Uselessness

by Eduardo Lalo

  I remember one awful Sunday, the last one I spent in Sandrine and Eve’s apartment. As usual, they had left on Saturday morning to go see their families. That afternoon—spring was already in the air—I was sick and tired of being indoors. Without any definite plan, I went out to wander around the city. I strolled along the banks of the Seine, stopping at the bouquiniste stalls to leaf through secondhand books and look over stacks of old postcards. But I couldn’t relax, and I walked for several hours just to try to calm my nerves. I saw how the fleeting joy of Sundays vibrated in the streets and was gradually seized by a visceral fear. I was alone in the vast ocean of that city: between the human beings I saw everywhere and myself yawned an enormous and insurmountable abyss. The move to my new apartment lent a kind of official status to my loneliness. I was afraid that Sandrine, Eve, and Marie would take advantage of it to be more distant. I would remain alone within my four walls, with a world of academic work ahead of me, and an empty life.

  When the sun was already setting, I found myself at the Tour Montparnasse. Ceaselessly, the doors of the train station ushered hundreds of people onto the street. The cafés and the restaurants were full, and long lines formed in front of the many movie theaters nearby. Soon, in a couple of days, this would be my neighborhood. I felt a slight and inexplicable change inside me. I could survey the sidewalks in a kind of truce. I stopped to look at everything: movie posters, clothing stores, the Brittany cultural center. I paused in front of a store window with a display of radios and realized that, no matter the little money I had, I would move to the apartment owning one of those. Little by little, I gained a sense of calm. Tired out from many hours of walking, I ventured as far as Les Invalides and circled home. I was finally able to eat something and study a bit for my approaching exams (which I would fail if I didn’t buckle down and prepare for in the coming days).

  The next day I went to buy a radio. After considering the various models, I chose a relatively expensive one with a cassette player, a shortwave band, and a stereo. I left the store with what felt to me like an enormous box: I hadn’t acquired anything this big in many years.

  Sandrine and Marie helped me move. I bought a used child’s desk from Sandrine’s friend and she lent me a mattress that we put on the floor against the bathroom wall. We carried the bed for blocks; to bring the desk over, I ordered a taxi. I went to a store on Rue de Vaugirard near closing time to buy a desk lamp. Then I unpacked the radio and for a long time I used the box it came in as a trash basket. The previous tenant had left a chair.

  When night fell, my friends left. Nothing happened as I had imagined it would. In a silence that finally was not oppressive, I felt at ease. I sat down to read, and for the first time in a long time, I experienced the consolation of books. I faced a mountain of pages, but luckily my move coincided with the beginning of the Holy Week recess. I divided my days between the desk and the bed, substituting the book from one course for a book in the other, and even today I remember that week as one of the most pleasurable of my life. Not just because on that table and on that mattress I read the pages of extraordinary books, but because I discovered there the ways in which reading gives meaning to life. The place was as bare as a monk’s cell, but I had my thoughts, and my passion for reading. I was alone (especially that week, when all my friends had gone on vacation) but the solitude did not oppress me: I was venturing onto a new path. My moments of rest were spent listening to the radio, an indescribable pleasure.

  In those days I came into contact with writers and topics that would change my life. I had to read a long novel by Paul Neptune, which, after a few pages, completely absorbed my days. Along with its literary qualities, the text generated a magical transformation of sorts that showed me a way to connect with the city where I had felt like a stranger. Neptune, playful and brilliant, had taken the map of one Parisian city block and woven together stories about all its inhabitants. Beginning with the social habits of a fragment of the city, he included all classes, the most diverse personalities, professions, tragedies, crises, and accidents. Neptune’s narrator brought back to me an experience we have in childhood when we first lose ourselves in a book. The afternoons and nights felt too short for me to read all I wanted of the over six hundred pages of small print in Rue de Babylone.

  Neptune had just died the year before, when he was still young. This felt like a personal loss: I could no longer meet the man who, through his stories, allowed me to connect with the city I was getting to know on my daily walks.

  I soon acquired all his books and even the work he’d published in literary journals. I pieced together his biography: the early death of his parents, his stay in several orphanages, his precocious passion for books and chess. He had not embarked on a university career. Having to support himself, he was prepared to do whatever was necessary. For years he distributed advertisements in the streets, gathered public opinion as a pollster, organized the files of a paleontologist. Finally, when he had established a reputation, he worked for a weekly paper writing a famously eccentric column on chess. His descriptions of the objects on his worktable, gathered in articles much admired by his devoted readers, struck me as miniature sagas comparable, from a certain perspective, to the great novels of the nineteenth century. He was invisible. His country, if he had one, was a modest apartment in a suburb of Paris.

  Literature creates imaginary affinities. The sense of connection that sometimes forms between a text, an author, and a reader is one of life’s wonders. No reader can forget that moment, just as nobody can forget when he or she finds out that such a connection is only an illusion. My move to that studio was marked by the stories of the inhabitants on that block of a fictional city; from then on, Paris became a world that was an indisputable part of my life.

