a stopover in France. All of Massenet’s students composed Orientalist desert or caravan melodies, settings of Gautier’s “La Caravane” (“The human caravan in the Sahara of the world . . .”) to Jules Lemaître’s “Petites Orientales” — I’ve always wondered who this Jules Lemaître was — no doubt very different from the caravan of “Through the Desert,” the aria in the second act of Marouf, when Marouf, to trick the merchants and the sultan, invents a rich caravan of thousands of camels and mules that should be arriving any day and describes in detail its precious cargo, with a great deal of Orientalism, which is rather vertiginous: there is a dream of the Orient in Arabic tales themselves, dream of jewels, silks, beauty, love, and this dream that, for us, is an Oriental dream is in fact a Biblical and Koranic reverie; it resembles the descriptions of Paradise in the Koran, where we will be presented with golden vases and cups full of anything we might desire, and everything will charm our eyes, where we will have fruits in abundance, in gardens and springs, where we will wear clothing of fine silk and brocade, where we will have houris with beautiful eyes, where we will be served drinks of nectar scented with musk. The caravan of Marouf — that of the Thousand and One Nights — uses these elements ironically: of course, his description is exaggerated, outrageous; it’s a lie, a lie made to charm the audience, a wonderful catalog, a catalog of dream. You could find in the Nights many examples of this exaggerated Orientalism in the Orient. Henri Rabaud’s caravan aria adds a movement to this construction: Mardrus’s translation of The Tale of the Honey Cake is adapted for Marouf, the Cobbler of Cairo by a librettist, Lucien Népoty, then set to music by Rabaud, with brilliant orchestration: here again, Massenet is in the shadows, hidden behind a dune in that imaginary desert through which wander (in G minor of course, with trills from the strings and glissandos from the woodwinds) the camels and mules of this extraordinary caravan of cloth, rubies, and sapphires guarded by a thousand Mamelukes, “handsome as moons.” Very ironically, the music exaggerates, forces the issue: you can hear the mule drivers’ sticks hitting the donkeys at each measure, a figuralism that would be pretty ridiculous, I must say, if it weren’t actually funny, exaggerated, made to dupe the merchants and the sultan: they have to hear the caravan for them to believe in it! And, miracle of music as much as speech, they believe it!

  I suppose Reynaldo Hahn, like his friend Marcel Proust, read the Nights in Mardrus’s new translation; both were at the premiere of Marouf in 1914, in any case. Hahn praised the score of his former Conservatoire classmate in a major specialist journal; he noted the quality of the music, whose daring never alters its purity; he cited the finesse, the imagination, the intelligence, and especially the absence of vulgarity in the “accuracy of the Oriental feeling.” In fact he greeted the appearance of a “French-style” Orientalism closer to Debussy than to the debauchery of violence and sensuality in the Russians — so many different musical cultures, so many Orients, so many exoticisms.

  I wonder if I should extend the article, with all these superimposed Orients, and add one more layer, that of Roberto Alagna in Morocco. After all, that would give a slightly “current-events” side to a contribution that I must say is rather serious, and also it would make Sarah laugh, the image of the sprightly European tenor in the Orient of the twenty-first century — this video is truly priceless. In a festi
val in Fez, an Arab version, with oud and qanun, of “À travers le désert,” Rabaud’s caravan aria: one can imagine the good intentions of the organizers, the parody defused, the caravan finding the real desert of the authentic, of authentic instruments and settings — and, since the road to hell is, as we know, paved with good intentions, everything falls flat. The oud serves no purpose, the qanun, hardly at ease in Rabaud’s harmonic progression, just inserts suitable commas into the silences of the voice; Alagna, in a white djellaba, sings as if on the Opéra-Comique stage, but with a microphone in hand; the percussions (clashing cymbals, jostling keys) try to fill by any means possible the great, immense void uncovered by this masquerade; the qanun player seems to be suffering martyrdom, hearing music that’s so bad: only Alagna the Magnificent doesn’t seem to notice anything, given over as he is to his grand gestures and his camel drivers, what a laugh, my God, if Rabaud heard that he’d die a second time. Maybe that’s Rabaud’s punishment, come to think of it — fate is punishing him for his behavior during the Second World War, his philo-Nazism, his haste to denounce the Jewish professors at the Conservatory of which he was director. Fortunately his successor, in 1943, would be more enlightened, more courageous, and would try to save his students rather than hand them over to the occupier. Henri Rabaud joins the