  One of the stories in Neptune’s text was about an aborigine, a dark man who lived on the ground floor. Nobody knew where he was from or how he had arrived. The young son of blue-collar workers, who lives in the same building, listens, his ear to the door, to the litanies the man hums at night. His curiosity piqued, on an impulse he doesn’t understand, he sets out to learn who the guy is. For days he follows him and finds out that he sings and plays a drum and a bone flute in the passageways of the Maubert-Mutualité metro station and that, every week, inexplicably, he visits some old woman in a bourgeois apartment. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, the boy knocks on the woman’s door and steps into a world he couldn’t have imagined. All the rooms and hallways are filled with indigenous artifacts that come, he will learn, from the Amazon. The woman tells him the story of Klok, the Indian her anthropologist husband, who died a few years earlier, brought to the city, after the man’s village had disappeared, devastated by slaughter, disease, and melancholy. Klok, the last warrior of his tribe, was teaching the students at the École des Hauts Études a language whose memory only he possessed and which formed part of a rare family of languages which constituted a kind of lost link in the anthropology of the Tupi-Guarani peoples. He was also a kind of star craftsman for the conservation of feather ornaments, Indian macanas, and bows and arrows in the collections of the Musée de l’Homme.

  After the death of her husband, the old lady took care of Klok as best she could. Since his French was rudimentary and nobody, aside from a bookish anthropologist here and there, knew his language, he lived in silence. He dreamed of his lost world, eating frugally, allowing himself the luxury of a pipe, amid rituals and gods who would die with him.

  The old woman arranges for Klok to meet the young man and they become friends. They go on excursions together to the Bois de Boulogne and Fontainebleau. Klok collects leaves, bark, and roots. They go to the city parks and run into problems with the police when they climb an old chestnut tree and when, at the Jardin des Plantes zoo, they try to free the falcons. The young man gradually learns Klok’s language and religious rites. When Klok catches cold and dies of pneumonia, he takes Klok’s drum and sits facing the corpse, chanting accompanied by the old woman in a langua
ge that has miraculously survived its last speaker.

  This experience will inspire the young man to study anthropology. On his first excursion to the jungle he will carry with him a clay urn with his friend’s ashes. His companions will see him get into a canoe and head up river with a handful of Indians. The expedition wasn’t supposed to take more than two weeks, but the young anthropologist doesn’t return. However, along the tributaries of the Black River, rumors spread about the domain of a white chieftain.

  These and other stories by Neptune struck a nerve. When I finished his book, with the sadness of a reader who would have wanted it to go on forever, I was inspired to read more anthropology. I was also taking a course on the indigenous literature of the Americas, which is how I discovered the essays of Pierre Plon, who impressed me so much that I came to read and reread almost all of his work. Like Neptune, Plon had died recently and in the flower of his youth. He had survived many long expeditions to the heart of the jungle, but one morning, as he was crossing the Boulevard Raspail, a milk truck ran him over. He left a brilliant and unfinished body of work that would raise the study of the “savage mind” to new heights. His first book was a heartbreaking chronicle about his fieldwork with a tribe in the Chaco region of western Paraguay. These indigenous peoples had not had contact with the white culture until very recently and would not survive the shock. In the epilogue of his book, Plon told how this society, which he had seen vital and basically whole, had, in the space of five or six years, while he was revising the text, become a little group, disconnected, sickly, in rags, awaiting their end on the margins of the estates of big landowners in Paraguay.

  In this and in other more theoretical works, Plon revealed the complexities of a political system that prevented the development of cultural resistance. His findings on the education of children, the difference between the sexes, homosexuality, and the mysticism of these distant beings, opened my eyes to other ways of seeing reality. This broadening of my ideas beyond Western teachings provided me with an invaluable new resource, a way to contemplate life in the city. Plon led me to other books, which led to new volumes and authors. I went to exhibitions, lectures, and films; I spent many hours in the dusty old Musée de l’Homme; I dug up studies and chronicles in the drawers of the bouquinistes. Indigenous marginality, the moral status of the defeated, the harsh struggle of indigenous minorities and their earthy wisdom—these became a mythology defining my life in the city. I acquired a series of affectations and practiced them with absolutely serious playfulness. I would buy loose tobacco and roll my own cigarettes; I carried an aboriginal bag on my shoulder; I even bought a Tarahumara drum. I saw myself in the role of the uprooted, the defeated. I embraced and enjoyed this new identity. I pretended to live like Klok and didn’t mind that it was all a fantasy.

  In spite of all the riches these books brought me, there were times when I couldn’t read even one more page. Then I would turn on the radio and lie down in bed. Thus I fell in love with the invisible world coming out of the speakers. For the first time in a long time, I was listening to music with a rich sound, to interviews of artists, filmmakers, addicts or drunken clochards, to stories by authors from all over the world, news, and political scandals. The radio created an intimacy and a state of relaxation that filled me with happiness. Here and there I bought cassettes and built up a library of recordings that did not follow any particular trend: Andean music, Asian and African folklore, French and Latin American songs, ancient music, contemporary and chamber music.