long list of Orientalists (artists or scientists) who collaborated directly or indirectly with the Nazi regime — will I have to stress this moment of his life, an episode much later than the composition of Marouf in 1914, I have no idea. Still, the composer would himself conduct, at the Opéra, the hundredth performance of Marouf, the Cairo Cobbler on April 4, 1943 (the day of a terrifying bombing that destroyed the Renault factories and caused hundreds of deaths in western Paris) before an audience of German uniforms and well-known Vichyists. In the spring of 1943, when they were still fighting in Tunisia but when they knew that the Afrikakorps and Rommel were beaten, when the Nazi hopes of conquering Egypt were very remote, did Marouf, the Cairo Cobbler take on a special meaning, a nose-thumbing at the German occupier? Probably not. Just a moment of good humor that everyone agreed to find in the work, good humor to forget the war, good humor about which I wonder whether, in such circumstances, there was something criminal: they sang, “Through the desert, a thousand camels loaded with cloth march under the goads of my caravaners,” while six days earlier, a few kilometers away, a convoy (the fifty-third) left carrying a thousand French Jews from the Drancy camp to Poland and their extermination. That interested the Parisians and their German guests much less than the defeats of Rommel in Africa, much less than the adventures of Marouf the Cobbler, his wife Fattouma the Calamitous, and the imaginary caravan. And no doubt old Henri Rabaud, at the podium thirty years after the premiere of Marouf, didn’t give a damn about those atrocious convoys. I don’t know if Charles Mardrus was in the audience — it’s possible but, at the age of seventy-five, he’d been living since the start of the hostilities secluded in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, went out very little, let the war pass by the way others do the rain. They say he left his apartment only to go to the Deux Magots or to an Iranian restaurant — you have to wonder how, in the midst of the occupation, that restaurant managed to find rice, saffron, and lamb. I know on the other hand that Lucie Delarue-Mardrus was not at the hundredth performance of Marouf; she was at her home in Normandy, where she was gathering her memories of the Orient — she was in the process of writing what would be her last book, El Arab, l’Orient que j’ai connu, in which she recounts her travels between 1904 and 1914 with her husband Mardrus. She would die not long after the publication of her last memoirs, in 1945: that book and its author fascinated Sarah; no doubt that’s why I could solicit her help for the article — once again, our interests intersect; Mardrus and the musical adaptations of his translation by Rabaud or Honegger for me, Lucie Delarue, prolific, mysterious poetess and novelist, who in the 1920s had a passionate affair with Natalie Barney, for whom she wrote her most famous poems, Nos secrètes amours, as at ease in homosexual erotic poetry as in her Norman odes and poems for children. Her memories of her travels with J. C. Mardrus are astounding, Sarah quotes them in her book on women and the Orient. It’s to Lucie Delarue-Mardrus that we owe this extraordinary phrase: “Easterners have no sense of the Orient. It’s we Westerners, we Roumis, as the Muslims call us, Christians, who have a sense of the Orient. (I mean the Roumis, still quite numerous, who are not boors.)” For Sarah, this passage all by itself summarizes Orientalism — Orientalism as reverie, Orientalism as lament, as a forever disappointing exploration. In fact, the Roumis appropriated this landscape of dream, it’s they who now, long after the classical Arabic storytellers, exploit it and travel through it, so that all their journeys are a confrontation with this dream. There’s even a fertile current that is built on this dream, without needing to travel, whose most famous representative is surely Marcel Proust and his In Search of Lost Time, the symbolic heart of the European novel: Proust makes the Thousand and One Nights one of his models — the book of night, the book of the struggle against death. Just as Scheherazade fights every evening against the sentence that hangs over her by telling a story to the Sultan Shahryar, Marcel Proust takes up the pen every night, for many nights, he says “maybe a hundred, maybe a thousand,” to fight against time. Over two hundred times in the course of his Search, Proust alludes to the Orient and to the Nights, which he knows in the translations of Galland (that of chastity and childhood, of Combray) and of Mardrus (that, more confused, more erotic, of adulthood) — he weaves the golden thread of the wonderful book throughout his immense novel; Swann hears a violin like a genie outside of a lamp, a symphony reveals “all the jewels of The Thousand and One Nights.” Without the Orient (that dream in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, stateless, which we call the Orient) no Proust, no In Search of Lost Time.