  When the holidays were over, I felt like a different person. I had come out of my depression and was enthusiastic about life again. My women friends returned from their family vacations and decided they didn’t have to worry about me any more.

  I soon learned things weren’t going well for Marie. One day she came to my apartment and complained that I hadn’t called her—a surprise, given the state of our relationship. She was annoyed and impatient. She had gained weight and was attempting fanatical fasting diets that lasted from six to eight hours, after which, in an uncanny mixture of rapture and defeat, she’d run to the refrigerator or downstairs to the pastry shop to devour whatever she could find. This ambivalence set her nerves on edge. But the primary cause of these manic swings was her love life. The man she was seeing since our separation had not told her he was married. Marie had found out too late—that is, after weeks of bliss—when she was already too emotionally involved with him. I learned from Sandrine that Marie could not tolerate her unknown rival, could not accept that she had been deceived and, in some way, left out of the plot. She’d refuse to sit and talk about it; she preferred to take her anger for long walks.

  Just as I had once gone to her, Marie would now come to my apartment to seek comfort. This familiar, impossible situation (crying on the shoulder of her old lover over the love that had split them up) perfectly illustrates the dependency between us and, perhaps, the harsh nature of the city. Paris was a tough place: a sort of an orphanage for lonely adults. Despite their sophistication, few of them seemed able to confront their problems directly. They always found something outside of themselves to blame; they concealed the real source of their distress and their own responsibility behind some big theory. Marie would come to visit me allegedly to discuss one issue—which she then never mentioned—and would remain talking for hours, finding an excuse to stay longer. My reaction was complicated. While I preferred not to see her, I would listen to her for hours, going from boredom and fury to the satisfaction of knowing she was unhappy. I thought that in some way her suffering vindicated me and—though I wouldn’t admit it—allowed me to hope we could get back together again.

  Whatever it was, I could never have seen what was coming next.

  One night, after writing some letters, I realized I still had time to run to Montparnasse and make it to the last showing of a movie. At the ticket office I ran into a French classmate from the university, and we went to sit together. The movie was about an eccentric group of people who founded a utopian community on a small island off the coast of Brittany. It told of the vicissitudes of their idealism that led to a hair-raising dénouement. The head honcho died shortly before a storm, one of their boats capsized, and at the end, the survivors, broken and defeated, decided to return to the civilization they had tried to escape. When the lights came on, Simone and I walked out on the boulevard and chatted until we got to the entrance of the metro. Facing us was a café, and through the windows one could see a group of musicians playing full-tilt boogie. I invited her in and we sat over glasses of beer, trying to communicate over the noise. It was a pleasant and different night. It wasn’t easy for a foreigner to meet French people, and Simone captivated me with her openness and good cheer. Past one o’clock, after getting her telephone number, I walked her to the taxi stand, watched her wave good-bye, and headed back to my apartment.

  The chat with Simone had filled me with enthusiasm. I decided to take a stroll before returning to the Impasse de l’Astrolabe to prolong the pleasure, the daydreaming the encounter had provoked. When I finally reached my door, I found a puzzling message, written directly on the wood with what appeared to be lipstick. It was a single word, cabrón (basically calling me a bastard), traced in separate letters, sloping downward. Incredulous, I read it several times.

  At first I thought it might be someone who had tried to get into the wrong apartment. After all, my neighbors were rather rude: I’d had to cover the wall we shared with cork to muffle the racket of their squabbles, glass and dish breaking, and afterwards, the sessions of hysterical and collective bawling. But I decided the insult was addressed to me because it was written in Spanish. I wondered if it could be a joke of Sandrine’s, as I had taught her a few words of Spanish. But there was something disturbing in the writing, and in the act itself, which did not fit this theory. After drinking some mint tea and listening to a little music, I decided to forget about it and went to bed.

  A knock on the door woke me. Disoriented, I threw on my pants
and a sweater and approached the door. I wasn’t dreaming. There really was someone on the other side, banging stridently on the wood. I asked who it was and heard Marie’s voice. Mystified, I opened the door, and she entered quickly, as if afraid I would block her with my body. I turned around to find her standing in the middle of the studio, looking out of control, as if she were about to attack me.

  “Where were you?”

  “What do you mean where was I?”

  “Where were you last night? I came over at nine, at ten, at midnight.”

  “I was out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Marie, please, what’s going on?”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I went out. To the movies.”

  “Who were you with?”

  Finally I had a clue. This was a fit of jealousy, out of the blue. For a split second I felt something close to satisfaction, but I also realized that even if that was what it was (and probably it wasn’t, or it wasn’t only that), there was something inexpressibly sinister about this interrogation.

  “I would think that, given the state of our relationship, this shouldn’t matter to you.”

  “Tell me who you were with, who the damn whore was.”

  The insult was laughable. I would have never imagined it from her mouth, but she said it with an absolutely straight face.

  “Calm down, and stop screaming. It’s the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake. I went out around nine, to the movies, and met up with a friend from the university. After the movie she and I went out for a drink.”